[Blarg]

Many people are addicted to it for decades, and it's possible to be so without much damage. You can kill yourself or seriously harm yourself much quicker with hard drinking. A big part of the problem with heroin is all the things that can typically go with it, not the drug itself. For instance, if you're happy to just stare at your toes for hours, you don't get a lot done. I've known some heroin addicts who were content to try to live on welfare for the rest of their lives. Do that long enough and you're also almost guaranteed to be very boring and have social problems. If you're happy to just zone out and eat nothing but boxes of sugar, your body is going to turn to crap and you're going to have roid problems. If you can't afford your habit, you very well may turn to the lifestyle of a petty criminal. If you're into the subculture, you may not give a damn about needle cleanliness or think of the very idea as a paranoid conspiracy. The drug itself is hardly a healthy thing to do long-term, but its the destructive lifestyle changes and personal habits based around the habit that really make it bad. There are some people who can minimize that, but I wouldn't want to do it without a trust fund, so if I decided being a sugar-eating, toe-staring vegetable was what I wanted to do with my life, at least I wouldn't turn to being a thief over it. That would seriously interfere with my private toe time.