One type of legal drug is killing far more people than heroin - and that's not the most disturbing part of the problem
Heroin use in the US is skyrocketing. The number of people using this powerful, addictive drug has grown by nearly 300,000 in the past decade, and more and more people are dying from overdose.
But while tragic, these numbers are still out-shadowed by another, equally disturbing statistic: The rise in deaths from people overdosing on powerful opiate painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin - the same drugs that many experts have said may open the door to later heroin use.
Research suggests that one of the reasons that abusing opiates can make people more susceptible to future heroin abuse is because the drugs act similarly in the brain. A new CDC report released Tuesday found that people who abused opiate painkillers were 40 times as likely to abuse heroin.
Here's a chart looking at overdose deaths from opioid pain relievers and heroin, compared against overdose deaths from cocaine and marijuana. The latest data, revised in Feb. 2015, goes until 2013:
Skye Gould/Business Insider
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