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GENERAL INFORMATION:
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HEROINWhat Is Heroin? Heroin is a highly narcotic, swiftly addictive drug. It was developed by several chemists out of morphine base as a "non-daddicting" substitute for morphine in the 1870's. Bayer and Company, a German pharmaceutical firm, first mass-produced it under the brand name "heroin" in 1898. Its name derives from the word "hero," suggesting courage, daring and impressive power. It is, however, the courage and daring of a deluded and oftentimes demented cireamer: illusory and transitory, selfAestructive and socially damaging in no time at all. The new drug, obtained by acetylation of morphine, was soon proved to have narcotic and addictive qualities far exceeding those of morphine itself. 'This was one of the deep tragedies of the medical world, because heroin was marketed as cure for morphine addiction and it was already addicting hundreds of thousands before it was outlawed. It produces an intense euphoria ("an initial sweet surge of super-orgasmic intensity and then four or five hours of daydreamy release," as Newsweek describes it) and has become the No.1 drug of abuse. It is quickly addicting: within as brief a period as a week, sometimes with the first needle. Like all narcotic drugs, a body tolerance develops rapidly with heroin. The abuser usually is hooked by the first "sweet surge" of the drug. He is possessed by an over-powering urge to take a second and quickly a third "hit." His existence, once he is hooked, becomes heroin-centered; the habit becomes near-to-impossible to kick, because he is seized by terrible pains when he falters to sustain his ever-growing need for the drug in ever-increasing doses. Because of its potency, heroin is "cut" (diluted or adulterated) with milk sugar, qumine and mannite dufour, commonly known as "behita." This watering down, which goes down the line of the illicit heroin traffick (from the manufacturer to the wholesaler to the last pusher), permits great profits to all involved in any heroin syndicate. The "scag," one of heroin's common street names, is "cut" to as low as only a 3% purity. Grain for grain, heroin is up to 10 times more potent than morphine. It is usually mixed into a liquid solution and ''mainlined'' (injected into a vein), but it is also ''snorted'' (inhaled) and "dropped" (taken by mouth). Mainlining gives a rapid and most pronounced "high" (lift or wellbeing), however. The first emotional reaction is an easing of fears and relief from worry. This is followed by a state of stupor, after which: the withdrawal symptoms. The whole process (the intense high the quick addiction, the rapid body tolerance) makes heroin the most dangerous of the narcotic drugs. How Does Heroin Work? How heroin exactly works was not known for years. What was known only was that, like opium and morphine, it depressed the central nervous system: the brain and spinal cord. Two American researchers, Dr. Solomon Snyder and researcher Candace Pert of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recently pinpointed, however, "8pecific opiate receptor sites" in animal brains. With this, they charted how heroin works in the human brain. The area of the brain where they found the heaviest concentration of opiate receptors is the "corpus striatum," which, they reported, seemed to play a part in integrating motor activity and perceptual information. The receptors occurred much less frequently, they said, in the "cerebral cortex," which regulates higher intellectual functions, and the "brain stem," which controls sleeping and wakefulness. With their findings, Snyder and Pert are now investigating whether producing addiction in an animal may permanently, increase the number of receptor sites in its brain, creating an insatiable, physiological crving for opiates that endures long after withrawal. Why Is Heroin Personally Damaging? "A wretched dope addict," which has been used repeatedly to describe the heroin addicts, is no exaggeration. Once-decent men and women have been reduced to pitiful wrecks by heroin. Their whole existence, once they are "hooked," becomes drug-centered: they become emaciated, because they do not eat; they become social derelicts, because they neglect personal hygiene; they become criminals, because they have to feed their habit by any means. They exist only for the "fix" or "hit" (heroin injection). Their waking hours are centered around: 1) obtaining the money to buy heroin ("hustling"), 2) making a connection with a pusher ("copping"), 3) trying to avoid arrest and withdrawal. It is a deplorable life. (See World of a Junkie, page 155). Addiction leads, invariably, to personality decay, mental harm and emotional disequilibrium - and, oftentimes, death. Convulsions, which come when an addict fails to feed his "monkey," have been known to kill. Overdoses, too, have killed; this happens when an addict has lost tolerance (a body's adaptive ability to take, absorb and adjust to the drug), or he has never developed tolerance because he was using greatly "cut" (very diluted) heroin, and he suddenly takes pjire heroin or heroin of high purity. Infections from unsterile solutions, syringes and needles are further dangers to a junkie, causing bacterial dise-es like: viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, pneumonia, congestion of thelungs, skin abcesses, inflammation of the veins, venereal diseases, blood poisoning, lockjaw or tetanus. All of these sum up to reducing the life expectancy of an addict to much, much lower than a non-addict's. There, too, is the added physical damage: addicts of both sexes became less fertile with heroin; infants born of addict mothers generally get born addicted themselves.
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