Topic: COMMUNITY INTEREST
A Special Kind Of Hell
By Tammy Duffy
“I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.”
― Dan Rather-1955
Yes, Dan Rather did heroin, ONCE, for a story. It was a special kind of Hell. He was lucky, he survived.
A good-looking and gifted son or daugher dies due to an overdose of a powerful drug that is indiscriminately claiming new victims every day in our country.
The details vary, although sometimes only slightly, in other homes in our county, our state, and our nation. But the irreversible results are the same: The death toll is rising because of overdoses of heroin, or in many cases heroin that contains fentanyl, an opioid characterized as so strong that a speck the size of a sugar crystal can be deadly.
In death after death, investigators have reported that the victims most likely thought they were buying heroin, but instead they got fentanyl or heroin that had been cut with or was laced with fentanyl. This serial killer is invading the illegal drug market. What is your town doing about it?
Fentanyl is deliberately added to heroin to enhance its effect and create a “super high,” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Drug users often turn to heroin because of an escalating cycle of abuse.
Abuse involving prescription painkillers has been a topic of conversation and point of concern for years. The opiates that bring blessed relief to people fighting terrible pain — drugs such as morphine and Vicodin — soon fed an addiction for many in our society. Heroin grew to become a cheaper and often more accessible substitute for the painkillers that had taken over the lives of their users. And in this deadly cycle, fentanyl has been used intentionally to increase the high of heroin or secretly by dealers to dilute heroin and increase profits.
Heroin has made a comeback. It can be the drug of choice for a user, or it frequently is adopted as an alternative for someone addicted to prescription pain medication who is seeking a cheaper, more accessible alternative. Heroin deaths, long in a decline, have bounced back in the past five years.
Our youth are turning to drugs for a reasons a parent will never understand. Most of the addicts had outward lives, were gifted musicians, brilliant young men and women, and people considered by many as charming. These same people are dying from overdoses. The addiction results are just in their infancy. They will get worse. It is not a poor man's drug of choice.
Help in the face of such extraordinary loss can come in several ways, starting most simply with education about a growing heroin problem and a campaign to warn of the dangers.
State legislators need to pass a homicide-by-drug-delivery law similar to what many states have adopted. The law would punish drug dealers not only for selling illegal drugs but also for deaths that resulted from overdoses.
Addiction treatment remains hard to find in this country even though 44,000 Americans die yearly from drug overdoses — more than die from car crashes or any type of injury. Treatment often is difficult to afford, too. Towns are charging, like in Hamilton N.J., astronomical fees to non-profits who focus on drug addiction. Obviously, the leadership has no heart or clear understanding of the drug issues in their own town to do this. It is heartless and cruel to the community to limit access to people for help when there is an epidemic going on.
Drug overdoses are soaring, addiction is growing and treatment is lacking. Solutions may be difficult to find, but our society cannot continue to ignore what is taking place.
We hope that these weekly articles are helping create an awareness and importance to get in front of this issue.
Posted by tammyduffy
at 10:14 AM EDT
Updated: Sunday, 21 June 2015 10:16 AM EDT
