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Comment by onetwotree | Hacker News Reader

The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait. Fentanyl is pretty well known amongst opiate addicts (and has been for a while). Everyone knows it's dangerous, including dealers, who like to avoid killing their customers and catching murder charges, believe it or not.

Aside from that and a bit of gateway drug BS towards the beginning, this is a solid and somewhat moving, if long, account of the standard Heroin story, and is more or less the same as the ones I hear from fellow recovering addicts all the time.

Key features, so you can avoid the longread:

* Insurance refusing to pay for treatment

* Parents being forced to get their kids arrested to protect them (and the plan failing)

* Relapse, relapse, and more relapse despite full knowledge of the consequences and a strong desire not to relapse.

* Terror of being dope sick

* Doing stuff you don't want to do to avoid being dope sick

* Death

View on HN

Hate to break it to you but your dealer does not give a fuck about your health. It is extremely difficult for the police to find the dealer of a dead person, and then very difficult to prove the elements needed for a murder charge.

The police do not even try to find dealers of drug deaths, unless the victim is a celebrity.

Furthermore, every heroin dealer knows that each of their clients is likely to go into a downward spiral and become a liability. Thus, they treat their clients as expendable.

I don't know where you're from, but my personal experience in my area (Maryland, USA) is that everything in your post is incorrect.

I'm from New York and now living in Austin, TX. I'll add that from my experience I agree that what he said was incorrect.

I can also concur. My dealer cares more about me than anyone except my mom.

While it isn't yet the law everywhere in the US, it's not just celebrities whose dealers get charged with murder for supplying drugs that kill via overdose.[1]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/her-fiance-gave-her-...

Conversely, dealers that have customers who OD will go up in demand, because other addicts will seek them out for their "stronger" drugs.

True - although one often prefers the OD not be fatal.

There are also plenty of incompetent dealers like the one here who mixed up his crack and fentanyl stash causing 39 ODs http://vancouversun.com/news/crime/36-drug-overdoses-in-one-...

What's interesting about dealers (at least the very low level ones that addicts typically buy directly from) is that they're often selling dope to support their own habits or to get ahead in a world they see as being stacked against them.

Thus, many of these people are not ruthless sociopaths, and recognize on some level that what they're doing is wrong. Through a great deal of rationalization, they are often able to convince themselves that it's morally OK.

These people would prefer not to have to bring murder into line with their already quite dissonant mental schema.

This is my experience talking to current and former dealers, mostly as part of my work with recovering addicts - I've had dealers help me track down relapsed sponsees, for instance, with very little convincing.

Couldn't agree more with the characterization of this article as sensationalist. Also, why post this to a forum such as Hacker News? If I wanted to read "news" of this nature, I'd go to Fox or Yahoo!

When the article is less sensationalist, HN often expresses an interest in stories about drug addiction.

I can see a couple of reasons for this.

First, there seems to be a prevailing view here is that the war on drugs is an abject failure.

Furthermore, I believe addiction gets attention here as a fascinating scientific puzzle, whose questions and answers are deeply involved with philosophical issues such as free will and the nature of desire.

This is probably why the article made it as far up as it did on HN.

The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait.

Huh? That's the exact drug that killed the person in the story. It's made quite clear:

Lucas County chief toxicologist Robert Forney and his staff meticulously screened DJ’s blood for drugs. Forney’s team didn’t find any heroin.

What they did discover was a lethal dose of fentanyl.

It's not a secret nor hidden. It's well known and something people want to avoid. Users don't intentionally take a dose dozens of times higher than helpful.

Blaming it on fentanyl is a red herring. The real issue is mislabeling. If people sold heroin instead of codeine or Tylenol, we'd see the same problem.

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