Keeping Your Kids Off Heroin and other Opiates

Heroin, hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine and other pain relievers are direct or semi-synthetic derivatives of opium, and therefore are called opiates. If they are fully synthetic, they are called opioids or “similar to opium.”

Heroin exists in our communities and close to our schools and homes. The annual Monitoring the Future survey of teens reported in 2012 that 20% of high school seniors felt that heroin was “easily available.”

The stigma associated with heroin has been changing over the last couple of decades so your children’s ideas about heroin may have changed, too. For many years, it could only be administered by needle. Changing methods of manufacture allowed the drug to be smoked or snorted. Many people who would never inject the drug were willing to try smoking it. Thus heroin’s appeal increased and the stigma attached to it decreased. But once a person begins smoking heroin, they may crave the more intense rush they could get from injecting it. The degradation in one’s morals that is commonly associated with heroin use opens the door to an injection habit.

Keeping your children safe from this destructive road now means starting very early. They must be educated on the danger associated with abuse of prescription pain medication because this may be the first drug they are exposed to. Not realizing that these drugs are addictive, many young people think they are safe to abuse because they are handed out by doctors. But in fact, they are every bit as dangerous to abuse as heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine.

You can successfully prevent drug abuse by your children. We can help you. More than anyone else, parents hold the key to preventing drug abuse by their children.

Children listen to what their parents say, even if they don’t appear to. Take action now to prevent abuse of or eventual addiction to heroin.