Cartel Hits Midwest With Heroin Killing Chicago Youth

[Purveyor]

By Andrew Martin - Nov 13, 2013

Danny Dillon, a three-sport athlete, thought he was snorting a crushed-up pain pill the first time he tried heroin, as a high school junior.

It wasn’t long before he was injecting the drug, a decision based not just on the effects but on his wallet.

“The price is what made it easy,” said Dillon, a recovering addict from Braidwood, a one-time coal town on Chicago’s suburban fringe. “Instead of paying $20 for some pills, I could pay $10 and it would last me two or three days.”

Dillon’s simple calculation captures the recent transformation of heroin use in the U.S.: who buys it, how it’s sold and, increasingly, who dies from it. More people are using it than at any time since the 1970s -- 79 percent more in the past five years alone.

Driving this explosion in customers is a growing nonchalance toward a drug once considered taboo. Users today are younger, more affluent and more likely to live in suburbs or small towns, according to government officials and drug treatment experts. And they’re snorting or injecting a form of heroin more potent than during the drug’s previous heyday.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/cartel-hits-midwest-with-heroin-killing-chicago-youth.html

[Wilms]

1. .

[Warren Stupidity]

2. black market heroin has dosage and purity issues that kill people

A rational society would limit the damage by making pure regulated heroin available by prescription to addicts. This would also reduce crime committed by addicts and take billions of dollars away from organized crime. As a side effect addicts, having safe legal access to their drug, would stop infecting each other with hepc, hiv, and other blood related diseases. Unfortunately it would also take billions of dollars away from the prison industrial complex, so it won't happen.

[TheMightyFavog]

3. Heroin's a big problem here.

It all got started with a bent doctor whose entire practice was writing scrips for Oxy. Then, all at once, the feds busted the doctor, and the manufacturers reformulated Oxy to make it harder to abuse. Heroin came in and filled the needs of all those people hooked on opiod painkillers.