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Originally Posted by Bighurt52235
Hey all right! Id be interested in hearing more about the opioids and fentanyls.
Its pretty complicated. Apparently big pharma decided that Rx opioids were a cash cow, and they were right. They got a few MD mouthpieces to poo-poo the addictive dangers of the drugs and everyone believed them, to the point that millions of scripts were written. Many by doctors who don't have the time anymore to sit down with their patients and really understand their problems (thanks managed care).
Well they are highly and inexorably addictive, and with the additions of the benzo's, ambiens, antidepressants, etc, these folks started to treat themselves, and have been dying in droves. These aren't street addicts, they are moms and grammas, dying from drugs they get at Wal-greens.
Fentanyl is a highly potent pain killer, great for chronic pain in the patch form, and anesthetic induction. We use to only see deaths with diverted patchs, people chewing them and such. But the chemists in China figured out how to make them in 5 gallon bucketfuls and sent it on over to Mexico and then north. This is a drug used by those street addicts, and when added to heroin to get an extra kick, has been killing them off now in droves, much higher than the usual high mortality of IV heroin users. Plus they are figuring out how to make analogs, staying ahead of state and national laws, like carfentanyl. You can follow the death spikes as the shipments get sent down the interstates and dropped off.
Plus on the black internet, or whatever it is you call it, you can get exotic benzodiazepams like etizolam, or novel opioids like U7700 sent right to your house by the USPS. You can even buy unwashed bulk poppy seeds off Amazon, which can have passive coatings of morphine, up to 2.7 gm/kg in some cases (I am a co-author on a recent paper showing this elegant study, so it wouldn't be too hard to find out who I am, but I am in the paper all the time anyway).
So it is a problem like I have never seen before in 25 years of doing this, eye popping in the numbers. The cases are boring as far as findings, but that's just me being selfish, what is sad is every one of these cases leaves a trail of lifelong tragedy behind for families.