Here in Maine Heroin has become a very popular drug. It’s rare to meet people here who have not in some way been touched by it. Personally this baffles me because for me a needle in the arm to get high is a serious indicator that you are playing a dysfunctional version of Doctor.

Common side effects include respiratory depression (decreased breathing) and about a quarter or more of those who use heroin become physically dependent. Other side effects can include abscesses, infected heart valves, blood borne infections, constipation, and pneumonia. That is just the start of what can happen.

Heroin was first made by C. R. Alder Wright in 1874 from morphine. In his quest of a non-addictive alternative to morphine, he had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called totolin, also known as guebon . So it was not his intension to make people addicted to a drug but the opposite. Later a man named Heinrich Dreser, a chemist at Bayer Laboratories, continued to test heroin and Bayer marketed it as an analgesic and ‘sedative for coughs’ in 1888. When its addictive potential was recognized, Bayer ceased its production in 1913. But alas other people saw the market for it. There is always someone who will take advantage that is the horrible truth.

It’s safer to smoke Pot instead stay away from Heroin.