heroin epidemic

RevRico wrote: In reply to T.J.: Well, oxycontin was running 80/pill on the black market last I heard a couple years ago, heroin is selling for $2-3 a dose. It's a lot easier coming up with 10 a day than 80 multiple times a day. Then there are things like this happening Almost 800 million pills shipped to West Virginia by pharmaceutical companies. Most of which winds up in counties of under a million people. The numbers is pills being distributed and sold "legally"by the producers is just mind blowing. Which is another reason I believe the theories that I do about the whole thing.

Oxy has never been $80/pill or even close. You're spouting a lot of hyperbole in this thread to try substantiate your stance on the issue.

Please continue, I'm getting a laugh.

Most heroin addicts are not using to get "high", they are using to avoid withdrawal----- which is nastier than you can imagine--- unless you've seen it. They need a fix to function in everyday society. No fix---- horrible pain, incontinence, and an inability to function as a "regular" human being.

The medical industry has a lot of blame on their hands. The over-prescription of opioids was rampant a few years ago. The law cracked down, reduced supply---- and those addicted turned to heroin.

Unless you've seen, or dealt with addiction, it's hard to comprehend. Opioids are physically, and mentally addictive. When in the throws of addiction, satisfying the drug is more important than family, more important than the law, and sometimes more important than life itself. Addicts will do anything to avoid going through withdrawal. They know they are going down the rabbit hole, but feel powerless to stop it. It's like a demon inside them that won't let them go. It's horrid, and makes people you thought you knew, do things completely out of character.

I'm all for personal responsibility, but when it comes to opioid addicts--- they need help, not incarceration. (plenty of drugs available in jail) Our medical industry helped create this problem. They should use some of the $$ they made of Oxycontin sales to fix it.

T.J. wrote: In reply to mtn: Me: I don't understand addiction. You: You must not understand addiction. Me: I thought that's what I said.

I don't much get it either. It isn't hard to find out what the consequences or effects are yet somehow an increasing number of people merrily embark on that journey in spite of all that.

Yea prescription drugs are likely the leading the "gateway" to opioids. Yea I can see the argument for escapism, but escapism doesn't, nor will it ever, improve your reality.

I suppose logic has no bearing on addiction though, I say as I guzzle down my fourth cup of coffee.

The0retical wrote: ...Yea I can see the argument for escapism, but escapism doesn't, nor will it ever, improve your reality...

Now all you have to do is figure out how to explain that to every teenager so that they understand it and believe it.

I suspect 75% (might be 90%?) of the people on this board would not have listened when they where young. I might have, but I never really went with the flow.

I don't much get it either. It isn't hard to find out what the consequences or effects are yet somehow an increasing number of people merrily embark on that journey in spite of all that. Yea prescription drugs are likely the leading the "gateway" to opioids. Yea I can see the argument for escapism, but escapism doesn't, nor will it ever, improve your reality. I suppose logic has no bearing on addiction though, I say as I guzzle down my fourth cup of coffee.

The way a lot of this starts is really benign. You get a pinched nerve in your back, or break your arm, and get prescribed some big painkillers to get you through the next few days. At first, they're just right, and dull the pain, but you get better and you've got a few left.

A month later, you twist your ankle, and pop a couple motrin. Doesn't help much. Six hours later your ankle is the size of a softball so you pop it on a pillow on the couch, take one of those big painkillers you have left over, and it helps - a LOT. Then you take another one before bed so you can sleep through your ankle pain. Your ankle still hurts in the morning, and you decide not to be a hero and grit your teeth and bear it, you pop one more pill to take the pain away. But this one doesn't just take the pain away, you end up in a nice pleasant fog. All that stress you've been under for weeks with work and the wife just don't seem to matter as much, and you finally feel OK. You can breathe easy, you stop fretting about that little stuff just for an hour. Later that same day, your ankle is getting better, but you're coming down off the pill and all that doom and gloom in your life starts to settle down on your shoulders again. You convince yourself that you'll just take one more pill, it'll get you through the last of your ankle pain and then you'll be done. You pop the pill, settle into the couch, RELAX, and actually enjoy some TV for once. An hour later you grab some peanuts and a beer and keep relaxing, think to yourself that this is like a mini-vacation from the stress of life. As the beer hits you, you get even more relaxed, you didn't even know this was possible.

Then your ankle is all better and you're back to the grind. You forget about how nice it felt to really relax, to breathe easy, to stop fretting about work, relationships, what other people really need. Until a month or so later that you've had a big fight with the wife and she storms out. You sit on the couch, nurse a whisky and dwell on how unfair it is that she doesn't understand your point of view. You're stressed, you can't stop thinking about what a crap situation it is, and you just want to FORGET. Whisky is good, but you remember how nice it felt taking that pill when your ankle was hurt. You've only got four left, can't hurt to take one to get your mind off things, you won't become an addict because you've only got FOUR left. Can't get addicted if you've only got four... can you?

It's baby steps. Nobody leaves the house happy and well adjusted and says "today I'm going to try some hardcore opiates". You just back yourself into it by baby steps.

In reply to Joe Gearin:

A quote associated to Jerry Garcia is that heroin concentrates all your wants needs and desires down to just one thing.

I have had it explained to me that withdrawal is like the worse body ache and violent flu that you have ever had but with the flu your body will ultimately crash and you'll sleep for 8 hours. In withdrawal, you instead remain at a heightened and agitated state the entire time.

If you are in opioid withdrawal, more opioids will immediately cure the "illness" but if you can't get or can't afford opioids, heroin will "cure" it also but now you've got new, additional problems.

The other thing I have come to wholly believe is that you don't want to get hurt!

I feel the med industry has too long been focused on maintaining you through meds rather than curing

In reply to the_machina:

I've had enough injuries in the past where I can fully see how it can sneak up on you like that. After I had my left rotator cuff repaired the doctor gave me a prescription for Norco. I made it the point where my wife was unplugging my air compressor and taking the nail gun away from me because I was attempting to start the trim work that hadn't been able to get to since I'd been overseas for so long. It felt great and I had the motivation to do it despite not being able to use one of my arms.

Once I "came down" off of them I recognized it for what it was. The rational side of me understands those effects and knows that it's not a rational or sustainable, way to live life. That might be the result of education, upbringing, or the fact that I had a security clearance to hold onto and an addiction to prescription opiates tends to be frowned upon. There's a lot of factors that play into it and it's really impossible to point a finger and say "Just do this" since that isn't how it works.

I watched a show last night or the night before about heroin in the twin cities. They said on the show that 100% of the heroin in that area comes from the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel. And it's some of the most pure heroin in the states. They said whether it came from the east or south or west it all came from Mexico. The mexicans supply the mostly white street dealers and do not get involved with anything on the street level to limit their exposure.

To my understanding, it doesn't need to be imported. Raw poppy is completely legal and manufacture is no more difficult than meth.

In reply to T.J.:

I ask because forced addiction is one of the ways pimps keep their slaves in line. It is surprisingly common.

While it seems to be a challenge nationwide we have been hit especially hard in Southern Ohio. I remember hearing that more people died from drug overdoses than from all other forms of accidental death in 2016.

Overdose deaths > Car crash deaths

RevRico wrote: ... Now people are selling doses for less than cigarettes, for that to still be profitable, you'd be looking at multiple container ships. Not even shipping containers, but whole ships, coming in at a time.

Do you have any idea how much one single relatively small by modern standards, container ship can haul? Let's do some maths:

1000 TEU ship (small-ish) can haul 1000 20 ft equivalent 40 ton containers, or 40K Tons, or 80,000,000 pounds or (roughly) 36.3 million kilos, or 100 grams for every man, woman and child in America. And that's a small container ship. The big ones haul more than 18 times that much.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opiod that is somewhere around 50-100 times as powerful as morphine. Heroin is several times as powerful as morphine. That is, x dosage of fentanyl is like 100x morphine, SWAGging it. Fentanyl is also very fast acting and as such, the effect does not last long. That is, it has a very short half life. Handy for anesthesia when you're whacking on someone.

In reply to Dr. Hess:

That fentanyl and versed is some good E36 M3. Much better than the propofol my doc uses now.

Up here its fentynal. It killed 1000 poeple in Vancouver last year, and Vancouver is not a big city. A lot of those deaths were recreational users. The hardcore addicts are well prepared with naloxone kits so when they OD a friend or street worker can quickly bring them back to life. Some paramedics have naloxoned the same addict three times the same day.

Fentanyl is added to the heroin to give a better kick and make it a more desirable product. You know, a leg up on the competition.

Joe Gearin wrote: Most heroin addicts are not using to get "high", they are using to avoid withdrawal----- which is nastier than you can imagine--- unless you've seen it. They need a fix to function in everyday society. No fix---- horrible pain, incontinence, and an inability to function as a "regular" human being. Unless you've seen, or dealt with addiction, it's hard to comprehend. Opioids are physically, and mentally addictive. When in the throws of addiction, satisfying the drug is more important than family, more important than the law, and sometimes more important than life itself. Addicts will do anything to avoid going through withdrawal. They know they are going down the rabbit hole, but feel powerless to stop it. It's like a demon inside them that won't let them go. It's horrid, and makes people you thought you knew, do things completely out of character.

I think that saying they're using to avoid the physical misery of withdrawal is downplaying the mental side of addiction a bit. Withdrawals can be horrific, but if you talk to people that deal with addicts regularly they'll tell you that even if someone goes through withdrawals and gets clean, they often fall back into the addiction. That's a psychological issue, and it's probably stronger than the physical side of addiction. It's why recovering addicts pretty much all go to group meeting regularly. It's not a physical thing that you kick and move on with. It's a mental issue that these people deal with every day, whether they're sober or not.

spitfirebill wrote: Fentanyl is added to the heroin to give a better kick and make it a more desirable product. You know, a leg up on the competition.

An interviewed dealer (may not be true) noted that spiking heroin with Fentanyl is easily deadly and was a good tactic to improve their brand. They overload someones dose with Fentanyl, kill them, and everyone knows they must have good stuff!

In reply to aircooled:

and it causes the user to come down quicker from a more intense high, creating a higher usage rate per a user.

spitfirebill wrote: In reply to Dr. Hess: That fentanyl and versed is some good E36 M3. Much better than the propofol my doc uses now.

Propofol is a different class of drug than the other two. Mostly used to induce and maintain anesthesia.

Versed is a benzodiazepine, sort of like short acting valium.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate, like morphine, only orders of magnitude stronger, like a 100 times more.

For a long time, prescribing opiates was discouraged. There was a cat by the name of Harvey Rose, a doctor who was taking care of a lot of hospice patients dying of cancer. He got a lot of static from the feds and California for writing a lot of narcotic scripts. He argued that he was giving the stuff to people that were dying, palliative care for those with no hope of recovery. They are going to die in a year, why should they suffer? This sort of opened the door to the whole, "You have a right to have your pain addressed" thing. The pendulum swung too far the other direction, as it is wont to do, so here we are.

Street prices on prescription narcotics are FAR higher than they are for non prescription ones. There was a lot of trouble around here with Norco tablets that were smuggled in that had been spiked with Fentanyl, because, dollah dollah bill, yo. If something is 100 times as potent, a little goes a very long way.

I have had numerous reformed heroin addicts tell me it is easier to give up smack than it is to quit smoking cigarettes. I was dubious the first time I heard this, less dubious after 10 different people told me so.

Thing about addiction, just because you stop using the drug you are addicted to, does not mean you are not an addict any more. You are an addict that is not using at that point in time. Ask a former booze jockey about it sometime.

z31maniac wrote:

RevRico wrote: In reply to T.J.: Well, oxycontin was running 80/pill on the black market last I heard a couple years ago, heroin is selling for $2-3 a dose. It's a lot easier coming up with 10 a day than 80 multiple times a day. Then there are things like this happening Almost 800 million pills shipped to West Virginia by pharmaceutical companies. Most of which winds up in counties of under a million people. The numbers is pills being distributed and sold "legally"by the producers is just mind blowing. Which is another reason I believe the theories that I do about the whole thing.

Oxy has never been $80/pill or even close. You're spouting a lot of hyperbole in this thread to try substantiate your stance on the issue. Please continue, I'm getting a laugh.

Maybe not in your area, but around here they were a dollar a milligram back in 2011, 80mg pill was 80, 20mg was 20. What it sells for now, I don't know. What I do know is that around that point something made a lot of pill manufacturers change the compounds making them harder to crush to snort or shoot, and that's when heroin really roared it's ugly head, cheaper than pills and snortable sealed the deal for a lot of people, like it lost the dirty stigma because you didn't need a needle anymore. I like weed, not pills, so my information is both outdated and second hand, but there are no national price registries for illicit substances, particularly pills that can change price depending how empty the bottle is or who is buying them.

Even before I had my kid I distanced myself from people that liked popping pills because they tend to steal, and I rather like my stuff staying mine. Kind of sad to see the friend pool shrink that way, but better than the alternative. Now having a kid to worry about, I go out of my way to avoid these types of people.

I never understood opiate addiction in particular, but that's because they never did anything for me whether I was taking them recreationally or medically. No high, no pain relief, just itchiness and anger and cold sweats, so I don't take them. Broken bones, wisdom teeth pulled, deep cuts requiring stitches, no useful affect. If I want to be sweaty and angry, I'll go work in a kitchen again.

Maybe I exaggerated my "shipping containers" quote a bit, but not by much. To reach the proliferation of the market as it has, legally and illegally, it might as well be Bayer Pharmaceuticals selling it over the counter again. If it was only in one area, or only around port areas, sure a smuggler or a few smugglers bribing their way through, but with saturation across the entire country, it's bigger than that. And with a documented history of our very own government doing such things in the past, as well as the national timelines syncing up, it's hard not to look their way.

We get the mixed batches, and it makes the news, of fentanyl laced or carfentanyl?(something that starts with a with a c and is used as an Elephant tranquilizer) laced, and the addicts go out of their mind trying to get their hands on the stuff that kills more of them because it's stronger. To me it seems like a problem that will solve itself given enough time. Seeing groups sue the state of Ohio for making overdosing and being brought back a misdemeanor isn't helping anyone though. Is rehab better than jail? Maybe, but that shouldn't negate the crimes committed in the first place, and should definitely not put the taxpayer on the hook for you're not being able to control your addiction. And if people can't get clean in jail, maybe it's time to clean up the jails.

Holy crap, I was looking for a statewide number, and found out my county, 1 of 67 counties in the state, held onto 10% of the state's overdose deaths in 2015 and grew in 2016. Just driving through town you can tell it's bad, but I'm both surprised at how much of the state's share it has, and how low the statewide number is 3300 per year(state population 12.7 million) seems low for the volume of news stories, rehab ads, methadone clinics and addicts encountered. I can't find an exact number at the moment of reversals performed with narcan, but it's well over 2000 for last year according to the news last week.

Last summer did bring a news story about this that made me laugh, a heroin bust IN the hospital. People coming in to visit someone and they didn't even know her name and were acting sketchy, so the cops were called to investigate and busted her with cash and heroin in her room, she had as a patient. Then it happened again, same hospital, different patient, like a month later.

On the same note, and this is a legitimate question, who decided making fentanyl lollipops was a good idea? I'm fairly certain they're off the market now, at least I haven't heard anything lately, but there was a string of little kids that were dying or overdosing because they thought they were regular lollipops that they find in their parents things. Sure, let's take a synthetic drug stronger than heroin, and put it in a package children recognize and love as candy. Brilliant idea.

GameboyRMH wrote:

T.J. wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: I still don't understand. If you are addicted to Oxycontin and can no longer get it, instead of moving to something worse that will kill you, maybe you should move to getting clean. I don't understand, but I guess there is no logic when it comes to addiction.

No there isn't. You'll just jones like hell until you get more opiates in you.

Now and then I get to see a good friend with seriously smashed wrists and a dependence on prescribed opiates when he has a hard month and runs out of pills a day or two early.

He had no idea that he was addicted...excuse me, its legal for him so we call it dependant... until it was way too late.

Heroin would be a very, very easy choice.

mtn wrote:

T.J. wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: I still don't understand. If you are addicted to Oxycontin and can no longer get it, instead of moving to something worse that will kill you, maybe you should move to getting clean. I don't understand, but I guess there is no logic when it comes to addiction.

If you don't understand it, you don't understand addiction. A kid I knew from elementary school just passed away from an OD. Sad times.

I just had one of those myself.

Streetwiseguy wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote:

T.J. wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: I still don't understand. If you are addicted to Oxycontin and can no longer get it, instead of moving to something worse that will kill you, maybe you should move to getting clean. I don't understand, but I guess there is no logic when it comes to addiction.

No there isn't. You'll just jones like hell until you get more opiates in you.

Now and then I get to see a good friend with seriously smashed wrists and a dependence on prescribed opiates when he has a hard month and runs out of pills a day or two early. He had no idea that he was addicted...excuse me, its legal for him so we call it dependant... until it was way too late. Heroin would be a very, very easy choice.

I can see how this happens, rather easily. Ex swmbo had a going prescription for pretty much all of them (how she never got on a shopper registry is beyond me), and I berkeleyed mys3lf up pretty bad and got into the light end of the stash. Not terribly proud of it, but man do I get it. Not to mention the facts that I was well beyond mentally taxed at this point, but the relief they gave you was pretty intense. I felt whole again. I could see extremely easily how getting addicted works. Even if dt'ing is not a concern (ive have to work her through them for extended use due to kidney issues) the down sucks. You don't want to go back to the less shiny reality. I consider myself fairly strong willed (I quit smoking cold, just because. No real motivation) and this E36 M3 scared me. I can't imagine someone with more problems, less wilo, and stronger pills.

RevRico, you are 15% low on your street value estimate

According to the 2009 National Prescription Drug Threat Assessment prepared by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the average street price for OxyContin is $1.15 per milligram.