Please stop spreading this meme. The long term health effects include PAWS, post-acute withdrawal syndrome. This is not coming from a drug warrior, but someone who has seen this in friends first hand.

Heroin downregulates receptors to such a degree that it can take a person months to years to never to feel normal again without opiates, depending on the length of habit.

A heroin addiction of as short a duration as three months can easily take someone 3-6 months to feel normal again from.

PAWS symptoms include anhedonia, lack of motivation, lack of concentration.

For people addicted to heroin for a decade, or for people who were addicted at young ages, they may never feel ok without long term opiate maintenance.

Heroin suppresses neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

Also, it should be made abundantly clear to anyone who has taken some oxycontin that heroin is not equivalent. A mild heroin addiction can develop in as little as three days of use, where oxycodone can be used for 2-3 weeks without developing significant withdrawal symptoms.

Heroin is more addictive than oxycodone, and it is easy to take doses that depress respiration while sleeping to unhealthy levels.

Heroin use can induce central sleep apnea in many people that use it. This is not healthy.

Drugs that downregulate receptors are incredibly irrational things to do compulsively.

Buy Feeling Good by David Burns and give yourself some cogntive behavioral therapy, please.

Heroin can make your world dark in a way you do not want to experience.

For anyone that wants to safely experiment with opiates, please stick to safer subsitutes like oxycodone, or opium.

If you want to experiment with heroin, never, ever do heroin more than two days in a row. Just two days is enough to produce some hangover effects. This is not the case with opium, or oxycodone.

And if you do have a habit, get some suboxone and get off heroin. The prohibition lifestyle will kill you.

I just buried a friend from an overdose.

Believe me, I really wish these weren't the facts. I wish heroin was as safe as this meme makes it out to be.

So heroin isn't clinically addictive and one can't overdose on it?

Heroin isn't significantly more addictive than cigarettes.

You can also easily overdose from nicotine, its just that this is mitigated by the relatively slow delivery mechanism, which makes it so that you get terribly sick before you could consume lethal quantities.

If we can come up with an effective delivery method then heroin would be no more dangerous than cigarettes (sort of, you still can't, for example, drive on heroin, but also it doesn't destroy your body long term).

Perhaps heroin could be adultrated with a chemical that causes nausea when consumed in an amount proportional to a dangerous level of heroin. This would help heroin users build the same negative associations with high doses that cigarette smokers do, and could make them unable to consume more.

While I enjoy the concept that heroin might be in some way similar to nocotine beyond both of the substances being tangible psychoactive, it does frighten me that this is actually an opinion people legitimately have.

Given that when the supply chain of heroin is disrupted the most statistically significant cause of eratic behaviour in users is that it just hurts so much I suspect its a little different to nicotine.

If you are interested in understanding drivers of addiction I would recommend looking at cases where people are forced into withdrawals.

For example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395915...

Although I recall another article published ages ago (early 80s) which had an interesting economic analysis of the elasticity of heroin prices, to paraphrase, resulting from what is essentially inflicting pain on users until they will pay yur asking price.

I would love someone to draw the connections to nictonine withdrawals

Absolutely.

Symptoms of nicotine withdrawal - agitation, anxiety, difficulty concentrating.

Without access to heroin or opiates, you are in for 7 days of anguish, intense feelings of guilt, shame, darkness, self recrimination, horrible introspection, and if given the chance to end the suffering you will take more heroin, putting you back at square one.

If you soldier on, you are in for at least 3 weeks of not feeling yourself.

Best bet is to detox with suboxone, then taper suboxone, do not stay on suboxone more than 30 days or you will just be addicted to that.

Gabapentin will really help the process, you will feel almost normal after stopping the suboxone.

If you have friends addicted, this is the most pain free way to get them off.

Heroin -> suboxone 30 days -> gabapentin 30-60 days.

That recipe can get anyone with a habit off heroin almost painlessly.

Depending on the length of your habit, you might still not feel great after all that. Cannabis and tianeptine are your best friends in that case. That will get you back in shape.

After this you will see that heroin, while beautifully seductive and glorious, is a dead end in prohibitionist america.

I believe it only would have a place for someone elderly and infirmed, who could take it without interruption for the rest of their life. For those cases I think it is underused.

If you are young and healthy, it will only make your life worse than it was before you started.