Heroin

Perhaps the most infamous opioid narcotic, heroin is a drug synthesized from morphine. The U.S. is currently in the grip of an opioid epidemic, and heroin – cheaper and often more easily obtainable than prescription opioids – has only increased in popularity. Coming in both powder form and a sticky resin known as ‘black tar” or “Mexican mud,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report heroin was responsible for over 8,000 deaths in 2013. Thankfully help can be found at a heroin treatment center.

Sovereign Health has seen the casualties of the opioid crisis first-hand. We provide expert heroin addiction treatment for women at our residential treatment facility in Chandler, Arizona.

Heroin Abuse

Addiction starts with a flower.

Sap from the Asian opium poppy plant is extracted and refined, turning it into morphine, a powerful painkiller which has been long used to treat pain. Further refining produces heroin, first manufactured at the turn of the 20th century in Germany and sold as a tuberculosis treatment.

Many opioid addicts enter into addiction after being prescribed – or recreationally using – prescription opioids like OxyContin or Vicodin. When prescriptions aren’t refilled and when obtaining the medications becomes too expensive, many addicts turn to heroin. Heroin is comparatively cheap and easy to obtain, and more powerful than most prescription narcotics.

Heroin is best known as an injectable drug, but it can also be snorted in powder form and even smoked. Heroin’s effects are devastating regardless of method. The drug is so powerful many addicts abandon jobs, school, family and even food in pursuit of the high. Injecting drugs over a long period of time can collapse veins, causing limb damage – to say nothing of the risk of hepatitis and HIV. Finally, as with any abused opioid, heroin users run a constant risk of overdose.