NEW YORK — The death of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman underscores a surge in heroin use reminiscent of the 1970s and early ’80s.
More than 660,000 Americans used heroin in 2012, health officials say — nearly double the number five years ago. Users tend to be more affluent than before, living in the suburbs and rural areas rather than the inner city.
“It’s reached epidemic proportions,” said Rusty Payne, a Washington, D.C.-based spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Mexican cartels are pushing ever-larger amounts of heroin across the Southwestern border, officials said.
Heroin has flooded the Northeast and reached the large market of American pain-pill addicts seeking a less-expensive high. Emergency-room visits have skyrocketed across the country, officials say, and more users are dying from a drug whose purity can be hard to judge.
Los Angeles traditionally was the final destination for Mexico’s trade, but recent distribution has spread across the U.S., said Sarah Pullen, a DEA agent in Los Angeles.
“Increasingly, heroin addicts are former prescription drug abusers,” Pullen said. “They become hooked on painkillers and move over to heroin because it is far cheaper.”
Heroin users in L.A. can get a hit for as little as $8, officials said, meaning they can get high several times for the price of a single pain pill.
In 2010 — the latest year such data were available — overdoses killed more than 3,000 people across the U.S., a 45 percent increase since 2006, according to the DEA.
Hoffman’s death at age 46 comes a week after Pennsylvania officials announced that a batch of heroin spiked with fentanyl had killed at least 22 people in January.
Although initial autopsy results on Hoffman are pending, the scene from the actor’s New York apartment offered a sad tableaux.
Hoffman was found dead with a needle in his arm. In his apartment were dozens of glassine packets, some containing powder, law enforcement officials said. Some packets were stamped Ace of Spades, marking them as a brand of heroin. Hoffman had battled addiction for years.
“Glee” star Cory Monteith, 31, also struggled with drugs. He died in a British Columbia hotel room in July after taking heroin, alcohol, morphine and codeine.
Heroin was a drug of choice for celebrities and inner-city addicts alike in the 1970s, often with fatal consequences. But its popularity declined in the 1980s as the HIV/AIDS crisis brought worries of infection-carrying needles. Crack cocaine supplanted heroin as a cheap, powerful option for poorer users.
Now, experts say, heroin is back. Americans’ widespread abuse of prescription drugs has created a new market for the opiate, which gives users a powerful euphoria similar to that of pain pills.
“This last year, we’ve seen a big uptick in heroin use,” said Theodore Cicero, a professor of neuropharmacology at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies drug treatment rates. “It’s becoming a rural and suburban issue rather than an urban issue.”
Most states saw an increase in heroin patients from 2000 to 2010, according to federal statistics. The drug was particularly accessible in the Northeast, where officials say New York City serves as the transit point.
In New York, one oxycodone pill on the street costs about $30 and is good for one hit. (Oxycodone is an ingredient derived from opium; in pill form, it’s marketed as OxyContin.) For about the same price, buyers can get six glassines of heroin, according to Erin Mulvey, another DEA spokeswoman in New York.
“Six hits and six highs, versus one high for oxycodone,” Mulvey said.
Heroin has such a grip on the Northeast that Vermont’s governor dedicated his state-of-the-state address to fighting the drug. The state saw a 250 percent increase in patients receiving treatment for heroin use since 2000.
In the Vermont town of St. Albans, population 6,894, Fred Holmes was treating about 80 teenage opiate addicts in his pediatric practice when he retired last year. Many of the kids had started out as OxyContin addicts before the drug got too expensive, which is when they switched to heroin, he said.
“There’s no socioeconomic discrimination in the world of addiction,” Holmes said. “Doesn’t matter if your father’s an attorney and you have a house on the hill.”
