Nonmedical opiate users more likely to use heroin

NIH reports on a new study finds that people who engage in nonmedical use of opioids are more likely to use heroin:

A new report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that people aged 12 to 49 who had used prescription pain relievers nonmedically were 19 times more likely to have initiated heroin use recently (within the past 12 months of being interviewed) than others in that age group (0.39 percent  versus 0.02 percent). The report also shows that four out of five recent heroin initiates (79.5 percent) had previously used prescription pain relievers nonmedically.

This is one of those studies that establishes something that seems to be well known already. Anyone in the field has known this for a very long time.

Maybe it’s necessary, I suppose some of these studies discover that some well known truths are not so true, but these never seem like a great use of time and resources.

This Onion report was posted at the same time. It’s satire of these kinds of studies. They found that people far away from you are not actually smaller:

According to a groundbreaking new study published Thursday in The Journal Of Natural And Applied Sciences, people who are far away from you are actually not, as once thought, physically smaller than you.

The five-year study, conducted by researchers at Princeton University, has shattered traditionally accepted theories that people standing some distance away from you are very small, and people close-by are very big.

[This post was edited to be less snarky :-)]