Heroin use on the rise in US and scientists say it’s costing billions

Heroin use in the U.S. is on the rise and scientists took it upon themselves to compute just how much this epidemic is costing the American society. According to their calculations, in 2015 alone, the costs were over $50 billion.

Made from morphine, heroin is an opiate commonly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. According to the World Drug Report 2016 from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, heroin use has reached the highest level in 20 years in the U.S. and is the deadliest drug worldwide.

Scientists form the University of Illinois at Chicago wanted to know just how much this epidemic is costing the American society.

UIC pharmacoeconomists led by Simon Pickard and Ruixuan Jiang created a cost-analytic model to determine the economic impact taking into account such variables as the number of imprisoned heroin users and their crimes; treatment costs of heroin abuse; chronic infectious diseases contracted through heroin abuse, like HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and tuberculosis, and cost of their treatments; cost of treating newborns with medical conditions associated with heroin; lost productivity at work; and heroin overdose deaths.

What they found was that heroin users are less productive than others. They also spend more time away from work due to seeking treatment for drug dependence and for drug-related hospitalizations, and have high rates of work absenteeism and unemployment.

On average, the societal cost per heroin user per year is $50,799. An estimated 1 million people are active heroin users in the United States, putting the total societal cost at approximately $51 billion.

And heroin users cost significantly higher than for patients suffering from other chronic illnesses, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ($2,567 per patient in 2015 dollars, or $38.5 billion for 15 million patients) and diabetes ($11,148 per patient in 2015 dollars, or $248.59 billion for 22.3 million patients).

“The opioid crisis didn’t happen overnight,” Ruixuan Jiang, author of the study said.

The study revealed that users often start taking heroin after becoming dependent on prescription opioid painkillers. Due to the high cost of opioids and difficulty in obtaining prescriptions, opioid abusers often turn to heroin, which is cheaper and easier to get.

Without meaningful public health efforts, the number of heroin users is likely to continue to grow, Pickard said.

“The downstream effects of heroin use, such as the spread of infectious diseases and increased incarceration due to actions associated with heroin use, compounded by their associated costs, would continue to increase the societal burden of heroin use disorder,” Simon Pickard said.

According to the CDC,  heroin-related overdose deaths have more than quadrupled since 2010. From 2014 to 2015, heroin overdose death rates increased about 21 percent, with almost 13,000 people dying in 2015.