Heroin by dreser x eroica by beethoven

Abstract

As a Classical Music lover, I go to the São Paulo Concert Hall frequently. On my way to get there it’s necessary to drive through an area with high density of addicts on streets, known as Crackland. In that moment I get to see closely the important negative social effects and damage of addiction in its users. Now I meet this issue in a different way, reading the paper: “Heroin and Electrocardiography- Effect of Heroin on Electrocardiography parameters”1 that adds an incremental knowledge in the medical literature about heroin cardiac effects and searches for signals of when this occurs. The authors of “Heroin and Electrocardiography- Effect of Heroin on Electrocardiography parameters”1 make it clear that there is little scientific information published in this field. Research in the PubMed shows a 1980 reference called “ECG examinations 115 heroin addicts”2 with no access to the abstract or the full-text contents. Very little was found about this specific topic since then. How can this be explained considering addiction has since then increased in alarming scale? Is there lack of interest by researchers in this area? Are there little financial resources for researchers? Logistical difficulties for studies in this field? Lack of interest in this social group? The magnitude of the numbers is striking. Data from the “World Drug Report” published in 2019 by “The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that 35 million people had some kind of disorder as a consequence of substance abuse and only one person in each seven received treatment. Addiction leads to rampant use with risk of death. In the case of heroin, the risk of death is about 1-3% among the addicts and it is most frequently related to respiratory depression3,4 although myocardial injury and arrhythmia can occur and may probably be underdiagnosed.5,6 The authors of “Heroin and Electrocardiography- Effect of Heroin on Electrocardiography parameters”1 show an occurrence of abnormalities in the ventricular repolarization