Brian is a rock musician who moved to Seattle about a year ago from a small town in the South. “I was straight-edge for a long time growing up, and there wasn’t much down there,” he says. “Just small-town potheads and some guys doing meth in a shack somewhere.” His most intense drug experiences involved beer and marijuana.
Within months of moving, he was in a popular underground band. John, also in the band and one of Brian’s roommates, brought a lot of drugs into their place—pot, pills, cocaine.
“One night, we’re hanging out and—typical John—he brings out this white powder and asks me if I want some,” Brian remembers. “He doesn’t tell me what it is at all. We’re freebasing—he pours the powder on some foil, gives me the straw, and lights it up. And I’m like, ‘This is fucking awesome!’ I just felt so good, so light, just so relaxed. And I ask him: ‘What is this?’ ‘Fentanyl.’ ‘Oh, what’s that?’ ‘It’s heroin.'”
Brian went on: “I was mad—like, ‘Oh my god, I just did heroin?!’ It could be said that addiction runs in my family. Ever since I was a kid, I was told to be careful. I’ve got aunts and uncles in and out of rehab. And this feels so fucking good—I can really see this becoming a problem. It feels like total relaxation. Finally. It feels like you’ve been at a spa the whole day. Instantly.”
Brian has used fentanyl since then at his place, mostly during parties. “F at this place is pretty open,” he says. (This is a little unusual—most fentanyl users treat it as a secret, sometimes shameful thing.) “If we’re doing it, we’ll freebase, because we want to be all sleazy, you know?” Brian says. “There’s a bit of novelty to it, the freebasing. Like: ‘We’re doing this fucking heroin, we’re already being such scumbags.'”
Another musician, Jake, first tried fentanyl in a room at a party with a few bandmates. Nobody really knew what it was. “It didn’t really have an identity at that time,” he says. “So some people did it and some people didn’t, and it wasn’t a big deal—nobody thought of it as heroin.” Eva first tried it with her boyfriend, a dealer. He didn’t really explain what it was, either. Charles was offered a line to sniff by some coworkers during an office party. Keith, Stilly, and others—I’ve changed all the names—told similar stories: They saw it (usually at a party), didn’t really know what it was, used it a few times, would probably use it again, and haven’t found themselves addicted to it yet.
Then again, there are others—Sam, Claude, Bony—who tried it a few times and had, or still have, an urgent, daily, metabolic need to constantly keep some F in their bodies.
Claude, another local musician, first came across fentanyl through a friend who happened to be a dealer. Before long, he’d wrapped himself in its web. “I didn’t realize it was happening,” he says. “It grabs hold of you.”
You don’t become a narcotics addict after your first dose. It is a process, a subtle inching along a hallway, into a room whose doorframe you don’t even notice as you’re walking through it. But once you’re inside—once you first feel the thrumming pangs of withdrawal—you’re an addict. It always comes as a surprise.
Soon, Claude was spending several hours a day at his friend’s house: freebasing, playing video games, and listening to music with a crew of six or seven people. Because it’s cut with sugar and smells sweet when it’s heated, they called it “shug.”
Claude kept his habit secret, even from his friends and bandmates. He has connections in the hiphop world where—unlike Brian’s rock ‘n’ roll friends who “want to be all sleazy”—freebasing is frowned upon.
“No, no, I definitely don’t see F in the hiphop and DJ community,” Claude says. “Because it’s hiphop. Freebasing is not a glamorous-looking thing. There could be any kind of shit in there.” Claude saw a few small overdoses among his crew during his time with fentanyl—some requiring a little resuscitation, none requiring professional medical help—but finally decided to quit when he overdosed.
“I had already realized it was a problem,” he says. “Eventually, on shug, everything turned gray—no ups, no downs, no range of emotions. If you offered me either a date with a super-hot chick or a $50 bag of F, I would’ve taken the F and gone home.”
One night, he nodded off and a friend said he’d stopped breathing. The day after, he had a blowout fight with his dealer-friend and hasn’t been back. He suffered through withdrawals—”irritable, achy, my skin feeling like the chemical was burning while it seeped out of my body”—and that was that.
“I’m so glad I’m off it,” he says. “I have friends who didn’t even know I was using who said my whole personality seemed to come back.”
Or take Sam, whose story is like a cliché from D.A.R.E., except that it has a happy ending. (Almost all of the fentanyl users interviewed for this story, by the way, went through the federal government’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in the public school system.) Sam is in his mid-20s and works at what he calls “a corporate job.” He hangs out with the glitch-hop crowd—”an electronica scene with a little bit of Burner crossover,” in his words—where he first ran across fentanyl.
“I’ve always experimented with stuff over the years.” Sam says he’s used marijuana, psychedelics, the occasional Vicodin or Percocet, and it never seemed to do him any harm. At a small party about three years ago, one of his friends brought out some white powder and explained it was a strong opiate called fentanyl. “People are not aware of what fentanyl is, and that may be the reason they are willing to try it,” he says. “If someone put heroin in front of you and asked if you wanted some, 99 percent of people would say, ‘No way.'”
He sniffed a line or two, liked it, tried it a few more times, really liked it, and then the city’s fentanyl supply—or at least his connections to it—seemed to dry up.
Then, in the summer of 2009, he started hanging around with a girlfriend who liked opiates. He’d heard that fentanyl was back in the city, so he went back to it. “I was kind of doing it recreationally for a while, but your tolerance builds almost immediately, after just a week,” he says. (The half-life of fentanyl is only about two hours, experts say. The half-life of heroin is around six.) “I would start to go into withdrawals on a daily basis.”
Within a couple of weeks, Sam was in deep. He managed to hold down his corporate job, but he needed a steady supply of fentanyl to keep him going. “At the height, I was using in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening just to stay normal.” Sam had set some rules for himself—how often he’d use, how much money he’d spend—and was horrified by how quickly he broke them all. Withdrawals set in quickly and sharply whenever he couldn’t make his connection: insomnia, hot flashes, cold chills, full-body aches, his guts seeming to liquefy into vomit and diarrhea.
“I ended up blowing through all of my savings, and everything hit the fan,” he remembers. “It broke up my relationship with my girlfriend. And then fentanyl dried up in the city—all at the same time. In retrospect, it kind of worked out for me in a way. If it were still around, I probably still would have used it.”
Sam has health insurance through his job, so he sought help from an addiction specialist and started taking Suboxone, a narcotic replacement-therapy drug. (Suboxone has advantages over methadone but is considerably more expensive.) Suboxone staved off the most acute withdrawals, and Sam pulled his life back into shape. He started saving money and even got a promotion at work. Soon he’ll be taking a long business trip to a faraway country he’s never visited before, and he’s very excited. “It worked out,” he says. “It’s almost storybook.”
But if fentanyl crossed his path again, would he use it?
He pauses. “If someone put it in front of me, I would probably do it,” he says. “And I would probably have a lot of regrets because of what the cycle entails, the extreme ups and extreme downs. It’s horrible. Horrible. But I still think about it every day.”
Sam pauses again, then adds: “This is my absolute overall perspective on that stuff—it’s absolutely amazing, it will ruin your life, it will steal all your money, and you will still love it more than anything.”
There’s surprisingly little hard data on the new popularity of fentanyl—it doesn’t seem to be on the official radar. In the first half of 2010, King County law enforcement submitted 840 pieces of drug evidence to the state lab, and only 4 (or 0.5 percent) tested positive for fentanyl. The federal Drug Abuse Warning Network, which collects data from a sampling of emergency rooms and coroners, saw 2,229 reports of opioids in the Seattle metropolitan area, but only 57 instances of fentanyl. (That’s 2.5 percent—still low, but it shows that fentanyl users are crossing the paths of doctors more often than police officers.)
Local experts aren’t hearing much about it anecdotally. Dr. Phillip Coffin, an infectious-disease senior fel- low at the University of Washington who has studied drug use in New York City and Seattle and has been active in the harm reduction community, hadn’t heard anything about it. Monte Levine, who runs a needle exchange in Kitsap County, said, “I haven’t heard of any fentanyl use out here.” He asked some of his clients—many of whom go to Tacoma to score—but says they haven’t heard anything, either.
Shilo Murphy, who runs the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance (also known as the U-District Needle Exchange), says he’s heard of fentanyl as a cutting agent for heroin, but not regularly used on its own. Same goes for Mark Kinzly, who works with opiate users in Connecticut at the Yale School of Public Health (and spent some time as an opiate addict himself). At first, Kinzly thinks my stories about people freebasing fentanyl sound like “an urban myth.”
I tell him it’s not an urban myth.
“Most of the time, we see it mixed in with heroin,” he says. “But it’s concerning to me that you’re even hearing about people using fentanyl on its own. We had such an awful experience here in 2006…”
Pure fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine, and doses are measured in micrograms instead of milligrams: Unless it’s mixed very precisely and very evenly, the strength of the drug can vary dramatically—dangerously—from one hit to the next. A few years ago, the Midwest and East Coast saw at least 1,000 heroin overdoses after a lab in Toluca, Mexico, produced fentanyl that was then cut into the heroin supply chain, making the heroin much, much stronger—unevenly so.
“That’s always the danger with really potent stuff,” Dr. Coffin says. “Imagine you’ve got a big pot of drugs and you’re stirring it up. Some of that is inevitably going to clump. And some clumps are going to be weaker and some clumps are going to be much stronger.” According to the Drug Enforcement Administration: “One gram of pure fentanyl can be cut into approximately 7,000 doses for street sale.”
Fentanyl is a good cutting agent for heroin because it’s entirely synthetic and therefore cheaper to produce—manufacturers don’t need lots of land or lots of labor, or all of the risk and the bribes that come along with cultivating acres of poppies. In 2006, some Mexican drug-trafficking organizations figured that out and started cutting their heroin with fentanyl to increase their profit margin. Mexican authorities busted the Toluca lab near Mexico City in May of 2006. Fentanyl-related overdose deaths in a sampling of US cities peaked a month later at 150 before declining sharply to a single death in February of 2007—a rare instance in which the two divided schools of drug policy (law enforcement versus harm reduction) worked together to save lives.
The very first wave of fentanyl-cut heroin, Kinzly says, hit the United States in the 1990s. “I don’t know if you know this, but bags of dope on the East Coast have stamps,” he says. “It’s a marketing tool. And there was a particular stamp called ‘Tango and Cash.’ That was heroin cut with fentanyl, and people were dying left and right. But as you’re well aware, any consumer wants the best product, the most for their dollar, so we had people running up and down the street trying to get the product.”
The deaths, he says, were an advertisement of quality.
Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960 by one of the geniuses of pharmacology—Belgian chemist Dr. Paul Adriaan Jan Janssen. Before he died in 2003, Janssen was awarded 80 medical prizes and 22 honorary doctorates, and was made a baron by King Baudouin I. Dr. Janssen is so famous in his own country, he won second place in a 2005 Flemish television poll for “the Greatest Belgian.” (First place went to Father Damien, the “leper priest” of Moloka’i, Hawaii.)
Along with his researchers at Janssen Pharmaceutica, Janssen synthesized more than 80 medicines in his lifetime. Four of his drugs (including the antipsychotic Haldol and the cattle deworming agent levamisole) are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines—an accomplishment that is, according to Janssen Pharmaceutica director of language and documentation Guido Theunissen, “quite unique.” (Guido is being modest. It’s a world record.)
Fentanyl has three major medical uses. First, for terminal cancer patients and others living with a constant level of baseline pain that cannot be controlled by high doses of morphine (for this use, it’s often prescribed as a skin patch). Second, in surgery, where it sometimes suppresses a patient’s breathing, requiring artificial ventilation (among recreational users, that is known as an overdose). Third, in ambulances as a first-aid response to massive, extraordinarily painful trauma.
The availability of the drug to medical professionals has resulted in some spectacularly sad fentanyl-related crime.
In November of 2010, prosecutors charged a nurse on Long Island with six counts of “unlawful release of regulated medical waste,” claiming that he had been stealing hospital garbage (bags of syringes, blood vials, etc.) and rifling through it for used fentanyl skin patches. “He was actually sucking the residue off the patch,” Suffolk County district attorney Thomas Spota told reporters, “the way you would eat an artichoke.” The nurse was accused of dumping the rest of the waste in public places—a few parks and at least one school playground.
In January of 2011, a 60-year-old fire department captain and paramedic in Camas, Washington, was sentenced to 27 months in prison for stealing fentanyl from the medical kits of his local fire department and refilling the injectable vials—meant for emergency first-aid patients—with tap water.
Last month, a 33-year-old nurse in Minnesota was charged with stealing two-thirds of a man’s fentanyl dose just prior to his kidney surgery. According to the complaint, she told him, “You’re gonna have to man up here and take some of the pain, because we can’t give you a lot of medication.” While the patient screamed and writhed on the table, and hospital staff debated whether to restrain him, the nurse rambled, gesticulated wildly, and kept passing out. A hospital technician later found two empty syringes with the labels torn off in the nurse’s pocket.
And just a few days ago, the Tenth Circuit Court rejected a hospital technician’s request to overturn her 30-year sentence for stealing fentanyl from Colorado hospitals where she worked. She was shooting up with syringes that were later used during patient surgeries—dirty syringes that infected at least 17 people (and maybe over 25) with the technician’s hepatitis C. The nurse confessed she had probably contracted the disease by sharing heroin needles during her long history of opiate addiction. According to Judge Carlos Lucero, at least one of her victims deprived of fentanyl “awoke mid-surgery in severe pain.”
Drug addiction—and, specifically, opiate addiction—has been part of the mythology of the physician for centuries. There’s Dr. Wilbur Larch, the fictional doctor and ether addict of John Irving’s novel (and Oscar- winning film) The Cider House Rules. There’s William Stewart Halsted (1852–1922), the real-life surgeon who pioneered techniques in aseptic surgery, mastectomy for breast-cancer patients, and anesthetics—which led him and some of his fellow surgeons into lifetime morphine and cocaine addictions. And there’s Crawford Long (1815–1878), the American physician who introduced ether as an anesthetic. According to a 2004 article in Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Long came up with the idea “after noticing that the injuries he received in intoxicated falls at ether parties did not produce pain until after the drug had worn off.”
However, fentanyl addiction among medical professionals might be more complicated than a simple matter of having access to the drug. A series of 2006 articles published in the Journal of Addictive Diseases, the Lancet, and Medical Hypotheses show that secondhand fentanyl “has been detected in the air within operating rooms, the highest concentrations being close to the patient’s mouth, where anesthesiologists work for hours.” That exposure and subsequent sensitization, the studies argue, may subtly nudge people toward tolerance, addiction, and the extreme drug-seeking behavior of the nurses in Minnesota, Colorado, and New York, and the paramedic from Washington.
These studies took other risk factors into consideration—the availability of opiates, the stresses of the job, the thrill-seeking personality types who tend to go into medical careers—and still found that anesthesiologists were overrepresented among opiate addicts. One study, based in Florida, noted that only 5.6 percent of the state’s physicians were anesthesiologists—but anesthesiologists accounted for almost 25 percent of the physicians followed for substance-abuse problems. Their drugs of choice were opiates. Especially fentanyl.
Fentanyl’s official—if not always legal—use extends from the medical to the military. It has been tested, and occasionally used, as an agent of chemical warfare.
In 2002, Chechen Islamic separatists stormed a large theater in Moscow that was showing a production of the popular musical Nord-Ost. Around 50 heavily armed Chechens, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, took around 850 people hostage, including the cast and crew, and demanded that the Russian military abdicate Chechnya or hostages would start dying. After three days of standoff and negotiation, Russian soldiers blasted a mystery gas through the theater’s ventilation system, incapacitating the rebels and the hostages, and then raided the building. The mission was not entirely successful. Between 115 and 200 of the hostages died—depending on whose numbers you believe—but only one, according to Dr. Andrei Selt- sovsky, chair of the Moscow health committee, died from gunshot wounds. The other 114 to 199—including 17 cast members of Nord-Ost, two of them child actors—were killed by the gas.
The Russian government tried to keep the chemical composition of the gas secret: Doctors on the scene complained that they could not treat hostages because police wouldn’t tell them what they’d been gassed with. But four days later, Health Minister Yuri Shevchenko announced that the gas was a derivative of fentanyl. (For the chemists among you, it’s widely believed—but has never been confirmed—that the Russian gas was Kolokol-1, which contains 3-methylfentanyl. That’s a derivative of fentanyl that’s more commonly made in clandestine labs and sold for recreational use than regular pharmaceutical fentanyl. In other words, the type of fentanyl you’re buying on the street is probably the same type used by the Russian military.)
The United States has also toyed with fentanyl as a chemical weapon. In 2003, Guardian columnist George Monbiot reported that the Bush administration had been trying to “wriggle free” from the US commitment to the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical weapons so it could use them in Iraq. (Never mind, Monbiot writes, that “the point of this war, or so we have endlessly been told, is to prevent the use of chemical weapons.”) According to Monbiot, Donald Rumsfeld’s office confirmed the decision had been made to use chemical “riot-control agents” in Iraq. Rumsfeld himself had been arguing against the Geneva Protocol, telling Congress’s Armed Services Committee that “there are times when the use of nonlethal riot agents is perfectly appropriate.” (Though the deaths of the Moscow hostages could hardly be described as “nonlethal.”)
Reports from Penn State and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory detail research done on behalf of the Department of Justice and the Marine Corps on the use of fentanyl for “less-than-lethal targeting.” The LLNL report declares fentanyl “an uncommon and very powerful drug” that could be fired at enemies as a projectile or “dispersed as a smoke… into an air duct or office building air conditioning system.”
Rumsfeld was CEO and president of the US pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle & Company from 1977 to 1985. By 2003, Searle had merged with Monsanto, which then merged with Pfizer—a major manufacturer of fentanyl.
Fentanyl users in Seattle often complain about how expensive it is. Price quotes vary wildly—people have cited prices from $80 per gram a few years ago up to $300 per gram today. It seems to depend on the month and the buyer’s proximity to the source. (These days, the cheaper heroin in Seattle is going for $20 to $30 per gram.) Claude, the hiphop musician, said that when he ran out of fentanyl or out of money and wanted to stay high, he’d try to smoke heroin. “But it didn’t work!” he says, shaking his head. “If you’re on F and you smoke H, it just doesn’t work.”
Nobody I talked to knew for sure where Seattle’s fentanyl was coming from, but many people told stories about local manufacturers, usually a shadowy Main Man and his even more shadowy Competitor, who have clandestine labs somewhere in the area: Some say in a house, some say on a boat, some say in a trailer. And nobody could explain why fentanyl is so much more expensive than heroin.
Jake, a user with connections to several dealers, has a theory: “If I were starting to make a new drug locally that was basically the equivalent of really strong heroin, I’d only want people with real money for customers. People who buy in their homes, people who aren’t going to get caught out in the street. That makes it safer to deal and it creates a cachet.”
Here’s another theory: The fentanyl entrepreneurs—whoever or wherever they are—are trying to introduce China White heroin to the West Coast’s longtime black tar heroin market, breaking a hallowed drug-market convention.
The difference between the two types of heroin is that black tar is less highly processed and closer to pure opium with all of its many alkaloids: codeine, morphine, thebaine. “Black tar is opium that’s halfway processed to heroin,” Dr. Coffin says. “Some West Coast black tar users who go on to use China White don’t like it because black tar gives them more of a holistic, opium-den feel instead of the sharp, crisp high of China White.” (People who have used both fentanyl and West Coast heroin say that fentanyl gives them a more cocainelike “up” feeling—which sounds like the “sharp, crisp high” Dr. Coffin is talking about.)
Most of the heroin that Americans can get west of Mississippi, Dr. Coffin and others say, is black tar from Mexico. The East Coast gets China White from Colombia and the Middle East, while Vancouver, BC, gets China White from Asia. (There is said to be a deal between Asian and Latin gangs to treat the US/Canadian border as a gangland border as well.)
Coffin adds that HIV transmission among IV drug users who are sharing needles is much higher among the China White crowd than the black tar crowd. “On the East Coast, prior to the impact of needle exchanges, about one-half of the HIV epidemic was due to injection drug use, and the Vancouver HIV epidemic was almost exclusively due to IV drug use,” he says. “In Seattle, never more than 12 percent of HIV cases were due to injection drug use.” Why? Because black tar is less conducive to HIV transmission, for three reasons:
(1) It gums up syringes, requiring users to rinse between shots.
(2) Black tar damages the veins faster. (“If [William S.] Burroughs had been shooting black tar, he wouldn’t have been able to inject like he did for 80 years,” Coffin says.) That leads to more abscesses and infections, but it also means that IV users turn to muscle injections and skin popping, which is a less efficient way to transmit HIV.
(3) You have to heat black tar more than China White to shoot it, which also reduces HIV transmission. “But,” Coffin is quick to add, “those factors do nothing to stop hepatitis C transmission, which is our huge problem out here.”
Back to the fentanyl/China White theory: Perhaps some entrepreneurs have decided to make an end run around long-standing gangland conditions and produce fentanyl so as to allow high-paying customers access to a synthetic version of China White heroin.
Which would explain why it’s so expensive. Perhaps musicians like Claude and Brian and Jake are at the poorest fringes of the fentanyl market—maybe people like Sam, people with “corporate jobs,” are the real target customers.
The last time I’d hung out with Bony, a local drug dealer, he’d been freebasing fentanyl. He’d smooth out a piece of aluminum foil, sprinkle powder from the bag onto the foil, heat it from below with a lighter, watch the fentanyl bubble and caramelize, and inhale the tendrils of smoke with the empty shaft of a Bic pen. His habit seemed fairly restrained a few months ago—just a guy taking the occasional hit of fentanyl the way other people take the occasional hit of marijuana.
Now, a few months later, he’s taking hits every 10 minutes or so, then nodding out in the middle of sentences. I ask him a question and he closes his eyes, his head drooping. I’m starting to wonder whether I’m going to have to call 911.
“This shit…” he drawls, slowly coming back to the surface, “this shit sometimes puts me to sleep a little bit.” He laughs gently and softly, like a slow-motion hiccup. “It’s almost like I’m dreaming.”
I repeat my question: So, do you think you have an addiction to F?
“No, no, I don’t think so,” he says softly, touching his face and smiling before getting up and drifting over to his record collection. “I mean, you’ve got to be careful, this shit can be addictive. Some people get in and out.” He wanders back to the couch and prepares another hit.
I ask how often he uses F.
“Off and on, but fairly regular,” he says.
How long have you been a daily user?
“I don’t know,” he says, a little irritated. “I haven’t ever had a super-big problem with getting hooked. I can go hours and hours without feeling like I need it. But sometimes I do need it.”
Hours and hours.
Bony first came across fentanyl last year. It was “a total drugs party,” he says, where people were smoking heroin and sniffing cocaine out in the open. “But people were hiding in the bathroom to do the fentanyl. I put down $20, which was pretty much just a hit.”
Why were people hiding in the bathroom to smoke F if they were smoking H out in the open?
“F is definitely…” He pauses, nods off a little, comes back. “It’s a greedy thing. People don’t want to share it because it’s so fucking expensive.”
Why is it so expensive?
“I don’t know. I hear it’s made around here, so I don’t know. Maybe because it still hasn’t really caught on yet.”
This logic is hard to follow—if it’s cheaper to make than heroin, and it’s not popular yet, why would it be so expensive? Wouldn’t the distributors want to make it cheaper until it caught on?
“I don’t know, man,” he says softly, flatly. “I don’t know.”
He stares off at the wall, obviously sick of talking to me.
I think of what Claude said about being in the depths of his fentanyl addiction, about how everything went gray and his personality seemed to go away. The Bony sitting in front of me isn’t the Bony I know. He’s somewhere else—and I’m clearly butting in on his new reality. He used to be cheerful. Now he’s irritable. And he clearly wants me to go.
I ask Bony if he’s heard of Washington State’s new Good Samaritan law—see sidebar, page 18—which gives people amnesty from prosecution for drug possession if they call 911 to help someone who’s overdosing. “It’s a law you and your friends should know about,” I say. “Just in case.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” he says. “But I’ll keep it in mind.” 
Heads up for you kids: if you ever come across a fentanyl skin patch, DON’T EAT IT. You’ll definitely OD and you might die. That is all.
I vaguely remember my ex talking about Fentanyl patches at least 5, 6, maybe even 7 years ago and how amazing they were, but how incredibly difficult they were to get, so I know that this isn’t really anything too new to the drug circuit, but this was a great article highlighting it. Well done =)
I am one of the few people I know who managed to kick a heroin habit and never went back. I quit in 1996 when the feds busted the guy who sold to my guy’s guy and Everett where I lived went absolutely dry. I had a forced sobriety of about a week before we clear headnd enough to realize I had a shot. I called my mom I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years and told her I needed to move away from everyone I knew. I left the next day and didn’t anyone else but her where I was it took about two years to figure out how to live normally but it worked. I am opposed to the War on Drugs, but this bust gave me the chance I needed and wouldn’t have had otherwise. I didn’t die and I didn’t go inside, I didn’t get the bug and if I weren’t an atheist I’d pray thanks every day.
Jesus Christ–when the freebase *anything* comes out, it’s time to leave the party. Anyone who doesn’t know that, good riddance.
I guess it’s all who you talk to. The new H is H, just to start off. Ever since last August when Purdue switched to the OP H blew up! Fentanyl is not as powerful as H. Everyone you talked to is getting ripped off hard! A Fentanyl patch costs about 50-100 dollars a patch. Good H costs about 50-100 a G and will get you way more high then F. One thing F was good for was making non OC beans. I knew this crew who had a chemist that would make an equivalent of an 80 with F and sell it for half the cost of a bean. It don’t matter now because when the bean went away H ruled the day. You should have interviewed people on the north end, not some yuppies on the bottom of the totem pole who are getting ripped off, it would have made for a more informative article. Plus how the heck are you going to talk about H without the mention of how the market blew up due to the poor decision of Purdue to stop making OC?
Who the FUCK freebases shit and then is surprised when they develop a habit? Am I the only one who had head-explosion after the first 2 paragraphs?
sorry, 4 paragraphs. Apparently my head explosion destroyed my ability to count.
@7&8 It is all about marketing.
“This logic is hard to follow—if it’s cheaper to make than heroin, and it’s not popular yet, why would it be so expensive? Wouldn’t the distributors want to make it cheaper until it caught on?”
I think I figured this out, will post my theory when I have more time.
Number 6’s comment is spot on. The new h is H. Its coming back in a big way.
i read this whole article thinking,”how do i, a total square, know what fentanyl is?” answer: ‘punks in the beerlight’ by the silver jews. sooo 2005.
seriously though, i grew up outside of dallas where high school kids were dying from black tar weekly in the mid- to late-nineties. stay away from shit like this, folks. read a book or something.
You mean, huffing an unknown white powdery substance given to me by shady people I barely know could have negative consequences for my health?
If you’re dumb enough to stick around a party where people are doing drugs you’ve never heard of, you probably deserve to OD.
Heroin is blowing up right now buck the suburban white kids are realizing it’s cheaper and easier to get than the oxy they have become addicted to.
ADD, ADHD,restless leg syndrome; big pharma helped create a generation that really believed pill=good. Combine that with their selfish, self-involved navel gazing parents and what you get is the homecoming queen sucking dick behind the University Way Jacks so she can cop some horse.
Good times.
Here’s a perfect example of what this shit does/can do…
http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2010…
Perfect example of what this shit can do…
http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2010…
@12. Thank you! I read the first paragraph and didn’t read the rest. “Dur, I used to be straight edge and then some dude said I should smoke some powder. I didn’t know what it was but, uh, sure!!!”
Everything I needed to know about Fentanyl I learned from the Intervention episode about delusional lollipop loving Linda.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohs0itLfR…
Fentanyl is also administered to women in labor.
I have learned something from you, Brendan. Thank you.
Wow Brendan. Educate.
No mention of the F lollipop? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actiq
Because there is an Intervention episode about that.
freebase first, ask questions later? give me a break.
Suuuuuuper dangerous – don’t mix it with something like Xanax either.
more (semi-glorified) info here:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n4/htdocs…
@6’s comment made me long to read Burroughs again. I think it’s time to dust off Naked Lunch and revisit a few old friends…
We should have more respect for what these things did to Layne and Mike, two of our own great Seattle musicians. I don’t think they’d recommend ruining yourself over this crap.
I think it should be kept in consideration that you can buy MORE heroin for the price of LESS suger. Therefore you get MORE high off heroin.
its like they say tho…
the suger kills
“Another musician, Jake, first tried fentanyl in a room at a party with a few bandmates. Nobody really knew what it was.”
Maybe I’m a nerd, but I always carefully researched anything before I tried it…
Good article.
Great work, Mr. Kiley. (Love the astute comparison/history of Black Tar v. China White. Another thing to look into is just what that synthetic heroin was that was so plentiful and damaging in Seattle in the mid-80s, competing with Black Tar.)
Would also love an update from you when you figure out the logic of why F is more expensive than H, too, Brendan. I trust your reasoning in all this, and I just can’t figure it out.
@9 Looking forward to your theory as well if you find time to post it.
@27 is a good argument, but it doesn’t seem to really explain it.
(It’s possibly a ridiculous explanation, but somehow I think this is all an experiment in advanced marketing. F just doesn’t have the alchemical, mystical, timeless allure of H. Thus, like cocaine, which was seen as resistible by many freaks for a long time till the prices came down, a similar change in pricing might happen with F just when it floods the city and everyone has been seeing people hoard it in bathrooms at parties, etc.)
“If we’re doing it, we’ll freebase, because we want to be all sleazy, you know?”
———–
Bullshit. You lame-ass hipsters are just too big of pussies to mainline your H of F like a real man. If you’re going to have an addiction, at least take it all the way. Fucking tourist. You hipsters can’t do anything right.
Interesting. I was given Fentanyl when I was in labor and, as they said, it didn’t take away the pain but it did make me care about it a lot less. I just felt kind of happy and loopy but not good enough that I’d want to repeat the experience. Of course, that could’ve been because it was overshadowed by horrific pain. I had no idea I was basically on heroin at the time! Yikes. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to be giving to pregnant women and potentially passing on to a baby.
I had never heard of “bathtub” fent. Most of it that’s on the black market comes from chronic pain patients with scripts for it who need the extra cash. I was under the impression that it was much more expensive than heroin. Even those w/opiate tolerances should be extremely cautious with this substance. As the author noted, the amount of active material needed to feel effects is very small, a fraction of a milligram. Therefore careful and accurate dosing is absolutely necessary. It would be extremely irresponsible to buy this on the street not knowing the exact strength. This is one that is best left to pain patients under a doctor’s supervision. Very easy to OD and tolerance builds fast. Very euphoric…high potential for abuse. Anyone considering taking this recreationally should consult harm reduction forums such as bluelight, dancesafe or erowid and do their homework. And I agree with the poster above that the reason we’re suddenly seeing Fentanyl as a street drug and heroin making a comeback (not that it ever really left) is because of the new, almost impossible to abuse oxycontin formulation.
My daughters dad started dealing Fentnyl in 2006. He convinced a shady eastside doc that he had Fibromyalgia, and was prescribed 12 patches per month, all paid for by his Basic Health plan. He would sell them at 40-80 dollars each and use them also, scraping out the gel and smoking it, or cutting the patch into pieces and chewing a piece. Very dangerous drug– can cause respiration to stop. Now he only gets to see our daughter in a DSHS room with a professional superviser. Sad.
@30 I fucking love you! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
This was such a retarded article. First off thanks for blowing up something that we were doing a really good job of keeping secret. Secondly I want so badly to beat the shit out of that idiot fucking hipster quoted in this article.
THIRDLY, THIS IS NOT THE SAME FENTANYL THAT COMES OUT OF PATCHES. This is a street-chemist-made alternate form of the chemical cut to around 3-4%. I think it’s hilarious that there’s an article about this and even more hilarious that you guys got ALL the facts wrong. It’s just pitiful. But the best part is is you missed out on the best part of the story, this pales in comparison to the truth. But I’m not going to elaborate on that, stay the fuck out of our world.
PS,
@30 You’re fucking awesome. Really. That’s all that was going through my head reading this. I want to THRASH that little hipster shit.
F is more expensive for one simple reason: it doesn’t show up on drug tests. Since doses are 1% of regular opiates they have to use gas chromatography on hair samples to detect it. No corporation does this.
White collar users in Seattle love this stuff. Boeing and Microsoft engineers need to “feel good” on the weekends. Fuck… everyone needs a break these days, even the hipsters in this poorly conceived article.
BUT, we don’t want our good synthetic drugs discovered and taken away from us. So to the chemist out there making this stuff: you are smart and a saint, don’t get caught! Assume all currency is marked and the Bill of Rights doesn’t exist. Keep the product flowing for all those you help.
To those who think drugs are bad and we’re just “addicts”: fuck you.
/Boeing Engineer (crazy huh?)
I had a small (codeine!) opiate addiction before using F. But i had never used heroin. I got some Fentora, a buccal tablet which dissolved in your cheek and tasted like a baking soda flavored hospital floor. Towards the end of my using I was up to 3200 mcg at a time. Breathing is hard. My love for Fentanyl was so deep that I gave her all my money. I gave her my apartment. I gave her my job. I gave her my life as a normal functioning adult. Finally she wanted to me to die. And I wanted to. I ended up in rehab. I’m better now. And so grateful she’s off my back, but I still salivate at the thought of F.
Fentanyl may be cheaper to produce than heroin, but it is not produced to meet the demands of recreational drug users. It is used as a painkiller after intense medical procedures such as brain surgery. Most of the heroin consumed in the US is produced outside of the country, specifically to meet the demands of heroin users here. It doesn’t go through the pharmacy. Fentanyl is produced in factories just like other pharmaceuticals and thus always in short supply for fet addicts. Just like Oxy.
This is my thinking about the economics of the thing: It is relatively cheap to make, but you can get top dollar. That doesn’t make sense, except for the fact that it is illegal, and they probably throw the book at you. While there is a solid fan base, you don’t want to sell to folks who are wishy-washy about it. In other words, the maker (and everyone down the distribution chain) are playing it pretty safe. Why stretch the envelope, when you can make solid money with your solid base.
It is not unlike the guy who only has a couple of grow lights in his basement. He could expand his operation, but right now he is selling to his best friends. If he expands, he runs a much bigger risk of getting ripped off, or getting busted.
Drugs are disgusting and they ruin your life. Blecch.
Sumerians farmed poppies 5,400 years ago. The relaxing effects brought people together and kept them from killing each other (at least long enough to sustain a population). Perhaps civilization owes its existence to these drugs?
The founding fathers of these United States grew marijuana and poppies. Perhaps this country wouldn’t exist without their drug-induced free thinking?
Face it, people who are against drugs are WEAK. They are either religious nutjobs or blame the drug for addiction. The drugs are NOT addictive; the addicts are WEAK. Addicts and junkies would have no purpose in society regardless of the drug’s existence. Worthless people prefer to just blame the drugs.
Alcoholics and fat people want to blame others for their problems. Put down the crack pipe (or spoon), get an education, invent something, and make this country great again.
(Or just hand it over to the Chinese in 50 years. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.)
Speaking of shug, whilst scrolling along, I happened to steal a glance over at girls searchin’ 4 boys, and WHO do I see? A little Dreamboat named — wait for it — sugarcereal!
WAY!
Imagine my utter Dismay when discovering my Future Bride had hidden her Spot! Damn!
Come BACK, sugercereal! Daddy’s HONGRY!
(And Clean!)
@35, 36
I really think if the people of the Seattle area are living in a place with a market and a culture for this drug then it’s a good thing for everyone to be informed of exactly what it is.
Personally I experiment with a lot of different drugs, some of them powders and some not and I’ve never heard of this before this article. The thing is this is a drug of addiction. There are plenty of people who aren’t going to become addicts and plenty of people whose addictions will not affect us, but there are still going to be people who get into the F scene and let it control their lives, this means that people in the SEATTLE community will lose some of their best friends and children to this drug and people will get robbed by people looking to score for this drug.
As citizens of the same community we all deserve to be educated about this. IT SHOULD NOT BE KEPT SECRET.
@35 and 36, if they got all the facts wrong then somebody who knows the facts should write another article, or if you have all the facts you should help send an email to the author helping him with information he missed, or something should be done to get the CORRECT information out there. Although from as far as I can tell this article seems well written and I really wasn’t able to anything wrong at all with the information provided. But if you’re certain that this writer has the facts wrong I beg that the correct facts can come out.
So I guess I should thank you for the “This is a street-chemist-made alternate form of the chemical cut to around 3-4%.” because I really did find that piece of information helpful.
Oh and even if the hipsters in the article sound like pussies I really think that nobody should ever encourage other people to start mainlining opiates even in jest.
Come on people, knowledge is power and whatnot. Let’s use education for harm reduction.
I have an idea. Let’s not do hard drugs because, well, do I really have to say why? Really?
Why, oh WHY must you STILL tease me so, STRANGER?
The unobtainable; so near, and yet…
When I was doing a report on Fentanyl years ago I came across a journal article describing a mortuary worker who had ODed after stealing Fentanyl patches off deceased cancer patients and extracting residual drug from them. Yuck. That was ’99 or so that I read that.
Fentanyl must be regarded as heroin.
I love how many people are all, “oh man, stay out of our world, our drug is highly superior to you,” and blah blah blah.
A drug is a drug is a drug is a fucking drug. I drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, and have experimented with many things in the past, but shut the fuck up with your “logic” about how your drugs are made/superior to other drugs and who “responsibly” uses them
Fentanyl IS a current problem in Seattle, and if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with a “little freebasing and mainlining,” your opinion is not valid.
@49 You got it dude. We ARE superior to you.
Drinking and smoking will likely reduce your life by 10-15 years, cause problems with relationships and violence, and create neurological problems later in life (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, etc.).
But pure opioid narcotics have no long term side effects (when properly administered). It’s the dumbasses injecting brown pudding into their arms that die fast. We do it differently.
The government WANTS you to use their legal drugs so that YOU DIE FASTER. Dead ex-smokers and drinkers are less of a drain on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Welcome to the system.
Below are the “safety ratios” for several drugs. This is the ratio of a lethal dose to an effective dose and a good indicator of a drug’s harmfulness.
Heroin: 5
Alcohol: 10
MDMA: 16
Fentanyl: 270 [Stanley, “New anesthetic agents…”]
LSD: 1000+
Marijuana: 1000+
To the Art Linkletters out there: children and adolescents who die from drugs were not loved and you simply failed at parenting (not being loved is the purest emotional pain possible). Your kid didn’t overdose on drugs, they committed suicide. Maybe educate your kids and love them unconditionally?
This starting to get through?
/Back to life in the nanny state.
Um, The dumb ass in comment #37 saying that addicts are week obviously NEVER experienced addiction. It’s easy to say “just quit”. opiate withdrawal pain is like no other. But I really hope you have cancer one day and get hooked on pain killers. Im not evil but untill you KNOW what people with this problem go threw you should shut your hick ass up. Try getting into rehab… You can’t if you have a job. Other wise plan on spending AT least $15,000- $30,000, or even more. No I dont have insurance or work at boeing but you fuckin Christians should know NOT to judge anyone. Only your “GOD” should. What comes around goes around. you will get yours little man.
@50/51/numerous other comments, that’s awesome, sir. Except I get the feeling we’re not the ones you’re trying to convince here, as you’re making multiple posts about the awesomeness of Fentanyl while also defending it. So who /are/ you trying to convince that F is so great? I’ve seen too many addicts making multiple attempts to defend themselves and their drug to take you all that seriously.
@50 “…pure opioid narcotics have no long term side effects …”
Is the liver damage just from the pills, not injectables?
I ask because there is a similar situation with steroids. Pills are formulated with a hepatoxin that is not necessary for injectables. Properly planned & cycled, the only long term effect is lean muscle mass. Yet the common notion is steroids = liver cancer.
@ 35. Sorry, but new drugs and big money don’t stay secret for long. Someone was going to say something sooner or later…
@52: Drugs are NOT great by themselves, and they are not addictive by themselves. They allow a person to experience another state of consciousness. Recreational users get high enough to maintain consciousness and enjoy it. They obtain other-worldly senses of “well-being”.
Unfortunately addicts don’t enjoy reality and escape it entirely. Life sucks for them and they don’t have anything to pull them back.
The causes of drug abuse are endless, but it is a SYMPTOM and not the problem. The real problem is the addict may not feel love in their lives (from a spouse or family), lacks social support, has body image problems, has PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, etc. etc.
We as a CULTURE need to support and help drug addicts, offer rehab for free, and educate people on the risks (and rewards) of drugs. We should not vilify substances like meth while at the same time FEEDING IT TO CHILDREN. Yes, we feed meth to children so the parents get a little robot, society gets an obedient slave, and another free-thinking soul is lost. I hate to think of the world if we had FED FUCKING METH to a young Einstein or Newton.
Rehab should be free and offered by the state. It saves money in the long run, but of course the people won’t support this. We like the drama, chaos, entropy, and Schadenfreude of watching people fail. Nothing makes a regular American feel better than saying “sucks to be you, loser”. We step over the homeless, jail addicts, and fill our houses with worthless shit.
@53: My audience isn’t the readers of The Stranger. My audience is the Seattle DEA or government peeps with some intelligence and compassion. They have to realize that not all drug users (or dealers) are bad and should be hunted down and put in prison. I’m paying crazy amounts of taxes and support the economy and police. Don’t forget that when you slap the handcuffs on me (a completely non-violent drug user) just to support your Prison Industrial Complex.
I don’t support Fentanyl use either, just like I don’t support eating tomatoes. But I wouldn’t restrict a person’s freedom to experience either. I’d prefer to give them controlled, pure doses in a regulated environment. Give them support them with counseling and such. Yeah I’m looking at you: fucking tomato eaters.
/Legalize.
@54: Liver damage is from the APAP (Tylenol). It is added for the synergistic effect. The opioid substance alone does NOT cause liver damage.
Of course overdosing on opiates causes respiratory depression and eventual death. But it doesn’t have long-term ill effects.
It’s heart-wrenching to hear of children who O.D. on Tylenol. They get their stomach pumped in the E.R. and they appear to be okay… but the parents are told by doctors that their child will die from liver failure because it was too late.
This shit is no joke if you start using it prepare to lose thousands of dollars, your dignity, your personality, and your self respect. It takes hold of your soul its not worth it.
@42 – Yeah, okay Charlie Sheen. You just keep telling yourself that. Fentanyl is for WINNERS who are WINNING and those addicts just weren’t full of enough Adonis DNA to handle it.
You’re so full of bullshit of denial I can smell you from over here.
Somebody give F another patch, I’m tired of hearing his pathetic attempts at self-justification.
Great article, there is a fascinating history of illicit fentanyl use and manufacture out there, much more than presented in the article. But this was a great personalized perspective. One qualm though….
Not exactly “freebasing”. smoking, vaporizing, sure. But the fenyanyl being used is a salt (HCl, or citrate usually) and is smoked as is. No converting to the base is necessary, as the m.p. is below where significant decomposition occurs. I didn’t hear any mention of basification.
does anyone think that F is for Fun and co’s comments kind of prove Brendan’s theory that F is being marketed towards cashed-up white collar workers too stupid to spot they are being ripped off?
that’s right, loser, F doesn’t have ANY harmful long term side effects, and you’re not drug-fucked, you’re just better than everyone else in the whole world.
Opiates (morphine, heroin, etc.) have no long-term side effects. Studies have tried to find them, but turn up very little. Pure opiates are harmless compared to OTC drugs, alcohol, and nicotine.
One study found slight hormone changes with years of use. My guess is this is due to decreased stress (blood pressure, heart rate, and glucocorticoids) on the CNS. If you know about glucocorticoids then you’ll know that long-term opiate users would live LONGER. After all, they say “stress kills”.
Maybe you retards write something worth reading? Ad hominem is weak sauce.
Remember kids: weed and LSD are the SAFE drugs. Don’t try opiates until you’re a pro with some dough. And of course alcohol and nicotine cause cancer and brain damage.
/Winning!
Another major medical use for Fentanyl is during childbirth. I am amazed that this wasn’t mentioned in the article. Epidurals which are nearly synonymous with childbirth today in the US contain a large portion of Fentanyl(about half). Also many (most in the Seattle area) hospitals use Fentanyl directly as a narcotic into a woman’s bloodstream during labor. A well documented side effect of too much of this medication given through IV close to delivery is respiratory trouble in newborns. And fentanyl has been linked to breastfeeding challenges in newborns. This article makes it sound like only the terminally ill, gravely injured or strung out addict takes it. Hello people… Healthy pregnant women (and unhealthy ones!) and their newborns are included on this list. No joke.
I’d rather get on the plant fertilizer than be ripped off buying some fake smack. Anything that mr Rumsfeld has his hand in stinks if you ask me.. Ain’t no mystery where it comes from.. The same people that bring you your iPhones and corn chips.. Afghanistan is now under control so get ready for the flood of new generation of synthetic bullshit at ridiculously inflated prices..with that comes the social and economic costs that will make the current situation seem like a 60s revival. Thank myself I’m not a junkie, but good luck with that hope it works out for y’all suckers
Opiates and their receptors have a lot of influence in a developing fetus, causing issues with the heart and spina bifida. I’m guessing mental retardation and depression/ADHD also occur since the dopamine reward centers won’t be “balanced” (although this is harder to correlate).
There are risks when mothers use antidepressants too. Any drug that interferes with neurons will probably fuck the fetus up.
During childbirth the problems with opiates are obvious. Labor pains trigger a flood of endorphins and oxytocin (which opiates interfere with). Oxytocin is used to induce labor and bond the baby to the mother. It causes lactation too, so it’s no surprise that Fentanyl mothers have problems.
Eventually human’s will no longer experience life… they will just dump tons of drugs to numb every “bad” feeling (with other drugs to counteract them during pregnancy). A whole new generation of retards emerges… and the cycle continues.
^^^Gimme a fucking break, you wanna point me to where a link between opiates and spina bifida is demonstrated? Or the developing fetus or heart? Not quite, professor. I’m not even gonna start with yr dopamine/ADHD hypothesis…
“Any drug that interferes with neurons will probably fuck the fetus up”
Jesus. Hmmm. Did you know that all CNS active drugs “interfere with neurons”? As do all neurotransmitters as well as salts?
You’ve gotta understand a bit more than the spelling of “oxytocin” and “spina bifida” to add anything constructive here, and these assumptions are downright incorrect, as well as pretty fucking hilarious. This sort of over-simplified scare mongering gets on my tits.
But thanks for the comedy.
And, if you are referencing that recent study, well, pretty shaky by all accounts, and .26% seems not quite statistically significant, considering this is one study glaring in the face of thousands to the contrary.
Sure, I did a little scare mongering. I agree the correlation between opiates and fetal development is tenuous at best, but people have to understand the risks are NOT ZERO.
There are hundreds of known teratogens. I doubt opiates are even on the radar, but mothers-to-be should be informed (especially if they are pill popping addicts).
Autism and other mental disorders are INCREASING. We have to stand back and look at the shit pregnant women put in their bodies.
And again, ad hominem is weak. Don’t attack my qualifications, attack the data. You don’t know me.
Joseph… that’s a unique name to Google! Maybe it is unwise to post comments using a doctor’s name (an article on drug abuse)? The DEA likes to play doctor and restrict pain medications (which is none of their business).
Fentanyl is put in counterfeit OC80s, which are huge DEA target due to the high death rate, and Joseph Piecuch’s DEA number is probably on some watch list now.
@9 (db): i wanted to reply directly to ur comment or at least be able to follow it, but the site doesnt allow for that….im kind of interested to hear ur theory about the pricing thing when u get around 2 posting it…
i don’t live in seattle, or anywhere near it, so this was kind of an interesting read for me -and very frightening. i am an ex heroin addict (needles and all) and it really worries me that there are more and more opiates widely available on the market that don’t have the same bad image that heroin has (i.e., oxycontin). just as dangerous, but it’s not the same at all, right?! everyone i’ve known who started using opiates casually, just once a week, it ended up being a full time addiction. sometimes it takes years but it happens. and it’s very, very, painful.
and now for my immature rant:
“There’s a bit of novelty to it, the freebasing. Like: ‘We’re doing this fucking heroin, we’re already being such scumbags.'”
oh, my god. this sentence made me so, so, so, angry. i have to go to the methadone clinic every day – it is the only thing that has kept me off of heroin, and trust me, i’ve tried a lot of stuff. i’m well aware that this is all my own shit talking, but FUCK YOU, you pretentious smug asshole. you think you’re some kind of awesome rocking out sleazy musician? you’re just another one of these idiotic twenty-somethings who think it’s cool to act like…well…scumbags. i hope you end up just as addicted as i did, lose everything, maybe then you’ll realize how really fucking immature you are.
– otterpop (neonexitsign at gmail, if anyone wants to speak directly to me. i’m not a regular commenter on the stranger although i read frequently, so i didn’t see the sense in making an account)
From the post,I can find that you write your post very carefully.The post is very useful,it helps me a lot,thanks.
i live in the kensington area of philadelphia. this shit is bad news. the high isn’t even all that great – in my opinion. yes, its very powerful but it seems to only be preferred by long-time addicts who use more to maintain than get high anymore. its a violent high if use anything more than a bag or two, which most users do. lots of puking and nausea. opiates can be great, my advice – stick with the percs and don’t do em a lot. this shit is nasty stuff.
Ok,
I’ve been recovering for a few years now, and fentanyl was explicity “my thing”. (At least when oxycodone (OC, Oxy, Oxycontin, Roxicet, Percocet, Percodan, Roxicodone etc. stopped working due to tolerance. Like any junky with a long lost love affair, I have remained intensely interested in the status and use of fentanyl in my community and especially the early recovery community. I was in my first year of medical school, moonlighting as a paramedic when I became addicted to fentanyl. I am currently a third year medical student and have studied anesthesiology, pain management, pharmacology, pharmacodynamics, emergency medicine, and addiction medicine extensively as a prominent US east coast medical school.
1.FENTANYL IS MORE POTENT THAN HEROIN. After a continued, acquired tolerance to fentanyl has been established, heroin (dimethyl-morphine) will not produce the euphoria (high) that the seasoned fentanyl user “needs”. This is due to numerous, multifactorial circumstances. Not the least of which are the high lipophilicity of “F”, it’s tremendously low equianalgesic dosage, and it’s rapid onset of action (which contributes to……)
2.) FENTANYL WITHDRAWAL IS MORE SEVERE (though shorter lived) THAN THAT OF HEROIN AND IS MORE IMMEDIATE IN IT’S ONSET. (Pharmacologically, a faster onset, and shorter duration of action equals a higher abuse potential. “H” is metabolized into more potent conjugates which are also very potent, but require at least one pass of metabolism for formation. “F” does not.
3.) the only reason F has not surpassed heroin yet as the “ultimate deadly drug” is that is it not easily produced or obtained, and has not the mythical history of the poppy or opium derivatives.
Jannsen set out to create a medication that was stronger than heroin and more pure. As mentioned in the article, H has many active compounds and metabolites, some pf them actually Opiate Antagonosts, or only partial Agonists. Jannsen knew this and produced a man made alternative with only the purest receptor affinity profile. In other words, FENTANYL WAS CREATED TO BE THE NEW HEROIN (which was medically used at the time) WITH MORE POTENCY THAN NATURE ALONE COULD PROVIDE.
DO NOT BE FOOLED, IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS ABUSING FENTANYL, IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU REACT WITH THE SAME VIGOR AS IF YOU ARE YOURSELF OR FOUND OUT THAT YOU OR THIS PERSON WAS USING HEROIN.
I’m completely pleased with all the intelligent responses here, and of course the comparatively excellent article as well. There are flaws, but it’s still pretty good. The media tends to “glamourize” opiates with all its talk of how horrifying and incredible it is and why people should “just say no”. Really the fact is this: what these stories have in common is ignorance. If we were to adjust our policy to “just say KNOW” and started educating people PROPERLY, giving them access to the kind of information that will allow them to make informed choices, you wouldn’t have people trying fentanyl without having any idea what it is or how it’s potency compares to other opiates. There’d be fewer overdoses and (possibly) fewer addicts.
But hey. Addiction is a choice. You can’t blame fentanyl or heroin or any such drug for the choice a person makes to try it. Everyone’s heard the stories of how addictive these substances are, and even if we won’t admit it to ourselves we all know that’s part of the allure. Would you keep trying something like this if it weren’t addictive? No. There’s a correlation between the potential for dependency and how pleasurable a thing is. At least in our heads. The reality, as any junkie will tell you, is quite difficult. Opiates aren’t addictive because they deliver a perfect sort of euphoria, but because the effects are imperfect. You need more to get more.
But to those who insist on the destructive properties of these drugs and encourage users to switch to “benign” drugs like weed: surprise, not everyone LIKES pot. And if you use ANY drug (from weed, alcohol, and nitrous to coke, meth, and lsd) you have absolutely no right to condem others for the choices they make. Choices which have nothing to do with you. You have no idea the reasons a person has for using their drug of choice, and given that it doesn’t affect you in any way, it’s none of your business besides.
If used correctly, opioids ARE harmless. Because of the cough-suppressing properties, users may be more susceptible to respiratory infections, but no more so than those who use other prescription drugs with the same property. My aunt caught pneumonia due to her use of Allegra. Opioids, while potentially spiritually/emotionally harmful as ALL drugs (even pot) are, are physically quite safe. Especially compared to alcohol, nicotine, and even tylenol and ibuprofen. People just hate to hear that users could possibly be happy with their choice to use heroin or oxycodone or whatever. The public is so fixed on this idea of miserable junkies that anyone who doesn’t fit that mould is ignored or “in denial” or told to “just wait”. I’ve been a functional user/addict for eight years and have known many like me. But I’ve yet to see the media report on my peers. People simply cannot handle the concept. THEY are the ones in denial. They’d accuse us of glamourizing drugs ourselves should we speak of positive experiences. Something which, when you truly think about it, is philosophically impossible unless someone (our society at large) has created a situation where the object of glamourization has immense power: the very thing anti-drug campaigns convince you is untrue. The public has created it’s own irrational paradox. And it’s time people learn to educate themselves and start treating junkies et all like the human beings they are– instead of “losers” or “idiots” or “bad people”. And we need to quit perpetuating this ridiculous notion that addiction is a disease and addicts are helpless in the face of it. Withdrawal is no excuse for hurting others. It sucks IMMENSELY, but it isn’t an excuse. Addiction is, as some brilliant individual above me said, a symptom of a greater problem. Unless you give addicts the PROPER kind of support they need (none of this, “he’s sick and he needs to admit that he is powerless and had no choice but to do all that awful crap”) the real issue will never be healed.
/tl;dr rant rant rant
Bottom line: fentanyl sucks. Do opana.
I’m completely pleased with all the intelligent responses here, and of course the comparatively excellent article as well. There are flaws, but it’s still pretty good. The media tends to “glamourize” opiates with all its talk of how horrifying and incredible it is and why people should “just say no”. Really the fact is this: what these stories have in common is ignorance. If we were to adjust our policy to “just say KNOW” and started educating people PROPERLY, giving them access to the kind of information that will allow them to make informed choices, you wouldn’t have people trying fentanyl without having any idea what it is or how it’s potency compares to other opiates. There’d be fewer overdoses and (possibly) fewer addicts.
But hey. Addiction is a choice. You can’t blame fentanyl or heroin or any such drug for the choice a person makes to try it. Everyone’s heard the stories of how addictive these substances are, and even if we won’t admit it to ourselves we all know that’s part of the allure. Would you keep trying something like this if it weren’t addictive? No. There’s a correlation between the potential for dependency and how pleasurable a thing is. At least in our heads. The reality, as any junkie will tell you, is quite difficult. Opiates aren’t addictive because they deliver a perfect sort of euphoria, but because the effects are imperfect. You need more to get more.
But to those who insist on the destructive properties of these drugs and encourage users to switch to “benign” drugs like weed: surprise, not everyone LIKES pot. And if you use ANY drug (from weed, alcohol, and nitrous to coke, meth, and lsd) you have absolutely no right to condem others for the choices they make. Choices which have nothing to do with you. You have no idea the reasons a person has for using their drug of choice, and given that it doesn’t affect you in any way, it’s none of your business besides.
If used correctly, opioids ARE harmless. Because of the cough-suppressing properties, users may be more susceptible to respiratory infections, but no more so than those who use other prescription drugs with the same property. My aunt caught pneumonia due to her use of Allegra. Opioids, while potentially spiritually/emotionally harmful as ALL drugs (even pot) are, are physically quite safe. Especially compared to alcohol, nicotine, and even tylenol and ibuprofen. People just hate to hear that users could possibly be happy with their choice to use heroin or oxycodone or whatever. The public is so fixed on this idea of miserable junkies that anyone who doesn’t fit that mould is ignored or “in denial” or told to “just wait”. I’ve been a functional user/addict for eight years and have known many like me. But I’ve yet to see the media report on my peers. People simply cannot handle the concept. THEY are the ones in denial. They’d accuse us of glamourizing drugs ourselves should we speak of positive experiences. Something which, when you truly think about it, is philosophically impossible unless someone (our society at large) has created a situation where the object of glamourization has immense power: the very thing anti-drug campaigns convince you is untrue. The public has created it’s own irrational paradox. And it’s time people learn to educate themselves and start treating junkies et all like the human beings they are– instead of “losers” or “idiots” or “bad people”. And we need to quit perpetuating this ridiculous notion that addiction is a disease and addicts are helpless in the face of it. Withdrawal is no excuse for hurting others. It sucks IMMENSELY, but it isn’t an excuse. Addiction is, as some brilliant individual above me said, a symptom of a greater problem. Unless you give addicts the PROPER kind of support they need (none of this, “he’s sick and he needs to admit that he is powerless and had no choice but to do all that awful crap”) the real issue will never be healed.
/tl;dr rant rant rant
Bottom line: fentanyl sucks. Do opana.