Jeremy Carpenter
Professor Plass
Lit Review
Heroin Overdose
As we learned in class last week, victimless crime can be one of many things. Victimless crime is defined as a crime taking place where there are no harmful injuries done from one person to another. Instead, the damage being done is committed by the individual who is committing the crime. Some examples of a victimless crime are, Drug use, prostitution, gambling, suicide, traffic citations and trespassing.
This literature review will focus mainly on the drug use of heroin, the scary numbers behind the drug and the sudden rise of overdosing on the drug across the United States. Issues that will be discussed are what is Heroin, what’s in Heroin that makes it addicting, how it can increase the users risk of contracting other life threatening diseases and where it’s use and abuse are most popular across the United states and we will take a look at multiple studies that show examples of our new drug problem in the United States. While we looked at how homicide rates have dropped while in class, the flip side to that is that the amount of drug usage has risen.
Heroin overdoses, have become a bigger issue over the last few years. Heroin is made from morphine, which itself is a very powerful and addictive drug. In an article on nlm.nih.gov they found that around .6% of people between the ages of 15-64 use heroin. About 23 percent of people who use the drug become dependent on it. Overdoses frequently involve suppression
Heroin, a powerful narcotic, acts upon the brain as a painkiller, increasing physical addiction and ongoing emotional dependence (Schaffer Library of…). Heroin has many challenging and highly risky effects on the user, all the more hazardous if overdosing is present. This extremely dangerous drug, heroin, will never cease being used, but may cease the existence of an individual.
My informative essay will discuss the unfortunate and accidental path of becoming a heroin addict. Heroin is an opiate that contains the same components as narcotic pain medications. There are people in this world that become dependent on opiates and strongly feel they can’t live without them. Pain medications are the number one source that links them to heroin use.
In the US, according to CQ Researcher, the number of those that used heroin had more than doubled between the years of 2002 and 2004 and doubled again between 2011 and 2013. It is a growing issue especially due to
ruining not only the lives of users but also the lives of the people around them. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the national number in the United States of heroin overdose deaths in 2014 alone was around eleven thousand, a number that is six times higher than it was only fifteen years ago in 2001, and it continues to rise. The issue of heroin is growing not only nationally but even locally in central Illinois, and is an undesirable epidemic that should not only be recognized as a pressing local issue, but also a dangerous street narcotic that has negative life-changing consequences that affect an individual personally and affect others indirectly.
The misuse of and dependence to opioid drugs such as the frequently prescribed oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl, and the illegal drug heroin is a worldwide crisis that impacts the societal well-being, health, and economy of nearly every population. The wake of the recently named epidemic can be felt by family members, health care professionals, communities, and policy makers around the world. Taking the lead in causes of accidental deaths in the United States, the fatalities resulting from opioid overdose have quadrupled since the early 2000’s. Research has indicated a causal link between prescription opioid abuse and increased rates of heroin usage
In general, Heroin is bad and less commonly useful in medical treatments otherwise increase the cases of heroin epidemic and healthcare institutions like to use other methods of administration until there is high requirement because after serving, it converts to morphine by the mean of first-pass metabolism and resulting in deacetylation when ingested in the body of the person. For instance, drug like OxyContin has impacted and had become heroin epidemic ravaging and could be seen in America. Its impact also depend on the type of ingestion and in past, it has many bad results where youngsters used for the intense pleasure since it floods the brain and its immediate unpleasant side effects and an example as Eve has threaten her own life. In this condition, it was difficult for her
In the United States today, heroin overdosage is the highest rate it has been since 2002 (“Overdose Death Rates”). Heroin is a drug that can be sold off of any person will to take the risk of selling the drug. Former addicts will tell you that heroin is cheaper on the street that any other drug. You can involve yourself with heroin in many different ways. This attracts people to obtain the drug for those reasons. Heroin addiction can happen to the most successful people as demonstrated in the story of Kurt Cobain’s abuse of heroin.
A crime is a violation of established law, but not all crimes have a readily identifiable victim. A victimless crime is one where an act that violates an established law is committed, without leaving a victim behind; that is, there is no resulting damage to a person or property. In these cases, there is usually no victim because the illegal activity was consensually entered into. For this reason, victimless crimes are often called consensual crimes.
Heroin is bad. That should not come as a surprise. What might come as a surprise, on the other hand, is that America is currently going through a heroin epidemic. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Heroin use more than doubled among young adults aged 18-25 in the past decade.” However, heroin addictions do not arise ex nihilo. The silent perpetrators are pharmaceutical companies and their weapons are prescription painkillers.
Heroin users and overdose deaths are on the rise. Especially among young middle-class white citizens (Seelye, 2015). Why is the amount of heroin users rising and how is the government handling this epidemic? There is a strong correlation between the increase of prescription painkillers and the amount of heroin users. “People who are dependent on prescription opioids are 40 times more likely to abuse or be dependent on heroin” (Seelye, 2015). One of the main reason there has been a recent increase of heroin users in the last decade is because there has also been an increase of prescription opioids such as OxyContin. And the government has never tested a way to stop the increase of drug users other than harsh
The portrait of a heroin addict. Images emerge of a homeless junkie huddled in the corner of a subway seat at 3:00am feening for his next hit. Or the drug addict laid out on a New York City bench, just skin and bones, with syringes littering the ground below. What probably does not come to mind is a picture of the perky cheerleader rooting her team on to victory at a Friday night football game, nor does a vision of the mother of three living in the suburbs with her husband working for a Fortune 500 company in her Executive position. However, these are some of the real people who are falling victim to the temptation of heroin on a daily basis. Heroin deaths are surging amongst suburban whites and the impact of the drug has taken a devastating turn. The heroin epidemic in the United States is entering a new stage in the war on drugs.
Heroin overdose is a HUGE problem in the world! I gave you just a few ways that you and the government can help! I think you should try and stop heroin overdose, and help save other people who might die from it. Why? There are so many reasons, you don't even know! One reason you should help is that heroin makes people feel satisfied with the drug and not want you to quit heroin, heroin makes you have this weird “glowing sensation” for the first 2-4 hours you do the drug. Heroin uses the user's pupils, heartbeat, slows their respiration, takes away their sleep, and gastrointestinal activity. You don't want these people who use the drug to lose sleep and suffer through all of this, do you? Another reason you should help heroin addicts is that
About 1.6% of the population, or around 4.2 million Americans aged twelve and up, were reported to use heroin in the year 2011. Among those 4.2 million, 23% of the user population was reported to be dependent on the drug [3]. It has been estimated that 27-38% of
1) Victimless crime can be defined as those types of actions and behavior that are illegal, although they do not affect the safety and personal rights of others. Individuals or groups of persons can commit victimless crimes. In cases that involve more than one person, only those capable of consenting to the actions are guilty of this type of crime (Liberal Democratic Party, 2009).
Heroin use and overdose related deaths have increased considerably in the United States in recent years (Jones, Logan, Gladden, & Bohm, 2015). The results of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health [NSDUH] (2014), showed in the year 2013, approximately 517,000 Americans abused heroin, which was almost a 150 percent increase since 2007 (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2014). According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] (2014), in the year 2011, 4.2 million people who were twelve years of age or older said they used heroin at least once in their lifetime. Furthermore, data from NSDUH showed approximately 460 people, twelve years of age or older, used heroin each day in 2013 (Lipari and Hughes, 2015). An even more frightening statistic is death rates doubled for people who were twelve years of age or older as a result of heroin overdose in the years 2010 through 2012 (Hedegaard, Chen, and Warner, 2015).