(CNSNews.com) – An official with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee Thursday that the number of deaths involving heroin increased 340 percent from 2007 to 2014, the latest year of available data. “In 2014, the most current year for which we have data, more than 47,000 Americans or approximately 129 people each day died from a drug overdose. Of the overdose deaths in 2014, 22 percent involved heroin,” Kemp Chester, associate director for the National Heroin Coordination Group within the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the committee during a hearing titled, “Cartels and the U.S. Heroin Epidemic: Combating Drug Violence and Public Health Crisis.”
“The threat posed by heroin has continued to grow dramatically over the past several years, and since 2007, deaths involving heroin have risen 340 percent--from 2,402 in 2007 to 10,574 in 2014. Heroin use is spreading to suburban and rural communities and is growing among most socio-economic classes, age groups and races,” he told the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues.
Mexico is the primary supplier of heroin to the U.S. “with Mexican drug traffickers cultivating opium poppy, producing heroin, and smuggling the finished product into the United States,” Chester said.
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