Did you know about the deadliest drug?

Ok so question for you to think about and ponder on.  What is the deadliest drug on the planet?  Cocaine?  Marijuana?  Meth?  Surprisingly none of those are the deadliest, that title goes to heroin.  Heroin isn’t one you seem to hear a lot about on the news as they typically talk about cocaine, marijuana, and meth.  Currently the U.S. has the worst heroin epidemic ever all due to the fact that it can be delivered right to your front door.

Yes, delivered to your front door and you may not even be aware that you have had it delivered.  Heroin is an opiate that is very chemically similar, sometimes referred to as a chemical sibling, to opioid pain killers like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet.  Heroin has gained in popularity due to the fact that it is much cheaper than those pills and can actually be smoked or snorted giving the same effects as being injected.  This helped several users to get the high without the needles and allows younger users to experiment much easier.

 

Heroin isn’t a new drug either, it’s been around since it was first discovered in 1874.  Chemists created heroin trying to find a less addictive form of morphine, but ultimately discovered heroin had twice the potency.  This lead to heroin addiction and due to the fact it’s so chemically similar to opioid pain killers has become the new drug of choice for those users.  Because doctors wrote millions of prescriptions for opioid painkillers from 1999 to 2010, thousands of Americans became addicted.  Chemists reformulated opioids to make them harder to abuse and a government crackdown on who could be prescribed the painkillers drove up the cost of the pills.

 

Typically those who use needles are deemed “hardcore junkies” while those who smoke consider themselves a more casual user and are under a false impression that they won’t be addicted, much the same way as tobacco.  Surveys show that about 80% of all heroin users started out using opioid pain killers and it’s not just some nameless homeless guys doing it.  According to Burlington, Vermont police chief Michael Schirling “We’ve got soccer moms on heroin.  This is a completely underground, behind-closed-doors phenomenon.”

The DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment has reported that 9% of all law enforcement agencies deemed heroin as highly available in 2007 and by 2013 the availability skyrocketed to 40%.  The northeast area of the states including Vermont, New York, and New Jersey the percentages jumped even higher.  The governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin, dedicated nearly all of his State of the State Address to the issue of heroin and addiction.  Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick declared a public health emergency in March 2014 due to the spike of deaths from heroin.

Despite the best attempts to try and reign in this deadly drug, overdose deaths aren’t uncommon, especially when they combine cocaine with the heroin and make a speedball.  For users who aren’t getting that high from heroin, due to the fact that they have developed a tolerance, they turn to mixing the drug with cocaine to get the high they desire.  Combining drugs is a very chancy thing to do and the results are typically deadly.