Heroin is taken in several different ways. It can be snorted, injected, or smoked. Heroin is extremely dangerous because once it is in your brain it is rapidly metabolized. Here, it is made into morphine because of the elements that are removed from it as it enters your brain. The morphine molecules attach themselves to the opiod receptors, and this is where the high occurs.
Depending on how you take heroin, there are different time frames for the high. When it is taken by mouth, the effects are the same as taking straight morphine. When it is snorted, it has a high onset in 10 to 15 minutes. When it is smoked, the effects are felt almost right away, although they are milder. They will increase as more is smoked.
According to the 1996 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, an estimated 2.4 million people used heroin at some time in their lives. When it comes to lifetime statistics, nearly 216,000 of them reported using it within the month before they had taken the survey. These numbers have only continued to increase since that time. When it comes to the numbers of new heroin users, in 1995 there were 141,000 new heroin users and this has seems to have been the trend since then.
Long term usage statistics show that since the early 1990s, there has been an increase in new users of heroin. Most of these users were under the age of 26, and when it comes to how they use the drug, most of them say that they have been using heroin by smoking, snorting, or sniffing heroin.
When it comes to Heroin users in other age groups, these too have increased over the years. Among the ages of 12 to 17 years old, first time heroin users have gone up almost four times from the 1980s until today. Even as recently as just one generation ago, heroin that was available in the US was barely five percent pure heroin and was not used by very many young people because it had to be injected into the skin with a needle. However, in recent years, it has gotten easier to obtain, and much easier to use.
In the United States, Heroin comes from several main source areas. There are four main places where the heroin will come from, and these are South America (mainly Columbia), Mexico, Southeast Asia (mostly Burma), and Southwest Asia (mostly Afghanistan). When it comes to the majority of Heroin in the United States today, it comes mostly from South America and Mexico.
In general, Heroin powder can vary in color. It is usually somewhere between a white and a dark brown color, and this comes from the impurities that are found in it from being manufactured in an low quality manner, which is usually crude and not experienced. This means that there are often different additives in Heroin, which make the drug even more dangerous.
When a person looks at what is usually sold on the street regarding heroin, it is hardly ever actually pure heroin. Most of the time, there will be 30 to 50 milligrams of powder sold in a bag of heroin. Only a small percentage of this powder is actually heroin. It used to be that the purity of actual Heroin in a bag sold on the street was from 1 percent to 10 percent. In recent times, the purity of Heroin has ranged from about 10 percent to 70 percent.