IV Drug Users Inundate Hospitals with Diseases
Living as an IV drug addict means accepting a certain lifestyle where disease and criminality are part of the norm. As a person graduates from casual drug use to full-blown addiction, their ethics level is lowered to the point they will do things they would not ordinarily do in order to maintain their high and not end up with withdrawal symptoms. You take a once straight-laced kid, brought up with proper values and get them addicted to heroin, and all those values go out the door. They’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down after which they will help you look for the very thing(s) they stole from you. You can rest assured most of what they tell you is a lie. With more people using IV drugs than ever before, addiction-related diseases have shot through the roof, requiring more and more addicts to get serious medical attention, to the point where hospitals are completely overwhelmed dealing with the fallout of not only the opiate epidemic but the methamphetamine epidemic as well.
Opiates and meth are two of the most commonly abused drugs with more and more people transitioning to IV use every day. When people get addicted to drugs, taking care of their health is the last thing on their mind. Their priorities are staying high, getting more drugs, and if they run out of money, finding ways to get their fix before they either come down or start getting dope sick. Many addicts lead a very risky lifestyle because drugs inevitably cloud a person’s judgment. While under the influence of drugs or in the throes of withdrawal, many addicts take calculated risks. Sharing needles, selling their bodies, irresponsible sexual activity and lack of hygiene are just some of the factors that have caused a huge surge in disease among those who struggle with addiction.
Infectious endocarditis, Hepatitis C, MRSA, and HIV commonly affect addicts and the thing is, most addicts don’t have enough money for a $20 bag of dope, never mind being able to pay for a health insurance policy. What ends up happening is indigent addicts wind up in hospitals with a variety of health complications, leaving the hospitals and taxpayers to foot the bill. The cost of healthcare is tens of thousands of dollars per addict per year, with no one else to pay for it. Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami estimates that they spend over $11 million each year treating the infections of IV drug users.
Obviously, what we’re currently doing to fight the opiate epidemic isn’t working. Overdoses still occur every day and each day more and more addicts die. Now, they’re spreading infectious diseases to each other to the point where, due to their irresponsibility and inability to fund their own medical care, the average taxpayer has become the one to financially care for the impoverished addicts whose endocarditis will kill them if not properly treated. The solution here is drug rehabilitation and getting to the core of a person’s issues and why they use drugs. If more addicts had access to good, quality substance abuse treatment, we might see a decline in not only the amount of people who wind up with life-threatening medical conditions but in the numbers of those struggling with addiction overall.
