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Heroin Abuse and Speedballs
What are Speedballs?
Speedball is a term describing the use of combined drugs like heroin and cocaine and administering the drugs intravenously. This is either done at one time or injecting the drugs simultaneously. A cocktail of drugs like this is extremely dangerous and can lead to death, it has many times.
What Are the Side Effects and Dangers of Speedballs?
Speedballing is extremely dangerous, cocaine is a stimulant drug and heroin is a depressant. When the two drugs are administered together or simultaneously, the user experiences an intense rush which is part of the reason addicts choose to use this way. Cocaine use causes anxiety and because heroin use can cause drowsiness many users combine the two drugs in hopes to reduce either of the two effects.
Combining the use of heroin and cocaine comes with serious risks and consequences due to mixing stimulants and depressants together. The user can become confused, incoherent, lethargic, drowsy, and their vision can become blurred. Other serious risk includes paranoid delusions, serious depression, hallucinations and possible death.
Many people have died combining dangerous drugs like heroin or morphine and cocaine together to intensify their high, some you may have heard of.
- River Phoenix lost his life at 23 involving lethal levels of cocaine and morphine.
- Chris Farley died of a cocaine and morphine overdose at the age of 33.
- Layne Staley died in 2002 as a result of injecting a mixture of cocaine and heroin.
- Comedian Mitch Hedberg died at the age of 37 from "multiple drug toxicity" which included cocaine and heroin.
- John Belushi died in 1982 from an injection of cocaine and heroin speedball.
