Heroin Addiction

People use heroin because they are in pain of some kind and are looking to escape that pain. Heroin removes your ability to perceive pain, with immediate effects like:

• A rush of pleasure or euphoria 
• Feelings of warmth and safety
• Sense of overall well-being 
• Absence of physical pain. 

Heroin is a pain killer in every sense of the word. It chemically removes the ability to perceive pain. In the absence of physical pain, heroin also dulls emotional pain since the brain regions for processing physical and emotional pain are located next to one another and are connected. As a result of its immediate effects, it’s no surprise that many people who abuse heroin also have a history of trauma, homelessness, or an underlying mental health issue. For so many people recovering from heroin addiction, heroin began as a way to self-medicate something. 

• Snorting Heroin: The least common method. Usually requires liquifying the drug before inhaling through the nose. Effects start and wear off quicker.
• Smoking Heroin: The most common method. It involves igniting the powder and inhaling the fumes. Effects start later and last longer.
• Injecting (shooting) Heroin: The second most common method (most common for heavy users). This injection drug requires liquifying the heroin before injecting it into the blood. Effects start and wear off quickest but are more potent, and therefore more dangerous.
• Mixing Heroin With Other Drugs: Heroin is often combined with other drugs to change the effects. A typical combo is cocaine and heroin. This is called a “Speed ball”.

The way someone uses heroin can reveal how severe their addiction is. Most people begin by smoking heroin. Usually, they smoke black tar heroin because it is the cheapest and easiest to find. Someone’s habit is likely more severe if they snort heroin since it requires distilling it into an injection drug that is in liquid form. If someone is injecting heroin, as for abusing most iv drugs, it indicates they’ve been using it long enough to build a tolerance because injecting heroin can be fatal without a tolerance. People with tolerances are also more likely to begin combining heroin with other substances to increase the high. 

Heroin often does not smell like anything and is odorless. However, heroin may smell like vinegar if it’s heavily processed and impure. As a result, black tar heroin is the most likely to have a vinegar smell to it.  

What Does Heroin Taste Like?

Since there is no safe way to sample heroin, descriptions of its taste come from people who use it. According to people in recovery, raw and uncut white heroin tastes very bitter. However, street dealers cut their heroin with other products and sell the mixture at full price to make money. As a result, heroin often tastes like whatever additives dealers used to cut it. 

Common things used to cut heroin: 

• Talcum powder
• Sugar (white or brown)
• Chalk 
• Flour
• Starch
• Caffeine
• Baking Soda
• Laundry detergent
• Rat Poison
• Crushed over the counter painkillers
• Other drugs like fentanyl, cocaine, codeine, or morphine. 

If you believe you’ve found heroin, you should not taste it since that will activate its effects. If you’d like to confirm that you’ve found heroin, the quickest way is to purchase an over-the-counter drug test from your local pharmacy.

Raw heroin is a fine white powder similar to baby powder or powdered milk. Black tar heroin is ashy or sooty in appearance, and brown heroin is a sandy brown powder. It is most often white, black, or brown. But it can come in various colors (pink, green, or purple) depending on the chemicals used to “cut” it during processing. 

Cutting is a practice used by drug traffickers to make money by using other things to dilute drugs. For instance, if a gram of heroin is worth $100, they might mix half a gram of baby powder with half a gram of heroin and sell it for $100. Although people often think white heroin is the purest, it’s important to understand that on the street this is a misconception. Generally, crudely processed heroin is black, and diluted black tar heroin is brown. But just because heroin is white doesn’t mean it wasn’t cut with another white substance like sugar.

Drug Misuse Definition: 

The definition of drug misuse is using any drug in a way not prescribed by a doctor or allowed by law. Heroin is classified as an illegal schedule 1 narcotic (meaning it’s highly addictive and has no medical use) and is illegal to make or prescribe. So when it comes to heroin, the definition of drug misuse is any use of heroin at all. 

Indications that somebody is abusing heroin can differ depending on how much, how often, and what dose a person uses. Signs include:

• Sleeping a lot: Heroin causes someone to “nod off” or go to sleep, so if someone keeps odd hours or suddenly goes from high to no energy, this can be an indication.
• Poor hygiene: Heroin is incredibly addictive and depresses energy levels. The result of these two factors is often less attention to superficial things like personal appearance. 
• Baggy clothes: Heroin often causes itching, and as a person scratches, rashes will develop and break open into unsavory sores. Injecting heroin can also leave track marks, pus-filled sacs (called abscesses), and bruises. To hide these things, someone may wear unseasonably warm or uncharacteristically baggy clothes. 
• Heroin Track Marks: “Heroin Track Marks” refer to the marks left by a needle after injecting heroin often leading to scar tissue at injection sites. When a person first begins injecting heroin, they have healthy, robust veins. However, over time needles will damage and collapse their veins from repeated injections. As a result, finding a suitable vein will become more difficult, and repeated stabs will leave “tracks” behind. 
• Pinned Pupils: When people are high on opiates like heroin, they often have pinpoint pupils that are constricted even in low light. This is commonly called “Heroin Eyes”.

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