(A Public Service Announcement from Suburra Publishing.)
Myth #5
Drugs Are Unhealthy
As with their legal brethren, popular illegal drugs are not unhealthy with occasional and moderate use. Once again, one of the most corrosive drugs in the public’s opinion is heroin. The heroin junkie sits at the core of the taboo on drugs. Governments are fond of showing a series of mug shots that progress from a person’s first arrest until their last. The visual transformation is provocative, disturbing, and extremely misleading.
First, this degradation is not from heroin. Outside of being chronically impotent and constipated, opiate addiction is “minimally injurious to the body.” In fact, with measured administration the typical addict is, “able to function quite well and live a long and normal life.” This is a sharp contrast to life-long addicts of the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, which destroy respectively, the liver and lungs.
The internal degradation of the body from heroin comes from the impurities found in black-market heroin. Common adulterants include sugar, starch, talcum powder, baking powder, or powdered milk. This is problematic when heroin is injected. Injectable legal medications are sterile and dissolve easily in blood. Street drugs are not sterile and are often crushed by the user. Uncrushed fragments and insoluble contaminants can lodge in tiny blood vessels in the heart, brain, and eyes, and cause hemorrhage, stroke, and blindness.
In addition, because of a century of criminalization and anti-drugs propaganda heroin is extraordinarily expensive, has a massive stigma, and is extremely illegal. All these factors drive many heroin addicts into an underground life of desperate vagrancy and homelessness in which non-addicts - even family and friends - will refuse to talk to you, much less hire you. This lifestyle degrades the health of abstinent individuals as well addicts.
All information taken from You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos, Book I by Robert R. Arthur. Detailed documentation of sources can be found therein.
Page last modified August 29, 2007.