Just because fentanyl has a shit therapeutic index doesn't mean it has a high body count (it gets used just fine even in tandem with other depressants in clinical circumstances...) - I would say the problem is more in the hands of the tough-on-crime lawmakers who seem to lack, at least in my neck of the woods, remorse.<p>Also, look up sufentanil, and once you feel you're ready, carfentanil..<p>Also, yes, yes, fentanyl is made because of its potency and therefore cheapness, but a napkin-back calculation shows: 17 $ / g codeine * 100 g codeine / 70 g morphine in a conversion tek * 3 g morphine / 2 g heroin = ~$37 g/heroin, if you were a pretty good chemist, and could legally source precursors (pyridine HCL, acetic anhydride..), which is probably a lot better than the stepped on shit you would get for even 60 bucks a gram (although you can get 60 dollar grams on AlphaBay iirc). That's near a dollar a dose for an opiate-naive user and a day's worth for the 60-year old junkie down the street.<p>Also, the high/euphoria from fentanyl is much shorter lasting (hence its appropriate use in surgery) - I could see this encouraging heroin users to use more under the idea that they've simply increased their tolerance..<p>Also, Prince died with traces of U-47700 in his system.
The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait. Fentanyl is pretty well known amongst opiate addicts (and has been for a while). Everyone knows it's dangerous, including dealers, who like to avoid killing their customers and catching murder charges, believe it or not.<p>Aside from that and a bit of gateway drug BS towards the beginning, this is a solid and somewhat moving, if long, account of the standard Heroin story, and is more or less the same as the ones I hear from fellow recovering addicts all the time.<p>Key features, so you can avoid the longread:<p>* Insurance refusing to pay for treatment<p>* Parents being forced to get their kids arrested to
protect them (and the plan failing)<p>* Relapse, relapse, and more relapse despite full knowledge of the consequences and a strong desire <i>not to</i> relapse.<p>* Terror of being dope sick<p>* Doing stuff you don't want to do to avoid being dope sick<p>* Death
Opiate addiction is a serious problem that affects people from all walks of life. My mother has had rheumatoid arthritis for decades. She was prescribed Fentanyl patches for the pain at one point, but the strength was too high. One day she wound up passing out in her kitchen after applying a patch. After that she stuck the patches in a drawer, intending for them to never to be used again.<p>She was fine after this incident, but my sister happened to mention the story to an acquaintance of my mother's from church. Upon learning that there was a box of unused Fentanyl patches in my mother's house, she suddenly became her best friend and volunteered to begin taking her to doctor's appointments. She would take her to doctor's appointments, then while my mother was there, would go back to my mother's house to "clean up" - do dishes, vacuum etc. This wasn't a mere act of charity; she also "cleaned up" not only the patches, but a significant percentage of my mom's other opioid pain medications.<p>At first my mother thought she was going crazy when pills began going missing. She finally told me about it, and while I was inclined to believe that she was simply starting to lose her mental acuity, I bought her a lockbox for her pills. It was only after this woman (an upper middle class mother of three young children) brought tools with her during a visit and actually destroyed the electronic lock on the box that I realized that her trusted "friend" from church was stealing her pain medications. When my mother told one of the leaders of her church what happened, the woman denied it, and three weeks later moved her entire family several states away.<p>You really can't make this stuff up. Addicts come in all shapes and sizes and will do anything to quench their addiction.
I just want to say that that I lost one of my close friends Thom Simmons last April due to Fentanyl overdose. He was a young, voracious autodidact prodigy that was always way ahead of the curve especially with technology. I met him through the #django irc channel about 7 or 8 years ago when I was starting out with python and django and we developed a friendship that lasted until he overdosed on fentanyl and died in a motel room alone last year. I had reconnected with him in his final weeks as he struggled to get clean and desperately wanted out of his situation but he felt trapped, afraid, alone, and hopeless. He broke down crying to me over the phone a few days before he died, after I helped pay for a night in his motel room because he had run out of money. I didn't realize the full gravity of the situation or know that he had already relapsed at that point and he was dangerously close to the end. I believe that Thom knew it was his last week on Earth and he was saying goodbye to me. He told me what a special friendship we had and how much that meant to him, how he hadn't met many people in his life that he could trust. We laughed a lot about the many memories of late nights programming, scheming on grand ideas for the next major social platform we wanted to build. He showed me Reddit when no one knew what it was, he showed me hackerne.ws before it was known, he helped me set up a trixbox server and program asterisk with voip connections, we built a custom PLC software for a startup and worked on other various projects. We also shared the disease of addiction and unfortunately he couldn't get the help he needed to stay clean and sober. Upon his death all he got was a short blurb in a rural Texas local newspaper, not a word about the amazing person, friend, genius he was. I later found out that 15+ people died of fentanyl overdose in his town that weekend, all of them addicts that lost the battle.<p>I had to get that out because every time I hear about fentanyl it reminds me of Thom and I hope that our society finds solutions to help addicts overcome the extremely dark and twisted pull of drugs and addiction so that other amazing people like Thom don't meet the same fate.<p>I'll never forget his memory and the amazing person he was, and that the very fact that I met him and we became friends was because of the same technology he was so fond of.<p>(<a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pearland/obituary.aspx?pid=174779466" rel="nofollow">http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pearland/obituary.aspx?pid=...</a>)
I've read a fair amount online about ibogaine, derived from iboga root, as a treatment for addiction, and opiate addiction in particular. It doesn't seem to be very well-known, but everything I've read makes it seem like a miracle cure. It is a schedule 1 psychedelic in the US, but there are apparently clinics/retreats in Mexico and Canada where it is used to treat addiction.<p>Reportedly, withdrawal symptoms immediately begin to subside when the trip hits and then disappear completely, never to return. Cravings don't return either. The success rate is incredible--one study I read about from ~2011 followed up with its participants, and 30/30 were still not using, and they and their partners reported a much higher quality of life. All from a single six-hour trip (though it seems like these places want people to hang out for a week or so afterward, too).<p>When I say "miracle cure" and "incredible" I mean them in the superlative sense, but these kinds of claims also make me suspicious because I'd expect to hear more noise about them if they worked as well as advertised. So consider this post both a plea to share more info if anyone has it, either for or against, as well as a jumping-off point for further research for anyone who is personally or knows someone who is suffering from an addiction. On the one hand, it sounds too good to be true, but on the other hand, psychedelics are so demonized that I could believe the word just hasn't gotten out yet. (After all, clinical LSD treatment showed a lot of promise in curing/greatly reducing alcohol addiction 50 years ago, among a host of other things, but you wouldn't know it unless you go looking yourself.)
Found by a coworker within two minutes of passing out, but no one called an ambulance for thirty minutes. We ought to care more about the people around us.
people who get addicted should be treated similarly to the mentally impaired/disabled persons. Once addicted, a range of specific brain functions are impaired, and thus it is a medical issue. A lot of other medical issues are result of personal irresponsibility too. That doesn't stop us from treating those issues medically (though it seems it took some time, even as recently as the end of the 20th century, to accept HIV as a medical disease to be treated instead of a "God's punishment for perversion"). Yet when it comes to addiction, the patients are treated as criminals instead.
It's 2016, and the media is still pushing the same classic tropes, marijuana as a gateway drug, etc. Yet other than a quick characterization of DJ being a risk-taker, this article fails to even consider the most important question- why did he start using? What was the <i>cause</i> of his addiction?<p>Nobody wants to consider the consequences of a society that confines adolescent male hominids in a classroom during the height of puberty, then locks them in cages to keep them from bothering others when they become too much of a bother, or a family that attempts to account for every minute of their adult offspring's life. I can't speak to the female experience, but I still remember the existential ache of a teenaged male trying to make his place in the world. But there's a pill for that, right? Nobody wants to admit that fighting a War On Drugs without fundamentally reforming our toxic society is the same as fighting a War On Climate Change while still burning fossil fuels.
My daughter died of a fentanyl overdose one month ago. She was 21.<p>It was her first time taking it. I assume she thought it was cocaine or something similar and simply took far too much.<p>If you have children, please teach them about drugs. That means more than "just say no" it means being really, really clear with them that a huge danger is that they get given something that isn't what it is claimed. Sadly, this is especially true if they are young and female and perhaps a little naive.<p>I expect that my younger children will experiment with drugs even knowing what happened to their sister. I expect their friends will as well.<p>All I can do now is teach them how quickly their life can end and, perhaps, give them ready access to test kits in the same way that they will have ready access to condoms and std education when the time comes.<p>Please, if you have a child, talk to them today about fentanyl in particular - most of her friends has never heard of it before she died and had no idea how strong or cheap it was.
There would be far, far fewer deaths from overdose if all drugs were legal. There may be more addicts if they were legal, I don't know - but there would be a lot fewer deaths.
Sad that the message of this piece will likely be discounted and discredited. It amazes me the blasé attitudes towards drugs in the tech world. Hearing even high-profile tech leaders extoll the 'virtues' of getting high while ignoring the huge toll it takes on individuals and their families seems selfish to me.
In the US you can't do research about a product then go out and buy quality product from a quality provider. That's really where I see a lot of the problems with all of this.<p>Yes there's a failure of information somewhere and people that fall through the cracks should be able to find their way out again, but the root of the problem stems from publicly vilifying people and actions that should be legal. Regulating all drugs like cigarettes, for example, would make it so they wouldn't have to get grade E stuff from some alley, we'd stop imprisoning people that may just need help and we could have discussions in the open about abuse. Privately vilify all you want, but the government should be mute on people's preferences as long as they are capable of making decisions, there's mandatory information disclosure surrounding dangerous drugs and companies can't lie about what they're selling.<p>Heroine for better or worse is a product that people are willing to go far out of their way to purchase and that goes for nearly all drugs. I would never do it and I believe if you made it legal, most people not doing it today wouldn't pick it up. We really need to get the idea that <i>legal === government endorsement</i> out of our heads.<p>We do things because the pros of doing them outweigh the cons of not doing them. Information around drugs, proper, honest and often, deters dangerous adoption.
Fentanyl is coming from China and other places. The main problem is the users not knowing what they are getting and dose exchanges, not the opioid itself. The DEA and people using addicts to make money instead of treating as a healthcare problem is what is causing this.
I talked to a friend of mine today who has a serious opiate addiction. It is heartbreaking. He is on the verge of losing what he has left to lose, but I don't know if there is anything to do. He refuses to seek treatment. I think his options are running out.<p>I've had my problems in life, specifically with mental illness and benzo addiction, but I'm thankful that I never went the opiate route.
was recently given fentanyl when I had to have a dislocated arm re-located. I passed out within 4 minutes, and woke up without a dislocation. I don't understand why you'd want to take it recreationally (how much does your life suck that you want to sleep constantly?), but I'm glad it exists to ease suffering. Maybe some of these scare articles should look at the "Rat Park" study, and figure out <i>why</i> people are doing the drug in the first place?
This was a well-written story but I could've done without:<p>A. The "MARIJUANA, THAT DEVIL WEED, STARTED HIS DESCENT INTO HELL" routine.<p>and<p>B. The "truth" anti-drug ad campaign-style video overlays
Chapter 2 is titled ‘Kissed by Jesus’, if that helps anyone avoid the longread.<p>// edit whoops yeah I'm wrong, my replier is correct. Nevertheless... Chapter 1 was stumbling into a long resume of the boy's high school experiences and I was getting bored, so when the title of chapter 2 was "Kissed by Jesus" I ended early. The first portion of the article is really good, but the long backstory and gateway-drug-ism in the article got old.