“I’ll just try it once.”

any people experiment with heroin thinking, “I’ll try it once or twice. I can always stop.” But those who start down that road find it nearly impossible to turn back. Consider the words of one 15-year-old addict: “When you first shoot up, you will most likely puke and feel repelled, but soon you’ll try it again. It will cling to you like an obsessed lover. The rush of the hit and the way you’ll want more, as if you were being deprived of air — that’s how it will trap you.”

	“I didn’t clean my apartment for a whole year. It was a mess. There was blood all over the walls, blood on my shoes, and tons of syringes on the floor. I didn’t bathe myself for six months. I became a robot: find my fix, shoot up, look at TV, find my fix...” — Sam, drug addict(1)

The threat of addiction is not the worst consequence of experimenting with heroin. Jim is twenty-one years old and usually spent his evenings drinking beer with friends. He had already experimented with heroin so when friends offered him a line to sniff, he accepted. Fifteen minutes after inhaling, he passed out, then dropped into a deep coma which lasted more than two months. Though the doctors did not expect him to recover, Jim did eventually regain consciousness. Today, he is confined to a wheelchair, unable to write, barely able to read. Whatever dreams and aspirations he once had are gone.

Think twice

After kicking a heroin habit and remaining clean and sober for seven months, one teenage user warned others, “I paid dearly for an expensive assassin to take my life, mind and body. I am now glad it did not succeed. So please, for the love of all that is dear to you, just think before you welcome a killer like heroin into your body.”