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| Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration |
By
The abuse of heroin in America has gotten a lot of attention lately, but there's another type of drug that is abused far more widely and kills more people than heroin and cocaine combined: prescription pills.
According to a 2012 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration survey, prescription drugs were the second-most abused substance behind marijuana. Cocaine, hallucinogens, and inhalants were also more commonly used than heroin.
This chart shows illicit drug use among people ages 12 and older in the month before the survey:
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| Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration |
As the chart illustrates, prescription pills greatly outstrip heroin in terms of raw numbers — 6.8 million people abused prescription pills over the course of one month, while only about 300,000 used heroin. Politicians and drug officials have called heroin use an "epidemic," but there isn't any recent national data that backs up that language. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't consider heroin use to be at epidemic levels yet, a spokesperson told Fusion just last month.
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