ABSTRACT
Cocaine is the most frequent cause of drug-related deaths in the United States. In 1999, across the 40 metropolitan areas included in the federal Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) survey, cocaine was the most frequently mentioned drug (4864 cases, or 48.1%), followed by heroin/morphine (4820) and alcohol-in-combination (3916). These numbers have changed very little in recent years. In 1994, for example, 4134 cocaine-related deaths were reported, accounting for 47% of all drug deaths reported to the government (Kissin et al., 2000).
