Deadly $2 heroin aimed at young teens..."Cheese Heroin"

A cheap, highly addictive drug known as "cheese heroin" has killed 21 teenagers in the Dallas area over the past two years, and authorities say they are hoping they can stop the fad before it spreads across the nation.

"Cheese heroin" is a blend of so-called black tar Mexican heroin and crushed over-the-counter medications that contain the antihistamine diphenhydramine, found in products such as Tylenol PM, police say. The sedative effects of the heroin and the nighttime sleep aids make for a deadly brew.

www.cnn.com...

Authorities aren't exactly sure how the drug got its name "cheese." It's most likely because the ground-up, tan substance looks like Parmesan cheese. The other theory is it's shorthand for the Spanish word "chiva," which is street slang for heroin.

By using the name "cheese," drug dealers are marketing the low-grade heroin to a younger crowd -- many of them middle schoolers -- unaware of its potential dangers, authorities say.

I'd never heard of this until today. Being the father of a 15 year old girl, I'll be having a talk tonight and encourage all other parents here on ATS to do the same.

You do have to wonder though if maybe experienced users have managed to use this form of drug properly and twenty one people that have died are maybe just unexperienced users? But we all know the news wouldn't report that type of thing.

how can you come here and defend the use of illegal drugs?

there's a special place in hell for people who hurt and mistreat children and I hope all drug dealers get to experience it.

Originally posted by elevatedone
how can you come here and defend the use of illegal drugs?

there's a special place in hell for people who hurt and mistreat children and I hope all drug dealers get to experience it.

How am i defending the use? I merely asked if any experienced drug users have died from it yet i doubt the news would report if they did or didn't. At the end of the day you can come here and claim 'OH THE POOR CHILDREN THEY'RE BEEN HURT AND MISTREATED' but get real this is the 21'st century no one forced them to have the drug they went out and bought of there own accord and your a one ignorant A-hole if your believe twenty one people did otherwise.

to me your post appeared to be "pro-drug", if I'm wrong I apologize.

However to sink to name calling because I was "wrong", well thats just childish.

Children are INexperienced in life, they need our support and guidence, we must protect them. Children do not know the dangers of drugs, predators, fast cars, sex, etc.

If we as adults are not here for the kids, then who will be?

Oh yeah, and does anyone else remember being a kid and the peer pressure that goes along with it? I sure do and I'm glad that my parents cared enough to talk to me and teach me the dangers that are out there waiting.

Drug dealers do prey on children, they're an easy target, they are out to make a quick buck and they don't care who gets hurt, I say damned them all.

Originally posted by elevatedone
to me your post appeared to be "pro-drug", if I'm wrong I apologize.

However to sink to name calling because I was "wrong", well thats just childish.

Children are INexperienced in life, they need our support and guidence, we must protect them. Children do not know the dangers of drugs, predators, fast cars, sex, etc.

If we as adults are not here for the kids, then who will be?

Oh yeah, and does anyone else remember being a kid and the peer pressure that goes along with it? I sure do and I'm glad that my parents cared enough to talk to me and teach me the dangers that are out there waiting.

Drug dealers do prey on children, they're an easy target, they are out to make a quick buck and they don't care who gets hurt, I say damned them all.

I apologise also but maybe it's just from what i've experienced but there is defintely peer pressure no matter what side of the fence you are on to be honest who do you think sells these kids the drugs it's not just how the media potrays it as the 'older generation' it's the kids within these kids years that do it know we could argue all day long until we are black and blue in the face but i'm talking from my own experience here and that doesn't automatically mean i'm biased.

When i was younger i was pushing drugs for older kids to earn extra money and i only did it for three months but during that time i was selling majorily to the kids in my year i was there 'man' 'dawg' 'homey' i suddenly went from being one of the broke kids to being a 'cooooool dude' now no one forced these kids to come up to me and by Weed & E all everyone wanted was to get high, have a good time and forget eveything going on at school and home.

Now i admit there was peer pressure on myself and these kids to do drugs but when everyone wasn't on a night out i was still stigmatized against for being a no good peice of sh*t..junkie peice of cr*p etc. but as soon as we were out of school half the people dissing myself and others were all over us to try and score and they were the same people dissing us six hours ago and suddenly there trying to buy drugs know you can't say drug dealers forced there opinion on them.

As i said earlier you've never find experienced drug users buying ridiculous amounts of gear or using an unknown dealer and that's what i've wondered about these kids have they just believed in the media glamourization of drugs and bought from some random person they've never met before to try and be cool and suffered the consquences.

And before you criticise my past i'm in university now doing a degree in civil engineering and help out every weeked at my local youth centre to keep the kids away from drugs i realise i was just a pawn in the game and i was expendable when my family and i moved out of the area and i was beaten up for 'not being loyal to the game' otherwords not making money for the corrupt bstards who think it's cool to ruin people's lives as long as they get there money.

What's missing from our culture is drug education!

Whilst the substances may be illegal, chances are that some wide-eyed impressionable kid will want to try for themselves anyway, but if no-one in their peer group knows what they are doing, then yes, they will become prey to unscrupulous scag-merchant who cuts what they sell with godknows what for a few quid extra profit.

I was in the fortunate enough position to have a parent who would find out and get hold of pharmacological information (as well as on alcohol and tobacco) and the such-like to educate me...she wasn't sure if I'd ever be tempted to experiment, but at least she equipped me with the knowledge of what to look-out for, what could be considered a 'safe-dose', and what effects to expect should I ever try...needless to say, I did, and I stayed safe (and as an added benefit, so did my friends who I shared my drug-experiences with)

Also, the fact that alcohol/tobacco production is heavily regulated so you know just how much of a dose of alcohol is in a shot/beer bottle or tar&nicotine in a cigarette...with narcotics, prohibition means that you cant know what the purity is of some substances or what its been adulterated with. Look at instances of blindness/death caused by prohibition-era booze caused by methyl, rather than ethyl-alcohol...the same case can be made for narcotics

(and before I get flamed...I'm pro-education, not pro-drug!)

The useless, wastes-of-space that take illegal drugs are an insult to decency. They all know that what they are doing is wrong, illegal and dangerous. They get warned all the time but are so bloody arrogant and full of their own self-importance that they snub their noses at decency and the rule-of-law that gives them their freedoms and rights and flips the bird to every person who fulfills their proper role as a citizen. IMHO having them remove their defective genes from the human gene-pool by their own hand is karmic justice.

I'm for the legalization of all drugs, but no matter how much you teach people, for the one poster who is for drug education (I am too), you're still going to get some idiot(s) out there who will abuse the drug, not to mention the dealers who are marketing to the kids. In and around Dallas, this drug has become a problem, along with a lot of others. The one that comes to mind along with Cheese is the candy drug that has Meth in it. A few people have died from using this junk that they're putting out. I believe the Cheese has Tylonol Pm in it and Heroin and it just is hittin' the younger kids hard. I usually see over the news ever so often now that some other kid has died from it. They also did a thing in the Dallas Morning News on the new drugs out there. One that I remember was "Pot Tarts"; so it's just not one drug out there but a whole slew of other drugs that are no availabe and aimed at kids. I think that Cheese stuff goes for around $2 so it's easy to get. Actually drugs in Texas are a problem and I'm for the legalization of them, but you can seriously get anything you want in about 30 minutes here. Even the foreign stuff is readily available, like weed from Afghanistan.

Originally posted by hippichick
The useless, wastes-of-space that take illegal drugs are an insult to decency. They all know that what they are doing is wrong, illegal and dangerous...etc...etc...

But being addicted legally prescribed drugs and having that addiction continually fed by a licenced doctor is ok then?

How many countless hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been enslaved to an addiction to big-pharma drugs such as Ativan, Valium, Diazepam, Temazepam...etc???

You'd do well to load your head before you shoot your mouth!

Wait, I dont get it, how exactly is this a child-targeting marketing campaign by dealers? Are they putting cartoon characters on the baggies?

Personally I think any kid thats stupid enough to take a bag of whatever from some guy and inject it into his arm would sooner or later be one of those statistics of kids who hang themselves for fun or inhale some cleaning product until they died.

It doesnt take a genius to know that injecting miscellaneous things into your bloodstream isnt the best idea.

As far as needing more drg education goes, I cant speak for every part of the country but I know that where I am there is a ridiculous amount of money and time wasted on just such programs within the public school system. From one reason or another a few choice individuals think it would be a good idea to become crack-heads. Teach all you want but a born moron will die a moron. Im just sick of paying for it with assinine social programs and rehab services. Let them die, they chose it. There are plenty of good people dying from disease and cancers who didnt choose it. Stop wasting time and money on people who choose to use drugs.

Natural selection if you ask me.

Well Thisguy, with names like "stoney ranchers" and "pot tarts" it seems that it is aimed at younger kids. And, with these new drugs costing say $2 almost anyone can afford them. In the Dallas Morning News article, they had a slew of names for them.



This ran May 10, 2007 in the Dallas Morning News, so yes, these dealers are trying to get younger kids.

Citizen Smith,
This thread is about illegal drugs aimed at kids. If you want to start a thread about addiction to legal drugs, I will tell you what I think about that too.

Originally posted by hippichick
The useless, wastes-of-space that take illegal drugs are an insult to decency. They all know that what they are doing is wrong, illegal and dangerous. They get warned all the time but are so bloody arrogant and full of their own self-importance that they snub their noses at decency and the rule-of-law that gives them their freedoms and rights and flips the bird to every person who fulfills their proper role as a citizen. IMHO having them remove their defective genes from the human gene-pool by their own hand is karmic justice.

OK, so your saying marijuana is bad, and alcohol is OK? Alcohol kills millions of people every year. Marajuana hasn't done damage anything close to that, but it's bad because it's illegal? Does that make alcohol ok?

Whats the difference between a pharmacutical company and a drug dealer? Pharmacuticle companies pay people off, lie, kill people with their poison, but it's ok because they have government permission to do so. The majority of drugs are bad for your body, legal or illegal IMO.

Lets not forget the Tobacco industry. Cigarettes kill around 400,000 people a year plus an additional 50,000 from 2nd hand smoke, yet, that is legal. In all it's history, Marijuana has never killed anyone. I can't find the site that I got this information from, it use to be on Drugwarfacts.org, but the site has changed so I can't find it, but I did a speech on why drugs should be legalized and it mainly dealt with why the legal drugs, Tobacco and Alcohol, and why they are worse then the ones that are "illegal". Heroin, Cocaine, and Advil kill about 2,000 people a year, far less than Tobacco or Alcohol. I agree with AcesInTheHole, most drugs you put in your body from either pharmacutical companies or the illegal kind will do harm to your body. However, I'd rather take my chances with the illegal drugs than with the ones the pharmacutical comapnies put out. You can just take a quick look at a TV commercial and see how many side affects there are from these drugs that are supposedly good for your body and see that you might be getting something more than you barganed for.

However this thread is about kids and drugs. I'm all for the legalization of drugs, but, I don't want to see young kids dying because some dealer is aiming his product at them.

gee one more thing bad coming from mexico why are we in iraq .if you look at all the illegals coming here all the cheap drugs for young teens gang violence. machismo . they seem to be doing more to endanger our way of life more than any iraqi were.

If drugs were just legal we wouldn't have this problem. Do you ever see someone dealing home made alcohol to kids? These concoctions are only made so the dealers make more money, if it was legal there would be no black market and it would be better controlled. Yes kids will still get drugs, legal or not, but at least it would not be a mixture of god knows what.

Something like 6000 die a year from alcohol related accidents, makes the 21 seem a little less alarming, no? Just pointing out drugs are not the biggest problem we have but it seems to get all the hype. Obviously it's not cause they care now is it?

Drugs kill because of black market tactics and ignorance. Legalise and teach people about it and there will be less overdoses from ignorance.

And no this is not pro-drug, it's pro-choice, it's pro sense...

It's also a double edged sword, putting this all over the news will inform parents, but unfortunatly get more kids interested as well.

Originally posted by hippichick
….and the rule-of-law that gives them their freedom…

That's what you believe, and you call yourself hippichick? LOL

(I apologize in advance for going a little off topic, but I feel a need to comment on this.)

Maybe some social studies are needed? A little research into the real causes of drug addiction?

Laws are what gives us our freedom? So what law is it that allows me the freedom to do what i wish to my own body? Where is the law that gives me the freedom to live and be what i choose, without societal hysteria and paranoia making me an outcast?

Some interesting quotes on the subject for your reading pleasure...

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982)

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774)

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived . . . the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually interdependent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realised, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness [read crime] is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which particular hostile tendencies -- either against others or against oneself -- are nourished... Eric Fromm The Fear of Freedom, p. 158

Your anger is being directed in the wrong direction. Getting angry at the result is not going to fix the cause.

I have to agree with ANOK here (for once).

Drug legalization (all drugs) is the only way to both minimize their total cost to society while still retaining personal freedoms.