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The escalating heroin crisis has roots in healthcare fraud

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By all appearances, Portland, Maine, is an idyllic setting. Despite the notoriously brutal winters, thousands of tourists flock to the small seaside city in the summer months to take in the state's rocky coast, lie on the sandy beaches, or enjoy a fat, red lobster on one of the city's piers.

With its quant, brick-lined streets, Portland does not present itself as a city in the midst of a crippling heroin epidemic.

I moved to Portland less than a month ago, and within weeks it became strikingly clear that heroin addiction is a powerful undercurrent within the small city and its suburbs. What's less apparent to many is the fact that the heroin crisis currently gripping the country is inextricably tied to prescription drug fraud. 

In July, the Washington Post published a long exposé on how the heroin crisis had affected Falmouth, Maine, an affluent suburb of Portland, where a 29-year-old man died of a heroin overdose. On the day of his funeral, his step-brother nearly met the same fate.

Less than two weeks after the article was published, Portland saw 14 overdoses within a 24-hour period, the Portland Press Herald reported. Public health officials later raised concerns that some of those overdoses could be linked to "bad batches" of heroin containing fentanyl, a drug 50 times more potent than heroin.

Of course, Portland is not alone. Other areas of the country including, Pittsburgh, small towns in Pennsylvania, Orange County, Florida, Baltimore, and rural areas of New Hampshire and Vermont are experiencing similar problems with heroin overdoses. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that heroin-related deaths have quadrupled from 2002 to 2013. From 2012 to 2013 alone, deaths involving heroin increased 39 percent.

It's clear that heroin addiction is indiscriminate when it comes to location, race or socioeconomic status. That's because heroin addiction frequently derives from an addiction to opioids that anyone--black, white, rich or poor--can legally acquire at the doctor's office. Forty-five percent of people who abused heroin were also dependent on prescription painkillers, according to the CDC.

At one time those drugs were easy to acquire--almost too easy. Then supply plummeted and prices jumped, but by that time too many people were addicted to opioids to stop cold turkey. Instead, they turned to heroin, which offered the same high with a cheaper price tag.

The country's addiction to painkillers can be traced back, in large part, to two decades worth of overprescribing. Some of that was perpetrated by well-meaning physicians, looking to provide a measure of pain relief for their patients, but unaware of the potential consequences. However, at least a portion of the growth in opioid addiction takes root in "pill mills" and prescription drug fraud schemes that profit on the backs of addicts.