Heroin

Heroin is a drug of extremes. For many people it is the most feared drug, while for others its powerful “high” offers the most dramatic way of escaping the cares and boredom of everyday life. It is the drug that immediately springs to mind when people talk about dependence and it forms the backbone of drug-treatment programmes in Britain and many other countries.

Just why do people take a drug like heroin, if is has so many association with illness and death? Although the answer seems complex, it can be reduced to one word-escape. Heroin does not promise to lift the spirits or to find new ways of looking at life. Instead it offers a chance to retreat from life, wrapped in a cocoon of artificial comfort while the drug takes effect. Gradually, as people become used to the drug, this sense of comfort fades and is replaced by a feeling of relief that they have found another dose- and it becomes harder still to return to the life that was so boring and difficult in the first place.

Heroin abuse is a serious modern problem, although humans have been sampling the affects of its raw ingredient for more than 4000