To the Editor:

A May 9 news article, "For Heroin's New Users, a Long Hard Fall," indicates
that heroin use and addiction has grown among the young and affluent. This
claim has been made before.

However, despite examples of middle-class drug addicts and clinical
impressions, epidemiological data do not support this idea. While
middle-class people are as likely to use drugs and alcohol as disadvantaged
people, addicts and alcoholics come disproportionately from uneducated,
impoverished and alienated groups.

It cannot repeatedly be true that such drug use is shifting from lower to
middle classes. If one day it were true, it would only be because our saying
it over and over had made it so.

Stanton Peele, Morristown, N.J., May 9, 1999

The writer is a fellow at the Lindesmith Center.