If you’re struggling with opiate addiction, you might be interested in heroin statistics in Savannah. Heroin is a toxic narcotic drug that’ll end your life quicker than you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle’—even if he isn’t. Heroin is a chemical processed from morphine, and whether you snort it, smoke it, or shoot it up, your body converts it back to morphine. It binds to the receptors in your brain that respond to pleasure and rewards. You feel so good when you do heroin, you won’t even notice you’re dead.
But that’s the problem with heroin. No matter what the high feels like, if you’re reading this then you’ve realized that it’s ruining your life. Nobody purposely sets out on the road to addiction. In fact most people don’t even start out using heroin—they just switch to it when their supply of affordable pain pills dries up. Drug dealers in some of Savannah’s better areas have become so accustomed to providing heroin to middle and upper class heroin addicts that they actually run specials and deliver out to the suburbs. Better than a pizza, huh?
Of course there are your average Joe Heroin Users, also. Those are the people who fall victim to it because they are looking for friendship and somebody says try this. They are trying to escape from a horrible home life or some kind of abuse, and somebody says have some. Before they realize what’s going on—we know this because we follow heroin statistics in Savannah—they’re reaching for the phone to call 911, to let Somebody know they fear they’ve overdosed, and there’s Nobody around to help them.
A Look at Demographic and Heroin Statistics in Savannah
To understand the drug problem in Savannah, you first want to understand the county as a whole. Chatham County is not a bad place to live overall, in fact it’s quite nice. There are over a quarter million people in Savannah, a few more white than black, with small amounts of other ethnic cultures in the population mix. To gauge community prosperity, about half of all school students qualify for free lunch programs, but only a third of the state’s children are raised in single-parent homes. When Chatham is measured against Georgia’s 158 other counties, it falls right about in the middle as far as identified drug problems.
The adult drug treatment rate is less than 10 percent, but what’s disturbing is that the amount of hospital discharges involving drug use is about 10 percent higher than the county average across the state. That means there are too many people in Chatham County and in Savannah, needing drug abuse treatment, who aren’t getting it.
Maybe You’ve Met Savannah’s Narcotics Police
Possibly you’ve been at the receiving end of some tender lovin’ care from the Chatham-Savannah Counter Narcotics Team. These guys are so friendly they even have an active Facebook page!
No look at heroin statistics is complete without admiring some of their work: Just a couple months ago they booked Calvin Phillips for possession of $150,000 worth of heroin in Savannah, so none of his Christmas presents got delivered. Around Thanksgiving, alleged prostitute Jessica Lane had cold turkey in jail following her arrest for possession of heroin. Just before Halloween, it was trick instead of treat for Marion “Skee” Samuel and Fatimah Polite, arrested for possessing large amounts of heroin, Oxycodone, money, and guns. And it’s somewhere around a year since last Valentine’s Day when they booked eight great sweethearts on a total of 39 charges for heroin possession in Savannah.
But Maybe They Really Are Heroes
If you’ve been arrested, whether you make a hundred bucks a year or a hundred grand, you probably resent the police. They booked you, searched you, put you in front of a judge, disrupted your life, and possibly cost you a marriage or a job. But maybe the folks on the Chatham-Savannah Counter Narcotics Team really are heroes. Has your life been so great on heroin?
One guy tells us he started out smoking marijuana at the age of 10. He hit heroin and crack by age 16. A young woman got addicted at the hands of her boyfriend, during an endless search to replace the parents who had abandoned her. She discovered she was pregnant the day he found out his brother had overdosed, and he begged her to join him in a suicide pact.
A coke addict’s rich daddy put her in one of those fancy rehabs that run ads on television. Three days after her graduation, a guy she met there shot heroin into her arm for the first time. She says it was like the biggest orgasm of her life while riding a terrifying rollercoaster.
Or maybe you’ve come across the story of Ben Rogers, who videotaped each day during the last couple years of his life because he believed that each day would be the day he began recovery. He died after bankrupting his father’s retirement fund, and his father died soon after. Heroin statistics in Savannah or anywhere provide no comfort or explanation for stories like those.
Maybe You’re Finally Lucky
So, with the same statistics on heroin in Savannah telling us that 286,000 people in Georgia misused pain pills in a given year or that over 500,000 abused an illicit drug, maybe you were lucky to be arrested or fired or confronted by your spouse.
You’re lucky because now you can look at your problem head-on and make a decision about how to handle it. Will you be just another one of the heroin statistics in Savannah that ends up on a coroner’s cold slab, or will you get the treatment you need?
Medication-assisted treatment provides one of the best options for opiate treatment because it helps you deal with the cravings and withdrawal symptoms that make your life hell. About 8 out of 10 opiate or heroin addicts find that they relapse when they try kicking drugs on their own or with abstinence-based treatment alone. It is difficult to kick.
Methadone is a federally approved harm reduction therapy, which means that it is recognized as an option that reduces the harm to your body. With the supervision of a doctor and the daily monitoring of a nurse, you will find the dose that works best for you. With the aid of a counselor, you can work through the issues that led you to addiction and heal the relationships that your addiction ruined.
Don’t be just one of Savannah’s heroin statistics, an addict that fails. Pick up the phone and call for help, because it means you’re walking into the sunshine.
