The New York Department of Mental Hygiene prepared a 16-page guidebook, entitled “Take Charge, Take Care: Ten Tips for Safer Use”, for the purpose of helping heroin users on how to use the drug safely and prevent overdose. This pamphlet should reduce the harm associated with injecting heroin before they get into safe treatment and recovery. However, this pamphlet came under fire, as it can be used to inform people on how to use drugs, such as by using new syringes, preparing them carefully, taking care of the veins, knowing the HIV status, and by not sharing the drugs. About 70,000 pamphlets were produced in New York City alone, to lessen the total number of lives caused by accidental overdose, which is about 600,000 lives every year since 2007 (Buxbaum 1).
It is true that this guidebook can only encourage the youths to try and use heroin or other injectable drugs. It gives detailed information on how to start using them, which is really ridiculous, to the point that the pamphlet can only reassure the youths that it would be safe to use injectable illegal drugs like the heroin. Its main purpose should have been, to give “potentially life-saving advice” (Buxbaum 1), as if there is a safe way of injecting these drugs. However, everyone knows that these drugs like the heroin can never be safe, especially to the youths, and there is no safe way of using them, since the drug itself is not safe. Thus, it should be included in the guidebook how these drugs are considered dangerous and harmful, and that the information will only prevent them from accidental death caused by drug overdose. Before distributing this guidebook, there is a need to reedit it and include that the best way would be for them to prevent taking injectable illicit drugs like the heroin.
Work Cited:
Buxbaum, Evan. NYC Heroin Pamphlet—Is It a Help or a How-To Guide? 5 January 2010. CNN International. 18 July 2015 <http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/04/ny.heroin.pamphlet/>.
