Out in my section of the Philly suburbs, we read news like this about our 62 year old neighbor getting arrested for selling heroin after getting hooked because a doctor prescribed them post-operative opioids despite her history of alcoholism. Just another day in my hood. In the city, however, this week has been historic.
Last weekend’s frightening and widely reported string of overdoses in Philadelphia — nine deaths in 36 hours, according to police — was just part of what officials suspect was a devastating five days that left 35 people dead.
It started Dec. 1, when 12 people died between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. “We have never seen that before,” said Sam P. Gulino, the city’s chief medical examiner.
Then came four more deaths last Friday, seven on Saturday, nine on Sunday, and three on Monday. The total could still rise, as deaths that initially appeared natural are investigated for drug links.
The overdoses may have resulted from heroin that was cut with more powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. But police said there were other possibilities, such as the appearance of heroin that was more pure than the users were accustomed to.
Here’s the general state of the news in the Philly metro area:
HEROIN CRISIS
-
Havertown couple who lost fathers to heroin now mourn friend who OD’d in Kensington
-
New Jersey’s overdose nightmare hits a new peak
-
Main Line woman, 62, gets jail for selling heroin out of home
-
Jury convicts Philly doctor who ran pill mills
-
S. Jersey mom pleads guilty in baby’s methadone death
One of the reasons so many people support the idea of building a wall between our country and Mexico is because most of the heroin in this country is now coming from Mexico. The problem is bigger than that, though. Most people don’t use heroin until they are already addicted to opioids, and far too many people get addicted to opioids because a doctor tells them to take opioids without doing enough to explore the patient’s personal and family history of addiction or limiting how many pills they prescribe or doing sufficient aftercare to keep on top of emerging dependency.
Then there’s the problem that we may be having in Philly right now where people are buying what they think is heroin but may in fact be something stronger, or perhaps it’s just really pure heroin or a combination of heroin and fentanyl, or even opioids and non-opioids. A lot of fatal heroin overdoses turn out to be cases where numerous different drugs were taken at the same time, either intentionally or unintentionally.
It’s killing a lot of people, and cutting off the supply of heroin from Mexico (even if this were possible) wouldn’t solve it. In fact, heroin use spiked when it got harder to get Oxy-Contins and other prescription opioids. The problem is people are addicted and they’ll use whatever they can get.
We can try a lot of different things, but the two most productive are preventing people from getting addicted in the first place and then treating people who have become addicted. We have a lot of work to do on both of those fronts.
I’m not going to just straight up call bullshit but I seriously doubt many people want to “build a wall” between us and Mexico because they want to keep out Mexican heroin as opposed to Mexicans, period. Any polling cite?
The character of drug crises (and drug hysteria) in the US for the past 50 years has had to do with the side-effects of the imperial war that the US is involved in. The Afghanistan War has dumped cheap opium on the world just as the Vietnam War did. And the Reagan Latin American wars savaged the cities with cocaine and crack cocaine.
What has to happen is dealing with a nation of addicts to one thing or another. The social pattern of addiction allows people to jump from one focus of addiction to another. It is not just opioids that are destroying families and lives, but more socially acceptable forms of addiction, like certain forms of co-dependence-inducing religions, politics, or work-styles (called workaholism).
If you haven’t seen W and Trump as essentially having one sort of addiction, you’ve not understood how pervasive the social form is before it manifests itself as a dependence of a substance.
Neither W nor Trump drink, according to their publicists. And neither shook their previous habits with journeys that dealt with the underlying addictive behavior.
We don’t prevent and we don’t treat because we don’t see that we have institutions who style is to create addicts–and then the substance is incidental. People laid off or effectively excommunicated from those addiction-creating institutions or those social relationships are the most vulnerable to substance abuse. And the most vulnerable to transmitting addiction through the style of their families.
Who gets trapped and who doesn’t still is a random process of many factors but social relations and cultural norms do affect the person. And of late, the health care system has become one of those addict-producing institutions by dispensing pills instead of health care.
The human condition. War, violence, hatred, and despair. I suppose the delusion of religious belief helps some, but these pathetic people will suffer regardless.
The failures of those who allegedly love these people are as sad as the failures of those who OD. Those who profit from this misery are like the merchants of death selling weapons and sowing social discord.
Treatment is useless. Love them instead.
Who allowed big pharma to become the number one pusher? They’ve gotta love the street value of their own prescription drugs.
As usual, it’s almost always the unregulated nature of the uncontrolled substances that kills users. Heroin too pure, mixed with god knows what else, etc. If we treated this like the public health crisis that it really is we’d be giving addicts safe heroin or alternatives (not methadone). And how about a real life / real reason to live so that fewer feel the need to escape in the first place?
But there’s too much money to be made by the rich guys running our country for us to treat each other like human beings. Can’t have compassion and understanding happening, might slow down the gravy train.
Our government seems hell-bent on doing pretty much the worst thing for its citizenry 100% of the time. Those tasked with running our infrastructure shouldn’t be allowed to hold a knife to our throats – how did it come to this?
No, not pure heroin. Fentanyl, which is a manufactured opioid about 100x as strong as heroin, and is much cheaper. It is issued in pills and the amounts in the pills are unknown. Addicts put the needle in, depress the plunger, and are often dead or incapacitated before removing the needle. In some cases, people seek this stuff out, because they want “the high-quality strong high”. But it’s too strong.
Addiction is much more complicated than “escape”.
Yes. For instsnce drugs can make you feel really fucking good even if you’ve no tragic “reason” to take them.
There are huge problems in our prescription methods:
This is what would have been written about the 100% black neighborhood I and others grew up in, in the 70s, with two main differences. All of the actors were black, and no one gave a damn.
Rather than see this as a public health issue, as society is starting to do now, back then it fell under Nixon’s “war on drugs” which we long suspected but now know, thanks to a confession by Ehrlichmann, that it was just a cover to the real purpose, which was to undermine and destroy the rising militancy in black community resulting from the civil rights movement.
But I’m glad to see that there is sympathy, and maybe this generation of white folk on heroin have a chance at not being lost to drugs and their criminalization, as many blacks were.