New Report Highlights 10 Trends You Should Know about Illinois' Heroin Epidemic

As the growing heroin epidemic pervades the nation, ravaging lives and families and consuming communities, Illinois has found itself at the losing end of an escalating crisis.

Nationwide, the number of individuals who have reported using heroin in the past year nearly doubled between 2007 and 2013, spiking to 681,000 from 314,000. Heroin overdoses claimed 8,200 lives in 2013–a fourfold increase from 2002. And in 2012, those who entered state-funded treatment citing heroin as the primary substance of abuse rose to 16.4 percent, which is the highest level since data collection began in 1992, according to a new report by the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University.

The report, “Diminishing Capacity: The Heroin Crisis and Illinois Treatment in National Perspective,” lays bare the problem plaguing not only Chicago and the suburbs, but also rural areas where the drug is gaining a stronger foothold.

While heroin continues to encroach on and erode the lives of thousands of Illinoisans, the dramatic decline in state-funded treatment capacity is one of the most disconcerting takeaways from the report, especially given that treatment admissions for heroin abuse is 56 percent greater than the nation as a whole.

Here are 10 more startling statistics from the report about the heroin epidemic in Illinois.