How does heroin affect the human body?
The effects of heroin on the human body are complex. But let's set one thing straight right away. And that is: most people, when they see a heroin addict, see someone who is very miserable; and they attribute that to the looks of whoever they have in focus - on him or her - taking that drug. Now, it's more complicated than that. Because most people who take heroin use a lot of money to take that heroin, and they don't use a lot of money for food, for housing, for health, and for spas and whatever, so they disintegrate. Their health disintegrates, but it's not because of the heroin they take, it's because of the lives they live. Heroin as such is a depressant, and it can depress your respiratory system to the degree where you don't inhale air anymore, and that's what you die from - that's the overdose risk of taking heroin. But it's not toxic in the way that we think with regard to poisons. You can't take a poison and be healthy afterwards; it will destroy something in your body. Now in that respect, heroin isn't toxic. It doesn't destroy anything in your body, and if you stick to pure heroin and don't mix it up with all sorts of other stuff, and alcohol and so on. One of the big revelations for me with regards to the toxicity of heroin was talking to people who examine dead bodies - cut them up - and see whether there had been any harm or what would be the cause of death. And I was surprised to hear that heroin doesn't harm anything in your body - not the tissue, not the blood, not the organs. I thought otherwise. I thought something would be actually wrong.
