This journal article analyzes heroine use data from surveys of adult arrestees from the southern region of the United States.
Through analyzing the results of surveys conducted with southern adults arrests, from 1990 to 1997, heroin use data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program (ADAM) are discussed in this journal article. After introducing heroin as the most commonly used and highly addictive of all the opiates, the authors described the five national surveys that reported heroin use among diverse populations. The five national surveys used were the Arrestee Drug monitoring (ADAM) Program (National Institute of Justice [NIJ], 1999b), the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 1998), Monitoring the Future (MTF; Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman, 1999), the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse (NHSDA; SAMHSA, 1999), and the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS; SAMHSA, 1997). The ADAM program formerly the Drug USE Forecasting (DUF) Program has six primary goals: to identify the levels of drug use among arrestees, track changing drug-use patterns, determine what drugs are being used in specific jurisdictions, alert local officials about trends in drug use and the availability of new drugs, provide data to help understand the drug-crime connection, and to serve as a research platform. Focusing on trends in heroin use from 1990 to 1997, data from the ADAM program survey was analyzed using univariate and descriptive analyses. Results from surveys during 1990 to 1997 of adult arrestees in Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and San Antonio indicated that there was a jurisdictional similarity among southern arrestees and that heroin use was higher among Hispanic and older arrestees than it was among young, white, and African-American arrestees. Tables, figures, references