All Positive Options - Heroin Page 2

Few drugs are more potent or more addictive, but unlike something like methamphetamine, heroin takes some work to become addicted to it. Smoking heroin once will not get you hooked, nor will injecting it once cause you to become addicted. (That's assuming that you don't absolutely fall in love psychologically, which a small percentage of people certainly do with first or second time use.)

Instead, like almost all substances or behaviors that become addictive, the real "lure" of heroin is that initially it seems harmless and manageable. But continued use over a period of a few weeks (or with some people even less) will get you addicted and you'd know because when you tried to stop, you'd experience withdrawal symptoms. At that point, to one degree or another, you've broken what we call your "addiction thermostat" and life changes forever, even when and if you ever get "clean" again.

Let's have a look at what heroin and other opiates do in the brain. Click on the "Mouse Party" picture below. This will take you a great presentation from the University Of Utah on how heroin and other drugs actually affect the brain. Even if you've never liked science, you're going to love this! Just pick up the mouse using heroin, and place it in the chair.

As we said, heroin is not typically "instantly addictive." A very recent study by The University Of Plymouth with 72 heroin users seems to confirm that becoming physically dependent on heroin does not occur instantly or quickly. Those in the study were using "regularly," which meant up to three times per week. Within the study, some participants took six months to become addicted, some took a year, some took five years, but nobody became “instantly addicted.” On average, it took nine months before the participants began using on a daily basis. The study also found that "social" factors played a role in how fast addiction became full-blown, such as whether the participant lived with another user.

As you've probably noticed throughout our site at All Positive Options.com, we believe that addiction is a very complex interaction of many factors. This involves things like social circumstances, personality types, and as this study seems to confirm, the context in which people are using a substance as well. Having said that, it's also worth noting that every single participant in this study (72 out of 72) became physically dependent on heroin. And again, this is how addiction works. No matter how short or how long the time-line is, given enough time, it's going to take over.

Having said that, it's reasonable to assume that if you have a genetic predisposition to heroin addiction (which many believe exists in certain people) and that's combined with negative psychosocial factors (depression, anxiety, boredom, poor coping mechanisms) you are a prime candidate to become addicted to heroin.

Mention "heroin" ten or fifteen years ago and it usually conjured up images of the inner-city and that "bad part of town." Not so today - heroin has gone mainstream and is in places and used by people that you would not normally associate with the drug. That's because many don't start with heroin, they start with drugs like Oxycontin or Vicodin and then graduate to heroin because heroin is cheaper, usually more readily available, and produces a similar "healing high."

In Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania, heroin has been the drug implicated in nearly half of the 141 fatal overdoses since 2002. There have been 14 drug-related fatalities in that county this year, and heroin is suspected in half of them. A little further down this page we discuss heroin overdose deaths when the heroin has been laced with something else, and then the numbers absolutely skyrocket.

At the Gateway Rehabilitation Center, which serves some very affluent areas of Pennsylvania, the number of teens battling heroin addiction is as they describe it, "staggering." They report that 10 years ago, they'd see five teens a year on heroin. But over the last five years, they see 200 to 300 teens a year seeking treatment for it.

Once again, may of these kids begin with pain pills and then that just gets way too expensive and heroin becomes a logical and economical alternative. As we say elsewhere on our site, we not believers in the traditional notion of "gateway" drugs wherein one drug leads to another, but there's no question that opioid-type pain pills lead to heroin in a lot of cases, purely because of the economics.

These kinds of numbers might make some people want to run out and spend millions of dollars on public service announcements and graphic ads to deter kids from drugs. It might raise questions like, "What can we do to stop the supply?" or "How can we scare kids away from this drug?"

But for us at All Positive Options, it makes us ask what we feel are more profound and relevant questions. Questions like, "What's happening today?" "What kind of world and life have we created where kids who seemingly have everything, actually have nothing?" "What parenting is happening, or perhaps more to the point, is not happening today?" "Are kids being raised by their parents today, or are they being raised by the culture and other peers they've chosen to attach themselves to?" And this is important because remember, heroin addiction, like any other addiction, isn't the "cause" of the problem, it's the "symptom" of another problem.