{"id":184,"date":"2014-04-16T20:10:55","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nashvillerecovers.org\/?p=72"},"modified":"2014-04-16T20:10:55","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T20:10:55","slug":"heroin-hits-nashville-all-of-nashville-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/2014\/04\/16\/heroin-hits-nashville-all-of-nashville-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Heroin hits Nashville \u2014 ALL of Nashville \u2014 hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Metro Police this week broke up a drug ring that they believe brought in about 22 pounds of heroin a month into Nashville. And that\u2019s only one drug ring.<\/span><\/p>\n

Do what?? Didn\u2019t heroin go away with tie-dye T-shirts in the \u201870s?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, like tie-dye, heroin is making a strong comeback. And it\u2019s not just in the inner-city.<\/span><\/p>\n

Heroin is in the suburbs, in private schools, in the hands more and more of affluent kids who have been snorting pain pills and smoking weed for the last couple of decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a deadly trend: In the last year and a half, heroin has been linked to 20 overdose drug deaths in Nashville alone, the medical examiner\u2019s office says.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"heroin\"<\/span><\/a>How did this happen? Well, it\u2019s about availability and price.<\/span><\/p>\n

All this cracking down on selling OxyContin and other pain pills has reduced supply considerably. It now costs $30-$35 a pill on the street.<\/span><\/p>\n

But a hit of heroin \u2013 about a tenth of a gram \u2013 sometimes costs only $10.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I couldn\u2019t find pills, I tried heroin, and I found I could get just as high for about a third of the price,\u201d says recovering addict Pat, 23, of Antioch, who has 17 months clean.<\/span><\/p>\n

And if all else failed in getting pills, Pat, who grew up in an affluent suburb, always knew where to get heroin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI just went to the \u2018hood and started approaching different people,\u201d he said. \u201cDesperation at its finest.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another recovering addict, Patrick M., 25, also made the switch from pain pills to heroin toward the end of his active addiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEventually, when the money starts running out, you gotta switch to heroin,\u201d he said. \u201cI knew how expensive opioids (pills) were and I didn\u2019t want to be paying for them all the time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Recovering addict Billy D., 30, agrees.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"medfrd2146\"<\/span><\/a>\u201cI knew people who I used to use opiates with had already made the switch to heroin,\u201d he said, \u201cThe high is slightly different, There\u2019s something about opiate pills that\u2019s a cleaner high, but the cost effectiveness is too hard to pass up.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHeroin curves the physical craving enough, and it\u2019s cheap. then the amount of heroin I started to use, it was impossible to go back to opiates.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So whatever hesitation addicts may have had about doing heroin, the simple fact is that today, heroin is cheaper and easier to get than pain pills.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that fact, eventually, is enough to break down any barriers than an addict \u2013 of any income, any race, any part of town \u2013 may have had about using heroin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing [people] as young as 15 from very affluent families,\u201d Metro Police Sgt. Gene Donegan told News 2 back in October.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u201dWe\u2019re seeing older, established professionals using heroin. It really is not respecting any boundaries right now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Users don\u2019t just inject heroin; they often smoke or snort it, so just because you don\u2019t find needles in your teen\u2019s bedroom doesn\u2019t mean he or she isn\u2019t doing heroin.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just in Nashville.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHeroin\u2019s on the rise\u201d stories have been popping up in national media since last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

A 2012 survey by the federal government showed about a half a million people were considered dependent on heroin \u2013 and that\u2019s about twice the number in 2002.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, heroin use is fairly rare among those who use illegal drugs.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that 2012 survey, about 669,000 said they had used heroin, but more than 4.7 million said they used cocaine in some form that year, and 31 million said they used marijuana or hashish in 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, the numbers are skyrocketing for heroin like no other drug, and some experts predict an epidemic could be coming sooner than later.<\/span><\/p>\n

Experts also say users get addicted to heroin far quicker than they do to pain pills.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ya don\u2019t often hear about recreational heroin users.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I had some solutions to offer here. But sometimes awareness is a great first step.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Metro Police this week broke up a drug ring that they believe brought in about 22 pounds of heroin a month into Nashville. And that\u2019s only one drug ring. Do what?? Didn\u2019t heroin go away with tie-dye T-shirts in the \u201870s? Well, like tie-dye, heroin is making a strong comeback. And it\u2019s not just in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nashvilleprevention.org\/nashville_recovers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}