Misusing drugs and alcohol just doesn’t kill people by overdoses. Drug abuse also kills people in other, less obvious ways.

Abusing drugs and alcohol can make you sick. The substances can make people immediately sick, like making people dizzy or nauseated or slow their breathing. What people often don’t know is that abusing drugs and alcohol also cause long-term health problems.

For example, using intravenous drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ketamine, or methamphetamine (meth) can cause problems. People ingest intravenous drugs by using needles to shoot them into their veins. This can cause collapsed veins and scarring.

Using needles also pierces the skin, which can create some particularly nasty medical results, including

• Hepatitis C, a disease of the liver that can be especially dangerous because people might have it for years without knowing it. Left untreated, hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis (scarring) and cancer.
• HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS.
• Damage to the heart.

When needles filled with intravenous drugs puncture the skin, the dirt and bacteria on the surface of the skin can then travel inside the body. This bacteria can cause endocarditis, an infection of the heart’s valves and/or lining. Symptoms of endocarditis include

• Pain
• Weight loss
• Breathlessness and coughing

If the damage is severe, people with endocarditis might have to have their heart valves replaced. If they don’t, their hearts will not function as well as they could, which could be deadly.

Patients who have had such valves replaced cannot continue to abuse drugs because they run the risk of infecting the new valves. Some people who have had such valve replacement surgery and abused drugs again have lapsed into comas and died.

Addiction, then, doesn’t just create temporary problems. Prolonged abuse of drugs and alcohol can produce debilitating long-term effects.