Increase in Heroin Emergencies of Young People in California

Mar 1, 2017

The awareness of the drug issue that is faced by the population of the United States, and indeed, the entire planet, is something that has grown in the past couple of years. This is a good first step, since awareness is needed to take further action. However, just as the rate of awareness has risen, so too have the rates of people affected by substance abuse.

Addiction is a horrific behavioral disease that affects every part of the population, regardless of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or any other sociological factor (although some of these populations might be adversely affected more than others). Recently, there has been a dangerous increase in the amount of heroin emergencies experienced by millennials in California…

Rising heroin trends among millennials

All across California, the opioid epidemic has affected more and more young people in the state. Many Californian millennials have gotten hooked on medically prescribed opioids, which have been increasingly sold over the past decade. This has led to a pipeline that pushes more and more people towards heroin, which is cheaper and delivers a stronger high that opioids. In 2015, alone, there were over 1,500 emergency room visits that were related to heroin across the state. In 2012, there were less than 750. This represents a 50% increase in emergency room visits, due to heroin abuse.

The severe and fatal consequences of this drug epidemic become even more apparent, once you consider that most heroin overdoses or medical complications, due to heroin usage, don’t even make it to emergency rooms. In particular, millennials in the northern part of the state are more at risk to have a fatal heroin overdose, because the population is a lot more spread out, and access to adequate medical facilities isn’t as readily available as it is in the southern portion of the state, where hospitals and emergencies rooms are more numbered to cater to a larger population.