26 have died alread

I don't know about you but I'm high on life by Morris Armstrong, Jr., age 19
Digital painting on altered digital photograph


Wow. Twenty-six children dead now from, well, we called it "goo" in The Concrete Jungle Book, but of course you know what we meant, especially if you go to school in the Dallas school district.

It goes by the rather innocuous name "cheese" but it's really a combination of black tar heroin mixed with OTC medications like Tylenol and I can't believe that stuff is still around. I thought after Sherikano and Dr. Nasdi died then it would go away, but apparently it hasn't...crush and rush. Imagine going to a detox center at the age of nine! It happens. Kids, mostly Hispanic, are dipping into this deadly stuff and don't think they're getting hooked because they aren't injecting, just sniffing.

Hey, homies, sorry but heroin is heroin, and this black tar stuff out of Mexico is highly addictive and it doesn't matter how you injest it, it will leave you with screaming bones, cold sweats, and major headaches upon withdrawal. Every time, okay? And that's if it doesn't kill you first!

Think about it. Our bodies are pretty strong at the age of eighteen, but this stuff is so lethal it's killing our strongest. There's this whacked-out mentality among Hispanic youth, especially boys, that they are somehow proving their manhood, their machismo, their toughness, by taking cheese and then surviving to talk about it.

The only thing you're proving is that you guys are idiots. Quit being so dumb and desperate!

…from the Dallas Morning News:

March 26, 2008

Imagine a 9-year-old heroin junkie.

In Dallas, health officials are seeing children that young being brought to hospitals with signs of heroin withdrawal. The city is in its third year of what drug abuse experts call a "mini-epidemic" among young Hispanics snorting a mild but addictive heroin called "cheese."
Cheese heroin is Mexican black-tar heroin that has been diluted with crushed tablets of over-the-counter sleep medication such as Tylenol PM.

Sniffing heroin is not particularly new, but addiction experts say this outbreak in Dallas is unprecedented. Typically, people who inhale heroin are older and they're white. In Dallas, however, users are mostly Latino, and they're young.

"Reports that we were seeing were pretty striking. Kids as young as 9 or 10 years of age coming to the hospital emergency rooms or detox facilities in acute heroin withdrawal," says Dr. Carlos Tirado, a psychiatry professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center and medical director of a drug treatment center in Dallas.

"We didn't know what to do with a 9-year-old in opiate withdrawal, or what the treatment ramifications of that are," Tirado says. "Do you send a 9-year-old to an AA meeting?"

A more typical user is 17-year-old Lizbeth. She is the daughter of immigrants from Juarez, Mexico, who moved to Dallas to get away from the border's violent drug culture. Lizbeth attends a public school in North Dallas with a large Hispanic population, and she says that sniffing cheese is commonplace there.

Dressed in a gray hoodie and hoop earrings, she sits on a couch at Phoenix House, a residential treatment center in Dallas.

"I thought that since it was used as sniffing I would, like, try to deny it. This is just cheese, it's not as bad as shooting it up," Lizbeth says.

She says she entered treatment — now for the second time — because she hates the withdrawal symptoms.

"I was tired of feeling my bones hurting. I was tired of headaches, cold sweats and all that," she says. "So I told my mom to bring me because I'm already gonna be 18 and I don't want to look at myself like being a junkie like some people I see in the streets. I don't want to be like them, I want to have a better life."


April 15, 2008
By TAWNELL D. HOBBS and JASON TRAHAN

"Cheese" heroin probably claimed the life of another North Texas student, preliminary toxicology tests indicate.

Sergio Leija, 18, was found dead by family members in a car parked in the 3000 block of Northaven Road in northwest Dallas on March 10, according to Dallas police.
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Mr. Lieja was a student at W.T. White High School, according to his family.

Further testing to conclude whether Mr. Leija died from cheese heroin is pending. At least 26 North Texas youths 18 and younger have died from cheese overdoses since 2005, according to an ongoing Dallas Morning News analysis.