In what is the biggest “I can’t believe we have to prove this academically” story of the year, three Johns Hopkins researchers showed that 66-92% of people who got a pile of prescription opioids, didn’t use them all. Not only did 67-92% of patients report unused opioids (92!) but up to 71% of opioids obtained even by surgical patients weren’t consumed. This review of 6 different studies drives home the need for much of the mainstream addiction/treatment community to modernize their thinking when it comes to harm reduction and human behavior. Unsurprisingly, 3 out of 4 people didn’t secure their opioids properly (yes, the FDA legitimately believes that people should store pain pills in locked containers). Even more unsurprisingly, no more than 9% of patients in any study “disposed” of their drugs “properly.” What does disposing drugs properly look like? This:
Tag Archives: fentanyl
Prohibition, Jake Leg, Methanol & Jamaican Ginger: Adulterants 100 Years Ago
Report by Terry Gotham
Picture New York City, Christmas Eve night, Bellevue Hospital. 60 people hospitalized over the course of the evening, with another 23 hospitalized from drug poisoning within the next 48 hours. With 8 dead by the time the smoke cleared, it sounds like a news story you’ve heard every week this year coming out of some distraught community in Ohio or Connecticut or Georgia? It’s got to be a bad batch of fentanyl? Maybe some spiked heroin or morphine that no one saw coming. It was actually alcohol and the year was 1926. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927:
“Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.” Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?”
~The Chemist’s War (Deborah Blum, 2/19/2010 Slate.com)
Returning to the History of Addiction series this week, I’m going to be exploring one of the lesser known eras of adulterated drugs in world history, Prohibition-era America. While it’s widely known that alcohol was still available during Prohibition, we have a romanticized idea of what this was like, with the speakeasy culture, Al Capone and flappers dominating our vision of it. The reality of bathtub gin and moonshine had some dangerous facets that we don’t talk about, that even continue to this day in places like Russia. This ties directly to the continued prohibition/unaffordable nature of scheduled substances.
Cocaine, “Narcan Resistance” & the Grey Death: Fentalogs in 2017
By Terry Gotham
If you follow the news about adulterants in the recreational drug supply, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the news breaking every day. Last Friday, the medical examiner’s office of Cuyahoga County in Ohio disclosed that they’re on track to obliterate their overdose record from last year. With 187 heroin/fentanyl overdoses on the books since Jan 1st, if things don’t change substantially, they’ll blow past their 2016 total of 660 overdose deaths by over a hundred people. If you missed my last article, multiple types of fentanyl are now being found in overdoses & drug seizures. And I don’t mean one or two. 24 fentanyl analogs & metabolites were found in blood/urine in Ohio overdoses alone:
1-3-Methylfentanyl; 4ANPP; Acetyl Fentanyl; Acetyl Fentanyl 4-Methylphenethyl; Acryl fentanyl; AH7921; Alfentanil; Beta-Hydroxythiofentanyl; Butyryl Fentanyl/Isobutyryl Fentanyl; Butyryl Norfentanyl; Carfentanil; Despropionyl Para-Fluorofentanyl; Fentanyl; Furanyl Fentanyl; Furanyl Norfentanyl; Norfentanyl; ParaFluorobutyryl/4-Fluoroisobutyrylfentanyl; Para-Methoxyfentanyl; Remifentanil; Remifentanil Metabolite; Sufentanil; U-47700; Valeryl Fentanyl
~Research Update on Fentayl Outbreaks in the Dayton, OH Area, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, 4/28/17