Heroin

Q: What is heroin?

 A: Heroin is a highly addictive illegal drug. On the street it is also called junk, smack, horse and H.

Heroin belongs to a group of drugs called opiates. It is made by adding chemicals to morphine, a natural substance found in opium poppies. Codeine also comes from poppies. Other opiates that come from opium poppies are found in the drugs Percodan® and Percocet®, and in some cough syrups.

Q: What does heroin look like?

A: Heroin is a white or brownish powder. It can be a fine powder or lumpy. Whatever it looks like, it can also contain other things like sugar, other drugs or even poison like strychnine.

Q: How is it used?

A: Heroin can be injected by needle, snorted or smoked. It can also be added to regular cigarettes or marijuana joints.

Q: What does heroin make you feel?

A: Heroin makes people feel intense pleasure and reduced pain (morphine, the source of heroin, is used in hospitals as a painkiller).

When it is injected, people can feel the effects of heroin in about seven seconds. When smoked or snorted, the effects are felt in about 10 minutes.

Q: What are the effects of using heroin?

A: People who use heroin may feel sick to their stomachs or vomit. They can also get itchy or sleepy, and they may start breathing very quickly. The pupils of their eyes get smaller.

Large doses can slow breathing so much that the person could slip into a coma and die. It is hard to know the strength of street heroin, so overdose and death can happen easily.

Q: What happens if heroin is used often over a period of months or years?

Injecting heroin regularly can cause your veins to collapse. Heroin users who share needles risk getting infections including hepatitis and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Smoking it often can lead to pneumonia and other lung problems.

Whether it is smoked or injected, heroin can make you lose your appetite to the point where you just don’t eat and suffer malnutrition. Constipation is also common.

Women can have irregular periods; men may develop some sexual problems.

Q: Is heroin addictive?

A: Yes. Heroin is highly addictive. People who use heroin regularly start needing more of it to feel the same effects as when they first started. This is called tolerance, and it leads to addiction.

Another side of heroin’s addictive power is withdrawal. When an addicted person quits, they start going through withdrawal in a couple of hours. Withdrawal can include restlessness, yawning, runny nose, tears, diarrhea, cramps, goose bumps, low blood pressure and strong cravings. These effects get stronger for two to four days, and then gradually weaken. Depression, weakness and stress can last for several weeks or months.

This combination of tolerance and very unpleasant withdrawal can make it very hard for some people to quit heroin.

Q: What is methadone?

A: Methadone is a man-made painkiller used to treat people who have an addiction to heroin. It is usually taken as a liquid.

Methadone blocks out many of the effects of heroin, it prevents cravings for heroin, and its effects last longer than those of heroin. This means people on methadone can start to put their lives back together, because they no longer need to spend all their time thinking about or looking for more heroin.

Methadone is also addictive, and it can be dangerous for people (especially children) who don’t have a tolerance to heroin. But because it is given under professional supervision, people can slowly stop taking it and have help dealing with their withdrawal.