How addictive is heroin, arguably the most notorious of all illicit drugs? For a long time, I used to believe all the hysterical claims regularly trotted out about it, before hearing a lot of counterarguments which seemed to suggest that it wasn’t quite the demon drug many people have made it out to be. Now I’m just confused. A couple of things about it that I think are pretty much indisputable are that it (as well as all other opiate drugs) has the potential to be habit-forming, and that experimenting with it once isn’t going to turn you into a raging drug fiend. Other than that, I’m not sure what to believe. Other claims about it that I’ve heard are that it’s not as addictive as cigarettes, and that only 1 out of every 10 people who try it (or any other drug for that matter) becomes addicted to it (I must admit that I’ve long been a bit suspicious of this 10% figure, however, if only because it sounds a little too neat). I’ve also heard conflicting claims about how it feels to give it up, the descriptions of the experience I’ve heard ranging from “it’s pure hell” (pretty much) to “it’s no worse than a bad case of the flu”. Can anyone (perhaps anyone who’s had personal experience with the big H) shed any light on this?
Also, I’ve heard that the closely-related drug, morphine, used to be legal in America (and presumably elsewhere), and was quite respectable in some quarters (I believe a lot of authors and artists used to indulge in it, as well as opium). I’ve also heard that heroin used to be a common ingredient in over-the-counter medicines (indeed, I know an elderly woman who was old enough to remember such a time; she actually had heroin put on a list of medications she was allergic to after being given a heroin-based cough medicine when young and suffering an allergic reaction to it!). Does anyone know anything about this: what the American (or British or whatever) experience with legal opiates was like, and why these drugs were eventually controlled, if not banned outright?
Heroin typically does not cause dependancy in one dose, it takes several goes during which the user believes they have control.
This means that take one hit one weekend, and leave it alone for a week and you’d feel like you had something of a hangover with perhaps a slight chill.
The problem is that it is incredibly insidious, an irregular routine soon becomes regular.
Heroin causes changes within the brain chemistry and the effects of withdrawal are real physical stresses.
Once you are hooked it is extremely addictive, and extremely difficult to give up.
I have come across lots of addicts, I work in a jail, and given that most have lost absolutely everything, in terms of property, relationships including wives, children and parents, they will do their rattle in jail and still get back on the stuff when released, this must give you some idea of the power of heroin addiction.
Trying the drug is not the same as taking it, I would not rely too heavily on any figures where addicts are questioned as truth goes completely out of the window.
Don’t know about heroin…but I could seriously get into morphine.
I did morphine in hospital when I broke my back and neck, and cold turkeyed it when the pain dropped to a managable with motrin level. I did not want to get dependent on it, and I have a very high pain tolerance anyway.
I can tell you, not hurting is the most addicting feeling anywhere! No pain, no mental pain, just this warm wrapped in cotton feeling…
Sorry, pain is what makes life real, if I am sad, or frustrated, or grumpy, I will deal with it … crawling up a syringe is not for me!
OTOH, marijuana is nice, but since I got the same feeling from alcohol, why bother with an illegal substance. But since I can’t really drink any more, I would use it recreationally [like the way I would use alcohol - a drink or 2 parties, of an occasional after dinner drink, total blitzdom once a year or so] if it did become legal.
I will also add that according to the following cite, heroin experimentation figures are far lower than you have been led to believe at less than 2% in students, the population most likely to experiment.
Whilst nicotine is an extremely potent drug in terms of volume and has very high toxicity, the sites I have seen that claim nicotine addiction is more powerful than heroin or other hard drugs do not seem to provide numbers, they just make the statement without evidence other than the fact that ‘lots of people smoke’ and ‘smoking is harmful’.
The physical effects of withdrawal from heroin and nicotine are of completely differant magnitudes entirely, the driving engine of addiction and the risks that addicts are prepared to take to maintain their respective habits also do not begin to compare.
There are arguments that many of the risks associated with heroin use would not be there is heroin was legalised, however the risks from overdose and the cumulative nature of the addiction from heroin are of a totally differant order than from nicotine.
Put it another way, for most people, getting addicted to nicotine as delivered by tobacco actually takes a ceertain amount of effort, it takes some time to build up a cigarette habit.
Heroin addiction can hook a few people in just one dose, but the majority of addicts take a few doses before they suffer the withdrawl effect associated with addiction, this can take as little as a week.
Heroin can hook you much faster and far harder than nicotine, and most heroin addicts don’t even know they are hooked, they think it is under control, untilit become obvious even to them.
To a susceptible individual, that first experience with heroin will often be compared to receiving “a great big hug from God”, which reassures the user that all his worries, fears, problems, and anxieties are forever solved.
Inevitably, that will over time turn into less of a “hug from God” and more of a “Dutch rub from your weird uncle” but even that is familiar and somewhat comforting to the user by that point.
aruvqan nails it when he describes the sensation as “pain avoidance”. The essential opiate addict is not a “pleasure seeker” so much as a “pain avoider”.
I don’t have an on-line cite but from my work-related reading I know that studies involving how many times a lab animal will press a lever to get a dose of a particular drug show that stimulants are the “most addictive”. This would be amphetamines, cocaine and, to a lesser extent, caffeine and nicotine.
I believe that one of the reasons heroin (and other opiates) are so addictive is their subtlety of action. The user is able to function normally on usual, tolerant doses which gives a false sense of security. How could anything which makes you feel so pleasant but doesn’t interfere with functioning (unlike alcohol or cocaine) be bad for you? The user generally experiences a very nasty surprise when faced with their first taste of withdrawal. The addiction is then fueled by the need to avoid withdrawal in addition to dependence on the pleasant feelings.
According to Licit and Illicit Drugs published by Consumer Reports, 90% of opiate addicts in this country were women prior to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. It was a ladylike drug used in patent medicines for “female” discomforts. The men would drink alcohol and the ladies would retire to their chambers to treat themselves with Lydia Pinkham’s Elixir or some such. After 1914 the sexual demographics changed radically.
The idea behind cigarettes being harder to quit than heroin is stated by Malcom X in his biography. He makes that very statement when describing the feeling of having to go cold turkey on both substances while incarcerated.
Where exactly does Malcolm X make this comparison? As far as I can see, the only statement he makes about giving up cigarettes in prison is (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1964; Ballantine, 1992, p152):
And he doesn’t seem to discuss coming off heroin.
Actually, the experience he compares to coming off cigarettes is giving up pork. But he claims to have found that simple as well.
The “nicotine is more addictive than heroin” thing comes from lab mice which were deliberately addicted to one or the other. After withdrawal of the drug, the frequency and duration of the mice requesting the drug (by pressing a lever) was tested. Mice addicted to nicotine pressed the lever more often and for a longer period after withdrawal of the drug. What this means for humans is unclear, since we can’t ask the mice how they were feeling. It may just be that the heroin-addicted ones became hopeless faster, or that the nicotine-addicted ones were more hyperactive.
While I personally have not tried either drug, experience with friends and family leads me to say that heroin may or may not be trouble, depending on how careful you are, but crack cocaine is one bad, mean, nasty motherfucker.
Your friends who say heroin withdrawal is “pure hell” and “no worse than a bad case of the flu” are both right, to a degree: it’s no worse than the worst case of vomit-laden sweat-dripping flu you ever imagined, with the added knowledge that all you need to cure it is to take a drug that you have in the past very much enjoyed taking. The “no worse than a bad case of flu” school of thought is sort of a statement against the pop culture view of withdrawal, as seen in movies like “The Man With the Golden Arm” and “Trainspotting.” Usually withdrawal is depicted as a little overly, shall we say, dramatic. The addict raves “Oh God! Just one fix! I gotta haves me some smack, man!” and thrases around like he’s literally on fire, eyes rolling back into his head, mouth foaming, hallucinating dead babies crawling across the ceiling, etcetera ad nauseum, pun intended. That’s not what actually happens, of course, but the filmmaker is trying to get across visually what amounts to an exruciatingly profound state of personal discomfort and illness. The real sight of an addict withdrawing cold turkey wouldn’t make very good movie material, but is disturbing in it’s own right. Just an otherwise healthy person absolutely sick as all hell and abjectly miserable.
The depth of the physical dependence and the length of time since the last fix will make the symptoms of the withdrawal vary in intensity from merely mildly “dopesick” to full on agonizing withdrawal. Some very heavy users will use five or ten times the amount of a “beginner’s dose,” which would, without exaggeration, kill the average person outright. The withdrawal syptoms of somebody that uses this heavily will be much, much greater than somebody whose tolerance to the drug is still comparitively low. Somebody that uses very heavily may possibly be at greater danger of overdosing after cleaning up and relapsing, the reason being if they start using again they are much more likely to overestimate their tolerance to the drug.
Experimenting with it once isn’t going to turn you into a drug addict, but neither is smoking one cigarette going to give you lung cancer. Most people don’t intend to get hooked on heroin, they slowly find that what began as a party turned into a habit. Even the subversiveness of the whole thing can be intoxicating for a while, but there’s another consequence most users have to deal with sooner or later: overdose. Heroin is usually self-adminstered in varying doses under sketchy circumstances, and is a strong CNS depressant. A user, even a casual user or first timer, can quietly slip into unconsciousness, stop breathing, and be dead before anyone notices, even if others are present. This is depressingly more common than you might realize. Many if not most users and former users have at least one friend or accquaintance who has died of an overdose, and often several. Heroin may not be the demon drug it’s made out to be, but only because nothing could live up to the reputation it has accquired. The reality is more subtle and more sobering.
I smoked a small amount many years ago (smoked, not mainlined mind you) and although I’m very much the libertarian about drugs I have to admit my gut reaction was “there ain’t no way in hell this oughta be legal”.
Neither tobacco nor heroin appear to be a picnic in the proverbial park to detox from. Paxil and valium appear to be nonslouchy hook-bearing substances as well.
“Heroin” is actually a defunct brand name: Bayre introduced it as a cough medicine in the 1890s. The drug apparently does have cough-suppresent properties, like codeine, another opiate.
This is second-hand, but my brother (who was very much a hedonist and thought that you should at least “try” everything at least once in your life) told me, “I only tried it once, and even though I puked my guts out from it, I can see where it wouldn’t take many times to get addicted. I felt as if I was completely insulated from the entire world.”
BINGO! I couldn’t have put it better myself–and I’m an opiate addict. To expand on that, when/if you do manage to get through the withdrawls and have some “clean time” under your belt, it’s still very much a problem for most people. You may still have cravings and will also forget the hell you went through and start thinking, “Well, I can handle a couple of pills”. You start to long for the nice, warm, gooey feeling. I’m especially susceptible when I don’t have my addiction (and, most importantly, the underlying emotional reasons for the addiction) in the forefront of my mind. When I stop dealing with things I’ll get too comfortable and think I’m okay with doing “just a little”. That “just a little” will push all of my problems to the back and I’m on the rollercoaster again. It really sucks.
Anytime someone tells me they are on painkillers for something long-term, I always warn them that it can sneak up on you. You won’t realize you’re addicted until it’s too late.
That is exactly why I stopped the pain killers except for ibuprofin…it was too tempting, and I didn’t want to be addicted. Probably one of the main reasons I have good body days and bad body days - I prefer to handle pain with motrin instead of anything heavier. If I am in a fairly painful day, I just take it really easy. If in a good day, I carry on as normal=)
