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Mental Health How bad is heroin, infrequently?

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p-helix

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Joined
Jul 25, 2010
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So I have been feeling quite worried, depressed and concerned about a few things recently, I smoked some heroin and now I feel less fed up. I expect to feel worse as a consequence soon with some of this arising from lambasting myself for using again and the associated guilt and shame.

While I am unlikely to start a pattern of more frequent use, I have been using heroin no more than once every few weeks or months for the last few years following a long break of seven years, I recognise that I am generally happier and stronger without any use of it. My attachment to heroin stems from the belief that there may be some protective effect in terms of alleviating suffering now and that should be enough of a benefit to do some good sometimes although of course there is generally a longer more drawn out opposite effect to follow. Buy now, pay later, which is why I would be better off not to, considering my history of depression and anxiety.

It is a dangerous game, a slippery slope, more pain to gain and so on but with modest and infrequent use the typical harms of an opiate are proportionally small. However, with such moderate and infrequent use it is the mental harm caused by association with the drug that is most harmful. This accentuates the tendency towards morbidity, secrecy, isolation and depression. I am not recommending this drug to myself or anyone else, just looking for perspectives on this pattern of use on somebody with depression.
 
what you should do is work on your issues and try to feel less pain and more positive things without having to become a junky.... and that comes from a junky
 
Good luck only using it every once in a while. But if you can then it's pretty much like any other drug.
 
Infrequent use isn't terrible assuming you aren't taking extremely high doses and risking overdose. It's definitely not healthy, but using it once isn't going to kill you or lead to serious brain damage so long as you dose properly.

The biggest risk is that infrequent use will become frequent use, as it does with nearly everyone... then it's pretty fucking terrible.

It's a game of Russian roulette, no one ever plans on getting stuck on heroin, but it sounds like you already know that...
 
Physically its not that bad with INFREQUENT USE AS IN MEDICAL/HOSPITAL. And I don't want to tell you what to do but, the issues you are self medicating by using heroin need to be addressed. Just saying.

Plz take care.
 
I, like many, have tried "using it once in a while" and let me tell you, it turns into a nightmare and a very shitty miserable existence.
 
To play devils advocate i have been smoking or snorting heroin once every 14 days on average for over ten years with no major health issues.

My tip to keep heroin use occasional is to only buy enough heroin for one days dose. Never buy in bulk large amounts to save money. And i mean NEVER.

You may think you have the will power to keep a gram of smack in your top draw only for special occasions without using 3 days in a row but buying in bulk more often than not leads to addiction
 
p-helix said:
It is a dangerous game, a slippery slope, more pain to gain and so on but with modest and infrequent use the typical harms of an opiate are proportionally small. However, with such moderate and infrequent use it is the mental harm caused by association with the drug that is most harmful.
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Most of the stigma attached to heroin use is due to the IV use of the drug. Provided as a heroin user you don't progress to the needle you really will be one step ahead. I won't beat yourself up about it, If you keep your use infrequence of course.

Half the reason my heroin use has never turned to abuse is from the stories i have read on BL over the years. The other half is the support network i have of friends co workers and family who give me the self worth to not stick needles in my arms and go round with track marks. I'm not saying i am perfect by a long shot as i have experimented with IV use 15 years ago but thankfully they're were some people to talk some sense into me before it got too serious. I was lucky and woke up to myself, some of my fellow users weren't and it was fatal. Or they are now homeless (no word of a lie)

For those who swear by the needle that's their choice however i wouldn't recommend if your aim is to keep drug use recreational
 
I know of very few people who have managed to remain recreational heroin users. I believed I could control my use by smoking every now and then and I felt that it helped with my depression by numbing myself to the world. I honestly thought that it would never happen to me and that I could smoke occasionally when I was suffering particular bad and I would do anything I could to not get addicted. I managed for a while.

Eventually my use had become so frequent that I was starting to wake up feeling really sick. It got to a point where I had to smoke at least 4 times a day to feel 'normal' and my tolerance was skyrocketing. I had to find/acquire the money somehow and I would do almost anything I could to avoid the horrible painful withdrawal symptoms that started creeping up just few hours after I had used. I used to spend a lot of time waiting for dealers where I picked up other good habits when I was hanging around with the other junkies like IV use and smoking crack. I lost absolutely everything and I had become a person I despised. Prior to that I had a good job and a pretty decent life in comparison to what my life had become.

Now I have to wake up every day and say hello to my local pharmacist to go and get my green juice. Which people say is harder to kick than heroin because the withdrawal symptoms drag on for months and months. I'm having to slowly try to rebuild everything I lost and it is not easy. No one starts off using heroin thinking the cliché will ever happen to them. It's honestly not worth it pal. Get help and reach out if your struggling with depression. There are plenty more drugs to use recreationally out there but bear in mind that using any addictive drug to self-medicate your mental health is even more likely to cause a dependency to it. Especially if the drug is heroin!
 
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Bad enough to not use it again. It isn't an effective antidepressant/anxiolytic because one needs regularly to raise their dosage to achieve the same effect as before. Also, there is a lot of physical crime associated with it.
 
If you can actually sustain this pattern of use in the long term, no, it's not that dangerous.

But that's the problem. You probably won't. In my experience, the problem is life for most people, and especially drug users, tends to be a rollercoaster. Things may work out fine for years, then everything may go bad initially for reasons that had nothing to do with the drugs. And that's when you might find yourself losing control of your usage. Or, alternately, you may eventually find your tolerance increasing and it costing more money, and with needing more money, things can get bad fast. Life isn't static, even if the way your life is now is compatible with functional usage doesn't mean it always will be.

Even if you've managed to functionally use heroin for 5 years, that still doesn't mean it can't go very VERY bad very fast one day in the future. Which is why I'd rate the probability as very high. I'm not telling you to stop, that's your choice to make. All I'm saying is that while the dangers with this kind of use, for now, aren't perhaps all that severe, in the long term it could still turn out very bad. It could be years before it does, but even if you think "well if it starts going bad, that's when I'll stop, I can still keep using till then" that still is probably not how it would work out. Because your mind will always find excuses like that and it only gets worse the deeper you get.

I think it's a great danger in the long term. How long? Impossible to say. But I haven't seen many last more than about 7 years or so before things got very bad. But ultimately it's up to you. Just know that the road to destruction is paved with a million small steps, a million small rationalizations and excuses. Good luck.
 
p-helix said:
...with modest and infrequent use the typical harms of an opiate are proportionally small... I am not recommending this drug to myself or anyone else, just looking for perspectives on this pattern of use on somebody with depression.
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This may be true but recreational or occasional use of heroin can very rarely be sustained long-term without it eventually becoming problematic for many people. What concerned me the most is that you are using to attempt to control or ameliorate your depression... This is exactly what I was trying to do with disasterous consequences.

Not all heroin addicts fit the media stereotype of the smacked up loser bumbling around in the gutter. But the stark truth is that heroin addiction is a hard, ugly addiction for most people and one that has wrecked many lives. Approach with caution but you are honesty better off avoiding altogether - From a caring addict. Take care.
 
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Thank you for the considerate responses from all of you.

I think my depression is something I cope with differently at different times and so occasionally use heroin as a pain killing drug to help nullify 'pain', as a drug of last resort. I suppose heroin is a tool I like to keep in a box, there are other tools too, mainly psychedelics and cannabis.

I would hate to glamorize heroin as it fundamentally causes pain and misery, but it is not necessarily worse than alcohol for occasional use. When I say I use it once, I mean several runs on the foil, maybe sniff a tiny bump, over several minutes, not a really heavy dose, not several times over the course of a day or more than once in a period of weeks or months.

I don't think heroin does me too much good and I would rather abstain for a long period of time and do it because I am in pain, which I feel is potentially harmful to me, because then it seems worth doing. My fear is that heroin separates me from feelings and emotions and others but sometimes that becomes necessary as part of the incubation process. A bubble of separation. I feel like it takes me two weeks to fully feel everything again.

Generally, I am happier not to use and have not used since I made this thread, but it is there when I feel the need for it and for that I am glad it exists.

I really appreciate your replies to this thread.
 
Yea man I hear you. I mean honestly for a long time I was like fuck it, fuck your opinions and views on it, fuck you - my sober life is so miserable and my depression was so great that it seemed the only thing that relieved it. Fuck life it'd be easier to just off myself, lying around all miserable until I got high then I'm up cleaning my room, accomplishing shit until I start nodding out.

Like others have said, no one plans on becoming a junkie, and the vast VAST majority of people don't sustain periodic use for long. Heroin is a sneaky bitch too. By the time you realize you're getting to deep in it, you're already hooked. And like embryo said a heroin addiction is straight shitty, and the withdrawals are hell on earth.

I had a 3.5 year break where I, lets say was around it all day everyday, and didn't use it. After that I found 2 bags, figured fuck it. Ill keep it weeks apart, weeks became days, and days eventually became hours again over a few months.

The withdrawals will only make your depression 10000x worse, if you get to that point. I've tried chipping again (which I know is stupid cus it never lasts) and can honestly say I've come to realize that even a day of using it and feeling that relief seems to set the progress I made in regards to my depression a few steps back again.

I'd say quit while you're ahead.
 
Opioids “work” for depression in a sense, although some better than others. But there are for more effective things out there for most people.
 
toothpastedog said:
Opioids “work” for depression in a sense, although some better than others. But there are for more effective things out there for most people.
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The problem isn't their effectiveness. Opioid probably are the most effective thing there is. The problem is all the other shit excessive opioid use tends to do.
 
Most definitely. When I was on opiates I didn't have much depression, just a lot of other issues, like legal dilemmas to pay for them
 
That why I put quote around the word work. They definitely work pharmacologically (amazingly so), but on the other hand the climate in which we end up using them most of the time these days isn’t very sustainable. Unless you’re on a HAT program or some other form of ORT (but even then, in the US at least those programs, while amazingly lifesaving and transformative, they are no walk in the park either).

I agree with both of you completely though. If I was able to take 180mg morphine IV each day like a famous and groundbreaking American surgeon did throughout his entire life, it would have worked out fine. But that was so not my experience in terms of access.

That said, while I wasn’t able to appriciate it’s significance at the time, my early period of opioid use blew my mind. It was the first time in my life I could function without any social phobia or anxiety whatsoever. That contentment made life so much easier for me, even though it was really real (in the sense of sustainable unless I continued using more frequently).

But then a bunch of bad shit happens, as it tends to with high stigmatized and illegal drug use.

IME longer acting opioids are better for depression and anxiety related issues, as is the oral ROA as it helps extend the half-life a little (or with buprenorphine sublingual or intranasal). So basically methadone and buprenorphine. IIRC buprenorphine was prescribed for depression at lowish doses, somewhere in Europe.

Opioids have a long and rich history of being used for mental health stuff until they started criminalizing their use in the early 20th century (not that their criminalization has anything to do with that; their criminalization was all about xenophobia, racism and people trying to gain and consolidate political power (Hoover, for instance)).

Anyone ever read The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend? Fun stuff ;)
 
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Opiates helped me deal with a lot of psychological issues, a lot better than anything else ever did
 
Opiates - and definitely Heroin - are relatively "safe" in the sense they're not really toxic - so a very low morbidity (probably a different sense than OP used the word, I mean the medical definition).

That said - I really don't know what you want to be told other than that you're obviously playing with fire.
 
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