Heroin is classified as a hard drug in terms of drug harmfulness. Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin may lead to adverse effects. The purity of street heroin varies greatly, leading to overdoses when the purity is higher than expected. [59] Short-term effects Short-term effects of usage [60] A Century of International Drug Control. United Nations Publications. 2010. p.49. ISBN 9789211482454. Archived from the original on 10 September 2017.

Treatment of heroin addiction often includes behavioral therapy and medications. [12] Medications can include buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone. [12] A heroin overdose may be treated with naloxone. [12] An estimated 17million people as of 2015 [update] use opiates, of which heroin is the most common, [14] [15] and opioid use resulted in 122,000 deaths. [16] The total number of heroin users worldwide as of 2015 is believed to have increased in Africa, the Americas, and Asia since 2000. [17] In the United States, approximately 1.6 percent of people have used heroin at some point. [12] [18] When people die from overdosing on a drug, the drug is usually an opioid and often heroin. [14] [19] Diamorphine was first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London who had been experimenting combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine which is now called diacetylmorphine or morphine diacetate. He sent the compound to F. M. Pierce of Owens College in Manchester for analysis. Pierce told Wright: Poisons Standard October 2015 "Poisons Standard October 2015". Commonwealth of Australia. Archived from the original on 19 January 2016 . Retrieved 6 January 2016.

A range of treatments including medicines and behavioral therapies are effective in helping people stop heroin use. It’s important to match the best treatment approach to meet the particular needs of each individual patient.

Dettmeyer RB, Preuss J, Wollersen H, Madea B (January 2005). "Heroin-associated nephropathy". Expert Opinion on Drug Safety. 4 (1): 19–28. doi: 10.1517/14740338.4.1.19. PMID 15709895. S2CID 11646280. University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions: "RIA Reaching Out to Others: The Growing Peril of Heroin." If you use heroin a lot, your body builds up a tolerance to it. But that doesn’t mean it won’t harm you. It means you need to take more and more to get the same high. Your body comes to depend on it. Then, when you quit using it, you have withdrawal symptoms that may include: Schlager N, Lauer J (2001). Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery. Detroit: Gale Group. pp. 360. ISBN 078763932X. OCLC 43836551.Wright's invention did not lead to any further developments, and diamorphine became popular only after it was independently re-synthesized 23 years later by chemist Felix Hoffmann. [88] Hoffmann was working at Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany, and his supervisor Heinrich Dreser instructed him to acetylate morphine with the objective of producing codeine, a constituent of the opium poppy that is pharmacologically similar to morphine but less potent and less addictive. Instead, the experiment produced an acetylated form of morphine one and a half to two times more potent than morphine itself. Hoffmann synthesized heroin on August 21, 1897, just eleven days after he had synthesized aspirin. [89] Liu J, Qin W, Yuan K, et al. Interaction between dysfunctional connectivity at rest and heroin cues-induced brain responses in male abstinent heroin-dependent individuals. PloS One. 2011;6(10):e23098. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023098.

Moore D (24 August 2014). "Heroin: A brief history of unintended consequences". Times Union. Archived from the original on 19 April 2015. Those who are addicted to heroin and stop using the drug abruptly may have severe withdrawal. Withdrawal symptoms—which can begin as early as a few hours after the drug was last taken—include: The next poem is about the slippery slope of recreational drinking that sometimes leads to binging, and finally, full-blown addiction to alcohol. In his youth, the author was just having fun, enjoying the bar scenes and living it up on weekends. Over time, he began drinking in increasing amounts until he realized one day (after many years) that he was intoxicated more often than not. A somber story about a life nearly lost to alcoholism, however, in the end, perseverance and sobriety prevail. Addiction isn’t heroin’s only long-term side effect. Chronic heroin use can cause a variety of physical and mental health issues: Physical effectsResearchers are attempting to reproduce the biosynthetic pathway that produces morphine in genetically engineered yeast. [150] In June 2015 the S-reticuline could be produced from sugar and R-reticuline could be converted to morphine, but the intermediate reaction could not be performed. [151] See also