Heroin addiction: a potentially fatal problem

Source: Washington Post

You've probably seen some news articles about this topic lately...I thought it was relevant to share in this forum.  The use of opioid pain medications for chronic pain is/was a standard practice for decades.  At this point, there are still many folks out there with chronic pain syndromes who are still being prescribed these medications.  They are, in fact. at increased risk of addiction due to that fact alone. 

Now that medical practitioners are starting to think differently about this prescribing practice, some patients are left addicted to these medications but no longer have access to them.  Some of these are actual patients, others may be someone who abused/borrowed Oxycontin and other narcotic analgesics by obtaining them via less than legitimate means.  It's a lot easier to obtain heroin in the present day, so it has become an attractive alternative.  

Statistics show that deaths due to heroin overdose have quadrupled since about 2002.  It remains to be seen what will happen from here on out now that we clearly know that there is a problem. It is up to the medical field to recognize what they can do from their end...but it's up to us as individuals to make the choice to find alternatives to this very dangerous road.