Is there really a heroin epidemic in this country?

The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has given rise to a massive outpouring of grief and sadness from his fans and admirers. It has also given rise to an equally massive outpouring of patently false and exaggerated stories about the increase in heroin use and the need to do something — anything! — about it. This is not just misguided but dangerous. High-profile drug deaths in the past have lead to major public-policy mistakes — think mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines — that can take decades to correct.

Even before the inconclusive results of Hoffman’s autopsy were made public, news outlets like MSNBC were already running stories about “America’s heroin problem,” “the rapidly growing crisis of heroin,” and quoting “law enforcement officials [who] believe the spike in heroin use is driven by addicts becoming priced out of more expensive prescription opiate-based pain killers.”

Yet as my colleague at Reason, Jacob Sullum, was quick to document, the government statistics that track heroin use show absolutely no increase in regular use of the drug. According to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (the latest available), 0.1% of Americans ages 12 and older reported using the drug in the past month. That’s exactly the same percentage that used in 2002, and there has been no significant fluctuation in the intervening decade. The Monitoring the Future study, which tracks behavior of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders, shows annual use of heroin declining across the board from a decade ago.

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Politicians are prey to the same mistakes. Earlier this year, Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont made news when he devoted his annual state-of-the-state address to what he called “a full-blown heroin crisis.” Shumlin testified that “we had nearly double the number of deaths in Vermont from heroin overdose as the prior year.”

It’s certainly true that there can be regional spikes, even if national usage rates are flat. But according to Vermont’s department of health, in 2012, there were just nine deaths classified as “heroin involved” (a category that doesn’t mean heroin was the sole or even the principal cause of death). Taking the governor at his word, that means there were fewer than 18 deaths last year in Vermont in which heroin was a factor. (2013 data were not available.)

Those deaths are sad, but in a state with 626,000 residents, they should not be driving major decisions about law enforcement, medical resources and health policy. As the Vermont department of health reports, “mortality due to drugs in Vermont has not changed greatly over the past nine years … these data do not suggest that deaths from any one specific type of drug is increasing or decreasing over the span of multiple years.” The 2013 Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey reports that just 2% of high school students say they have ever tried heroin, down from 3% in 2011. If Vermont is at the forefront of a “major comeback of heroin in the U.S.” (as the Los Angeles Times puts it), we all need to take a few deep breaths.

Read more: Philip Seymour Hoffman's Heroin Problem Does Not Constitute a Crisis | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2014/02/06/philip-seymour-hoffman-heroin-crisis/#ixzz2ujgHPq8A

Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to believe whatever the MSM is pushing.