Heroin (AKA: smack, horse, mud, brown sugar) has been a part of the drug culture for many years. It is primarily used through injection causing wide spread concerns for everyone. Syringes lost or left behind by users carry disease and narcotics which can effect anyone who comes in contact with them. Syringes from heroin addicts have been found at bus benches, vacant lots by schools, alleyways and public bathrooms. Diseases such as HIV, hepatitis, and tetanus are common amongst heroin addicts (Strategy 1996). Heroin is an opiate or a downer and is made from the resin taken from the seedpod of the poppy plant.

To put a perspective on heroin, morphine is one of the strongest legal painkillers known and heroin is five times stronger. Heroin tends to relax the user. An immediate rush usually will occur and sometimes be accompanied by side effects such as restlessness, nausea and vomiting. A user of heroin may go on the "nod". This is best described as going back and forth from feeling alert to drowsy. Due to the use of needles with this drug, infections and abscesses on the body are common. Heroin users will normally have injuries that have been left unattended due to the drug's pain killing abilities. Addiction usually leads to malnutrition and weight loss. A person addicted to heroin may look like they are in a daze, almost to the point of sleep, have a dry mouth, low raspy voice, droopy eyelids, profuse itching, and fresh puncture marks or sores covering their body (Mckim, 1996). Morphine, which is used as painkiller in most hospitals and terminally ill patients, can have a down side to it as well. Morphine may be said to cultivate crime instinct; at all events, it prepares the way to certain criminal acts, which often have some previous predisposition. The perversion and damage to the higher centers, which govern the ethical relations of life, are always associated with morphinists (JAMA, 10-11-99)

7. Siegal, S. (1982) Drug dissociation in 19th century. 267-262.

Heroin is such an addictive drug that it needs substantial detoxification treatment. Methadone maintenance is the most effective known treatment for heroin addiction. "Used properly, methadone reduces drug use, related crime, death, and disease among

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