There Are No More Heroin Overdoses

Report by Terry Gotham

Enough people sent me the NY Times article about Fentanyl overtaking Heroin that I had to say something about it. If you’ve not seen it and the plurality of think pieces surrounding it, the only piece you need to read on it is by the person who runs The Dose Makes The Poison, Kevin Shanks. He’s been one of my go to sources on novel psychoactive substances for years now, and he, along with a handful of others have been yelling as loud as they possibly can. The point he raised almost a month ago is one I’ve not seen a single mainstream medical journal begin to grapple with in any kind of meaningful way.

As I’ve said for a while now, this ain’t your father’s heroin. At what point do we stop calling it heroin and refer to the standard “heroin” product on the street as fentanyl?
~Kevin Shanks (9/2/17)

While drug overdose deaths are up 22% from 2015 alone, fentanyl deaths doubled. That’s not including the fact that cases are severely under counted, given the volume of fentanyl analogs in circulation right now. I previously reported on the report coming out of Ohio with 24 analogs & active metabolites being identified. That, combined with the increased cost in testing for analog substances, we’ve arrived at a place where medical staff have no idea how many chemicals they’re not testing for. How many rural communities are testing for acrylfentanyl or butyrylfentanyl? How many rural communities are seeing analogs that we don’t even know about yet? Communities along the migratory arc that fentanyl takes from China into Western Canada or Mexico into border communities, that see these substances first, are they still getting the same analogs, or is there already something new? At this point, it’s likely the unknown unknowns are already on the ground and slowly being consumed for the first time.

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Fentanyl, Toxicology, Healthcare Costs & Estate Planning: Strange Bedfellows in 2017

Report by Terry Gotham

This week’s edition of “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is a look at a couple of different secondary effects of the opiate overdose epidemic that I don’t think are being given enough scrutiny. With Donald John Trump Jr. declaring a “state of emergency” but not promising any tangible resources, I thought it would be best to do the opposite. Dive into the nitty-gritty of two facets of the opiate epidemic that are so far out into the policy weeds that our president has probably never thought about them.

One of the more complex problems caused by the flood of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs is the difficulty in investigating overdose deaths. This is somehwat related to the explosion in complexity that ER staff are forced to cope with when it comes to determining what someone is overdosing from exactly. I spoke about this a while ago but only touched on the difficulties Emergency Rooms and hospitals are dealing with while working with the patient in vivo. But the work doesn’t stop there.

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Do No Harm: Initial Prescription Details Influence Chance of Opiate Dependence

By Terry Gotham

One of the biggest problems with writing about the War on Drugs is the almost exclusive focus on problems. There’s this myth that drug use is a combination between a ratchet & Russian roulette. It’s going to keep getting worse, and it gets harder and harder to “not be addicted” the longer you do it. This continued narrative is believed widely (just ask your family at Easter dinner), while being only lightly supported with evidence. Harm reduction & physician/client education is surprisingly effective at mitigating a lot of the factors that contribute to this “it’s probably going to kill you” problem, but outside of needle exchange/safe injection sites & drinking water while partying, complex harm reduction ideas rarely make it into non-academic circles. So, I’m going to start talking about constructive, modern ideas and research that have been either theorized, published or put into practice, about how to fight this deluge.

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