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Heroin use surged over the past decade, and the wave of addiction and overdose is closely related to the nation’s ongoing prescription drug epidemic, federal health officials said Tuesday. A new report says that 2.6 out of every 1,000 U.S. residents 12 and older used heroin in the years 2011 to 2013. That’s a 63% increase in the rate of heroin use since the years 2002 to 2004. (Girion, 7/7)

Primed by widespread use of prescription opioid pain-killers, heroin addiction and the rate of fatal overdoses have increased rapidly over the past decade, touching parts of society that previously were relatively unscathed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. The death rate from overdoses nearly quadrupled to 2.7 per 100,000 people between 2002 and 2013, CDC Director Tom Frieden said during a telephone news conference Tuesday. (Bernstein, 7/7)

Health officials, confronted with a shocking increase in heroin abuse, are developing a clearer picture of who is becoming addicted to this drug and why. The results may surprise you. The biggest surge is among groups that have historically lower rates of heroin abuse: women and white (non-Hispanic) Americans. They tend to be 18-25 years old, with household incomes below $20,000. (Harris, 7/7)

Heroin use is reaching into new communities — addicting more women and middle-class users — as people hooked on prescription painkillers transition to cheaper illegal drugs, a new report shows. The rate of heroin use doubled among women over a decade, according to the study released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compared data from the three-year period between 2002 to 2004 with data from 2011 to 2014. (Szabo, 7/7)