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alcohol, it found that the ratio was about ten to one--in other words, if a couple of shots of vodka are enough to make you tipsy, twenty shots might kill you, if you can keep them down. Cocaine, it found, was slightly safer, with a ratio of fifteen to one. LSD has a ratio of 1,000 to one, whereas marijuana is safest of all: it is impossible to die of overdose, as far as anyone can tell. Even with the edibles, there is no evidence that one can die of overdose--you simply have a stronger and longer-lasting effect than you may have wanted. For heroin, the ratio between an effective dose and a deadly one is just six to one. Given that batches vary dramatically in their purity, each shot is a game of Russian roulette.

Art Schut, the head of Arapahoe House, another Denver rehab clinic, tells me that many of the heroin addicts he sees now are well-off young people of college age who get into heroin via OxyContin or similar pills. "Most of them are middle or upper-middle class, and the pathway is prescription drugs. Prescription drugs are pure, they're medicine, we think they're good for us. It's a pretty easy step," he says. Nationwide, two-thirds of America's heroin addicts started off by abusing prescription painkillers.

According to the National Institutes of Health, in the U.S., nearly half of young people who inject heroin started abusing prescription opioids first.