I had him at 15 so we grew together. What is fentanyl and how did he get it? Twelve died. Less than a month later, this mysterious drug — largely unheard of by most Americans — killed the musician Prince and burst on to the national consciousness. Fentanyl, it turned out, was the latest and most disturbing twist in the epidemic of opioid addiction that has crept across the United States over the past two decades, claiming close to , lives.
The epidemic of addiction to prescription opioid painkillers , a largely American crisis, sprung from the power of big pharmaceutical companies to influence medical policy. Even though it was several times stronger than anything else on the market, and bore a close relation to heroin, Purdue claimed that OxyContin was not addictive and was safe to treat even relatively minor pain. That turned out not to be true. It spawned an epidemic that in the US claims more lives than guns, cutting across class, race and geographic lines as it ravages communities from white rural Appalachia and Mormon Utah to black and Latino neighbourhoods of southern California.
The prescription of OxyContin and other painkillers with the same active drug, oxycodone, became so widespread that entire families were hooked. Labourers who wrenched a back at work, teenagers with a sports injury, just about anyone who said they were in pain was put on oxycodone. They made millions of dollars a year. By the time the epidemic finally started to get public and political attention, more than two million Americans were addicted to opioid painkillers.
Those who finally managed to shake off the drug often did so only at the cost of jobs, relationships and homes. After the government finally began to curb painkiller prescriptions, making it more difficult for addicts to find the pills and forcing up black market prices, Mexican drug cartels stepped in to flood the US with the real thing — heroin — in quantities not seen since the s. But, as profitable as the resurgence of heroin is to the cartels, it is labour intensive and time-consuming to grow and harvest poppies.
Then there are the risks of smuggling bulky quantities of the drug into the US. The ingredients for fentanyl, on the other hand, are openly available in China and easily imported ready for manufacture. The drug was originally concocted in Belgium in , developed as an anaesthetic.
It is so much more powerful than heroin that only small quantities are needed to reach the same high. That has meant easy profits for the cartels. At first the cartels laced the fentanyl into heroin to increase the potency of low-quality supplies. But prescription opioid painkillers command a premium because they are trusted and have become increasingly difficult to find on the black market.
So cartels moved into pressing counterfeit tablets. But making pills with a drug like fentanyl is a fairly exact science. A few grammes too much can kill. One of our labs had a dime next to 0. Potentially that could kill you. The authorities liken buying black market pills to playing Russian roulette. After Prince died, investigators found pills labelled as prescription hydrocodone, but made of fentanyl, in his home, suggesting he bought them on the black market.
The police concluded he died from a fatal mix of the opioid and benzodiazepine pills, a particularly dangerous combination. It is likely Prince did not even know he was taking fentanyl.
Recommended Could psychedelics be prescribed for depression? More about psychedelic drugs Ayahuasca Mental Health. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Where does it come from? Is it the same thing as ayahuasca? Does it really naturally exist in your brain? What does it feel like? How is it consumed? How long does it take to work? How long does it last?
Does it cause any side effects? Are there any risks? Any other interactions to know about? Is it addictive? What about tolerance? Harm reduction tips. The bottom line. DMT was later found to be naturally occurring in the human body, found in large quantities in the cerebral spinal fluid.
The pineal gland is a weird organ. During the daytime it produces serotonin, which we know keeps us happy and buoyant, and at night the serotonin gets converted into melatonin.
Why would we have an extremely strong psychedelic substance being produced in our brains? What is its ordinary function in humans? The initial speculation thought that it was perhaps responsible for psychosis, in that people with schizophrenia may have an overproduction of DMT. So that idea was abandoned. Shortly after that, the research with humans stopped because psychedelics became illegal. Recently, research has begun again. About 50 to 60 participants were given high doses and they reported some extremely bizarre phenomena.
Approximately half of the participants on a high dose reported being in other worlds and encountering sentient entities, i. The experience was so powerful that participants were convinced of the reality of experience with these other beings. It poses some very interesting questions. The beings themselves took on various forms.
Rick Strassman also speculated that the DMT experience had a lot of similarities with what we know about the near death experience. The near death experience is a type of experience syndrome, whereby people perceive themselves to be near death or in danger of dying.
Typical experiences include the sensation of leaving the body, entering into a tunnel of light and flashbacks of their lives.
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