Back when I was a budding newspaper staff writer in 2014, I penned a feature on the heroin epidemic in Monmouth County, NJ. Unfortunately between then and now, not very much has changed and users are dying all over the country. For reference, in 2014 in the United States, there were 10,574 overdose deaths… which is staggering.
Now ex-Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx is speaking out about the heroin epidemic across the nation. Coming from a man who literally wrote a book titled The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, I'd venture to say that Sixx is more than qualified to speak about the drug's death grip on your life.
"I just read in the news recently twenty-four people died on a Friday night alone in Akron, Ohio from heroin overdoses. And a lot of the heroin is mixed with fentanyl. That’s what Prince died from. And carfentanil is like an elephant tranquilizer, for large animals, and 40 percent of Ohio’s overdoses is attributed to this. What [drug] dealers are doing is they’re taking heroin and they’re cutting it with fentanyl to give it a little extra kick.”
“Now, when you get a prescription, and it says how many milligrams are on it, and even if it’s something like oxycodone, you can see how many milligrams are on it, and you know what you’re getting each time. Of course your body adjusts to that. Now I’m talking about addicts.”
“Oxycodone is a painkiller, so people who get surgeries will be given that, and you get addicted to it very easily, and then they start going to the street once because they’re addicted once they feel better from the surgery or whatever it is, and then they start buying heroin, and then they’re finding that they don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody knows what they’re doing.”
“As a recovering heroin addict, I’m telling you, you don’t know what you’re doing. When you buy a balloon of Persian heroin, you don’t know what’s in it, and that’s what’s happening. It just breaks my heart to think that something so deadly… I mean, this is fifty times stronger than heroin, and people don’t know what they’re getting, and they’re dying.”
“When you’re addicted, it’s exactly that — you’re addicted; you have to have it. The only way out is through death or through withdrawal. You’re a drug addict. You’re not thinking rationally. You go back to the dealer who gives you the best price and gives you the best dope. And you always say, ‘I’m gonna quit tomorrow,’ and tomorrow never comes.”
“You’re going to die, or you’re gonna get clean. And if you’re listening to this right now and you’re an addict, I’m telling you you’re gonna die if you don’t get clean. And I’m telling you if you’re not using drugs and you ever thought about it, you’re gonna get ’em and you’re gonna die. You’re not gonna get ’em and you’re gonna party. You’re not gonna get ’em and you’re gonna try it out. You’re not gonna get ’em and have a good time and say, ‘I have a story to tell my friends, that I did a little heroin in the locker room with my friends,’ or, ‘We snuck behind someone’s house and we smoked a little heroin,’ or, ‘One of our friends, who’s super cool and has a nice car, got a little heroin, got some pills.”
“We’re gonna do ’em just on weekends.’ And then weekends turns into a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and here comes Monday and here comes Tuesday, and you know what? It only takes five to seven days to become an addict. And you start to get the twitch, you start to get the itch, and you go, you start buying it off the street, and next thing you know, you’re fucking dead. Don’t do it.”
Addiction is never something that immediately rears its ugly head. It creeps up, and before you know it, your life is drastically changing to accommodate it. It's easy to say "oh, just don't do drugs," but that counts out the thousands of users who are self-medicating due to an underlying mental illness… so please. Pay attention to your loved ones and your friends, and try to help them get help if they show signs of drug use.
[via Rock Feed]
