Heroin overdose deaths are skyrocketing in Mississippi, on pace to reach 26 by year’s end.
Several years ago, the state averaged one death a year from the drug, according to state Department of Health numbers.
“A year ago, I might hardly see a heroin addict,” said Dr. Randy Easterling of Vicksburg, medical director of the Marion Hill Chemical Dependency Unit. “Now I see one every day.”
Heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. have nearly quadrupled over the past decade. Experts blame this spike on both contaminated supplies of heroin and using the drug after being addicted to other opioid painkillers, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine and methadone.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes clear that heroin, once the scourge of the inner city, has moved into the suburbs with middle-aged white women seeing some of the largest jumps in use of the illegal narcotic.
The CDC is urging states and health care providers to help curb the growing problem by addressing addiction to prescription painkillers, increasing access to substance abuse treatment and expanding access to naloxone, a drug that can help reduce deaths after people suffer opioid overdoses.
Between 2009 and 2011, heroin overdose deaths remained at one per year in Mississippi, according to death certificates collected by the Health Department. In 2012, three were reported. By 2013, that number rose to six.
Those numbers are slightly higher than the heroin deaths reported by county coroners to the state Bureau of Narcotics, which reported one death in 2013 and four deaths in 2014.
More disturbingly, there have been 13 deaths in just the first six months this year, on pace to reach 26 by year’s end.

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/08/08/heroin-od-deaths-spike-mississippi/31330451/