Recently I worked in another Maine city and was astonished at the number of patients I encountered who were using heroin.  I had never seen anything like it, during a lifetime practicing medicine. In New Hampshire, it was said, deaths from heroin now exceed deaths from car accidents.  Nationwide, CDC noted, “Between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled, and more than 8,200 people died in 2013.”  Massachusetts (population under 7 million) had 1,000 deaths related to (all) opioids in 2014, “the highest ever recorded.“

I’ve heard stories on NPR about insufficient state funding of heroin treatment facilities. I’ve heard about plans to make Narcan injections available to iv drug users, for overdoses. Another popular angle I’ve seen repeated multiple times (and one currently pushed by the US Drug Enforcement Agency) claims prescription narcotics became harder to get, so users switched to heroin, instead