Introduction: One of the diseases that has left a mark on our age is psychoactive substance addiction. The onset of narcotic substance abuse has dropped to very early ages of life in our country. The prevalence of abuse of such substances as heroin and cocaine through inhaling is increasing dramatically. Abusing these substances by inhalation has life-threatening risks such as bronchospasm, alveolar hemorrhage and acute respiratory syndrome. Our aim in this study was to describe possible respiratory system risks in individuals who had substance addiction.
Material and methods: The study was conducted with 40 healthy and 40 drug addicted people who receive treatment at AMATEM department in Akdeniz University Medicine Faculty. The data were interpreted according to the results of the anamnesis, physical examination, chest X-ray, spirometry and respiratory questionnaire for both test groups, and the final evaluation was carried out using these data.
Results: For the addicted group, the symptoms related to the respiratory system and the symptom scores of the respiratory questionnaire were found to be significantly high during our study (p < 0.05).
Conclusions: Consequently, the results of our study revealed that substance addicts most frequently preferred the inhalation mode when abusing narcotic substances. Moreover, it was also determined that they were heavily smoking besides narcotic substance abuse. We believe that efforts to prevent smoking addiction in society can be developed so as to include narcotic substance abuse, especially among young individuals, which in turn can contribute to a decrease in future risks.