Perscription Heroin

Prescription heroin is a thing and when I first heard about it I thought it was crazy. It is given to people in crosstown clinics, crosstown clinics are places where heroin addicts receiving this type of treatment go to get there medicine. The environment is a sterile for people to go inject there heroin, using clean needles, gloves, etc. Prescription heroin or diacetylmorphine, which is it's medical name, is given to people to people to take as a type of treatment for there heroin addiction; however, when I heard about it, it sounded like they were just taking addicts off the streets, putting them in a clinic and then fueling there addiction not helping them recover.I thought treatment was suppose to do the opposite, I couldn't and didn't understand how it could help someone get over there addiction, or how it was considered treatment because to me it didn't seem like it would help someone recover. How could something that we are constantly being told is bad and awful, be used to help someone and actually work. When I asked these questions on twitter I got quite a bit of feedback explaining to me what it was and how it can help people. Surprising to me most of the feedback I got was supporting the idea and only one person agreed with my former opinion. To help explain, I was given this video https://vimeo.com/161191620 and this podcast http://bit.ly/2pt3Mp2. They are both really great and I would very much recommend them to anyone interested because they explain the things you don't think of when you hear the words prescription heroin, they really helped me deepen my understanding about how it helps people.

I have learnt many things from the people who help explained this to me, so here is my understanding and the advantages of prescription heroin. People can't and wont recover from an addiction until they want to, so if they don't want to there is nothing you can really do; however, the crosstown clinics can. The point of the crosstown clinics is not so much to get people to recover fully although it can help with that, but more to maintain the health and wellness of the addicts. They provide a sterile environment for the patients. They use sterile needles to inject and they use rubbing alcohol to clean/ prep the area before and after they inject there medication. They wash there hands and the clinic also provides gloves for them to use so that they can make what they are doing as clean as possible, limiting the chance of infection by needle almost entirely. Whereas, if they were on the streets the environment in which they would be shooting up in wouldn't be so good. There syringes wouldn't be clean and have probably been used before and they would most definitely not use rubbing alcohol to clean and prep the area before and after injecting the heroin. Gloves would not be provided either and you most likely wouldn't be able to/would't wash your hands before and after. Thus making the risk for infection very high and almost impossible to defend yourself from. Crosstown clinics also help reduce the chance of overdose. Overdoses are found more likely to happen when one is alone or by themselves, by being in a crosstown clinic program you are never alone and you are not giving yourself the heroin, the people at the clinic are. If you do happen to overdoes, you are going to be able to receive help almost eminently, as the people at the clinic have access to Narcan a drug that can reverse overdoses and help stop the effect of any opioids almost entirely. So the chance of fatalities due to overdoes are nearly entirely limiting the chance of fatalities due to overdoses; however, this would not be the case on the street and you would more likely than not have that fatality due to an overdoes.

These clinics although seem to be entirely beneficial from the reasons above they can also have some disadvantages like anything else; however, in this case I feel like the pros out weigh the cons, and for that reason I believe it is good. Some people think that it is bad because they figure the only way to make this happen is through using tax payers money, and to some people who don't understand the situation entirely think that the government is using there money to fuel drug addiction in there city which is something the government seems to constantly be trying to protect people against. People also don't like it when the centers are put in suburban areas because that is where family's live and they don't want there children to be around addicts as they see them as something other than a human being, something less. Which I don't think is fair for anyone really, if addicts don't get the help they need they will probably die from it, and if we never normalize users there will always be some sort of bad reputation with being an addict even though it is just a chronic illness that some people have much like anything else. It also gets back lash because it is not the type of treatment that everyone is used to hearing about. When you think of treatment you probably think of becoming clean and dropping your addiction; however, it is a different approach they use with the crosstown clinics, so people don't like it because it is some form of change and people don't like change.

Prescription heroin is something that I hope is going to become more normal, as it can help so many people and change lives. Although it may sound shocking at first, it helps more than it hurts.