Heroin may be the drug attracting front-page New York Times stories, primetime television investigations, and attention from US presidential candidates, but alcohol is the drug that worries Americans most, a recent AP-NORC survey found.
As this chart from the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog makes clear, more Americans are concerned about alcohol use in their communities than they are about the use of prescription drugs or heroin.
This makes sense, when you consider data around rates of use and deaths associated with alcohol and heroin. Drinking is much more pervasive than heroin use: Nearly 90 percent of Americans say they’ve had a drink in their life, but fewer than than 1 percent say they’ve tried heroin.
And while heroin-related overdoses (including those deemed suicide or homicide) killed more than 10,000 people in 2014. Alcohol-related deaths average more than 80,000 per year.
