Why Do People Use Heroin?

It may be difficult or even impossible to understand why a friend or family member uses heroin. From the outside, the destructive effects of heroin are apparent. The addicted person may isolate themselves, lose jobs, steal money, and engage in other reckless activities.

However, heroin addiction is less likely to be attributed to recreational abuse than other drugs such as marijuana, amphetamines, ecstasy, or other prescription drugs. It is more often the case that a person who uses heroin has underlying health conditions or psychiatric disorders that precipitate drug use.

How Heroin Use Starts: A Timeline

How heroin addiction develops, from first use to full dependence, can help make sense of why stopping is so much harder than it sounds.

1. First Use

Heroin directly affects chemical opioid receptors in the brain that lead to a release of the feel-good neurotransmitter, dopamine.

2. The Heroin High

The rush of pleasurable emotions caused by dopamine may drive a person to abuse the drug after just one use, in spite of adverse effects and the high risks of overdose death.

3. Continued Heroin Misuse

Over time, and with habitual use, it becomes harder for a person to stop heroin use without help.

4. Heroin Addiction And Dependence

Heroin dependence is often established with regular abuse. The person’s brain and body may require black tar heroin, or other prescription opioids, like fentanyl or oxycontin, to regulate itself.

A person with a heroin addiction may simply be unable to stop heroin use without medical intervention.

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Reasons People Use Heroin

There are several reasons why an individual may develop an addiction to heroin.

Heroin Is Highly Addictive

Heroin is highly addictive and often leads to chronic addiction, even with just one or a few uses. Heroin often comes in brown powder form and may be injected, smoked, or administered by snorting the drug. With continued use, an individual’s brain and body quickly become dependent on its pleasurable effects or “highs.”

To Self-Medicate Mental Illness

Heroin use has a high co-morbid association with depression and anxiety. People who use heroin are often using the drug as a means to avoid pain, emotional discomfort, and underlying symptoms of mental illness.

For Its Euphoric Effects

Heroin is an opiate drug that causes dopamine release in the brain. The release of this neurotransmitter creates a rush of pleasurable feelings.

For Pain Relief

Heroin relieves both emotional and physical pain. This potent drug has pain-killer properties that reduce discomfort from chronic injuries and mental distress.

A Sense Of Calm And Sedation

Heroin acts as a central nervous system depressant that reduces activity in the brain, leading to sedation.

Withdrawal Avoidance

When a person stops using heroin after becoming chemically dependent and addicted, uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms begin to surface, causing significant distress.

Triggers For Heroin Use

Triggers are the people, places, emotions, and situations that create a strong urge to use heroin, and for someone in recovery, they can be one of the most significant obstacles to staying sober. Environmental triggers might be as specific as driving through a neighborhood where drugs were used, while social triggers can include conflict with a loved one, job loss, or contact with people associated with past drug use.

Emotional triggers are often the most powerful and the hardest to predict. Feelings like loneliness, anxiety, guilt, shame, and depression can all activate the same neural pathways that heroin once relieved. Because heroin frequently replaces healthy coping mechanisms over time, the brain learns to reach for it whenever these feelings surface.

How Addiction Leads To A Cycle Of Substance Use

Habitual heroin use can result in a cycle of addiction. People with drug addiction often fall into patterns of repetitive emotions, thoughts, and behaviors associated with addiction. A person may feel stuck between drug use and uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms that develop when stopping use.

A cycle of drug use may be exacerbated by:

• environmental, emotional, and social triggers or pain that leads to drug use
• obsessing over drug usage to alleviate discomfort
• drug use and participating in other illegal activities
• guilt, fear, shame, and remorse over drug use
• withdrawal symptoms
• unsuccessful attempts at sobriety

The cycle of abuse will continue until a person receives treatment, detoxes from heroin, and is finally able to live drug-free outside repetitive patterns that drive substance abuse.

Getting Help For Heroin Addiction

Heroin is a highly addictive drug. Addiction to it often requires aggressive substance use treatment in order to break the cycle of addiction, avert medical crises like heroin overdoses, and achieve recovery.

Treating heroin addiction may include naloxone or methadone treatment to support opiate withdrawal, counseling services, behavioral therapy, dual diagnosis treatment for co-occurring mental health disorders, 12-step recovery groups, and more.