Smack. “H”. Horse. Skag. Junk. Just a few of the names for heroin. Here’s another one: BAD NEWS!
Heroin can be in liquid or powder form. Usually, it’s in powder form. And, usually it’s white, which makes it easier to “cut” or mix with all sorts of good stuff like powdered sugar, flour, cornstarch, or strychnine.
That’s right. Strychnine. RAT POISON! What people put out for rats and mice. And, guess what rat poison does? It thins the blood to where it won’t clot. The rats ultimately bleed to death. OK, so there’s heroin, which already does some pretty nasty stuff on its own, and now it’s mixed with rat poison. That sounds like a recipe for death.
All right, so not all heroin has strychnine as an extra ingredient. The other stuff, that’s just food, right? That’s not going to hurt anything. “Snorting”, taking heroin in through the nose causes the sugar and the heroin to go to the lungs. Do you know what happens to lungs when enough of a powdered substance, or something like heroin, hits them? Abscesses, that’s what. Fluid-filled pockets, which can burst, or can impair breathing, or cause lots of other problems.
And, eventually, the heroin and the stuff it was mixed with are going to get in the bloodstream. If it hasn’t all dissolved by the time it hits the capillaries and veins, guess what can happen, then? BLOOD CLOTS! The blood can’t get to where it is supposed to be going.
If the heroin is “dirty”, that is, if there are foreign objects in it like rocks, pieces of rope, or even small pieces of the packaging, and that stuff gets into the body, there’s another chance for a blockage somewhere.