Body
& Soul
Voice Care with David M. Alessi, M.D
EFFECTS OF HEROIN ON THE VOICE AND HEART, AND A GRAPHIC DECRIPTION OF OPEN HEART
SURGERY CAUSED BY HEROIN
MBADC: Heroin—what does that do to the vocal cords?
DA: It depends on how they’re taking it. If they’re smoking
opiates, then of course you worry about burning the vocal cords. If you’re injecting
it has all the usual effects where, number one, it’s going to ruin your performance.
Number two is, you’re going to wind up with some type of infection that’s going
to wind up in your heart, and it’s going to be life threatening. I’ve seen so
many 23 year-olds having open heart surgery because they had infected heart valves and
things like that…
So someone injects, OK? They think it’s clean but it only takes a small amount of
bacteria, it gets in their bloodstream and, gets in the heart valve. So then they have a
little thing there, they get treated with antibiotics in the hospital for about six weeks.
Then they come back and make an incision in the middle of your chest. They get a saw, and
they cut your breastbone in half. Then they get this big--kind of like a retractor, kind
of like a crank thing that you just crank around with little handle, and you hear all the
ribs splitting open and crack, and that’s how they get to the heart. And then they
have to cut the heart valve out and put a new valve in. And all you have to do is just see
one of those operations, and it’ll make anybody quit right away.
MBADC: Wow.
DA: All that from a little high, huh?Drug Use in the Music Industry
Body & Soul |
