Heroin

Heroin is made from morphine that is extracted from a plant and usually appears as a sticky black substance or a white or brown powder, the black sticky substance is often known as “black tar heroin”. Heroin was first brought about in the 1890s and it was considered to be a great painkiller even better than morphine and it often helped coughing. Heroin is injected with a needle and after the injection it has been noted that a rush comes over the users but then also hot flashes, dry mouth, a cloudy mental state, and heaviness of their hands and feet. With the first effect being a sort of euphoria make a user feel peaceful and quite content, but after it masks all of the users instincts, fears, and any remorse. Heroin is one of the most addictive drugs for the fact of its peacefulness and also its pain killing effect, making you just feel numb. The attraction of the numb feeling is only one thing, but on the other end it also depresses you, numbs you of course, and can cause nausea and vomiting. Since heroin is injected with needles often diseases are spread among heroin uses from sharing needles since they are often an expensive part of using the drug. Also you can become highly addicted to heroin and while you are injecting yourself some of you veins may even collapse causing many other issues such as an infection with your heart lining or with your heart valves.

Heroin addicts have many negative effects that happen on their brain and there are many signs of it. Often users can become easily tired but then have spurts of energy, they can have a hard time breathing, and users will always have wounds from the injections themselves, often there will be skin infections, feeling nauseous or vomiting, their eyes will appear distant and will have constricted pupils. Users often have a lack of motivation as well and will try and distance themselves from friends and family in order to avoid as much interactions with others as they can, and sometimes users experience memory loss which can even make their families want to distance themselves because you just are no longer there, no longer the person they knew. Often addicts become only focused on now and not the future at all making it hard to get away from the drug.

Heroin abusers are usually associated with problems with pregnancy, infectious diseases, and most importantly, fatal overdose. With all of the diseases a user can develop from using the drug, things such as pneumonia can develop making it even harder to breathe and harder to survive. This street drug is full of toxins that can even clog your veins causing liver, kidneys, brain, or lungs to either fail or have permanent damage. Despite the fact of having permanent organ damage the most damage heroin can do to someone is get them addicted. With the addicting drug users start to become only focused on using and spend more time and energy obtaining the drug than they do on anything else. With being so focused on getting drugs, users can become malnourished as the drug changes their thoughts and behavior and decides heroin is more important than food.  

Getting off of heroin is quite a challenge when it comes to the withdraw symptoms. They crave more, can’t relax, their muscles ache, no more sleep, their system flushes itself, and users experience cold flashes and they sit and shiver. It often takes addicts over 72 hours to hit the peak of their withdraw and about a week to finally stop craving the drug they’ve always been attached to. Some people aren’t even able to make it past the withdraw because the drug already took their life too far down to recover.

(http://www.castlecraig.co.uk/resources/drugs/types-drugs/heroin)

Not Just Toppings

A fungus, part of your pizza, sometimes poisonous, and sometimes even drugs. Mushrooms tend to be a topping or part of your food but there are some hallucinogenic mushrooms that grow in Ireland that will give you hallucinations and are called psilocybe mushrooms. These mushroom’s effects can be different for everyone and can start anywhere from 30 minutes to even 2 hours after you consumed them. What is even more astounding is these effects can last up to nine hours making it a very long haul. The hallucinations that these mushrooms can cause can be things such as distorted color, sound, and objects, they can disrupt your feeling of time and you may feel like you are moving faster or even slower, you of course can feel sick and disorientated, and the last short term effect can be that you feel super creative and enlightened. Some varieties of these mushrooms can give different effects such as out of body experiences, vivid dreams, and you can even “smell words” or “taste colors”. Even though the effects of these hallucinogenic may sound interesting to experience the long term effects of the drug aren't worth it. No drug is worth trying for the risks and there are a few that come with these mushrooms. Some long term effects are that they can cause flashbacks or give you awful anxiety but there is another risk to these. Some of these mushrooms are poisonous, which can cause severe sickness or even death. When it comes to mushrooms its best you stick with the ones on your pizza because hallucinogenic mushrooms can be deadly. They aren't addictive but you might just get addicted to their effects instead. 

(http://www.drugs.ie/drugtypes/drug/magic_mushrooms_hallucinogen)

Bubbles

Most people when taking drugs know what they have gotten themselves into but sometimes they don’t. There is so many risks when taking any drug and if you don’t know what you are taking it can be even worse. Legal drugs have been a way to get high and they are easy to get a hold of. Young adults have been buying a street drug referred to as “bubble”, the street name was for mephedrone but it started to be a name for any white powder you can buy off of the street. With all of these white powders being named the same users don’t know what they are in for or what risks they are taking, all they know is that they bought themselves a cheap legal high. All of these white powders were found to be white stimulants. Often users have been buying bubble and mixing it with cocaine for a more exhilarating high as well. Some users have even stated that there isn't even drugs in drugs anymore because people have been substituting other things into the drugs in order to make more of a profit. For most users bubble is a gateway drug since it is so cheap and easy to get a hold of. When it comes to no drugs in drugs anymore a study showed that in the 90s the popular club drug ecstasy contained about 80 mg in a pill but in 2011 ecstasy wasn't as popular and the pill only contained about 20 mg of the drug, also making it easier for dealers to make a profit if they sell it for about the same price with spending less. Bubble is just another street drug and it is cheap, easy to find, and of course can give you a high even though it can be a different substance because all you know is those three things and also that its just another white powder. 

(http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/nov/06/drug-users-bubble-cheap-high)

Strawberry or Chocolate

When you say kids get into everything you usually don’t mean everything but mostly they just end up making a mess out of whatever they can find. Well you might be right when it comes to getting into everything. In the United States a drug has been going around to kids called Strawberry Quick, now it sounds like Nesquik but it is far from it. Strawberry Quick is methamphetamine, it’s a mix of meth and Kool-aid. The mix with Kool-aid was an attempt by drug dealers to make strawberry quick look and taste better. The name Strawberry Quick is a great way to appeal to kids with it sounding like Nesquik and it is less suspicious.

                Selling drugs to kids is becoming a new trend in the United States and dealers know just how to market to them. Strawberry Quick was the solution to get more money off of kids who were recently addicted to cheese, most cheese users when trying to get away from drugs move onto needles if they do survive. Most meth addicts know how much a con Strawberry Quick is, it’s just a way to get money off of addicts, rotting teeth and scabbed skin, they know it’s bad but the withdraw is worse. When trying to get off of cheese the mental and physical pain from withdraw is so unbearable that most go back to using some sort of drug.

The only solution to the situation is to talk about the drugs and raise awareness because otherwise drugs will continue to circulate around the younger generations and lives will be lost. Some parents have taken action to raise as much awareness as they can because they already lost something that meant so much to them, their kids.

What can you do? Fernando Cortez is getting involved. He lost his 15-year-old son to cheese earlier this year. Cortez swears his son wasn’t a user and is haunted by what-ifs. What if he had done this versus that? Would his son still be alive? In the end, Cortez has had to put away those thoughts and channel his grief into something that could save lives. He goes to Dallas schools, speaking out about his painful experience and giving out his cell phone number to anyone who needs to talk. He urges parents to do the same — talk to their kids. (FOX News)

The drug market is always working to find something new. They market to everyone they can and continue to profit without thought about anything. It’s a dealer’s job to market to everyone and everybody and get the best they can from it. With this happening though people’s lives are at stake even people who haven’t gotten to have much of a life so far, it’s just being cut short to make a profit.

(http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/05/10/marketing-drugs-to-kids-from-cheese-to-strawberry-quick/)

Cheese? Dairy or Drug

We go about our day doing our daily thing without even thinking about the bad things that could be happening around us. Obviously awful things happen around us all the time but we tend not to even think about it because the more you think about it the more likely it seems that it will end up happening to someone you know or even you yourself.  Even though we may be worried more about ourselves when it comes to bad situations, we should also be worried about others around us. In 2005 many in Texas were quite concerned about the youth of the state when it came to bad situations.

In 2005 a drug called “cheese” was going around to kids in Texas, it was a mix of black tar heroin and crushed Tylenol PM Tablets. This drug was highly addictive considering the heroin in it and dealers had specific clients in mind, kids. Dealers were selling cheese at two or three dollars for a bit which made it easy for kids to buy it. Not only were adults dealing drugs o kids but cheese was also deadly like many other drugs.

“Traditionally heroin is going to be an adult user drug,” says Dallas Independent School District Officer Jeremy Liebbe. “Black tar heroin is cooked on a spoon, mixed with liquid and injected. Meaning needles. Not many kids are wild about needles, so if you want to market heroin to kids you've got to come up with an alternative to it.” (FOX news)

Since heroin is usually cooked and injected, dealers had to find a new way to get kids to buy cheese. An alternative is exactly what they found, dealers went and made cheese so it could be snorted which was more appealing to kids rather than needles. From this drug with a seemingly meaningless name “cheese”, at least 20 children overdosed from the drug.

Again, we worry about people trying to harm us but yet somehow some people will go to every measure to benefit themselves and not think about how it will affect the lives of others at all. The fact that it was an affordable drug made it even easier to get into the hands of kids. Yet still no one thought about how it would take its toll.

(http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/05/10/marketing-drugs-to-kids-from-cheese-to-strawberry-quick/)

Biologically or Hormones

               We go about our day doing all the things we enjoy, being accepted for the normality of our everyday lives. But for some people, they were born feeling every way except normal. They feel trapped or lost feeling as though everything to do or want is wrong and that if they do take action and do everything it takes to feel normal some feel as though they won't feel accepted. For some not being accepted keeps them from being who they want to be, while others won't take no for an answer and will even do every step it takes to be who they really are.

                People were born with a biological sex and some consider it to be normal and other think that how they were born isn’t what they want. Some express themselves by their clothes, hair, and things like such but others would rather fully become and identify as a different gender. People who feel the latter stated before will often take hormones (estrogen, testosterone) in order to change their body. Most are able to get the treatment they want but it can be expensive keeping some people from being able to be who they really are, while in some cases the reason isn’t because of money but it’s because of others opinions on “that lifestyle choice”.

               When it comes to opinions no one is ever wrong but some people go too far with their opinions to keep some from being able to live life to the fullest and being as happy as possible. In order for a transgendered to become what they want, some go to hormone therapy to be able to develop characteristics of a male or female. To receive such hormones you have to go to a doctor to be prescribed such therapy. When it comes to getting the okay from a doctor though some aren't lucky to have a doctor who agrees with the transgender "choice".

                 While some drugs or hormones may be illegal, hormone therapy is not. Most doctors are familiar with hormone therapy but yet some still refuse to administer hormones to a patient not because they lack them but only because they want them. Eventually all transgendered will be able to receive the treatment they want without much hassle because right now it takes lot of effort because of the way the doctors see it or even family. It will get better and hopefully everyone will get to be who they please.