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:
“A little health now and again is the ailing person’s best remedy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Don’t look now, God, we’re all right.
All the suicides are eating Black Bean Soup;
the Dalmatians, our turnip, our spotted parasite
snoozles in her chair.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)