become addicted to Oxycontin will quickly switch to heroin which is much more widely available on the street. Withdrawal from some depressant drugs can be very dangerous and even deadly (e.g. alcohol withdrawal).
Opioid withdrawal is not deadly but it is very uncomfortable and the person craves more drug to stop the discomfort. These withdrawal signs and symptoms include severe muscle and stomach cramps, runny nose, sweating, nausea/ diarrhea and agitation from an overactive brain. Remember actor Jamie Foxx in the role of Ray Charles when he withdrew from heroin cold-turkey?
The effects are agonizing. So opioid addicts essentially spend their lives between a zombie-like state where they are subdued by the drug and actively seeking drug to prevent going into withdrawal; a horrible existence. Opioid addicts require more and more drug to produce the same effect. Soon, the dose required to produce a high is close to the amount that can produce an overdose and death.
The common practice of sharing needles between persons injecting heroin and other drugs can result in the transmission of HIV, hepatitis B/hepatitis C, and other blood-borne infections. The residual blood in a syringe after an infected person injects the drug mixes with the heroin when another person uses the same syringe… Addicts are injecting drug multiple times a day and their priority is getting high, not using good hygiene. They may lack money to have access to clean needles. Sharing is generally a good thing, but when it comes to injection drug use; it’s NOT! I started this series of articles talking about racial complexities in how we cope with substance abuse.
As I mentioned in a previous article, the medical community had solid scientific evidence for over 20 years showing that distributing clean needles to addicts would reduce the transmission of HIV and viral hepatitis. Yet conservative legislators refused to allow Federal and/or state funds to be used for needle exchange programs…..until 2016. That year, the use of Federal funds was approved for use in needle exchange programs. After all these years having the evidence of the effectiveness of this intervention, why do you think it took so long for the government to finally support it. You get one guess.
In the next article, we will talk about medicines that can be used to control and halt opioid addiction.
Dr. Crawford has over 25 years of experience in the treatment of HIV. While at Howard University School of Medicine, he worked in two HIV-specialty clinics at Howard University Hospital. He then did clinical research as a visiting scientist with the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He served as the Assistant Chief of Public Health Research with the Military HIV Research Program where he managed research studies under the President’s Emergency Plan for AID Relief (PEPFAR) in four African countries.
He is currently working in the Division of AIDS in the National Institutes of Health. He has published research in the leading infectious diseases journals and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal AIDS. Any views and perspectives in his articles on blackdoctor.org are not representative of any agency or organization but a reflection of his personal views.