Serving All Your Heroin Needs

It really sucks to hear of my friends from highschool are doing 'MDMA' without waiting long enough to not do brain damage to themselves. Not to mention, they're sourcing these drugs at festivals and are probably instead taking synthetic cathinones. It pains me to think that most of my friends don't reagent test their blotter, and will take 4 tabs of 'acid' without thinking that it actually is probably 2C-E and they could die from it. It bothers me that people have parents that will drug test them, so they're smoking JWH-017 and irreversibly fucking their brains up because they don't know any better.

Those in the know rely on sites like wikipedia, reddit, and erowid to get our drug information. Those that are not in the know rely on their 5th grade DARE education which they've entirely rejected after realizing weed isn't deadly, and word of mouth from other not in the know drug users that are obviously biased towards drugs not being harmful.

So in summary, yes, I 100% agree with you. I've many friends that are on heroin, a few that have escaped it, and a few that I know won't.

I have nothing to say besides that it's super fucked up and I'm glad I learned about erowid before I had the opportunity to do any drugs.

Well I tried it, and boy did I like it. Slowly, over time, I ran the gamut of different strength pharmaceuticals, administered orally, intranasally, and even rectally.

Eventually, you develop a physical addiction. One day, you can't afford the $40 for an 80mg oxycontin that you need to get well, and you're staring down the barrel of a long night of withdrawals. But a small bag of heroin might cost $10 and last you a couple of days. And so it goes.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is how some define insanity.

Also, if these gangs are non-violent and their custom are non-violent, isn't that preferable to the kind of raw violence that is seen with other Mexican cartels?

From the article:

> "the victims — mostly white, well-off and often young"

> "A result has been a rising sea level of prescription painkillers that continues today, of opioids such as Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin. Sales of these drugs quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. Addiction followed. And this has given new life to heroin, which had been declining in popularity since the early 1980s."

I think your point is valid but not relevant to the article. It's not claiming the things you said.

Also Rat Park is highly controversial and has failed to be reproduced and, obviously, is a rat study, so I wouldn't really rely on it as a robust narrative for what's going on with drug addiction in humans.

Bupenorpine is here. We have a problem with opioid addiction. Doctors should be able to prescribe the drug without going to a class, and then limit the number of patients who can take it.

The drug is expensive. Even the generic version is expensive?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something is not right with the way this drug is regulated, and manipulated?

Some of my details are fuzzy, but the original manufacturer of this drug fought hard to extend the patent.

When that failed, they scared Physicians into thinking your patients will abuse the drug if you don't use our expensive strips.

Antidotal, but I can honestly state it's a hard drug to abuse. It's not a fun drug. It is addictive though. This bit about having a low affinity for addiction might be true for some individuals. The people I know on it have a hard time getting off the drug.

I think people would be surprised to find out just how many people are on this drug; they shouldn't be nickeled and dimed by the cost of the drug, and endless expensive office visits.

(The average patient has usually suffered in life. Why give them a addictive drug and let doctors use the 100 patient limit as a excuse/incentive to raise the cost of mandatory office visits? The office visit is essentially--ok--you showed up and payed me--I will refill your addictive medication.)

So it is government policy here to consider paracetamol a dangerous, lethal drug. It's far easier to seriously harm yourself with than codeine. But of course, codeine is far more likely to lead to addiction.

That they then considered it a good idea to - when legalising the sale of painkillers that includes codeine - require mixing the highly addictive but relatively safe drug with ones that are far more lethal at low doses (paracetamol or ibuprofen) says everything about how drug policy is set based a core view based on seeing drug addicts as immoral, and drug abuse as an evil in itself where it's apparently ok to harm the addicts or let them die if it reduces addiction.

You're right. It's shameful.

Speaking as an ex-user, opioids are a horrendous class of drug. They steal your motivations, your desires, your dreams—your very soul. They turn you into a shell of your former self.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that opioids are gentle and harmless just because they are technically non-toxic.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_depen...

Your solution isn't so simple when you provide pure heroin to an addict who gets behind the wheel and kills a family coming home from dinner. The devil, as always, is in the details - maybe some aspects of that sort of plan will work in a small country like Switzerlend, but in somewhere like the US, there are just too many practical barriers to a plan like that working. Hell, we can't control our drunk driving problem - there is just no way free heroin for addicts is going to work at scale.

Balloons are typically sold in .1 gram quantities, with lower quality heroin. I do recall buying balloons wet with saliva, but only some of the time. An acquaintance told me that it used to be standard practice for dealers to use young Mexican children to sell dope by this method on foot in Skid Row, but that the city had really cleaned up downtown. With the popularization of cell phones, the delivery system described in this article became the standard.

Higher quality heroin was usually sold by the half gram. Instead of being in a balloon, it would be wrapped in plastic torn from a grocery bag, tied off or melted to close and seal it. I don't recall these ever being spat out. They would often hide it under the hood in their beat up trucks or minivans.

I never got customer satisfaction surveys from dealers. I'm sure that the dealers had customers or friends from whom they got feedback on their product, but I was never one of them.

A dealer's number was quite a hot commodity. You couldn't just call the dealer up and expect to get served—you had to be introduced. And the dealer would often throw in a free bag if you bought x number of them.

The result of this was that one user would have the dealer's contact information, and would make a buying run for other users who didn't. If they bought enough they could keep the free bag, or otherwise pinch off the bags that they acquired for the other users.

Once swallowed, a pat-down search finds nothing, you wait until the police leave, then stick your fingers down your throat and throw up the bags. Here they are ususally wrapped with cling-film (saran wrap) and as long as you don't wait too long, stomach acid won't be a problem.

You can't help people that are already addicted by persecuting dealers more, but you can make it more safe for them in lots of ways (harm reduction). Cutting out the dealers might even help getting less people addicted.

If I had a loved one addicted to heroin I would not like them to spend time in prison. I'd want them to receive treatment.

Targetting heroin use as a public health problem means you reduce the impact that drug use has on society, and you save money.