| Abstract: | Background:
Drug abuse usually makes addiction accompanied with compulsive craving behavior, and especially it is almost unable to quit heroin. Heroin abuse not only causes individual and social problems, but also expenses huge social resources.
Purpose:
Heroin craving is the primary factor that causes addiction and recurrence. Investigating through survey, we tried to check the abusers? level of drug abuse, personality character, mental health status, intention of heroin craving and then analyzed the relationship among them. The results may provide some information to the authority for formulating policies such as education promotion, drug abuse treatment, counseling, and mental rehabilitation.
Method:
In this study, heroin abusers were enrolled from the prisons in Yunlin region. After signing the informed consent under free will, the abuser received self-filling questionnaires conducted by groups, and interviewing questionnaires by individuals. The results of Chinese Health Questionnaire(CHQ), Desires for Drug Questionnaire(DDQ), Tri-dimensional Personality Questionnaire(TPQ) were adopted for descriptive and inferential statistic analysis.
Results:
There were 266 abusers enrolled, including 245 males and 21 females. There were 235 subjects reported junior and senior high school education level, 128 living in Yunlin county, and 200 using amphetamine. The average age of initial drug use was 20.7 years old for amphetamine, and 25.5 years old for heroin. Near all of the subjects (261, 98%) consumed tobacco. Mental health, level of dependence on nicotine, novelty-seeking personality were all highly associated with the intention of heroin craving, but the durations of using alcohol, amphetamine or heroin were all not associated with the intention of heroin craving.
Conclusion?
It is necessary to promote more education on prevention of drug abuse. Those who reported high intention of heroin craving require more mental rehabilitation to keep them away from heroin recurrence. |
