Down Here, They Sometimes Call It 'Boy'
I was on heroin for a few years and I live in the UK. I had managed to keep it hidden for maybe 18 months but eventually it become obvious and my mother started organising help.<p>Within a week we had some people from the local drugs outreach charity turn up at the house with free Naloxone IM kits and they trained us how to use them. A couple of weeks after that I was assigned a counsellor whom I would meet regularly and talk to over the phone.<p>A few months after that I finally got into an NHS programme (which was mostly useless, it was all just preaching which doesn&#x27;t work for me).<p>In the UK we can pick up injection kits in chemists for free. They include: needles; sterile water vials; cooking spoons; micron filters; a sharps disposal box; and packets of citric acid (the heroin we get in the UK needs an acid to dissolve in the water).<p>Heroin addiction is a public health problem, and the healthier the public is, the better off everyone else is. The fact that you have to pay for treatment in parts of the US is unbelievable to me.<p>Having access to naloxone and injection kits for free surely saved me from getting a blood-borne infection, and the counselling from the charity really helped.<p>On a global level we need to stop treating addiction as a crime but as a health problem. No one wakes up first thing and thinks &quot;Hmm, I think I&#x27;ll try shooting heroin today&quot;. There are almost always deep-rooted issues that the addiction hides, because being addicted to heroin is essentially a full-time job. You just don&#x27;t have time to address what is causing you to need to feel numb.