Disappearance of flakka, synthetic drug that pushed South Florida to the brink | Hacker News Reader

Disappearance of flakka, synthetic drug that pushed South Florida to the brink

washingtonpost.com

47 pointsfraXis31 comments

> Tasers didn’t always work on flakka users. And talking them down never did. Deputies had to wrestle users to the ground, punching them to gain control, Tianga said. The official protocol was to attack and attack hard. It looked brutal.

I don't really understand this. How can tazers not work? It's a physiological reaction, right? Electric current prevents your nerves from working. How is punching more effective than that?

This is a human interest piece. We have no need for science here. Another example: "The chemical attached itself to brain pathways with such ferocity..."

You see, this chemical was downright ferocious. We have anthropomorphized it past the point of science being relevant.

There's two levels of tasers, I think. The older and weaker kind causes a lot of pain, but doesn't totally disable your muscles. You can resist if you have a high pain tolerance or are too high to feel it.

There's a newer and stronger kind that's actually impossible to resist, but it might be less widespread, and it's also somewhat controversial because it's more dangerous and potentially deadly for people with heart problems.

Plus if it's a taser, where the probes are shot out, you can potentially be "stunning" a small area of the body, depending on how far away they were shot from. The video in the article shows a dude impaled on a fence for 30 minutes high on this stuff. If that doesn't show you the kind of pain tolerance you get...

It's bullshit. Cops (and the media) will repeat and exaggerate the most preposterous nonsense they can find if the subject is drugs. Doubly so if it lets them excuse things they were going to do anyway, like beat the shit out of a black dude for giving them lip. What this article is describing is such a typical moral panic that it should be in a museum somewhere as a type specimen.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/jenkem.asp

Many TASER darts don't end up embedding properly in the skin, or come out on their own. Patients with excited delirium (a term that may or may not represent a distinct clinical phenomenon from stimulant-induced psychosis, and which may or may not have been invented by people trying to explain deaths occurring in custody) have been known to be "resistant" to the effects of conducted electrical weapons. It's tough to say whether they were functioning as intended in those circumstances or whether people are just ignoring the stimulus in the face of very powerful competing internal or external stimuli, amped up by really powerful and often dissociative stimulants.

I feel for the people that get called to deal with these people. In the ED I have access to drugs that can bring people down fairly quickly if necessary, and teams of people who are used to physically restraining people without hurting them. It doesn't always work the way we want it to, but we can generally get people safe without hurting them. Cops don't have that training or context, and I have a lot of admiration for the ones that can (and many do) deal with stuff like this without hurting people on a daily basis.

Someday we'll just have ketamine blow darts. (Seriously. Maybe.)

I've often wondered why we don't have 'tranquillizer dart guns' already. Given the issues with Tazers, how much worse can the dart gun be? Has it ever been studied?

> Given the issues with Tazers, how much worse can the dart gun be?

Let me change into my swim trunks, and we can go slip'n'sliding down this slope together.

Dosing problems: it's a fine line between sedating and killing and it's dependent on many factors you can't control for, especially from a distance. Sedatives can also react dangerously to drugs the person may already have in their system.

The media and law enforcement have been so misleadingly sensational in the past about every drug that it is hard to take them seriously anymore. Flakka sure sounds pretty bad but who could know? After watching Reefer Madness you realize that you can't trust a thing that comes out of their mouths. I was systematically filled with all sorts of non truths about drugs as a kid in the DARE program. You don't forget being misled like that when you are so impressionable.

>you can't trust a thing that comes out of their mouths. I was systematically filled with all sorts of non truths about drugs as a kid in the DARE program.

while we didn't have drugs, i remember that 2 big scares adults were filling us with were proved by experience through like 4-6th grade to be fundamentally untrue, ie. even after 40 years in the ground the WWII munitions without detonators don't accidentally explode just by virtue of disturbing/moving them (it is actually some effort to make them explode), and your palms don't become hairy.

Oh, I always assumed the WWII munitions caution in eg Germany was (a) general good gun culture (as an extension of `always treat weapons like they are loaded') and (b) a relict of earlier times just after the war.

No, the WWII munitions caution in Germany is because some of them are still deadly: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/routine-disposal...

The trouble with WWII munitions buried in the ground is that a lot of them do still have detonators and after being buried in the ground for a few decades you have no idea what state they're in - they can be rather rather unstable. Some of the bombs were also designed to detonate when moved in order to kill bomb disposal workers.

It is not about discussing on technical details - we're all adults and nobody of us is going to touch that stuff in any condition :) The post was about a junior midschooler - me more than 30 years ago - who during that time had with friends found and "responsibly recycled" (in the forest outside of the city :) a range of various WWII munitions without any issues (while adults at the military installations and Navy base in the city had pretty regularly various mishaps, sometimes deadly, with their weapons systems and hardware) Today, if i had a son, i'd be trying to scare him away from the stuff the same way (or even stronger as the same way didn't work on us back then), and i'd tear him a new one if i caught him with a hand grenade in the backpack :). It is the circle of life i guess...

Razors in Halloween candy.

1. WWII ended 71 years ago, not 40.

2. WWII munitions still kill people. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-ma...

3. However you feel about them morally, illegal drugs are extremely dangerous. 44k people die from drug overdoses every year. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-ma...

>However you feel about them morally, illegal drugs are extremely dangerous. 44k people die from drug overdoses every year.

Most danger in drug business and drug use stems from the illegality of drugs, and isn't intrinsic to the drugs itself. For example, even basic consumer protection laws and quality control is disabled for drugs because of the illegality of the drugs. So you have heroin mixed with fentanyl while most people have no idea that it is there and what such mix is capable of (was mentioned recently as one of the killers in current wave of overdoses in US).

flakka - alpha-PVP is a cathinone that has a fairly low dose and is a pretty strong stimulant and often is sold represented as ecstasy/mdma/molly. I feel there is a lot of sensationalizing in the media about it, but it's real danger is the amount of times it's being misrepresented which poses a real danger due to people taking incorrect doses.

This is a pretty bad article, with little science and lots of tabloid qualities.

Like I suspect many other readers, I had never heard of alpha-PVP, though.

Obligatory Erowid link: https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/a-pvp/a-pvp.shtml

"Euphoric Stimulant" ... "Its dose, effects, and duration are similar to those of MDPV. Chemically, it is a synthetic cathinone, and first became popular in the US in 2013."

Guess the test was successful and the CIA^h^h^hcompany moved on :-)

I am constantly amazed by the way in which people will try anything to get high. Given the ability to compound pretty much anything with anything you know its going to result in a bunch of these sorts of experiences. I guess its how you A/B test drug compounds when you aren't looking for FDA approval.

In my younger days I had occasion to spend four months in a county jail. The more regular inmates would go to a medical appointment, and no matter what pills they were issued, on returning, he and a couple friends would get together, one would tell a guard they had a headache and get two aspirin. They would then grind up all and snort it. I never saw the point or the wisdom, but they'd even snort antibiotics.

WOW

>I am constantly amazed by the way in which people will try anything to get high.

Research "jenkem". Doubt anything will ever top it. Proof even amazement is finite.

Wikipedia and snopes say it's a hoax.

That's because it paints black people in a negative light. Search for videos of its use, they're out there.

Pasting. 4chan did not have a hard time convincing a lot of people to spread toothpaste on their nipples.

Explanation: there are tons of less-conspicuous synthetics the same factories could be pumping out instead. Lots of publicity & graphic anecdotes leads to pressure which isn't good for anyone.

"flakka was just one of hundreds of lab-made substances so new that governments did not have time to identify and ban them.

Hall, at Nova Southeastern University, made sure to bring up the China connection in media interviews last summer...

... When they returned, China announced that back on Oct. 1 it had banned 116 different synthetic drugs, including fentanyl and flakka"

Dangers of Flakka are related largely to the prohibition of substances such as MDMA creates a black market where the desired drug is in fact adulterated or substituted with drugs such as alpha-PVP (flakka) or other cathinones, piperazines, etc...

Development of synthetic drugs would not happen if all drugs were legal and available cheap. If available and cheap, then people would get their high from the "known" drugs.

> would not happen

Wishful thinking. And there might be synthetic drugs that aren't "bad."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com