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34% of overdose deaths in Oregon are related to heroin. A heroin overdose occurs when you put too much of a substance into your body before it’s able to properly process it. Sometimes, you may feel as though you’re no longer being impacted by a substance like heroin when in reality, it hasn’t fully made its way through your system yet. Knowing how long it takes for a substance to pass through your system can be important to making informed decisions about your health. So how long do the effects of heroin last?
Helping to prevent future overdoses is important to us at Serenity Lane. That’s why we find importance in answering questions such as these. By providing easy-to-access information regarding substance use, we hope to continue to lower the stigma and potentially help people make life-saving decisions regarding their health.
Any substance you take, prescription medication included, has a “half-life.” The term half-life is used as a means to define how long a substance is present in your body, measured by the length of time it takes for half of it to be out of your system.
Heroin has an incredibly short half-life of 30 minutes on average. Even when a substance is still in your system, there are times when you can no longer feel the effects due to the amount still remaining. This means that people may feel as though they no longer have heroin in their bodies and decide to consume more before it’s fully passed through their system.
There are many different ways that heroin can impact your body. There are effects that can be felt during use and shortly after, and these are known as short-term effects. There are also effects that develop over time with long-term use.
What exactly are these effects, though? Are any of them permanent? Do you only experience long-term side effects if you have a heroin use disorder? Let’s talk about that.
Many of these short-term side effects are felt primarily during the “high” period, or for a short period of time afterward. These effects usually don’t last long outside of when the heroin is consumed:
As the name suggests, long-term side effects not only take a while to develop, but they also don’t appear in one night and go away the next. Many of these side effects can impact a person for years, though a large majority of them are both treatable and reversible.
For those who are managing a heroin use disorder, here are some of the most common long-term effects:
While the timetable of heroin withdrawal can vary from person to person depending on their unique situation, on average it lasts about a week, with symptoms usually starting within 12 hours of your last dose.
Withdrawal occurs when the body becomes accustomed to a substance being within it that alters how the body functions. Our bodies are incredibly adaptable and can adjust to a substance being within them. When this happens and the substance is then removed, the body has to then adjust back to behaving without the substance. This doesn’t come without consequences. The process of your body adjusting to not having a substance in it is what is known as withdrawal.
The common side effects of heroin withdrawal include:
There are many forms of drug tests that can be performed to see if heroin is still present in your system. The four most common types of drug tests are saliva, urine, blood, and hair follicle. Each has its own purpose and efficiency. Because of heroin’s incredibly short half-life of 30 minutes, however, many of these drug tests are not very efficient for detecting heroin.
Urine tests are one of the most common when it comes to trying to detect heroin. When heroin is processed within the body, it is broken down into two different forms: 6-acetylmorphine (6-AM) and morphine. While 6-AM has a half-life similar to heroin, morphine can be detected in urine for up to 7 days after consumption. This combined with the ease of a urine test, cost, and lack of invasiveness makes urine tests a go-to choice for many.
Blood tests and saliva tests are unreliable choices for detecting heroin and are not used very often. Because of the half-life of heroin, you often can’t detect it in either after 30 minutes past consumption.
Finally, there’s hair follicle testing. Hair retains information about the substances you consume for quite some time. In the case of heroin specifically, it can come back positive up to 90 days after your last dose.
Our team at Serenity Lane is no stranger to helping those who are looking for recovery from a heroin use disorder. We offer treatment options for many forms of substance use, heroin included. If you or a loved one is looking to start your recovery journey, you’ve come to the right place.
We believe in tailoring the recovery process to the individual in order to make sure it works for them. We know that each of our clients is unique and no one recovery plan works the same for everyone. Our team of clinicians will work with you to ascertain the level of care that will be best for you.
At our facility, we offer everything from detox to inpatient and outpatient programs. We also offer medication-assisted treatment (MAT). This is when treatment plans utilize FDA-approved medications to help assist with withdrawal and other side effects. Utilizing these medications, you can focus on your recovery instead of your symptoms.
Starting with detox, you will be monitored alongside a medically licensed and trained team. From there, based on your needs, you will move to either inpatient or outpatient treatment. These programs will help you learn the skills and tools that you need to address your ongoing recovery and best manage future symptoms or triggers.
If you’d like to learn more about our programs, feel free to check out our page on our heroin treatment, or give us a call anytime at (800) 543-9905. Our Serenity Lane team will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
What is Heroin?
Heroin is an illicit opioid made from morphine.
What does heroin look like?
Heroin most commonly appears to be a white or brown powder. Sometimes it appears to be a black, sticky substance which is referred to as black tar heroin.
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