Behavior: Heroin: A Plaything?

It has long been believed that experimentation with heroin is an irrevocable act that leads eventually to addiction and the criminal acts necessary to support the expensive habit. Thus it has also been assumed that the tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who used the drug in Viet Nam have returned home as addicts, increasing the proportions of what was already a national heroin epidemic. But last week the Defense Department released a study that seemed to undermine these assumptions.

The study asserts that narcotics dependence among returned veterans is no higher than it is among those who did not serve. In...

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