Tag Archives: drug use

heroin

Heroin

Over the last several months I have been noticing that there are more reports in the media about the rise in heroin overdoses in older Americans. None of the reports had any explanation on why this may be happening. For the most part it was just kind of interesting in passing to read of the phenomenon as part of my background is in substance abuse counseling. I have worked both inpatient and outpatient facilities.

Some of our discussions on this topic of the reported increase have included causes such as the down economy and general dis-stress in older populations leading to recreational use / escapism. That is one of the easiest conclusions to reach. Another possible explanation is the era that this age group was raised… the ‘Baby boomers’ being teens in the 1960 -70s and going back to their roots.
These speculations were logical and reasonable in general.

OH well, this does not affect me directly and I have other things to worry about like dealing with this website and other work. And besides that now that we have Obamacare there is hope & change coming to take care of all our troubles.

Over the last few weeks we have also been discussing the situation in a neighboring state decriminalizing pot and how much the state is raking in on the taxes generated from the regulated sales. For good or ill our state is going to be following in that state’s foot prints and setting up a similar system. A few of the benefits of the state doing this is of course the added revenue which always pleases politicians. For the people there will be no need of back ally deals gone bad and hopefully ‘better’ quality weed.

One person that we know has been making use of the now legalized pot. Not for recreation, but for pain management. He reports that the pot does a good job relaxing him and decreasing the pain. Why would he do that, given that he is covered for medical treatment? WELL, that is the $64,000 question isn’t it.

There is a big push on in the medical profession [DEA] nationally to decrease the prescription and use of narcotic pain relievers. Think about this – someone who has chronic pain which they have trouble dealing with on prescription medications gets told by their doctors that they have to cut down on the pain meds [because the DEA says so] and the patient suffers more because of this. What are most people going to do?

What would YOU do in that situation?

Most people are going to do whatever they have to do to control that pain. If that means using pot, they will. If it means using heroin [a less pure form of morphine] they will. This leads us to the increase of heroin overdoses. There is little to no quality control programs in the manufacture and distribution of heroin and other street drugs. The dealers in order to make more profit will cut [dilute] the heroin, some more than others and sometimes with stuff that is harmful, so the user does not know batch to batch how much of the active product they are actually taking which leads to increased dosing and finely an over dose and death.