Heroin Use and Abuse
Darren Aronofsky's film Requiem for a Dream follows the lives of 4people, lost and isolated in their own worlds into the descending spiral ofdrug addiction. At first, their desire for the drug is a based on a desireto escape from the doldrums of everyday life. An elderly widow usesprescription pain killers in order to clam her nerves, but soon thepsychokinetic effects are the focus of her desire, and she slips into afantasy dream world. A pair of young lovers and their friend starts thejourney seeking a bit of fun, which turns into a desire for power, and thenan addiction to the ability to escape the devolving conditions of theirlives into the drug induced dream. Unlike feel good endings of most oftoday's modern films, individual vignettes conclude the film, showing eachof the four lived helplessly shipwrecked, somewhere in between reality and The effects of powerful drugs such as heroin, or cocaine on the livesof their users lead to self destruction. The powerful chemical interactionbetween the drugs and the normal neurological activity in the brain renderthe user unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The result oflong term use is the tragic loss of a
Besides the dangerproposed by the misuse and abuse of the drug, heroin poses additional risksto the street level user. In the early years of thenineteenth century, medicines had been prepared using crude naturalmaterials like opium, the dried milky substance derived from poppy seeds. Heroin, made by adding twoacetyl groups to the morphine molecule, was followed a year later byanother acetyl derivative of a painkiller from plants; the second naturaldrug was salicylic acid and the Bayer derivative was named `Aspirin'. 8percent of admissions in Baltimore, 43 percent in New York City, and 32percent in Detroit were for heroin related conditions. Purity levels in other CEWG areas ranged from 11. Thus the cycle of use and addiction has snared, and entrappedanother victim like a spider traps, and kills an unsuspecting fly. [iv] In June 2000, Community Epidemiology Work Group (CEWG) membersreported that heroin indicators were showing mixed trends in majorpopulation centers across the country. Synthetic medicines were something new. The discoverer of morphine was in due course nominated foracademic honors. Unfortunately, the side effects of a highly powerful drug such asheroin is that the substance is also highly addictive, and long term use ishighly destructive to human tissue, organs, and the brain. When a level of physical dependence is reached, the body has'adapted' to the presence of the drug and will likely suffer from minor tosever withdrawal symptoms if use is reduced or stopped. Morphine came to market at a time of high demand, and waswidely used for pain relief in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, in combination with the hypodermic syringe, which wasinvented in 1853.
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Acceptance Essays
