Health Matters Specific To Injecting Black Tar Heroin
Users who intravenously inject black tar heroin are at higher risk of venous sclerosis (a condition where the veins narrow and harden, making injection there nearly impossible) than users of powder heroin. Researchers at UC-San Francisco have found that the rapidity with which black tar heroin destroys veins (forcing users to inject subcutaneously), along with its gummier consistency (requiring that needles be thoroughly rinsed between use, in case new, sterilized ones are not available during usage), may put users at a lower risk of HIV infection.
At least one study has drawn attention to lower rates of HIV infection among injecting drug users in areas in which black tar heroin is the major form of street-available heroin, suggesting that this may be due to the need to heat black tar heroin to dissolve it (which also inactivates any HIV present in the solution).
However, users of black tar heroin can be at increased risk of life-threatening bacterial infections, in particular necrotizing soft tissue infection. The practice of "skin-popping" or subcutaneous injection predisposes to necrotizing fasciitis or necrotizing cellulitis from Clostridium perfringens, while deep intramuscular injection predisposes to necrotizing myositis. It can also be associated with Clostridium botulinum.
Read more about this topic: Black Tar Heroin
Famous quotes containing the words health, matters, specific, black, tar and/or heroin:
“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“If the heart beguiles itself in its choice [of a wife], and imagination will give excellencies which are not the portion of flesh and blood:Mwhen the dream is over, and we awake in the morning, it matters little whether ‘tis Rachael or Leah,—be the object what it will, as it must be on the earthly side ... of perfection,—it will fall short of the work of fancy, whose existence is in the clouds.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A black sun has appeared in the sky of my motherland.”
—Wuer Kaixi, Chinese student leader. Quoted in Independent (London, June 29, 1989)
“The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate,
Loved Mall, Meg, and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, ‘Go hang!’
She loved not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch:
Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country—it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.”
—James Fenton (b. 1949)