When people think of heroin, they think inner city, urban, low-income culture. According to CBS News, a new study shows that abuse of heroin is actually more common in nice suburban areas.
Negligent doctors prescribing everyone and their mother’s reckless amounts of narcotics is the main culprit for this change. We as a society need to make changes to improve this alarming trend. It used to be poor kids from poverty-stricken towns would get hooked around 17 years old. It was mainly males, and 80% of the abusers used from the start.
Today the drug is most commonly used by people in their early 20s, males, and women, and more than 75% of the users live outside of urban neighborhoods and started with doctor prescribed narcotics. They then make their way down to heroin for financial convenience. Oxycontin can cost around 80 dollars while the heroin tends to be around 10 dollars. So now we have people in nice neighborhoods, successful and productive members of society dumping their hard-earned paychecks into the hands of our illegal drug dealers.
Basically, our own medical system has enhanced the profit of cartels and street gangs. Instead of rising people out of poverty, we’re pushing our middle and upper class down, as heroin addiction is quite famous for running bank accounts empty to the point where abusers go homeless.
As I’ve cited before, doctors have continually over-prescribed medical narcotics. I have also written about the lack of education on narcotics medical schools are providing our doctors to be. Clearly, these issues have to change. However, we as a society can’t sit back and leave this solely to the medical units. We have the power to look at these statistics and tell our doctors no thank you, I’d rather have something non-narcotic. There are non-narcotic pain medications you can ask for that aren’t addictive. Even if you don’t have a history of drug problems, it’s much better to keep it that way then to develop one through medical narcotics, and deal with the treacherous life-threatening burden of trying to overcome it.
If you or someone you love is addicted to heroin, help is available. Contact us today to learn about our treatment programs.
Onward,
