The illegal trade in oxycontin, as everybody knows, spawned drug empires, turf wars, and dramatic TV shows. It was typically cleaner than heroin—at least black tar heroin—since oxy is made in laboratories by Purdue Pharma, and contains fewer corrosive additives than many mystery batches of home-cooked drugs.
Despite oxy’s smashing success on both markets—legal and illegal—Purdue responded to pressure in the US and Canada to make the drug more difficult to divert for off-label use with anti-counterfeit packaging, tracking features, and OxyNEO, a new pill design that supposedly makes the drug harder to crush for sniffing or injection.
In Canada, where OxyNEO is completely replacing oxy, doctors and First Nations leaders warned that switch could trigger a public-health crisis. From an article in February of 2012:
An Ontario First Nations leader says a catastrophe is looming with the decision to stop manufacturing the drug OxyContin.
Nishnawbe Aski Nation Chief Stan Beardy says thousands of residents of Ontario reserves are addicted to the drug, which is up to twice as strong as morphine. The organization, which represents 49 First Nation communities in northern Ontario, estimates close to half its members are addicted to OxyContin…
For chronic OxyContin users to stop, they will either have to replace it with something else or go into withdrawal, Juurlink said…
“You respond to an epidemic as if it were an epidemic,” [Dr. Claudette Chase] said. “When it was H1N1, there were extra nurses, there were flu clinics all over the north — help.”
So what’s filling the void? Some say heroin is making a comeback and, more worryingly, doctors are beginning to see signs of krokodil, a cheap injectable opiate recipe from Siberia (made by cooking codeine with gasoline, ammonia, iodine and/or red phosphorus, and more) that got its name from what it does to some users’ skin: severe tissue damage, gangrene, and bleeding ulcers, which sometimes require amputations. (That link goes to a Russian medical site you might not want to visit before lunch.)
Krokodil is turning up in the US and in Canada:
“Addicts, being as creative as they are, didn’t miss a beat,” Tom says. “Within weeks of Oxy being gone there was already stuff online about how to make these chemicals at home.”
… Rhonda Thompson, the StreetWorks co-ordinator at AIDS Niagara, is closely following rumours of the arrival of a “homemade heroin” imported from Russia called Krokodil that can cause brain damage and gangrene. “It’s really the Wild West out there now,” Thompson says. “We’ve never seen it like this.”
For the millionth time: People are going to use drugs—at this point, that’s simply irrefutable—and the harder the forces of prohibition work to keep the safer drugs away, the more dangerous the alternatives will become.
It’s no different from alcohol prohibition, which turned us from a nation of beer and wine drinkers into a nation of liquor drinkers. During those years, tainted liquor killed an average 1,000 Americans a year. All because some legislators decided booze was too dangerous for public consumption*. Drugs can be dangerous. Prohibition makes them more dangerous.
But you knew that already.
* Have you heard about how the US government intentionally poisoned liquor—purposefully murdering people—to scare citizens away from illicit drinking in the 1920s? It’s a strange, sad footnote in prohibition history.
