A man walked into a meeting with a fent sucker in his mouth treating it like a toothpick and I had to hold back my alarm so that everyone else did not ask why I knew exactly what it was. At that time no one outside of post-op, end of life cancer, or major pain management were really aware of this stuff. But to see a guy just stroll in on fentanyl like it was nothing at all was a watershed moment.
Now an addict does not need to steal from a ped surgery floor. You can buy fentanyl straight from China in a properly wrapped packet. Dosage is the problem, mixing dry is not easy, hence the street deaths.
I carried narcan back in the day because some of my friends were heroin users. But I never came across a fent addict, now I can only imagine how much of this stuff is floating out there.
Average people have no idea what this stuff feels like, what the pull is like. In reality you never get away from it; it is always there in the back of your mind but you have to tell yourself that it will destroy you.
sorry for the disjoint mess but I am being hit with the thoughts of those I knew who were lost to black.
I had interventional radiology brain surgery three times. I got a decent medical dose of fentanyl. I was strapped onto a surgery table awake because I had to hold my breath every time they put tools into my brain. I could see the x-ray image of the tools going into my brain in the corner of my eye on the screen above the table. With fentanyl the world was right as rain, however, I didn't feel any desire to have it again after. The feeling wasn't happy, sad, high, speedy, or low. It was just everything was ok.
At least here in upstate New York, there aren't really 'fent addicts'. There are opioid addicts in general, but even the hardcore users are generally seeking heroin, not fentanyl.
> A man walked into a meeting with a fent sucker in his mouth...You can buy fentanyl straight from China in a properly wrapped packet.
Talking about OTFC lollipops? You can get those in the mail from China? I'm guessing these are disjoint cases.
> Dosage is the problem, mixing dry is not easy, hence the street deaths.
I feel like the bad rap it gets is mostly about dosage, ultimately it is the market at work despite the law, producing ever more potent and compact (concealable) fixes as customers demand. If caffeine were a controlled substance, people would buy it more often in the (hazardously potent) powdered form. When booze was prohibited, it was regularly distributed in 180/190 proof.
The demand is the part you can improve, the supply is the part you think you can solve.
I'm scared I may have to advise close friends to start carrying Narcan. It doesn't really make sense how horrifying opiates are until they start ripping away people you've known for years...
I'm in the process of recovering from a serious addiction to furanyl-fentanyl. I don't really care to get too into it, I really can't explain the pain that stuff has caused me. I've been through a lot in life, but I've never been through anything so traumatic.. This stuff is a nightmare like you can't possibly understand without being there yourself, I hope none of you ever find yourself in that position.. I've been in a methadone program for the past 6 months now. We really need to put money into treatment, the program that I'm in literally saved my life. I'm lucky enough to have insurance that actually covers most of the cost, but most people in my situation don't have that luxury.
I was actually addicted to methadone, only used heroin a couple times in my life. I used it because I could work and get stuff done for days on end while being high. I knew people who died because they forgot you can't drink alcohol when you're on it, but I was delusional enough to think I was better when I was on it.
It ended for me when I got old enough to notice the kids at these places I was going to by my drugs, just to do my dirt and leave. The last straw was when I stumbled into a bedroom while trying to find a bathroom at a dealers house. I walked into a room with 6 or 7 kids under 10 years old wearing big bubble coats and gloves, all huddled together in the middle of the room trying to stay warm. It was winter, and it hadn't dawned on me that the house had no heat. I've never been able to forget how I'd been contributed to their situation, my actions rippled out to affect many people beyond myself. Relying on drugs started to feel like a very selfish, narcissistic way of life
> I'm in the process of recovering from a serious addiction to furanyl-fentanyl.
> This stuff is a nightmare like you can't possibly understand without being there yourself
From someone who hasn't been there themselves, but just lost my best friend to fentanyl, I hope you stick with recovery. She was actually in a very nice recovery program, but managed to sneak a cell phone in. Point is, it only takes one bad decision that I hope you don't make.
Im glad to hear you're doing better. Keep at it. I didn't get into opioids personally but grew up in and lived in that type of environment for years and had my own addiction issues. I've seen alot of good people get caught up in it. We need more programs for addiction and mental health. It's wrong that things are the way they are. No one should have to live like that. We need to find a better way.
Fentanyl is nothing compared to carfentanil - some 100x stronger, which is 10,000x stronger than morphine, gram for gram.
So much so that first responders are suffering serious overdose from inhaling bags of it accidently.
More crazy was the fact it's for sale on the darknet markets for as little as $150/gram. Worldwide legal use is about 50g a year.
This is what prohibition does - inctentivizes strength per unit mass. It's much easier to import 1g of carfentanil than 10kg of heroin. And I think it will just get worse and worse.
Carfentanil is terrifying. Wound up in a Wikipedia hole looking that up. 10,000 times as potent as morphine. Only recently illegal in China. Therapeutic dose of one microgram. May have been the way the Russians subdued the Moscow Theater Attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis#...) by just spraying it over the crowd. It seems that many people died of asphyxiation when they passed out and flopped over. It's considered a chemical weapon.
Consider the mixing requirements of carfentanil: one insufficiently ground grain of the chemical is lethal. And the people making the end-product are amateurs.
One kilo from China was confiscated in Canada. Certainly a bit hyperbolic, but "According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough carfentanil to wipe out the entire population of the country[...]". Divide that by ten and it's still terrifying. Dump a small bag over NYC Times Square or Mumbai and you'd create mass casualties.
This isn't some crazy, Bethesda-managed super-bug or insecticide. It's a bog standard, synthetic opioid.
That is insane. Part of what's so awful about this is how these can just be mixed into other powder drugs and nobody is the wiser. Like, doing coke now just seems crazy to me, where in the past it didn't seem a big deal at all. But the lethal doses of these things are so tiny that it seems not worth the risk.
Fentanyl is a wonderful, miraculous, lifesaving drug when used by doctors and paramedics. In a hospital setting, it's a much better drug than morphine for acute pain management in most cases. It's also -- no question -- really freaking dangerous when abused. I worry about stories like this painting such a one-sided picture that Fentanyl will be demonized out of existence.
Paramedic here... I agree wholeheartedly. I see both the best and worst of fentanyl. I have woken up plenty of folks who took a much bigger dose than they expected (because it was cut with more fentanyl than usual), and pronounced more than a couple people dead for the same reason...
That being said, it's my go-to tool for analgesia. It acts a lot faster than morphine, and wears off faster as well (which is a useful property in the event of an adverse reaction). Before we carried fentanyl, it would not be uncommon for some patient's pain to remain untouched by morphine. I've yet to have that happen with fentanyl.
Carrying fentanyl means the difference between "Let's get some pain medication in place before we manipulate your broken leg in order to splint it" vs "Morphine is gonna take 20 minutes to reach a meaningful therapeutic effect, and we don't have time for that, so just grit your teeth and we'll try to be quick".
Legalizing heroin and regulating it like alcohol would save so many lives.
Not sure where everyone here is from, but in Connecticut we've seen hundreds of people die from fentanyl overdoses in just the past few years.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases, they were sold what they thought was heroin.
Why should we keep forcing drug addicts to buy from dangerous and expensive dealers? Not only would legalizing heroin save millions of lives, it would bring in trillions of dollars in tax revenue
Not only that, the response to the opiate epidemic has negative impacts on people actually in pain.
My girlfriend, who has lupus and constant pain, was recently denied pain medication because the doctor was concerned that continuing to write prescriptions for opiates would cost him his license. So my girlfriend has been in excruciating, 9/10 pain for the last month because doctors are too concerned about over-prescribing because every soccer mom is suddenly concerned that responsible adults in pain are suddenly going to turn into opiate crazed monsters.
As much as addicts need help, the feeling of the general population is that it's better for someone in pain to suffer than for someone to get a safe, known, pure quantity of opiates without having a good enough reason.
Librarians in Philadelphia have started keeping naloxone in their desks so when the next addict OD's in the grass in front of the library they can bring them back to life.
I'm not sure the intent behind your quote, but that's very true. Used in a clinical setting, fentanyl is generally the best choice for acute pain management (post-op, traumatic injury, etc).
No, it's a business problem. There's too much money tied up in the infrastructure that criminalizes it, too many people invested and making a lot of money on the status quo.
Treating it like a criminal problem works extremely well for Singapore. If you sell drugs, you get executed. If you have any amount drugs, you almost certainly go to prison. Police have extraordinary powers to investigate and prosecute drug crimes, including compelling drug tests of suspected users. As a result, there is effectively no drug use or trafficking in Singapore.
So this oft-repeated mantra that the penal code cannot solve drug problems is frankly bs. I'm not suggesting that we should throw drug addicts in prison for a dozen years, but I'd have no problem letting a fentanyl dealer rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Maybe start sending commandos to kidnap cartel leaders from Mexico to bring them to the US to face charges, for trafficking drugs and for murder. Let's run sting operations with cops posing as drug-seeking addicts to catch doctors handing them out like candy.
[+] [-] JonDav|8 years ago|reply
Now an addict does not need to steal from a ped surgery floor. You can buy fentanyl straight from China in a properly wrapped packet. Dosage is the problem, mixing dry is not easy, hence the street deaths.
I carried narcan back in the day because some of my friends were heroin users. But I never came across a fent addict, now I can only imagine how much of this stuff is floating out there.
Average people have no idea what this stuff feels like, what the pull is like. In reality you never get away from it; it is always there in the back of your mind but you have to tell yourself that it will destroy you.
sorry for the disjoint mess but I am being hit with the thoughts of those I knew who were lost to black.
Apparently fent is the new black.
[+] [-] zappo2938|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|8 years ago|reply
At least here in upstate New York, there aren't really 'fent addicts'. There are opioid addicts in general, but even the hardcore users are generally seeking heroin, not fentanyl.
People are _really_ scared of fentanyl...
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
Talking about OTFC lollipops? You can get those in the mail from China? I'm guessing these are disjoint cases.
> Dosage is the problem, mixing dry is not easy, hence the street deaths.
I feel like the bad rap it gets is mostly about dosage, ultimately it is the market at work despite the law, producing ever more potent and compact (concealable) fixes as customers demand. If caffeine were a controlled substance, people would buy it more often in the (hazardously potent) powdered form. When booze was prohibited, it was regularly distributed in 180/190 proof.
The demand is the part you can improve, the supply is the part you think you can solve.
[+] [-] nefitty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokr004|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pigo|8 years ago|reply
It ended for me when I got old enough to notice the kids at these places I was going to by my drugs, just to do my dirt and leave. The last straw was when I stumbled into a bedroom while trying to find a bathroom at a dealers house. I walked into a room with 6 or 7 kids under 10 years old wearing big bubble coats and gloves, all huddled together in the middle of the room trying to stay warm. It was winter, and it hadn't dawned on me that the house had no heat. I've never been able to forget how I'd been contributed to their situation, my actions rippled out to affect many people beyond myself. Relying on drugs started to feel like a very selfish, narcissistic way of life
[+] [-] stronglikedan|8 years ago|reply
> This stuff is a nightmare like you can't possibly understand without being there yourself
From someone who hasn't been there themselves, but just lost my best friend to fentanyl, I hope you stick with recovery. She was actually in a very nice recovery program, but managed to sneak a cell phone in. Point is, it only takes one bad decision that I hope you don't make.
[+] [-] microwavecamera|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinald|8 years ago|reply
So much so that first responders are suffering serious overdose from inhaling bags of it accidently.
More crazy was the fact it's for sale on the darknet markets for as little as $150/gram. Worldwide legal use is about 50g a year.
This is what prohibition does - inctentivizes strength per unit mass. It's much easier to import 1g of carfentanil than 10kg of heroin. And I think it will just get worse and worse.
[+] [-] CoffeeDregs|8 years ago|reply
Consider the mixing requirements of carfentanil: one insufficiently ground grain of the chemical is lethal. And the people making the end-product are amateurs.
One kilo from China was confiscated in Canada. Certainly a bit hyperbolic, but "According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough carfentanil to wipe out the entire population of the country[...]". Divide that by ten and it's still terrifying. Dump a small bag over NYC Times Square or Mumbai and you'd create mass casualties.
This isn't some crazy, Bethesda-managed super-bug or insecticide. It's a bog standard, synthetic opioid.
[+] [-] whipoodle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cylinder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|8 years ago|reply
That being said, it's my go-to tool for analgesia. It acts a lot faster than morphine, and wears off faster as well (which is a useful property in the event of an adverse reaction). Before we carried fentanyl, it would not be uncommon for some patient's pain to remain untouched by morphine. I've yet to have that happen with fentanyl.
Carrying fentanyl means the difference between "Let's get some pain medication in place before we manipulate your broken leg in order to splint it" vs "Morphine is gonna take 20 minutes to reach a meaningful therapeutic effect, and we don't have time for that, so just grit your teeth and we'll try to be quick".
[+] [-] loeg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cody8295|8 years ago|reply
Not sure where everyone here is from, but in Connecticut we've seen hundreds of people die from fentanyl overdoses in just the past few years.
In an overwhelming majority of the cases, they were sold what they thought was heroin.
Why should we keep forcing drug addicts to buy from dangerous and expensive dealers? Not only would legalizing heroin save millions of lives, it would bring in trillions of dollars in tax revenue
[+] [-] cuckcuckspruce|8 years ago|reply
My girlfriend, who has lupus and constant pain, was recently denied pain medication because the doctor was concerned that continuing to write prescriptions for opiates would cost him his license. So my girlfriend has been in excruciating, 9/10 pain for the last month because doctors are too concerned about over-prescribing because every soccer mom is suddenly concerned that responsible adults in pain are suddenly going to turn into opiate crazed monsters.
As much as addicts need help, the feeling of the general population is that it's better for someone in pain to suffer than for someone to get a safe, known, pure quantity of opiates without having a good enough reason.
[+] [-] vesche|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/mike_newall/opioid-c...
[+] [-] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl
[+] [-] JshWright|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbarn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildmusings|8 years ago|reply
So this oft-repeated mantra that the penal code cannot solve drug problems is frankly bs. I'm not suggesting that we should throw drug addicts in prison for a dozen years, but I'd have no problem letting a fentanyl dealer rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Maybe start sending commandos to kidnap cartel leaders from Mexico to bring them to the US to face charges, for trafficking drugs and for murder. Let's run sting operations with cops posing as drug-seeking addicts to catch doctors handing them out like candy.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwanem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbolt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|8 years ago|reply