To solve this problem and Jared's going to jail, so he can blame the rising death rates on the Mueller investigation.

This has long been an issue, to be sure. But it really took off after he invaded Afghanistan - and succeeded in nothing except turning it into the world's opium poppy field.

Which, of course, is what he and Darth Cheney went in to do in the first place.

It's happening because of synthetic opium. Although it's possible to OD on natural opium, it's not that easy. Most happen as a result of drug mixing. Synthetic opium is a completely different story. The ingredients come from China and it can be produced in China or Mexico from imported ingredients with little technical knowledge and the result is so strong it takes less than a milligram to produce a more potent high. This makes it very easy to smuggle, but it also means the lethal dose is around 2 milligrams.

The OD crisis is a direct result of the "drug war" and until our drug policy is radically changed, it's only going to get worse.

Last edited Thu Aug 16, 2018, 12:15 PM - Edit history (1)

And don't get me wrong, I'm not calling people stupid for becoming addicted. I'm calling them stupid for not taking a few minutes to learn about the relative potency of one opioid vs. another, not knowing the difference between a 10mg time release pill vs a 30mg instant release pill when there's pictures online, etc.

And anyone who's friggin shooting street drugs of unknown potency should have a narcan shot in their pocket at all times, esp. if they're not so seriously opioid-tolerant to the point that a shot of 100% pure Heroin wouldn't take them out ... you're just asking to eventually die if you don't.

I mean, it's sad but, this really is Darwin Awards in effect in many cases. The info to make reasonably smart decisions EVEN WHEN YOU'RE ADDICTED ... is right there on the internet. Not taking the time or making the effort to find out WHAT you're taking, and whether or not it's in the zone of what you can safely ingest ... when it's so obvious from so many sources of information that you WILL DIE if you fail to do so ... I just don't get it.

This is why we should do what we can to help the people who are still alive and want to be helped ... because they're the smart(er) ones. The reckless and/or dumb ones ... won't make it to the point of asking for help.

Lastly, I'd be willing to bet that under 1/2 of those 72K died from opioids alone. Usually when people die from opioids, other depressant drugs like benzos or especially alcohol ... are involved as well.

It's not just them, americans in general will do every little thing to avoid pain, when in fact, pain is a good thing. Got a little headache? Take Tylenol ASAP. And we do this to our children. Here's a great article I read about an American in Germany who got surgery, and what the doctors do there for pain management:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-germany-vicodin.html

Frequent studies have found that most people are all too willing to poo-poo other people's pain. Even doctors and nurses have very little sympathy for the pain of their patients. Studies indicate that before the mass promotion of opioids, most health professionals prescribed too little pain relief for too short of a time. If health care professionals carefully prescribed pain medication a patient heals much quicker and with better outcomes.

Even the current rise of opioid deaths is due largely to Doctors prescribing it and then NOT having a plan for withdrawal. So addicted patients go off on their own to handle possibly deadly withdrawal symptoms.

It's just all the people I've seen who were prescribed pain medication weren't having minor headaches. They were in such pain that it deformed their bodies and frequently immobilized them. Real awful pain is very prevalent in today's workplace where a person wears out their body trying to make a living with very little health care to prevent serious damage to muscles and bones.

The real problem is others can not really feel your pain and so to them it is a mild or nonexistent thing. And really in our dog eat dog capitalist way of life we discourage feeling another's pain anyway.

Pain pills I don't think would help with my problem but for a couple months I've had dizziness, headaches and my stomach is so upset I can't eat. Ie lost 30 pounds,had all kinds of tests but no one can figure out what's wrong. Sometimes it's almost unbearable so I understand why you would do ANYTHING to feel better.

I've known people to beg to die because their pain was so horrible. Keep trying to find some relief. Sometimes it's as simple as some lidocaine patches or medical cannabis.

I'm supposed to see a neurologist so hopefully they can find something.

Assistance when taking a person off the opiods. Most doctors when they notice a patient is taking large quantities, just stop prescribing. They rarely taper off and usually the now addicted patient is left to their own devices on how to handle withdrawal. Even rehab clinics, until recently, wouldn't touch opiod addiction. So the solution was in many cases to buy it illegally.

Notice the high suicide rate of white males? Who is most likely to have health insurance and doctors willing to prescribe pain killers? White males. A major side affect of opiod withdrawal is depression and suicide. Just odd that both are on the rise.

The lethal dose of synthetic opium by itself is minuscule. You don't have to mix it with anything. The reason the game has changed is because the synthetic opium that comes from China is an order of magnitude more potent. This makes it easy to smuggle, but it must be cut after it enters the US. You can be a moron and still distribute drugs in the US, and street potency varies by huge margins. A dose that barely gets you high today could kill you tomorrow and there's no way to know the potency of what you're taking.

for going on 15 years now in this country, and fentanyl from china and mexico is newer than that.

But by now everyone should know it's a problem, and there are steps you can take (if you're reasonably careful aka smart) to minimize the risk from this problem, too.

Just one example ... when you get a new bag, esp. if you don't know the dealer, you do a 'taste' before you rush to dump a bunch of it straight into your damn vein. You can skin-pop a little bit of it, or you can smoke(if tar)/sniff(if powder)/put some in a gel capsule and either swallow, or stick it where the sun don't shine ... and then you learn to judge the effect of the 'taste' and hence the dose. Did it just barely get you 'well', or did it actually get you high?

And again, you can legally get narcan shots nowadays ... hell, even just keeping a suboxone tablet in your pocket (buprenorphine + naloxone), those are available on the streets for like $10 ... could save your ass, and you don't even have to have the presence of mind to fix one up and shoot it, if you put a suboxone under your tongue when you feel yourself getting too high (or you make it a point to never fix a fresh bag without someone WITH YOU), the buprenorphine in that suboxone will prevent you OD'ing. It'll make ya hella dopesick, but you'll live at least.

The difference is instead of the illicit market getting it's supply from pharmaceutical sources, it can now get it internationally from illegitimate sources. Heroin has been around for over 100 years and there's never been anything close to what is going on now. Previously ODs were mostly due to drug mixing. With synthetic opiates you can die solely from the drug itself very easily.

I 100% understand, and agree with what you're saying.

But ... both the profligate opioid prescribing that went on from about 2000 to 2010, and the flooding of opioid pills onto the streets from Rx sources (and no doubt diversions from the supply chain to pharmacies as well) is responsible for their being a shit-ton MORE people ... ending up on heroin, and at risk for a fentanyl OD. It's MUCH more expensive to be hooked on, say, Oxycontin (unless you have an Rx) ... than it is to be hooked on heroin.

And a LOT of people have died from the pills alone (although it is far more likely to occur with mixed with booze and/or benzos, as you allude to), before they even got to the point of buying H on the street.

And at every step of the way the so-called "war on drugs" makes the problem far worse.

what you say is true, that all these clueless people were duped into becoming raging addicts by a codeine prescription for a bad tooth. Prohibition of opioids causes so many more problems that it solves, it's not even funny, not the least of which is that many people with serious, chronic pain have seen their quality of life drop to about zero. and how many of the people who you claim died from prescription meds alone, actually had a prescription, and died from taking the amount they were prescribed? not many, i'd say.

And I agree, I'm anti-war-on-(some)-drugs as well ... I think we'd have less societal problems if all drugs were legal.

I don't want anyone who legitimately needs opioid's for chronic pain ... to be denied them either.

I never said people who needed painkillers were 'duped' into becoming addicts ...

I also never said people that are legitimately Rx'd pain killers are likely to die from them, esp. not pain killers alone, taken at Rx'd doses. You're putting words in my mouth.

BUT ... I also don't think it can be denied that much of the current OD deaths aren't related to very lax Rx standards in the 2000-2010 era, which made it easy for drugs to flood the streets, which created a lot of addicts ... who are now OD'ing on Fentanyl.

If we're not just going to legalize, I think there's nothing wrong with doing our due-diligence ... as long as the main goal is keeping dope out of the hands of new users ... while not hurting pain sufferers.

I COMPLETELY agree that the British model of regulated use ... would save a ton of US lives, btw ...

The articles also don't mention how many suicides have occurred from people with chronic pain who can no longer get medications from doctors who are resigning out of protest.

And it also wouldn't include how many people committed suicide because they're in the throes of terrible opioid withdrawals, which also happens a LOT (and this number would overlap with many chronic pain sufferers who got their Rx yanked ... it's really a double-whammy then, the pain + the withdrawals, it's a very dangerous combination, and it should never happen).

Got any mental health awareness? Apparently not but you have plenty of judgmental condemnation.

Let me ask ya something ... how bad does a 'sniffing 400mg of oxycontin per DAY' habit ... sound to you? Mental-health-wise, I mean?

...my X was up to banging about 300mg a day and that was a lot of money at street prices of $20 to $30 a 10m Roxie.
(she is clean now and does a lot of NA meetings)

Also, free all prisoners incarcerated on drug charges immediately.

decides to implement overly burdensome rules as there are people that need such medication to help them deal with pain.
I mean even I have a prescription for 20 50mg tramadol here at home for when either the nerve in my neck flares up or my winged scapula decides to.
I have just been lucky in that I have only needed to take it 6 times in the last 7 months.

And who can argue that they're bad. And they've done this with "just say no," and AIDS and crime and the evils of dope. Yes, they are serious problems, but so are guns and alcohol and poor medical help and wars and poverty and malnutrition and other leading causes of death. Here in MA, our Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, moderate on every thing else, plays up the opioid crisis as the central message of his re-election campaign. He thinks it plays well with an overwhelming Dem. majority who tend to confuse it with other pc health issues like smoking and wearing seat belts. Seldom do they want to go to the cause of these problems or the treatment or the corrupt sources or why drugs are necessary to cope with the desperate lives many have to lead.

Obviously we must focus on rifles!

How about funding? How many are making a candidate's position on the opioid crisis the defining criteria of a Democrat?

And I'm not giving the NRA a click if I don't have to.

My point is that while some Democrats are trying to make gun control the defining factor in what a Democrat is, there are lots of real people dying from drug overdoses (200 per day!) because we're not running things. And we're not running things, in large part, because of things like assault-weapon bans that have no real impact on crime or public safety but have a hell of an impact on electoral turnout.

Step one to running things is getting elected. Thanks to Fanta Menace winning two years ago (again, how much did gun control help us?) we're about to have a Blue Wave. But what happened from 2000 to 2014, and what's going to happen in 2020?

I get you think that proliferating the most dangerous weapons into every aspect of our society is a great idea, but I'm pretty sure your efforts to win over hearts and minds is having the opposite effect here. Not everything is about guns, nor should it be no matter how much you want it to be.

Let's keep wondering why people agree with many aspects of the Democratic platform then vote Republican. That will be much more effective and lead to more gun control!

Why, that's $20 million per state!!

Prior to synthetic opiods, the vast majority of ODs that involved natural opiods were a result of drug mixing. Had the CDC and other government agencies been focusing their efforts on publicizing the dangers of drug mixing and spending more effort on getting people on methadone, they could have prevented thousands of deaths and ruined lives. Instead have been supporting the so-called "war on drugs" mentality that has never worked and never will.

It's much safer for one thing, and secondly a person stands a far greater chance of actually getting off of it some day. Also you can get it in a regular Dr's office setting, and get a month's worth at a time. Way easier than a daily trip to the methadone clinic (or only 'near daily', if you manage to earn the clinic's trust, usually over the span of many months or years).

such a convenient tool to terrorize/incarcerate the masses, and enrich the 1%.

The age of smack to forget everything but dreams
The age acid and weed to enlighten and rebel
The age of cocaine to make lots of money and party hard
The age of meth to stay up for days and fuck til you drop.
The age of opioids to kill the pain til you pass out dead.

Funny how the drugs we use reflects on everything around us and who we are. From the audacity of hope to making America so despairing again.

NOT. apparently the Drug Warriors' strategy isn't working.