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ToggleMany people imagine that using heroin will lead to a slow descent into madness. Users are often stereotyped as people who commit robbery, lie to their families, and sneak around with needles and bags. While this may be how the media portrays heroin users, it is not entirely accurate.
Although it is an addictive substance, heroin has an especially short half-life, making it difficult to detect in blood and saliva tests. It is detectable for 5 to 24 hours in the blood, depending on use frequency. If you are interested in learning more about how long heroin stays in your system, go ahead and read further.
Heroin Metabolism
Absorption and Metabolism in the Body
Heroin has a high lipid membrane solubility, which makes it rapidly absorbed into the body, whether taken orally or through injection. When you take heroin orally, it goes through complete presystemic metabolism, which converts it to morphine. If you inject it into your bloodstream, it goes through rapid hydrolysis in whole blood and converts to 6-monoacetylmorphine (6-MAM) in the brain, which is then converted to morphine by the liver.
Variables in Heroin Metabolism
Your genes and even what you place on your plate can determine how your body deals with heroin. Let’s explore!
Genetic Influences on Heroin Metabolism
Studies indicate that genetic factors can contribute to 20% to 95% of patient variability. Through pharmacogenetics, physicians can properly understand why and how differently people react to various drugs. Your genes can influence the rate and general heroin metabolism in the body.
Genes help in building enzymes, which are responsible for your bodily functions, including drug metabolism. Genetic differences influence how you respond to medications. Additionally, genetic factors determine the amount of enzymes produced and how such enzymes work, thus affecting heroin metabolism in the body.
Diet and Heroin Metabolism
The type of foods you eat can also impact heroin metabolism in the body. The metabolic food-drug interactions happen when the food eaten influences the operation of a drug-metabolizing enzyme system, causing changes in the pharmacokinetics of the particular metabolized drug.
Tea, spices, herbs, and vegetables contain complex phytochemicals mixtures and thus have the highest potential to inhibit the activity of heroin-metabolizing enzymes. If you consume herbal dietary supplements, your body will undergo extremely high heroin metabolism due to higher metabolic food-drug interactions.
Other foods such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats can also affect heroin metabolism in the body, although not as much as the ones above.
How Long Does Heroin Stay in Your Saliva?
After intravenous injection, the content of heroin in saliva rapidly decreases. It is only detectable for about an hour, depending on the dose and frequency of use. On the other hand, heroin that has been inhaled can be found in saliva for up to 24 hours. If you know a teenager that is doing heroin, look into our Los Angeles adolescent opiate addiction treatment to help save their life.
How Long Does Heroin Stay in Urine?
How Long Does Heroin Stay in Hair?
How Long Does Heroin Stay in Blood?
Factors that Affect How Long Heroin Stays in the System
- Height and weight
- Age
- Genetics
- Body fat content
- Dosage
- Drug quality
- Metabolism rate
- State of the liver and kidneys
- Hydration
- Whether the heroin is water-soluble — mostly pills and powders — or not. Non-water-soluble heroin can remain in muscle tissue for up to 30 days.
- How much heroin has been consumed in a specific period.
- An individual’s metabolism, size, and weight.
- Chemical intake to detoxify the body. This speeds up the heroin’s metabolic breakdown.
- Learn about our Adolescent Intensive Outpatient in Los Angeles
Heroin Detection
When it comes to heroin detection, laboratories use various techniques to detect opioids from samples. The United Nations has developed a manual for use by National Drug Testing Laboratories for testing Opium, Morphine, and Heroin. Let’s break it down!
Color Test
A color test is simple, quick, and involves using different reagents. Due to its sensitive nature, the smallest sample quantities, less than 1 mg, are used for the tests. There are two procedures employed during color tests to detect heroin:
- The sample is mixed with water and then filtered. The resulting liquid is then reacted with the color reagent to determine the resulting color.
- The second procedure involves mixing the sample with methanol instead of water. After filtration, the liquid is evaporated to dryness, and then the sample is reconstituted in a minimum amount of water before reacting drop by drop with the color reagent.
The presence of heroin is detected by a purple-violet color in Marquis, a dark green color in Mecke, and purple/purple becoming grey in Frohde.
Anion Test
The Anion test can be used to detect all opioids except prepared or raw opium. When used to test heroin, it will be encountered as a free base or hydrochloride salt. In an anion test, solubilities are combined with selected reactions, and the presence of a precipitant indicates the presence of the opiate tested.
Heroin base dissolves in carbon tetrachloride, whereas heroin hydrochloride is soluble in methylene chloride and chloroform. Other heroin bases are insoluble in carbon tetrachloride. Heroin citrate, heroin tartrate, and other inorganic chlorides are insoluble in chloroform and methylene chloride.
Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC)
Another method for detecting heroin is TLC. This technique applies to many substances and visualization techniques; it is less expensive, sensitive, and fast. With this technique, heroin solution is used moving on TLC plates as a free base. Heroin is then detected through spotting.
Gas Chromatography (GC)
Gas chromatography is another old technique that is used to detect heroin and other opioids. It has undergone upgrades and updates. Today, micro-bore capillary column GC systems can conduct baseline separations between 100 and above compounds as opposed to 60 or 80 earlier. However, most laboratories use and recommend using narrow-bore capillary GC, which is easier to use, performs similarly to micro-bore GC capillary, and maintains a packed column system.
Other techniques used to detect opiates include:
- High-Performance Liquid Chromatography
- Spectroscopic/Spectrometric data
Detecting Heroin in Special Cases
Did you know that breastfeeding, pregnancy, and surgery can significantly affect heroin tests? Special circumstances may call for extra caution when testing for heroin. Let’s explore!
Pregnancy and Breastfeeding
Do not use heroin if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Heroin passes to the baby via the placenta during pregnancy and through the breast milk during breastfeeding. Heroin use can be dangerous to you and your baby. The known heroin problems during pregnancy are:
- Placenta abruption
- Congenital disabilities
- Premature birth
- Low birth weight
- Stillbirth
- Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS)
During pregnancy, heroin use can be detected through routine tests such as health screening, ultrasounds, and blood tests. Tissues like urine, hair, maternal blood, umbilical cord tissues, placenta, and neonatal meconium can be tested for heroin use during pregnancy. The techniques used to detect heroin during pregnancy are high-performance liquid chromatography (HLC), gas chromatography (GC), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs), and mass spectrometry (MS).
Medical Procedures and Heroin Detection
Patients are always administered opioid-based analgesics during surgery. Some of these analgesics may be derivatives with properties like heroin. Some analgesics can also break down into substances that can be detected in drug tests, thus producing incorrect results. Anesthesia may also affect heroin metabolism and clearance rates, which will, in turn, complicate test results.
Injecting heroin into your blood or skin popping may complicate intravenous access. This may make your surgery slightly difficult and dangerous. Anesthesia and analgesia may be difficult for long-term heroin users. Long-term heroin users are known to have high sensitivity to pain due to heroin-induced hyperalgesia. Since heroin has variable purity levels, it becomes difficult to calculate an equianalgesic dose of a different but therapeutic opioid.
Effects of Heroin
Once in the brain, heroin is converted to morphine and quickly binds itself to the opioid receptors. These receptors are located all throughout the brain, in the spinal cord, and in the digestive tract. Heroin users often describe feeling a wave of euphoric sensations or a “rush.” The amount of heroin taken and how quickly it enters the brain determines the intensity of the rush. If your or a teenager you know is using heroin or has a drug problem, contact us about our Evidence-Based Los Angeles Teen Addiction Treatment Programs. Up to 100% of the costs might be covered by insurance.
Symptoms of Overdose
How to Get Heroin Out of Your System
Legal Implications of Heroin Detection
In California, the employer holds the discretion to have a drug-free workplace policy. However, one holds an inherent right to privacy, which every employer must respect. The law allows employers to conduct suspicionless pre-employment drug testing as a condition for employment as long they respect the employee’s voluntary and informed consent.
An employee’s right to privacy also negates random drug tests by employers. An employer, thus, cannot conduct random heroin tests without notifying the employee of the intended drug tests. Employees in public positions are exempted from this rule for public safety.
The following instances of heroin tests are illegal in California:
- Discrimination involving drug testing of some applicants instead of all.
- Violating an employee’s right to privacy during or after drug tests.
- Failure to provide reasonable accommodation for employees who are undergoing drug rehab.
- Insisting that employees pay for their drug tests.
Getting Help for Heroin Abuse and Addiction
Whether a person is an inpatient or outpatient, heroin therapy is incomplete without behavioral and cognitive therapies. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Contingency Management (CM) Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are two examples of mental health interventions that teach people how to navigate the outside world and reintegrate into society.
Conclusion
Heroin is an extremely addictive substance that drags its users down hard and fast. It might make you feel as if your worries have vanished, but they will be waiting for you when you return from the “high.” The comedowns are gradual and give your mind adequate time to reintegrate with life facts, so you will not perceive this as an issue at first. While you might feel cognitively strained at first, you might also experience a mentally serene high for several days after the drug has left your system early on.
Call us today if you or a teen you know is experiencing adolescent heroin addiction.