Publication Date:
1984-10-05
Description:
Deaths associated with injected street preparations of heroin increased substantially in the District of Columbia between April 1979 and December 1982. The 1981 population-based mortality rate (17.4 per 100,000) is possibly the highest ever reported. A case-control study based on toxicologic analyses of postmortem blood samples indicates that concentrations of both heroin and ethanol are substantial risk factors for heroin-related deaths. Analyses of the composition of street-level preparations of heroin and quarterly mortality indicate that the quantity of heroin in packages sold on the street, the price of heroin in these packages, and the quinine weight per package each predict deaths equally as well. An increase in the causal use of heroin in combination with ethanol and quinine is the probable cause of this epidemic.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ruttenber, A J -- Luke, J L -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1984 Oct 5;226(4670):14-20.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6474188" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adolescent
;
Adult
;
Alcoholic Intoxication/complications
;
Costs and Cost Analysis
;
District of Columbia
;
Drug Contamination
;
Ethanol/blood
;
Female
;
Heroin/analysis/*poisoning
;
Humans
;
Male
;
Morphine/blood
;
*Pharmaceutical Preparations
;
Quinine/poisoning
;
Risk
;
*Street Drugs
;
Substance-Related Disorders/complications/*mortality
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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