Painkiller Addicts Are Starting To Use Heroin as Well

It seems that more and more painkiller addicts are starting to use heroin as well. To a normal person this sounds like a horrible trade off but you have to understand that painkillers aren’t exactly the healthy option either.

In order to find out more about this subject a team of researchers did interview with 267 patients who suffer from addiction. The group of people was selected from around 15,000 addicts that went into drug treatment centers in the last year.

Almost half of the people that were interviewed were regularly using drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin. These are some very powerful drugs which derive from the substance opium. Most of them admitted that recently they’ve started using heroin instead of these pills.

Almost all of the people who took part in the interview admitted that the main reason they started using heroin is due to the lower cost and how easy it is to find on the streets. What they’re not taking into consideration is how much more dangerous heroin is compared to opiates.

Besides the fact that heroin is more addictive than other substances, you can never be sure of how pure it is when buying from shady dealers. In some cases people who sell heroin will try to add different substances to the product in order to make more money with a smaller amount of pure heroin.

The fact that the strength of the heroin you are purchasing can wildly vary will sometimes lead to unwanted overdoses and even death. Heroin abuse is considered to be a true epidemic of our modern times, especially in the United States.

This increase in heroin usage is attributed to the federal government shutting down a lot of clinics which would issue drug prescriptions illegally. While their measure was well intended it only made the decision for addicts to switch to heroin a lot easier since they couldn’t get their pills anymore.

It seems that the Northeast region of the U.S. has been hit the hardest. States in this region have the highest number of heroin users while narcotic painkillers come in second place. As far as the Midwest and South go, prescription drugs are still a problem but there are less heroin addicts roaming the streets and endangering their own lives.

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