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Originally Posted by tw
Heroine is probably the most destructive recreational drug. Since heroine addicts most often are not 'cured' in their first drug therapy, then we make the victim into a criminal. Extremist conservative then say rehabilitation cannot work. One successful program for heroine addicts is heroine maintenance. They get a small daily dose which is usually enough to keep them productive and alive. But this is contrary to a political right wing agenda that says all drugs (except those who make campaign contributions) are evil. So yes, there is a major disconnect between drug laws and reality. When a mariguana user can get mandatory sentences equivalent to murder. Yes, there is a major disconnect between those making the laws and reality.
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Bypassing your inability to spell "heroin" ...
First off, maintenance programs are nowhere near as successful as you seem to believe. Whether you provide maintenance doses of heroin itself or of the best-known heroin analog, methadone, you've still got an addiction. An addiction, incidentally, to a substance that requires higher and higher doses to get the same level of satisfaction from over time. The cravings are still there, and so are the withdrawal symptoms. Cramps. Sweats. Nausea. Chills.
It's like the hole in the water skin example ... you can keep pouring water into the skin with a hole in it, but by doing so, the hole becomes larger, and so you have to add the water at a faster and faster rate, until you reach the point at which the outflow is equal to the inflow.
Rehabilitation can work, but requires a strength of character that often, had the junkie had it from the get-go, would have kept them from starting use of the drug in the first place.
I see people who relapsed after 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years of sobriety on a variety of drugs and/or alcohol. One of my repeat customers was a drug rehab counsellor, who had 10 years under his belt, and had helped a lot of other people become sober before his own relapse ... talk about a placement problem!! Try to find a rehab for a guy who can't go anywhere local because of the likelihood that he'd be hospitalized along with people that he had treated.
One of my most problematic heroin users was an adolescent girl. She'd started using when she was around 15 or 16 ... I started giving her evaluations to go to rehabs after she turned 18 (there's a different type of eval that I'm not certified in for adolescent placements). I evaluted and placed her at least five times, and I'm not the only professional she had approached. Her parents had taken her to this doctor in New Jersey who has a treatment which is generally very effective ... He places a Narcan implant into the patient's body, usually in the upper arm. Narcan is a heroin antagonist. It stops the drug from working. It's the same stuff that is given in an ER for a heroin OD. Brings you down QUICK. Anyway, the implant is surgically placed deep in the upper arm. This chick ripped the Narcan implant out of her arm.
Twice.
As far as the "most destructive drug" I'm going to have to vote for crack cocaine.
$1000/day crack habits are commonplace. $1000/day of heroin is rare, and for most people, fatal. Even the real stone heroin junkies rarely do more than a bundle a day, with most of them around the 4-5 bags a day IV level.