How Does Heroin Kill You? The Facts About Heroin Overdose

Heroin overdose kills because it inhibits the body from breathing. Heroin overdose also causes your blood pressure to drop, with heart failure resulting. Other health problems heroin can cause include:

• Infectious endocarditis – an infection of the heart’s surface
• Arrhythmia – a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm
• Pulmonary edema – a condition that causes blood to flow in the body in the wrong direction, backflowing into veins, through the lungs and into the left side of the heart
• Heart attack or kidney failure – these conditions are caused when excess fluid enters alveoli in the lungs and reduces oxygen

Common Characteristics of Heroin Overdose and Deaths

Heroin death is more likely when the following are true:

• The user is male
• Other drugs or alcohol were recently used
• At least one other person is present during the drug use
• The drug use is occurring in the user’s home
• The user is an experienced user

Heroin Death Does Not Have to Be the Result

Death happens more often to experienced users of heroin than to new users. This means that every time you or your loved one pick up the syringe to inject heroin, the risk of death grows. This also means that getting into a quality detox program and rehabilitative treatment grows more critical each day. Futures of Palm Beach in South Florida offers dual diagnosis residential inpatient adult addiction treatment programs that provide patients with a wide array of evidence-based therapies and relapse prevention techniques. Call Futures Recovery Healthcare before the chance to stop heroin addiction is lost to overdose.