Kids In Texas Are Becoming Addicted To Form Of Heroin Known As “Cheese,” Mac Daddies That They Are

Young Texans are becoming increasingly addicted to “cheese” - snortable black-tar heroin cut with crushed sleeping pills, which is probably a little worse than consuming Kraft singles, even. Health officials in Dalls, Texas are growing increasingly worried by the number of young, Hispanic people admitted into area hospitals with symptoms of heroin addiction and withdrawal:

“Reports that we were seeing were pretty striking. Kids as young as 9 or 10 years of age coming to the hospital emergency rooms or detox facilities in acute heroin withdrawal,” says Dr. Carlos Tirado, a psychiatry professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center and medical director of a drug treatment center in Dallas.

“We didn’t know what to do with a 9-year-old in opiate withdrawal, or what the treatment ramifications of that are,” Tirado says. “Do you send a 9-year-old to an AA meeting?”

A more typical user is 17-year-old Lizbeth. She is the daughter of immigrants from Juarez, Mexico, who moved to Dallas to get away from the border’s violent drug culture. Lizbeth attends a public school in North Dallas with a large Hispanic population, and she says that sniffing cheese is commonplace there.

The kids often start out having convinced themselves that, since cheese is not injected, it is somehow safer. Which precisely why we inject all our drugs directly into our mottled veins, to remind us precisely how dangerous they are.

‘Cheese’ Heroin Hooking Young Users in Dallas [NPR]
Earlier: This Is Your Brain On Cheese, An Update