Addictions to drugs like alcohol and prescription medications can last for decades, slowly damaging the user's health until he or she dies from chronic organ failure. However, some drugs quickly ensnare the user, causing addiction even after one use. Such addictions are difficult to kick, and can even kill within a few years.
What is Addiction?
A person is addicted to a drug when they have a psychological or physical dependence on it. Tolerance to drugs builds over time, causing the person to need more and more of it to get high.
Neurotransmitters are chemicals in the brain that govern the brain's perceptions and activities. Many drugs cause decreased appetite because of the way they act on the neurotransmitters involved in causing hunger. A person who is addicted to a drug does not have normal neurotransmitter activity, even when they are not high from using the drug.
Many reputable sources include the following criteria for determining if someone has an addiction:
- The person continues to use the drug even though they know it is harmful to them.
- The person experiences withdrawal effects such as irritability, headaches, and other emotional and physical symptoms.
- The person has a tolerance for the drug and needs to use more to achieve the same effects they once experienced.
Heroin
Heroin can cause addiction after only one use. It causes euphoria, drowsiness, nausea, and itchiness. It also significantly suppresses breathing, which can sometimes kill users.
Heroin is usually injected, which can cause problems when needles are shared or not cleaned before they are used. Collapsed veins, abscesses, and infections of the blood and heart tissues can occur from using dirty needles. Communicable diseases, such as Hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS can be passed between users when needles are shared. Heroin can also be smoked, which causes respiratory problems.
- About 23% of people who use heroin develop an addiction.
- Each year, about 150,000 people try heroin for the first time.
- Heroin is involved in roughly 14 percent of emergency room visits in the United States. This includes hospital admissions for problems such as respiratory problems, infections, and other conditions that result from heroin use.
- Up to 70% of heroin users have experienced a non-fatal overdose.
- 14 percent of people who seek rehab treatment are seeking help for heroin addiction.
Cocaine
Cocaine causes euphoria, elevated energy, and high heart rate and blood pressure. The cardiovascular effects can cause heart attack and death.
Cocaine is usually snorted through the nose, but it can also be injected. It can be smoked when it is refined into crack. Each of these methods has its own side effects. Snorting the drug can cause frequent nosebleeds, lessened sense of smell, and problems swallowing, while smoking it can cause respiratory and dental problems.
- Each day, about 2,500 people try cocaine for the first time.
- About 30% of drug-related emergency room visits are cocaine-related.
- About 30% of cocaine-related deaths occur because of the physical effects of the drug itself; impaired judgment, irritability, and other psychological effects cause car accidents and other incidents that result in the rest of these deaths.
- Many cocaine-related deaths result from using alcohol at the same time.
- About 10% of people who use cocaine will become addicted to it.
Methamphetamine
Meth causes feelings of power and euphoria, physical excitement, sleeplessness, elevated heart rate and blood pressure. Sometimes people have heart attacks or strokes while using meth.
Meth is usually smoked, which causes tooth decay and other dental problems. The drug causes hallucinations that make the user think that bugs are crawling underneath their skin. These people often pick at their skin compulsively, leaving open sores that scar. Anorexia is common among addicts, so extreme weight loss is frequent.
- People can become addicted to meth after one use. People with meth addictions often live 5-7 years after becoming addicted.
- About 500 people die each year from the direct effects of the drug itself, but around 25,000 people die from incidents resulting from mental and physical impairment such as accidents, murders, and suicides.
Sources
- National Institute on Drug Abuse: Heroin
- United States Library of Medicine: Cocaine
- National Institute on Drug Abuse: Methamphetamine
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