Psychosocial and biomedical aspects of deaths associated with heroin and other narcotics.

Our findings point to sizable intercity differences in the United States among certain psychosocial and biomedical aspects of deaths associated with narcotics. Secondly, narcotic-involved deaths are not purely accidental, but many are motivated by suicidal goals and a smaller percentage by homicidal intentions. And finally, in addition to the errors that have been surmised to occur in estimates of psychoactive drug deaths from heroin and other narcotics owing to inadequate reporting or other shortcomings in data collection, there are biomedical errors due to variations in the quality control of toxicological laboratories.