Pharms will always be used by addicts, but with oxy and other painkillers going abuse-proof, I'm not sure that will continue to grow.
There's still oxynorm and the assorted morphine pills. Though they aren't quite as all purpose as the good old OC80, so maybe heroin will make a comeback (morphine is a pain to prep and the histamine release is absurd, and you can't snort it, and oxynorm doesn't come in higher doses - although on the flip side, heroin is a gamble in terms of quality, which is why so many people turned to pharms in the first place, you get what you pay for.).
NBOMes are still around, and RCs will always be risky business - but very few people in the media in this country seem to have gotten their heads around what's really happening with research chems yet.
Given how completely untested, unreliable and dangerous the current batch of RC's are, I can only imagine what that scene will be like in a year or two. Won't be surprised if it dies out entirely, especially with the rise of darkweb drug markets.
Scare stories are always about - especially about heroin - but it's gone from being pretty rare to being pretty visible in the area I live in. I don't have much else to go on besides that, except to say that heroin/opiates and economic downturn have gone hand-in-hand for some time.
I think the availability and popularity of heroin in the US is having cultural impacts in Australia; I don't think it has the stigma attached to it that it did 10 or 15 years ago. Then again, it would depend who you asked.
I've always found that heroin, even opiates in general to a lesser extent, have the greatest stigma among any class of drugs in the country. You can't throw a rock without hitting a stoner, everyone loves some good MDMA, hallucinogens will always have a stable demand with those looking for that experience, and meth is so pervasive right now that it sometimes feels like everyone is doing it. Kids at Uni trying to study, shift workers and the service industry to keep up with the pace, people bombing it before festivals or smoking pipes in the club carparks and at recovery parties, not to mention all the full blown lifestyle addicts and the people producing and dealing it.
Heroin doesn't hit that cross section of society, it lacks the pervasive crossover utilitarian/recreational/habitual appeal that makes it so easy to fall into the meth trap. Opiate use, and especially heroin use, generally comes down to three categories - miserable people trying to self medicate, people seeking it out because they think it has some kind of dark glamor to it or they're looking for new sensations (or who are offered it by friends who do), or people trying to cope with physical pain, and the second category has shrunk drastically after a generation grew up with the heroin problem of the 80's and 90's and the propaganda around it. For whatever reason, the addictive and dangerous nature of heroin has sunk in in a way that it hasn't for meth - maybe because it's had more time, maybe because it's more likely to cause death by acute OD, maybe some other reason, I don't know.
Or maybe I just live in the wrong part of the wrong city, and there really is a climbing rate of heroin use. I dunno, I haven't used opiates regularly in 2 years now. When I was looking at the various darkweb markets, I noticed that H was by far the most common opiate within Australia. 5 - 10 listings of H for every listing of pharmaceutical opiates, and the latter were pretty much exclusively oxy's being sold at exorbitant prices (think 3x street value), and will probably dry up soon, if they haven't already.
Pretty irrelevant to me now, I have no intention of climbing down that particular rabbit hole again :/
