Help is out there
"We all need to have an interest in making sure teens grow up healthy and drug-free." -John Walters
Not all, but many teens have easy access to prescription painkillers that can first promote an addiction. This can be accessed through a family's medicine cabinet or through the black market. Simply, heroin is ravaging America and is incredibly easy and cheap for teeangers to access and afford. One relevant reason heroin began to surge was when government authorites cracked down on doctors and drug companies who were overprescribing pain medication which then sent their users off to look for a new high (Khazan).
"According to recent statistics, 3 in 100 high school students have used heroin," derived from the Center for Disease Control (Himelstein).
Heroin is a highly addictive opiate that is produced from morphine, a principal component of opium. The drug is highly illegal in the United States, but its popularity is growing rapidly. It can be injected, snorted or smoked and most commonly comes in a white powder or a brown or black powder referred to as tar, which is pictured on the far right ("Heroin" 1).
What is heroin?
Why is this an issue?
Beware of the dangers
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Heroin enters the brain quickly and instantly slows down reaction time and rapidly affects a user's ability to make unconscious decisions (Mgrid)
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Many believe that snorting or smoking heroin versus injecting it will prevent addiction ("Heroin" 1). You will become addicted.
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It is rare to know the purity of a dose of heroin and whether it contains Strychnine, a poisonous chemical ("Heroin" 1).