The Heroin Epidemic In Philadelphia

The topic i chose to write about is the Heroin Epidemic in Philadelphia. The history of Heroin and how it started. In the early 1800’s the drug morphine was introduced as a painkiller. It wasn 't until the 1850’s that the drug was available in the United States. During the civil war was when the “addictive properties went unnoticed”. Thousands of people started becoming addicted to morphine. In 1874 the discovered the answer to the problem. Researchers discovered “Heroin” this was the non-addictive substitute for morphine. This slowly became the next drug epidemic. Until 1920, the distribution of Heroin was legal in the United States, but by the time the law was passed against it in 1925 there were already 200,000 addicts in the country. Where

Programs such as PDMP’s (Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs) have been put into place to help stop this drug abuse. Students in schools across the country are being educated about drugs through programs such as CSCP (Caring School Community Program), GGC (Guiding Good Choices), LST (Life Skills Training), and SFA (Skills for Adolescence). Detoxification treatment centers are meant to slowly help people get off of their Heroin addiction but are also mostly linked with relapse. There are plenty of Treatment centers in Philadelphia, all over the city but yet still so many drug addicts, and drug overdoses each year. Treatment centers have a waiting list that they put people on when they don 't have enough beds to sleep anymore people. This is something i strongly disagree with. If a person is willing to get help and have taken the initiative to go and get it, they should never be denied the help simply because there is not enough room to hold them. If a person is there and willing to get help they should last resort be offered to sleep on the floor. As long as they are getting the help they need to recover. Last Stop is a treatment center in the middle of Kensington Philadelphia. They will take any person willing to get help regardless of how much space they have available. They don 't take funding from the government but only fund on donations from anyone willing to donate. Statistics show that the amount of deaths from Heroin overdose is continually growing. This shows that the policies that the government has previously put in place and continues to put in place are not working. I have a close friend who 's mother grew up in Philadelphia, by the age of 18 she was already addicted to Heroin. Her mother had died of a Heroin overdose when she was 2 years old. From that point on she was raised in a drug free household. When she reached middle school she began to hang out with a crowd who soon got into drugs.