What you don’t know about drugs and alcohol can hurt you. Sad to say, the manufacturers and dealers often look for ways to make their products more attractive to buyers. After all, they’re not in business out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re in it to make money. And make money off of illegal, dangerous products, to boot.
Sometimes, drug manufacturers package their products in different ways to attract people. They might print cartoon characters on squares of hallucinogens such as LSD or stamp smiley faces on ecstasy tablets.
Speaking of tablets, did you know that some drug manufacturers are making heroin in pill form? Perhaps the makers think that these pills will make heroin more palatable (and easier to use) for people who don’t want to inject, snort, or smoke the drug.
But if something is easy-to-use, it’s not necessarily healthier, of course. Easy-to-use heroin could make it easier and faster for users to ingest, so people might use more heroin than they would have by other means.
And heroin often isn’t just heroin. Many times, dealers cut heroin. This means they add other products to heroin. They might add baking powder, a cheaper, more accessible product, to a batch of heroin in order to stretch the amount of heroin.
Cutting heroin distributes the drug to more users, which could maximize products for the dealers. But this profit maximization might come at the expense of users, because users
- Aren’t receiving the drugs they bought
- Might encounter health problems by ingesting unknown materials
Such health-related dangers can also occur because dealers sometimes add other drugs, such as fentanyl, to the drugs they’re selling. Users thus might be using drugs that are more potent than they realize. If they overdose, they might seek treatments for the wrong drug, yet another instance where unknowns can cause great harm.
There’s an old expression that says that ignorance is bliss. But in the case of heroin, fentanyl, and other substances, ignorance can mean death.
