Monday, September 29, 2014

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.

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