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What Do Drug Addicts Use Bleach For

How Disinfection Can Reduce Transmission Risk: It Reduces The Number Of Viruses And It Kills Them

Making Chloroform

Current disinfection recommendations are based on the following steps:

  • Flush out blood, drugs, and other organic matter from the syringe. These can contain viruses and do interfere with the disinfection process.
  • Disinfect the syringe.
  • Rinse out the disinfectant.

The idea behind these steps is to reduce the risk of HIV transmission in two ways. First, flushing removes blood and drugs from the syringe, which reduces the number of viral particles. Second, using a disinfectant can kill remaining viruses so they can’t infect anyone else. Instructions for disinfecting syringes usually include ways to make sure that viruses are removed and killed:

  • Fill the syringe with clean water .

  • Shake or tap the syringe containing water or disinfectant then squirt out and throw away the water repeat until no more blood can be seen.

  • Leave the water or disinfectant, especially the disinfectant, in the syringe for a while then squirt out the disinfectant.

  • Rinse out the syringe with clean water rinsing is done to get rid of disinfectant and any viruses left in the syringe.

Addiction And Your Brother

“This has been going on for a very long time. It started when we were in high school. He’s my younger brother, so I’ve always felt like I had a duty to look out for him. That hasn’t changed now that we’re in our thirties. He started by binge drinking with friends on the weekends. Eventually he started using marijuana. I tried to steer him away from that life. He just wouldn’t listen to me.

“It wasn’t until we were in our late twenties that he started using heroin. Now, it’s an everyday thing. I’m worried about him. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. I’m scared that he’s going to overdose one day, and then it’s going to be too late to help him.

“What can I do?”

Overdosing: Multiple Times On The Edge

I used a little too much. It was fun for a while, then I passed out in the hotel hallway for eight minutes. They told me later that I died.

~ Slash, talking about one of his overdoses

Overdoses were all-too-frequent occurrences among the GNR members, including a few that were very nearly deadly. Because they abused multiple drugs, the risk of polydrug poisoning was extremely high. In fact, 75% of all overdosesand 98% of those that are fatalinvolve more than one substance.

This is particularly true for alcohol/opioid combinations. Both are central nervous system depressants that lower blood pressure, heart rate, and most especially, respiration. In effect, an overdose victim will forget to breathe.

It can be difficult to distinguish a typical heroin response from the early stages of an overdose because someone experiencing a normal high often nods off or passes out. But timely identification is crucial if life-saving reversal measures are to be effective.

  • Blue lips/fingertips
  • Unconsciousness to the point of unresponsiveness
  • Coma

A heroin overdose is a life-threatening emergency, but it takes between 1 and 3 hours to die. This means there is time to summon help and respond with emergency measures such as CPR and Narcan.

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What Is Liquid Meth

Liquid meth is the newest form of methamphetamine that is reported to be surfacing throughout many areas in the United States. Manufacturers of this highly toxic drug are beginning to dissolve meth in water in order to liquefy the drug the reason that liquid meth is quickly becoming popular with many of the individuals who are meth dealers, is because it had made transporting the toxic drug so much easier. Individuals who produce meth will often place this liquid form of the drug into various different types of liquor bottles, which are regularly seen at various different ports of entry. Once the liquid meth has passed inspection and been shipped to its destination, individuals will then boil away the water thus, only the solid form of meth will remain.

Liquid meth is also being applied to paper, and is sometimes sent through packages in the U.S. mail. Illinois law enforcement officials discovered this recently while investigating a suspicious package that had been sent through the postal service after a thorough search of the package was completed, the officers reported finding sheets of paper that appeared to have had liquid meth applied to them. After doing the initial lab test in order to positively identify their findings, the officers concluded that methamphetamine users could easily tear off a piece of this meth laced paper and put it into their mouth in order to be able to get the drug into their system.

How To Clean Equipment

Bleach on the skin: What to do, first aid, and effects

One day you might feel you have no option but to share, so its useful to know how injecting equipment can be cleaned. However, its important to note that its never advisable to share needles as they can transfer viruses and bacteria and put you at risk of HIV and hepatitis B and C.

In their leaflet for professionals working with people who inject drugs , NHS Education for Scotland explains how to clean a syringe:

  • first, rinse the syringe and any other equipment to be re-used several times with clean, cold water
  • second, flood it with undiluted household bleach
  • third, rinse out the bleach with more clean, cold water.

You can read more in-depth information on Page 15 of the British Liver Trusts leaflet A Professionals Guide to Hepatitis C and Injecting Drug Use.

Its impossible to guarantee that cleaned equipment is safe to use. Although bleach can be effective when it comes to reducing the spread of hepatitis B and HIV from syringes, this isnt the case when it comes to hepatitis C. The best course of action is to use new, clean equipment rather than taking a risk.

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Unsure Where To Start Take Our Substance Abuse Self

Take our free, 5-minute substance abuse self-assessment below if you think you or someone you love might be struggling with substance abuse. This evaluation consists of 11 yes or no questions that are designed to be used as an informational tool to assess the severity and probability of a substance use disorder. The test is free, confidential, and no personal information is needed to receive the result. Please be aware that this evaluation is not a substitute for advice from a medical doctor.

How Did Disinfection Become A Widely

The strategy of disinfecting syringes to prevent HIV emerged in California in the 1980s. East Coast epidemics among IDUs made public health officials fear that HIV would be a major threat to California IDUs.

California IDUs, like those in other parts of the country, shared and reused syringes, in part because it was hard for them to get new, sterile ones. This greatly increased their risk of HIV transmission . State law made it illegal for drug users to buy syringes from pharmacies and a crime to possess them. Restricted access to sterile syringes, combined with limited capacity of substance abuse treatment programs, forced prevention programs to focus on reducing injection-related risks among IDUs who would not or could not stop injecting. Field research in California showed that IDUs would act to reduce their risks if acceptable measures were available to them. One such measure was syringe disinfection with household bleach. Laboratory tests had shown that bleach killed HIV. Bleach also was cheap, quick, and available everywhere.

Substance abuse treatment and access to sterile syringes through pharmacies, physician prescription, and syringe exchange programs are essential components of HIV prevention efforts among injection drug users. See “” at the end of this fact sheet for information on how to get fact sheets on these topics as well as other materials on HIV prevention among IDUs.

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Use Of Bleach For Disinfection Of Drug Injectionequipment

On April 19, 1993, the National Institute on DrugAbuse of the National Institutes of Health, the Centerfor Substance Abuse Treatment of the Substance Abuse andMental Health Services Administration, and CDC issued ajoint bulletin updating recommendations to preventtransmission of human immunodeficiency virus through the use of bleach for disinfection of druginjection equipment. The bulletin particularly addressespersons who cannot or will not stop injecting drugs. Thisbulletin states that 1) bleach disinfection of needlesand syringes continues to have an important role inreducing the risk for HIV transmission for injecting-drugusers who reuse or share a needle or syringe and 2)sterile, never-used needles and syringes are safer thanbleach-disinfected, previously used needles and syringes.The bulletin contains provisional recommendations for theuse of bleach to disinfect needles and syringes.

CDC recommendations for disinfecting environmentalsurfaces contaminated with blood are unchanged. The CDCrecommendation for disinfecting environmental surfacescontinues to include use of a 1:100 dilution of householdbleach or otherappropriate disinfectants .

Copies of the bulletin are available from the CDCNational AIDS Clearinghouse, telephone 458-5231 orthe National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug AbuseInformation, telephone 729-6686.

Injecting Drug Users And Their Health Seeking Behavior: A Cross

Recognizing a Meth Addict

Sheikh Mohammed Shariful Islam

1Center for Control of Chronic Diseases , International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh , 68 Shaheed Tajuddin Ahmed Sarani, Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

2Center for International Health , Ludwig Maximilians University , 7 Leopoldstraße, 80802 Munich, Germany

3Research Administration, International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh , 68 Shaheed Tajuddin Ahmed Sarani, Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

4Department of Community Medicine, Ad-din Sakina Medical College, Jessore 7400, Bangladesh

5Center for Child and Adolescent Health, International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh , 68 Shaheed Tajuddin Ahmed Sarani, Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

6Staff Clinic, Ha-Meem Group, Tejgaon, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

Academic Editor:

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Study Design, Place, and Population
2.2. Data Collection Tools

Data were collected through face-to-face interviews using a structured questionnaire in Bengali. The questionnaire was developed by a team of epidemiologists, physicians, psychologists, and social scientists and pretested among 20IDUs attending the outpatient department at a drug addiction treatment center in Tejgaon, Dhaka. During the pretest phase we considered if the questions were too sensitive to answer, level of difficulty, and privacy of the respondents. After pretest, the questionnaire was modified and used for data collection in this study.

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Why Teenage Substance Abuse Is A Big Deal

teenagers often experience a far more rapid progression from experimentation to addiction than is true for adults. Denial manifests differently, too, in that young people are more likely to glorify their use, while adults are more likely to minimize theirs.

~ John Daily, LCSW, CADC II, Adolescent and Young Adult Addiction: The Pathological Relationship to Intoxication and The Interpersonal Neurobiology Underpinnings

Adolescent and teenage substance abuse is a serious problem in America. Per the National Institute on Drug Abuse, every single day, nearly 8000 people try illegal drugs for the first time.

54% more than half are younger than 18. In fact, the average age of the first intoxication is just 12 years old.

Even if the drug of choice is just marijuana, the consequences can be significant.

Is Bleach Effective As An Hiv Prevention Strategy

Real-world studies among people who inject drugs have demonstrated that using bleach to rinse needles has little or no protective effect against HIV transmission 1,2,3,4 however, bleach has been found to be effective at killing HIV in syringes in laboratory settings.5

One study conducted in the community found that people who reported always using bleach to rinse their needles had no reduced risk of HIV transmission compared to those who reported sometimes or never using bleach,2 while another study found a modest reduction in HIV risk for those who reported using bleach or alcohol to rinse needles all of the time compared to those who did sometimes or never.3 Additionally, one study found that in a U.S. population of people who inject drugs the prevalence of HIV increased over a two-year period where the use of bleach to rinse needles increased significantly, which suggests that rinsing with bleach was ineffective at killing HIV.4

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Does Disinfection Work Against Viral Hepatitis

Hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus cause serious illness among millions of people. They also are closely connected with HIV, injection drug use, and high-risk sexual behaviors. Many people think that disinfection doesn’t work against HBV or HCV, but laboratory studies on HBV show that disinfection works against this bloodborne virus in the same ways that it does against HIV.

An important thing to remember about HBV and HCV is that the numbers of viruses in blood are much higher for HBV and HCV than they are for HIV. As a result, getting rid of as much blood as possible by flushing out and rinsing is especially important in reducing the risk of becoming infected with viral hepatitis.

Addicts Deserve To Be Hated

Methamphetamine Making Chemicals Seized at Los Angeles ...

As a former drug addict, I am familiar with both sides of addiction. On one side you have normal people, who hate addicts and wish theyd all hurry up and die. On the other side you have the addicts themselves, who wish exactly the same thing. Thats the one thing we all have in common: We all think junkies are pieces of shit.

Alcoholics are just as bad as druggies, if not worse. For one thing, drug addicts know that their poison of choice is illegal and thus are forced into darkened corners when they want to use. Sure, theyll stumble around and beg for change to get what they want, but once theyve scrounged enough cash together for a fix, they generally have the decency to destroy themselves in private.

Drunks beg for change far less, as their favored intoxicant is much cheaper than most illicit substances. But drunks have the annoying tendency to hang out in public because theirs is a sociable drug. Theres nothing worse than a disgusting loser who wants to be friends with everybody, or, as is far more common, takes a perverse pleasure in trying to intimidate passersby because daddy didnt hug them enough as a child. I couldnt give a fuck about the latter group and when I see them passed out on the sidewalk, it takes every bit of resolve I have not to cave in their miserable heads with my size thirteens. The saddest part is that theyd probably thank me as I did it.

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Testing For Marijuana Use

“The bottom line is toxicologists are smarter than drug abusers,” Dasgupta told reporters at a meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry in Washington. “If try to cheat on a drug test, we will catch you.”

That’s usually true. But even Dasgupta concedes there are some holes in his drug-testing net. He says parents should be on the lookout for over-the-counter eyedrops. A full vial of the easy-to-buy product can successfully mask THC — ‘s active ingredient — if it’s added to a urine sample.

This cheating method doesn’t work for heavy marijuana users. But for “borderline” tests, some eyedrops can envelop THC molecules, effectively hiding them from chemical detection, adds Dasgupta.

Hair Drug Testing And Bleached Hair

Whenever a drug is consumed the drug metabolises within the body.

The drug compounds, metabolites, will be inside the hair as it grows. Bleaching the hair can remove between 40-80% of metabolites found in the hair strand. If multiple bleaching attempts are made a participant can remove all drugs from their hair. A worrying situation and one of the reasons why so many blonds arrive at sample collections.

So why does bleaching remove drugs from the hair? Its due to how bleaching reacts with your hair to change its colour. Bleaching will crack and damage the strand, this can cause the leaching of the metabolites out of the hair, hence removing some of the evidence of drug use.

As not every drug is incorporated the same the level of leaching, it will depend on the drugs that the person has allegedly taken, as some drugs are more detectable in hair than others. For example, cannabis is a difficult drug to detect in head hair, and slightly more difficult in body hair.

As mentioned above the possibility of detecting drugs in hair will also depend on how many times a person has bleached their hair. If theyve bleach their hair on a regular basis, it will be likely that no drugs can be detected, or if they are, they will be at very low levels. However, if the hair has only been bleached once and this was only a couple of weeks before sampling, it may still be possible to detect the drugs.

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What Should We Tell Idus

Education and outreach workers should stress the following messages when they talk to IDUs:

  • The best way for you to prevent HIV, HBV, and HCV transmission is to NOT inject drugs.

  • Entering substance abuse treatment can help you reduce or stop injecting. This will lower your chances of infection.

  • Get vaccinated against hepatitis A and hepatitis B. You can prevent these kinds of viral hepatitis if you get vaccinated.

  • If you cannot or will not stop injecting, you should:

  • Use a new, sterile syringe obtained from a reliable source to prepare and divide drugs for each injection.
  • Never reuse or share syringes, water, cookers, or cottons.
  • Use sterile water to prepare drugs each time, or at least clean water from a reliable source.
  • Keep everything as clean as possible when injecting .
  • If you can’t use a new, sterile syringe and clean equipment each time, then disinfecting with bleach may be better than doing nothing at all:

  • Fill the syringe with clean water and shake or tap.
  • Squirt out the water and throw it away. Repeat until you don’t see any blood in the syringe.
  • Completely fill the syringe with fresh, full-strength household bleach.
  • Keep it in the syringe for 30 seconds or more.
  • Squirt it out and throw the bleach away.
  • Fill the syringe with clean water and shake or tap.
  • Squirt out the water and throw it away.
  • If you don’t have any bleach, use clean water to vigorously flush out the syringe:

  • Fill the syringe with water and shake or tap it.
  • Squirt out the water and throw it away.
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