Posted on 03/24/2014 6:26:18 PM PDT by mgist
The drug has followed prescription painkillers into new neighborhoods, forcing police and parents to confront an unexpected problem. In the upper left, a nurse shows off a container of naloxone, a drug which can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose. NEWBURYPORT, MASS. Ana was a good student in middle school. She got above-average grades, seemed poised and self-possessed, and, like many of her friends in her charming coastal town north of Boston, was on a probable path to college. Then, during her freshman year...One night she got very drunk with some friends and loved it. She says it made her feel like "the person she wanted to be." Before long she was also smoking marijuana. Soon after, a friend gave her some prescription painkiller pills to try, which Ana (not her real name) says made her feel even better than the alcohol. She started buying the pills illicitly – often spending several hundred dollars a day. She stole to support her habit, but it wasn't enough.
Then her friend asked her: Why not try heroin, since it's so much cheaper? Ana was shocked. Heroin, after all, was for "real" drug addicts. But by that time her dependence on the painkillers had become more than she could resist. She bought the heroin, snorting the powder at first. But within six days she was injecting herself with a needle – becoming the archetype of a classic heroin addict. Ana's anguished journey from conscientious student to heroin user is one confronting many young people in suburbs across the country...
The rise is being driven by a large supply of cheap heroin in purer concentrations that can be inhaled or smoked, which often removes the stigma associated with injecting it with a needle.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Because people are addicted?
I’m not quite getting Wall Street’s role in this.
This shit is hitting my friends’ families... My own are too young now. It’s not about the beer or booze binge at 40, it’s about the plunge at FIFTEEN into these drugs.
I pray a few bad doctors will be strung up.
Need I repeat that, or be banned?
Drug companies are sending ANYTHING to doctors.
I don’t trust government but I do trust rope.
PASS IT ON before it hits your kids.
The article can be summed up in three words.
“Junkies are everywhere”
The needle does not care if you are from the slums are from a wealthy suburb.
Fishtown
Where were Ana’s parents (if she had any)?
It’s so sad. Heroin claimed a 26 year old in my town last weekend.
The dealers had this guy on their front stoop when he stopped breathing. They refused to call 911. They threw buckets of cold water all over him.
Finally, the girl who drove him down from the country to the city dropped him off at the ER and took off. She didn’t even get out of the car.
The dealers got caught! I hope they lock them up and throw away the key.
I read all 5 pages of the Article. We had a real pain pill epidemic here in our area of Texas. Sure, there is still a lot of abuse of pain killers but we worked with the Sheriff, our Congressman and others in the community, and we successfully closed down 3 pill-mills in our town. That was 5 years ago, and they have not returned. A guy I know, in the Houston area, went to a pill-mill in Houston the other day. He got his prescriptions at one of Houston’s pill-mills and then went to a pharmacy that the Dr. at the pill-mill sent him to. It was a 4 hour wait at the pharmacy. People were lined up inside and out in the parking lot waiting..... 4 hours. Something needs to be done.
The artticle implies heroin is now cheaper pills. I wonder what heroin costs?
The only good junkie is a dead junkie.
It’s been going strong for about 13 years in western PA. I saw it coming hard on the the heels of OxyContin.
This is nothing new. It doesn’t make it any less tragic though. My sympathies now are more for the families and victims of the addicts than the addicts themselves. Their souls are gone from the first time they stuck that crap in their bodies.
“Because people are addicted?”
Naturally, but I think even before that young people today have little hope for their futures. Their standard of living isn’t enviable (as many Americans watch the American Dream slip away), they see no light at the end of the tunnel, and they’re not mature enough to cope. Not making excuses for them; I just see a lot of despair there.
Because Afghanistan sells all the Opium, Karzai’s brother controls it, and must payoff the US officials to ramp sales into the US, that’s why.
Ask yourself, who benefits?
BINGO! That’s the right answer.
People need to put their eyes on God again.
This is needed in both “good” times and bad.
I am battling this with my 16 year old son. Model upper middle class kid, very smart with ambition. Then all of sudden about the time he turned 16, he tried marijuana with friends on the football team. Now, I have him in rehab because he was snorting everything under the sub, and even huffing aerosol spray cans.
It all starts at the schools today. Because the school systems go out of their way to integrate the “have and have not’s”, you have the average suburban kid having more access to these drugs.
It is epidemic in my opinion. My son is in a residential rehab facility and you wouldn’t believe all the young kids in there now.
Absolutely correct!
In a country where every thing is going down the crapper, and living life is an Iphone stuffed to your ear then it is not to hard to figure out why this is happening. These young people don’t have a whole lot to look forward to. They may not realize it in words. But they feel it inside just the same. Liberals and Socialist’s have destroyed this country.
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