Talk:Heroin

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Heroin article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: 3 months

This page is not a forum for general discussion about Heroin. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about Heroin at the Reference desk.

Medicine High‑importance

	Medicine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Pharmacology High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Pharmacology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Pharmacology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PharmacologyWikipedia:WikiProject PharmacologyTemplate:WikiProject Pharmacologypharmacology
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs (defunct)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs, a project which is currently considered to be defunct.Psychoactive and Recreational DrugsWikipedia:WikiProject Psychoactive and Recreational DrugsTemplate:WikiProject Psychoactive and Recreational DrugsPsychoactive and Recreational Drugs

Chemicals Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Chemicals, a daughter project of WikiProject Chemistry, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of chemicals. To participate, help improve this article or visit the project page for details on the project.ChemicalsWikipedia:WikiProject ChemicalsTemplate:WikiProject Chemicalschemicals
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Heroin.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

Legal status in the province of British Columbia in Canada

Harm Reduction

A great amount of article space was devoted to discuss the general idea of Harm reduction. This article is not a place for this and it ought not be included except for what can be connected to heroin. I have boldly removed that section entirely as being only tangentially related. Graywalls (talk) 09:20, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Heroin is also used in medical treatments, not only as a recreational drug. The description of the page should mention such. Instead of only saying it’s used for recreational use

Such as, "Pain medication and more commonly used as a recreational drug"

No other common opioids that are abused recreationally have this description on wikipefia Utaninja (talk) 13:09, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a Medical Uses section, and non-recreational purposes are mentioned throughout, and the lead says more commonly as a recreational drug. I think that's almost certainly true, but if you can find a source saying it's more commonly used in a medical setting than recreationally, I'm sure that'd be welcomed. For a similarly structured article, i.e. a drug that is more commonly used recreationally than medically but does get some niche medical use, see methamphetamine. I think with other opioids, even heavily abused ones, they are more used medicinally than recreationally; also most other abused opioids are manufactured pharmaceutical drugs, and so at some stage require an intent for medical use (i.e. a prescription) to make their way onto the (black) market, whereas heroin sidesteps the pharmaceutical manufacturing step.

Kimen8 (talk) 13:28, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense. Heroin is certainly used more recreationally than medically. Thanks for the explanation! This makes perfect sense. Utaninja (talk) 17:42, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Opium is grown in

At present, opium poppies are mostly grown in Afghanistan (224,000 hectares (550,000 acres)), and in Southeast Asia, especially in the region known as the Golden Triangle straddling Burma (57,600 hectares (142,000 acres)), Thailand,

Afghanistan might be a little outdated by now since it's been about 3 years after the taliban outlawed it, but they were still growing itnshoetly after the ban. The main poppy source globally is now: Australia, Turkey, and the EU (Spain and one or two other countries, France and Hungary I think). Australia (Tasmania/J&J) grows >50% of the world's supply. I'm aware that poppy growing and thebaine and opravine is different to what this article is about. W;ChangingUsername (talk) 04:57, 18 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Heroin is used medically in several countries to relieve pain, such as during childbirth or a heart attack, as well as in opioid replacement therapy.[8][9][10]

this sentence implies the references cite uses of the original chemical heroin as opioid replacement therapy but that does not seem to be the case when reading the actual citations. to be more blunt, in those citations, heroin is not used as the treatment medication but is itself what is being replaced by a different opioid. Spicy-Pepe (talk) 08:29, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]