Heroin: Growing Addiction
When I saw that I was required to write a paper on a drug of abuse I knew instantly which drug I was going to select. Heroin. This drug has made a large impact on my personal life the past few years. In early 2014 my boyfriends’ uncle passed away due to the withdrawal of heroin, at the young age of twenty-six. He was not able to overcome the mental damage from the lack of heroin in his system and killed himself. After the incident my boyfriends’ younger brother, who was eighteen at the time, took up heroin to try and cover up his emotions of the loss. It has been an enormous impact on our lives and a struggle to assist him to give up the demon. The drug changed him from someone I loved to someone I wish I did not …show more content…
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration website it states that schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. This drug is highly addictive. When I saw the classification that heroin was in schedule I could not agree more. Do I agree it should be classified with marijuana? No. But I do not agree that marijuana should be in schedule I drugs either. Heroin is a drug that can instantly cause addiction, you may quickly develop tolerance and physiologic dependence. By becoming dependent on the drug you need more to continue getting the same rush. Once a user becomes dependent on the drug and tries to pull away it can cause withdrawal symptoms as early as six hours later. A few signs of withdrawal include vomiting, tremors, sweating and moodiness. A person going through withdrawal can be noticeably distant. I had the personal experience of watching my boyfriends’ brother the past few months go through this stage, he was always tired and laid up in bed with the lights off, he would take a shower every hour to try and shake it off. It is such a hard thing to watch, but even harder for the abuser to overcome. The euphoric rush from the heroin will cause the addict to want more, crave more. In …show more content…
– a number that more than doubled from 2010 when there were only 3,036 heroin overdose deaths. In one Swedish research study, it was found that those struggling with heroin addiction had death rates that were 63 times the rate of non-heroin users. Of the 21.5 million Americans 12 or older that had a substance use disorder in 2014, 1.9 million had a substance use disorder involving prescription pain relievers and 586,000 had a substance use disorder involving heroin. It is estimated that 23% of individuals who use heroin develop opioid addiction. I found a site that includes a lot of statistics for 2016 and this site is fascinating, I wanted to include every single bit of it in this paper, however there was too much to transfer over. I have included the website below for you to use and share with fellow peers, as it is incredibly interesting and factual, including numbers and statistics I would have never
When I saw that I was required to write a paper on a drug of abuse I knew instantly which drug I was going to select. Heroin. This drug has made a large impact on my personal life the past few years. In early 2014 my boyfriends’ uncle passed away due to the withdrawal of heroin, at the young age of twenty-six. He was not able to overcome the mental damage from the lack of heroin in his system and killed himself. After the incident my boyfriends’ younger brother, who was eighteen at the time, took up heroin to try and cover up his emotions of the loss. It has been an enormous impact on our lives and a struggle to assist him to give up the demon. The drug changed him from someone I loved to someone I wish I did not …show more content…
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration website it states that schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. This drug is highly addictive. When I saw the classification that heroin was in schedule I could not agree more. Do I agree it should be classified with marijuana? No. But I do not agree that marijuana should be in schedule I drugs either. Heroin is a drug that can instantly cause addiction, you may quickly develop tolerance and physiologic dependence. By becoming dependent on the drug you need more to continue getting the same rush. Once a user becomes dependent on the drug and tries to pull away it can cause withdrawal symptoms as early as six hours later. A few signs of withdrawal include vomiting, tremors, sweating and moodiness. A person going through withdrawal can be noticeably distant. I had the personal experience of watching my boyfriends’ brother the past few months go through this stage, he was always tired and laid up in bed with the lights off, he would take a shower every hour to try and shake it off. It is such a hard thing to watch, but even harder for the abuser to overcome. The euphoric rush from the heroin will cause the addict to want more, crave more. In …show more content…
– a number that more than doubled from 2010 when there were only 3,036 heroin overdose deaths. In one Swedish research study, it was found that those struggling with heroin addiction had death rates that were 63 times the rate of non-heroin users. Of the 21.5 million Americans 12 or older that had a substance use disorder in 2014, 1.9 million had a substance use disorder involving prescription pain relievers and 586,000 had a substance use disorder involving heroin. It is estimated that 23% of individuals who use heroin develop opioid addiction. I found a site that includes a lot of statistics for 2016 and this site is fascinating, I wanted to include every single bit of it in this paper, however there was too much to transfer over. I have included the website below for you to use and share with fellow peers, as it is incredibly interesting and factual, including numbers and statistics I would have never