10 ms·

Serving All Your Heroin Needs

67 points by romefort 11y ago

rcarrigan87 11y ago
Having grown up in suburbia with a number of friends who have gone the heroin route, from my experience the biggest issue is young kids don't associate their Mom's painkillers in the medicine cabinet with heroin. Oxycontin is viewed like a fun drug. It's legal, so it must be okay... Once they're addicted and out of money they eventually turn to heroin(something they would have never touched prior).
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  My biggest problem with the war on drugs is not the frivolous spending and disgusting financial cost to the taxpayer, or the ruined lives of people in jail for nonviolent crimes. My biggest problem with the war on drugs is that it has created drug education that is propagandized, but even worse, even the nonpartisan content is still severely inadequate and abstinence focused. It really sucks to hear of my friends from highschool are doing 'MDMA' without waiting long enough to not do brain damage to themselves. Not to mention, they're sourcing these drugs at festivals and are probably instead taking synthetic cathinones. It pains me to think that most of my friends don't reagent test their blotter, and will take 4 tabs of 'acid' without thinking that it actually is probably 2C-E and they could die from it. It bothers me that people have parents that will drug test them, so they're smoking JWH-017 and irreversibly fucking their brains up because they don't know any better. Those in the know rely on sites like wikipedia, reddit, and erowid to get our drug information. Those that are not in the know rely on their 5th grade DARE education which they've entirely rejected after realizing weed isn't deadly, and word of mouth from other not in the know drug users that are obviously biased towards drugs not being harmful. So in summary, yes, I 100% agree with you. I've many friends that are on heroin, a few that have escaped it, and a few that I know won't. I have nothing to say besides that it's super fucked up and I'm glad I learned about erowid before I had the opportunity to do any drugs.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > abstinence focused. Why shouldn't the focus be on abstinence?
    - simplexion 11y ago
      Have you seen the rate of teen pregnancy in the Bible Belt?
    - GeneralMayhem 11y ago
      "Abstinence-focused," in drug and sex education, tends to mean "abstinence only." If all the kids are getting is "drugs will all cause you to get addicted and die a horrible death," then once they learn that's not true, they don't have any other knowledge to go on. I agree that the focus should still be on abstinence in most cases - many drugs can in fact cause you to get addicted and/or die a horrible death in very short order - but "teaching abstinence" is shorthand for not really teaching at all.
      - morgante 11y ago
        I agree that abstinence-only sex education is harmful, but I'm not sure the same could be said of drug usage. There's no reason that the majority of people would need or want drugs, and many go without, so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that most will not partake. That being said, any education should still be honest—including explaining the exact harms of different drugs and, hopefully, in the process guiding future users towards safer choices. However, I don't think that should be extended to include the corollary of condom usage—there's no reason to educate people on how to use needles, for example.
        danenania 11y ago
        A big part of the problem is lumping all drugs together in the first place and painting them with the same broad brush. While it may be true there's no non-self-destructive reason to use some drugs (meth and heroin come to mind), there are plenty of others that many people are able to use responsibly and gain enjoyment, insight, or other benefits from. MDMA, for example, while widely abused, has shown great promise as a therapeutic tool for treatment of PTSD and can have powerful strengthening effects on relationships. Is it your place to tell someone who stands to benefit greatly and plans to use this drug responsibly that there's no good reason for them to do it? Shouldn't that be up to them?
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Trip route should have been from Oxycontin addiction to treatment, not with a detour into illegally obtained needle drugs. The Drug War makes the path to treatment much much more difficult.
  - pedrosorio 11y ago
    Still relevant: http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decri...
- soberhacker 11y ago
  Opioid addiction is an insidious series of compromises. At 16 years old, I would have laughed off any notion of trying heroin as absurd. "No, I would never do that!" But having recently tried marijuana, and open to exploring drugs I thought of as "safe," the 5mg Vicodin I found in the medicine cabinet didn't seem like such a big deal. Well I tried it, and boy did I like it. Slowly, over time, I ran the gamut of different strength pharmaceuticals, administered orally, intranasally, and even rectally. Eventually, you develop a physical addiction. One day, you can't afford the $40 for an 80mg oxycontin that you need to get well, and you're staring down the barrel of a long night of withdrawals. But a small bag of heroin might cost $10 and last you a couple of days. And so it goes.
  - rcarrigan87 11y ago
    This is so true. My hometown wasn't far from Camden, NJ, the perfect place to go score heroin once you were out of money and could no longer afford prescription pills. I had a friend even trick me once into driving into Camden for what I eventually realized was so he could buy heroin. Meanwhile, Camden continues to be a place riddled with crime fueled by the money coming in from all the rich white surrounding towns buying Camden's drugs. It's a sad state of affairs.
  - hn_ 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing your story. A while back I saw something about heroin addition on the TV. There was an interview with a doctor. She basically said the same thing as you - none of her patients just decide to start heroin one day, they start on prescription opioids. Then their supply runs out... Then they show videos from pharmaceutical companies from the 90s directed at doctors telling doctors to prescribe their opioids to all their patients (basically). It was basically like "30 million Americans have chronic pain... give them Oxycontin. It's totally safe."
    - ddmf 11y ago
      I remember reading something similar about the pharmacy companies telling their doctors that oxycontin didn't cause addiction and therefore it was safer to prescribe than codeine etc: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-america-on-legal-heroin http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-ameri...
- growupkids 11y ago
  As Elvis Presely used to day: these aren't drugs, these are pills see I've got a 'script from my doctor. Psychology is everything, prescriptions aren't drugs, pills are safe, needles are scary.
facetube 11y ago
In the US, Methadone also keeps people tethered to a daily drive to a Methadone clinic, followed by a relatively long wait in line. When someone is trying to hang on to a job and get their life back together, this can be a significant drag on the process. Buprenorphine (with or without added naloxone) has no such restriction, and can be dispensed from a normal pharmacy in 30-day supplies. However, the DEA limits the number of patients a buprenorphine-licensed physician can take on, which leads to shortages of available care (or very high prices) in a lot of areas of the US. The article seems to blame the drug, and the delivery service, and the people selling it. But many of the people in the bottom 20% income bracket in the US are sick, isolated, have no access to health care (at least without winning their $6,250 out-of-pocket maximum on a lottery ticket), are poor enough to have to prioritize rent over food, and have little to no opportunity for social or economic advancement. As the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park guy said, "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."
- danielschonfeld 11y ago
  The second half of your message, that! If only people realized here that selling the notion of work hard win big isn't working for most middle class and lower class Americans. We can keep on saying its in the name of Capitalism and that this is what this country was founded on that we keep on burying our heads in the sand but at what point does one give up old notions and adjusts to the realities of living at a particular time and stop quoting old cliches that don't work for the majority?
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  He's also blaming addicts for being addicts. At the end of the article he lays out a "rugged individualism" argument that addicts should just suck it up and quit being addicts. Well, they can't, and they've proven that they can't multiple times, so what does he propose we do, other than crack down even harder? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is how some define insanity. Also, if these gangs are non-violent and their custom are non-violent, isn't that preferable to the kind of raw violence that is seen with other Mexican cartels?
stplsd 11y ago
I hate when heroin is described as some terrible extremely dangerous drug, when in fact it is quite the opposite - it is very gentle and relatively harmless drug. Of course I am talking about medical grade pure heroin, not that Mexican black tar shit or white heroin mixed with god knows what. Even with street shitty heroin, 90% overdoses can be so easy avoidable: just don't mix with it alcohol or benzos, and have someone in your shooting gallery with shot of Naloxone. I am not even talking about medical grade morphine/heroine, which is gentle and safe as milk (I mean constipation and some temporary hormone imbalance is the worst you can get, compare it with side affects of otc NSAID, which includes renal failure, myocardial infarction, Gastrointestinal bleeding). And the solution is so simple - just provide addicts with pure heroin, other countries, like Switzerland do this with great success.
- acjohnson55 11y ago
  That sounds like a much more humane way to manage addiction, but I'm interested in knowing what more effective ideas are out there for stopping the on-ramp into addiction, and what the off-ramp is. Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost. This is a common assumption. But empirically, it turns out that the inherent social cost of heroin use (or even heroin dependence) is relatively low, no greater than the social cost of alcohol use/dependence, and arguably a lot less. The only condition is that heroin has to be easily accessible for an affordable price and with a known potency. Diacetylmorphine maintenance programs do exactly this, and have had great success in Switzerland and the UK[0]. People on diacetylmorphine maintenance are able to hold steady jobs and lead otherwise "normal" lives, save for a daily trip to their local clinic. Substitute "bar" or "coffeeshop" for "clinic", and suddenly we're talking about a large chunk of the upper-class workforce, including the tech industry. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
ljd 11y ago
I have a very close friend who this article described perfectly. None of us grew up in a great environment, so when his friends suggested Oxycontin it wasn't abnormal or even strange to do it. But it's been 9 years since and after being homeless, a methadone patient (it's hard to call it treatment when they themselves are so predatory), and endless amounts of family support he is slipping into the harder street drugs that are cheaper and more abundant to find. Growing up in that world has given me an appreciation for the very slight difference between obsession, which drives us to be great and addiction which drives us into the ground and I wonder why I got one and he got the other.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
b6 11y ago
Parts of this story are not ringing true to me. Do dealers really drive around with balloons in their mouths, prepared to swallow them if stopped? Do buyers really receive calls from dealers asking them whether they're satisified? Do buyers really announce their intention to quit using or switch dealers, and get free heroin? I don't have a lot of experience with stuff like this, but it sounds so bogus.
- soberhacker 11y ago
  I'm 4 years sober from heroin now, so I can speak from my experience using in Los Angeles from ~2008-2011. Balloons are typically sold in .1 gram quantities, with lower quality heroin. I do recall buying balloons wet with saliva, but only some of the time. An acquaintance told me that it used to be standard practice for dealers to use young Mexican children to sell dope by this method on foot in Skid Row, but that the city had really cleaned up downtown. With the popularization of cell phones, the delivery system described in this article became the standard. Higher quality heroin was usually sold by the half gram. Instead of being in a balloon, it would be wrapped in plastic torn from a grocery bag, tied off or melted to close and seal it. I don't recall these ever being spat out. They would often hide it under the hood in their beat up trucks or minivans. I never got customer satisfaction surveys from dealers. I'm sure that the dealers had customers or friends from whom they got feedback on their product, but I was never one of them. A dealer's number was quite a hot commodity. You couldn't just call the dealer up and expect to get served—you had to be introduced. And the dealer would often throw in a free bag if you bought x number of them. The result of this was that one user would have the dealer's contact information, and would make a buying run for other users who didn't. If they bought enough they could keep the free bag, or otherwise pinch off the bags that they acquired for the other users.
  - BorisMelnik 11y ago
    Thanks for your experience also. I am also clean from heroin. I never got "surveys" either but your dealer never asked you how a new batch was?
    - 11y ago
sithu 11y ago
There should also be some discussion about why the US uses more prescription narcotics than any other country. Some interesting data and charts here on global consumption and how it's changed over time. http://www.painpolicy.wisc.edu/global http://www.painpolicy.wisc.edu/global
BorisMelnik 11y ago
Interesting business model for sure. Very impressed to hear they actually did customer surveys and follow ups. The next step is an app over SSL. Choose the quantity you want and your unique customer identifier and you will be SMS'd a Google Maps link to a pickup location. What a horrible problem this is. I was hooked for a very long time on this stuff and have had many friends die as a result. It is a nasty habit to kick.
- gwern 11y ago
  It would be interesting to compare this to the Silk Road model: the Tor black-markets are more robust against surveillance (LE pulls countless cell records every year) and more systematic about feedback (every order) but the delivery mechanism is much slower (mail is never faster than overnight and international orders take weeks or months) and it's unclear whether it's more or less secure (individual vendors can be profiled and their packages intercepted reliably; on the other hand, driving around is pretty darn insecure).
darawk 11y ago
As a former heroin addict who used to buy from these guys, this article is spot on. They were always polite, fair and non-threatening. They were usually (relatively) on time. They really did have a great customer experience relative to the alternatives (which I also used from time to time). The thing about them keeping business hours is also accurate and was amusing to me at the time, except of course when I ran afoul of the deadline. As I recall, they even engaged in some network marketing. The group I bought from had a standing offer of a free balloon in exchange for bringing them a new customer.
- soberhacker 11y ago
  This is my experience as well. The "runners" (as the delivery persons were called) were always friendly, and usually didn't speak English. They would tell me, "Tengas cuidado," (be careful).
king_magic 11y ago
This is why I tend to roll my eyes when people advocate legalizing all drugs, no matter what. All the talk about giving up on the failed war on drugs starts to matter a whole lot less when it's your loved ones who you're not sure you're ever going to see alive again on a day to day basis. I'm completely willing to grant that keeping certain drugs (like marijuana) illegal isn't effective or necessary from a public safety standpoint compared to legalization/regulation. But for dealers of heroin and other hard drugs like these, I support extremely, extremely harsh penalties and much stronger enforcement. Far harsher and much stronger than what we currently have. At least that's my (likely unpopular) opinion.
- tmp-20150107 11y ago
  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal for an example of decriminalisation of posession of all drugs, even heroin. Dealers are still prosecuted, but users are not. This seems like a sane solution.
  - king_magic 11y ago
    Totally agree with not prosecuting users. It's the dealers that need to be dealt with.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    It still fails to address many of the worst problems of criminalisation of drugs, namely the level of other crime associated with production and distribution, and the sale of contaminated products. The biggest risk from heroin, for example, is contamination and varying strength, not the drug itself. E.g. street heroin is often mixed with all kinds of other drugs or stuff like brick dust. Clean medicinal heroin is a quite safe drug (safe enough to be used for e.g. post-op pain relief as an alternative to morphine in some cases in the UK, for example - if you are ever prescribed "diamorphine", that's heroin). Decriminalisation of possession is basically a halfway step where politicians don't have to admit to how horribly criminalisation have failed, but can instead "sell" the change as caring about the addicts. But if they really cared about the addicts they wouldn't keep leaving them in a position where they're injecting drugs contaminated by brick dust and where they are still left dealing with criminals for their supply.
MichaelGG 11y ago
"But instead of pursuing more complicated pain solutions, which might include eating better, exercising more and, thus, feeling better, too many saw doctors as car mechanics endowed with powers to fix everything quickly." And what's wrong with that? Opiates have a very low side effect profile, compared to other popular medications (like mood stabilizers, antidepressants). Why should someone unfortunate to have a pain issue also need to change diet and exercise if there's another option? As far as doctors being mechanics -- eh, almost. This unfair system of medicine licensing means that you need to get paid approval before taking medicine of your choosing. And even then, unless you're wealthy enough to demand service, you're entirely left to the doctor's personal whims. Many of which include an anti-addict narrative influencing their decisions. This story is rather Luddite in its views. Don't use medicine, find your inner strength; be American!
dionidium 11y ago
Let's not forget about the shameful inclusion of acetaminophen (at least partially, explicitly) as a harmful deterrent against opioid abuse. Serial abusers mostly know about this (and have strategies to mitigate it), but kids popping their mom's Percocet with a Bud Light have no idea how harmful that combintaion is. That it's unnecessarily, intentionally harmful is, again, shameful policy. http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/13/fda-cuts-acetaminophen-dose-in-opioid-painkillers/ http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/13/fda-cuts-acetaminophen...
- vidarh 11y ago
  That's one of my pet peeves too. In the UK, the sales of paracetamol/acetaminophen was a few years ago restricted - pharmacies can only sell 32 pills at the time; other stores can only sell 16 at a time. This was done to cut the number of (accidental or intentional) overdoses, and is credited with having saved hundreds of lives despite obviously being trivial to "work around" by going to multiple stores. So it is government policy here to consider paracetamol a dangerous, lethal drug. It's far easier to seriously harm yourself with than codeine. But of course, codeine is far more likely to lead to addiction. That they then considered it a good idea to - when legalising the sale of painkillers that includes codeine - require mixing the highly addictive but relatively safe drug with ones that are far more lethal at low doses (paracetamol or ibuprofen) says everything about how drug policy is set based a core view based on seeing drug addicts as immoral, and drug abuse as an evil in itself where it's apparently ok to harm the addicts or let them die if it reduces addiction. You're right. It's shameful.
- roma1n 11y ago
  This was done on purpose? I have seen paracetamol/tramadol combinations to get a synergistic effect (not sure that it works though). But what is the rationale here? "You got an addiction problem, so we're going to fuck your liver while we're at it" ?
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Paracetamol/acetaminophen does appear to have synergistic effect with codeine as far as I'm aware, and the combination is often prescribed for severe pain (the prescription-only variation - at least in the UK - has a far higher codeine to paracetamol ratio), but the requirement that they are combined is clearly to deter abuse of the codeine. The irony is that paracetamol overdoses are far harder to treat and far more likely to lead to death or severe long term damage than opioid overdoses... In the UK, codeine on it's own is still a controlled substance to the point where if you extracted the codeine from a single pill (possibly two, not sure of the exact limit) of the combination products, possession ould get you arrested, while you can go and buy packets with a total of 64 pills (32 each of ibuprofen and paracetamol combined with codeine) at the time from your local pharmacy no questions asked. Basically there seems to be a bizarre belief that addicts will act as rational actors when faced with the knowledge of this mix, despite the fact that most other drug policy is based on the assumption that drug users - addicts or not - are incapable of making decisions about harm on their own. This becomes even more bizarre in places like the UK, where there have been restrictions on the number of paracetamol pills that can be sold per transaction because of the amount of harm caused by accidental or intentional paracetamol overdoses.

67 points by romefort 11y ago

Having grown up in suburbia with a number of friends who have gone the heroin route, from my experience the biggest issue is young kids don't associate their Mom's painkillers in the medicine cabinet with heroin. Oxycontin is viewed like a fun drug. It's legal, so it must be okay... Once they're addicted and out of money they eventually turn to heroin(something they would have never touched prior).

nickysielicki 11y ago
My biggest problem with the war on drugs is not the frivolous spending and disgusting financial cost to the taxpayer, or the ruined lives of people in jail for nonviolent crimes. My biggest problem with the war on drugs is that it has created drug education that is propagandized, but even worse, even the nonpartisan content is still severely inadequate and abstinence focused. It really sucks to hear of my friends from highschool are doing 'MDMA' without waiting long enough to not do brain damage to themselves. Not to mention, they're sourcing these drugs at festivals and are probably instead taking synthetic cathinones. It pains me to think that most of my friends don't reagent test their blotter, and will take 4 tabs of 'acid' without thinking that it actually is probably 2C-E and they could die from it. It bothers me that people have parents that will drug test them, so they're smoking JWH-017 and irreversibly fucking their brains up because they don't know any better. Those in the know rely on sites like wikipedia, reddit, and erowid to get our drug information. Those that are not in the know rely on their 5th grade DARE education which they've entirely rejected after realizing weed isn't deadly, and word of mouth from other not in the know drug users that are obviously biased towards drugs not being harmful. So in summary, yes, I 100% agree with you. I've many friends that are on heroin, a few that have escaped it, and a few that I know won't. I have nothing to say besides that it's super fucked up and I'm glad I learned about erowid before I had the opportunity to do any drugs.
- morgante 11y ago
  > abstinence focused. Why shouldn't the focus be on abstinence?
  - simplexion 11y ago
    Have you seen the rate of teen pregnancy in the Bible Belt?
  - GeneralMayhem 11y ago
    "Abstinence-focused," in drug and sex education, tends to mean "abstinence only." If all the kids are getting is "drugs will all cause you to get addicted and die a horrible death," then once they learn that's not true, they don't have any other knowledge to go on. I agree that the focus should still be on abstinence in most cases - many drugs can in fact cause you to get addicted and/or die a horrible death in very short order - but "teaching abstinence" is shorthand for not really teaching at all.
    - morgante 11y ago
      I agree that abstinence-only sex education is harmful, but I'm not sure the same could be said of drug usage. There's no reason that the majority of people would need or want drugs, and many go without, so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that most will not partake. That being said, any education should still be honest—including explaining the exact harms of different drugs and, hopefully, in the process guiding future users towards safer choices. However, I don't think that should be extended to include the corollary of condom usage—there's no reason to educate people on how to use needles, for example.
      - danenania 11y ago
        A big part of the problem is lumping all drugs together in the first place and painting them with the same broad brush. While it may be true there's no non-self-destructive reason to use some drugs (meth and heroin come to mind), there are plenty of others that many people are able to use responsibly and gain enjoyment, insight, or other benefits from. MDMA, for example, while widely abused, has shown great promise as a therapeutic tool for treatment of PTSD and can have powerful strengthening effects on relationships. Is it your place to tell someone who stands to benefit greatly and plans to use this drug responsibly that there's no good reason for them to do it? Shouldn't that be up to them?
Zigurd 11y ago
Trip route should have been from Oxycontin addiction to treatment, not with a detour into illegally obtained needle drugs. The Drug War makes the path to treatment much much more difficult.
- pedrosorio 11y ago
  Still relevant: http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decri...
soberhacker 11y ago
Opioid addiction is an insidious series of compromises. At 16 years old, I would have laughed off any notion of trying heroin as absurd. "No, I would never do that!" But having recently tried marijuana, and open to exploring drugs I thought of as "safe," the 5mg Vicodin I found in the medicine cabinet didn't seem like such a big deal. Well I tried it, and boy did I like it. Slowly, over time, I ran the gamut of different strength pharmaceuticals, administered orally, intranasally, and even rectally. Eventually, you develop a physical addiction. One day, you can't afford the $40 for an 80mg oxycontin that you need to get well, and you're staring down the barrel of a long night of withdrawals. But a small bag of heroin might cost $10 and last you a couple of days. And so it goes.
- rcarrigan87 11y ago
  This is so true. My hometown wasn't far from Camden, NJ, the perfect place to go score heroin once you were out of money and could no longer afford prescription pills. I had a friend even trick me once into driving into Camden for what I eventually realized was so he could buy heroin. Meanwhile, Camden continues to be a place riddled with crime fueled by the money coming in from all the rich white surrounding towns buying Camden's drugs. It's a sad state of affairs.
- hn_ 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. A while back I saw something about heroin addition on the TV. There was an interview with a doctor. She basically said the same thing as you - none of her patients just decide to start heroin one day, they start on prescription opioids. Then their supply runs out... Then they show videos from pharmaceutical companies from the 90s directed at doctors telling doctors to prescribe their opioids to all their patients (basically). It was basically like "30 million Americans have chronic pain... give them Oxycontin. It's totally safe."
  - ddmf 11y ago
    I remember reading something similar about the pharmacy companies telling their doctors that oxycontin didn't cause addiction and therefore it was safer to prescribe than codeine etc: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-america-on-legal-heroin http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-big-pharma-hooked-ameri...
growupkids 11y ago
As Elvis Presely used to day: these aren't drugs, these are pills see I've got a 'script from my doctor. Psychology is everything, prescriptions aren't drugs, pills are safe, needles are scary.

facetube 11y ago

In the US, Methadone also keeps people tethered to a daily drive to a Methadone clinic, followed by a relatively long wait in line. When someone is trying to hang on to a job and get their life back together, this can be a significant drag on the process. Buprenorphine (with or without added naloxone) has no such restriction, and can be dispensed from a normal pharmacy in 30-day supplies. However, the DEA limits the number of patients a buprenorphine-licensed physician can take on, which leads to shortages of available care (or very high prices) in a lot of areas of the US. The article seems to blame the drug, and the delivery service, and the people selling it. But many of the people in the bottom 20% income bracket in the US are sick, isolated, have no access to health care (at least without winning their $6,250 out-of-pocket maximum on a lottery ticket), are poor enough to have to prioritize rent over food, and have little to no opportunity for social or economic advancement. As the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park guy said, "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."

danielschonfeld 11y ago
The second half of your message, that! If only people realized here that selling the notion of work hard win big isn't working for most middle class and lower class Americans. We can keep on saying its in the name of Capitalism and that this is what this country was founded on that we keep on burying our heads in the sand but at what point does one give up old notions and adjusts to the realities of living at a particular time and stop quoting old cliches that don't work for the majority?
jschwartzi 11y ago
He's also blaming addicts for being addicts. At the end of the article he lays out a "rugged individualism" argument that addicts should just suck it up and quit being addicts. Well, they can't, and they've proven that they can't multiple times, so what does he propose we do, other than crack down even harder? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is how some define insanity. Also, if these gangs are non-violent and their custom are non-violent, isn't that preferable to the kind of raw violence that is seen with other Mexican cartels?

stplsd 11y ago

I hate when heroin is described as some terrible extremely dangerous drug, when in fact it is quite the opposite - it is very gentle and relatively harmless drug. Of course I am talking about medical grade pure heroin, not that Mexican black tar shit or white heroin mixed with god knows what. Even with street shitty heroin, 90% overdoses can be so easy avoidable: just don't mix with it alcohol or benzos, and have someone in your shooting gallery with shot of Naloxone. I am not even talking about medical grade morphine/heroine, which is gentle and safe as milk (I mean constipation and some temporary hormone imbalance is the worst you can get, compare it with side affects of otc NSAID, which includes renal failure, myocardial infarction, Gastrointestinal bleeding). And the solution is so simple - just provide addicts with pure heroin, other countries, like Switzerland do this with great success.

acjohnson55 11y ago
That sounds like a much more humane way to manage addiction, but I'm interested in knowing what more effective ideas are out there for stopping the on-ramp into addiction, and what the off-ramp is. Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost. This is a common assumption. But empirically, it turns out that the inherent social cost of heroin use (or even heroin dependence) is relatively low, no greater than the social cost of alcohol use/dependence, and arguably a lot less. The only condition is that heroin has to be easily accessible for an affordable price and with a known potency. Diacetylmorphine maintenance programs do exactly this, and have had great success in Switzerland and the UK[0]. People on diacetylmorphine maintenance are able to hold steady jobs and lead otherwise "normal" lives, save for a daily trip to their local clinic. Substitute "bar" or "coffeeshop" for "clinic", and suddenly we're talking about a large chunk of the upper-class workforce, including the tech industry. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

ljd 11y ago

I have a very close friend who this article described perfectly. None of us grew up in a great environment, so when his friends suggested Oxycontin it wasn't abnormal or even strange to do it. But it's been 9 years since and after being homeless, a methadone patient (it's hard to call it treatment when they themselves are so predatory), and endless amounts of family support he is slipping into the harder street drugs that are cheaper and more abundant to find. Growing up in that world has given me an appreciation for the very slight difference between obsession, which drives us to be great and addiction which drives us into the ground and I wonder why I got one and he got the other.

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b6 11y ago

Parts of this story are not ringing true to me. Do dealers really drive around with balloons in their mouths, prepared to swallow them if stopped? Do buyers really receive calls from dealers asking them whether they're satisified? Do buyers really announce their intention to quit using or switch dealers, and get free heroin? I don't have a lot of experience with stuff like this, but it sounds so bogus.

soberhacker 11y ago
I'm 4 years sober from heroin now, so I can speak from my experience using in Los Angeles from ~2008-2011. Balloons are typically sold in .1 gram quantities, with lower quality heroin. I do recall buying balloons wet with saliva, but only some of the time. An acquaintance told me that it used to be standard practice for dealers to use young Mexican children to sell dope by this method on foot in Skid Row, but that the city had really cleaned up downtown. With the popularization of cell phones, the delivery system described in this article became the standard. Higher quality heroin was usually sold by the half gram. Instead of being in a balloon, it would be wrapped in plastic torn from a grocery bag, tied off or melted to close and seal it. I don't recall these ever being spat out. They would often hide it under the hood in their beat up trucks or minivans. I never got customer satisfaction surveys from dealers. I'm sure that the dealers had customers or friends from whom they got feedback on their product, but I was never one of them. A dealer's number was quite a hot commodity. You couldn't just call the dealer up and expect to get served—you had to be introduced. And the dealer would often throw in a free bag if you bought x number of them. The result of this was that one user would have the dealer's contact information, and would make a buying run for other users who didn't. If they bought enough they could keep the free bag, or otherwise pinch off the bags that they acquired for the other users.
- BorisMelnik 11y ago
  Thanks for your experience also. I am also clean from heroin. I never got "surveys" either but your dealer never asked you how a new batch was?
  - 11y ago

sithu 11y ago

There should also be some discussion about why the US uses more prescription narcotics than any other country. Some interesting data and charts here on global consumption and how it's changed over time. http://www.painpolicy.wisc.edu/global http://www.painpolicy.wisc.edu/global

BorisMelnik 11y ago

Interesting business model for sure. Very impressed to hear they actually did customer surveys and follow ups. The next step is an app over SSL. Choose the quantity you want and your unique customer identifier and you will be SMS'd a Google Maps link to a pickup location. What a horrible problem this is. I was hooked for a very long time on this stuff and have had many friends die as a result. It is a nasty habit to kick.

gwern 11y ago
It would be interesting to compare this to the Silk Road model: the Tor black-markets are more robust against surveillance (LE pulls countless cell records every year) and more systematic about feedback (every order) but the delivery mechanism is much slower (mail is never faster than overnight and international orders take weeks or months) and it's unclear whether it's more or less secure (individual vendors can be profiled and their packages intercepted reliably; on the other hand, driving around is pretty darn insecure).

darawk 11y ago

As a former heroin addict who used to buy from these guys, this article is spot on. They were always polite, fair and non-threatening. They were usually (relatively) on time. They really did have a great customer experience relative to the alternatives (which I also used from time to time). The thing about them keeping business hours is also accurate and was amusing to me at the time, except of course when I ran afoul of the deadline. As I recall, they even engaged in some network marketing. The group I bought from had a standing offer of a free balloon in exchange for bringing them a new customer.

soberhacker 11y ago
This is my experience as well. The "runners" (as the delivery persons were called) were always friendly, and usually didn't speak English. They would tell me, "Tengas cuidado," (be careful).

king_magic 11y ago

This is why I tend to roll my eyes when people advocate legalizing all drugs, no matter what. All the talk about giving up on the failed war on drugs starts to matter a whole lot less when it's your loved ones who you're not sure you're ever going to see alive again on a day to day basis. I'm completely willing to grant that keeping certain drugs (like marijuana) illegal isn't effective or necessary from a public safety standpoint compared to legalization/regulation. But for dealers of heroin and other hard drugs like these, I support extremely, extremely harsh penalties and much stronger enforcement. Far harsher and much stronger than what we currently have. At least that's my (likely unpopular) opinion.

tmp-20150107 11y ago
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal for an example of decriminalisation of posession of all drugs, even heroin. Dealers are still prosecuted, but users are not. This seems like a sane solution.
- king_magic 11y ago
  Totally agree with not prosecuting users. It's the dealers that need to be dealt with.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It still fails to address many of the worst problems of criminalisation of drugs, namely the level of other crime associated with production and distribution, and the sale of contaminated products. The biggest risk from heroin, for example, is contamination and varying strength, not the drug itself. E.g. street heroin is often mixed with all kinds of other drugs or stuff like brick dust. Clean medicinal heroin is a quite safe drug (safe enough to be used for e.g. post-op pain relief as an alternative to morphine in some cases in the UK, for example - if you are ever prescribed "diamorphine", that's heroin). Decriminalisation of possession is basically a halfway step where politicians don't have to admit to how horribly criminalisation have failed, but can instead "sell" the change as caring about the addicts. But if they really cared about the addicts they wouldn't keep leaving them in a position where they're injecting drugs contaminated by brick dust and where they are still left dealing with criminals for their supply.

MichaelGG 11y ago

"But instead of pursuing more complicated pain solutions, which might include eating better, exercising more and, thus, feeling better, too many saw doctors as car mechanics endowed with powers to fix everything quickly." And what's wrong with that? Opiates have a very low side effect profile, compared to other popular medications (like mood stabilizers, antidepressants). Why should someone unfortunate to have a pain issue also need to change diet and exercise if there's another option? As far as doctors being mechanics -- eh, almost. This unfair system of medicine licensing means that you need to get paid approval before taking medicine of your choosing. And even then, unless you're wealthy enough to demand service, you're entirely left to the doctor's personal whims. Many of which include an anti-addict narrative influencing their decisions. This story is rather Luddite in its views. Don't use medicine, find your inner strength; be American!

dionidium 11y ago

Let's not forget about the shameful inclusion of acetaminophen (at least partially, explicitly) as a harmful deterrent against opioid abuse. Serial abusers mostly know about this (and have strategies to mitigate it), but kids popping their mom's Percocet with a Bud Light have no idea how harmful that combintaion is. That it's unnecessarily, intentionally harmful is, again, shameful policy. http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/13/fda-cuts-acetaminophen-dose-in-opioid-painkillers/ http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/13/fda-cuts-acetaminophen...

vidarh 11y ago
That's one of my pet peeves too. In the UK, the sales of paracetamol/acetaminophen was a few years ago restricted - pharmacies can only sell 32 pills at the time; other stores can only sell 16 at a time. This was done to cut the number of (accidental or intentional) overdoses, and is credited with having saved hundreds of lives despite obviously being trivial to "work around" by going to multiple stores. So it is government policy here to consider paracetamol a dangerous, lethal drug. It's far easier to seriously harm yourself with than codeine. But of course, codeine is far more likely to lead to addiction. That they then considered it a good idea to - when legalising the sale of painkillers that includes codeine - require mixing the highly addictive but relatively safe drug with ones that are far more lethal at low doses (paracetamol or ibuprofen) says everything about how drug policy is set based a core view based on seeing drug addicts as immoral, and drug abuse as an evil in itself where it's apparently ok to harm the addicts or let them die if it reduces addiction. You're right. It's shameful.
roma1n 11y ago
This was done on purpose? I have seen paracetamol/tramadol combinations to get a synergistic effect (not sure that it works though). But what is the rationale here? "You got an addiction problem, so we're going to fuck your liver while we're at it" ?
- vidarh 11y ago
  Paracetamol/acetaminophen does appear to have synergistic effect with codeine as far as I'm aware, and the combination is often prescribed for severe pain (the prescription-only variation - at least in the UK - has a far higher codeine to paracetamol ratio), but the requirement that they are combined is clearly to deter abuse of the codeine. The irony is that paracetamol overdoses are far harder to treat and far more likely to lead to death or severe long term damage than opioid overdoses... In the UK, codeine on it's own is still a controlled substance to the point where if you extracted the codeine from a single pill (possibly two, not sure of the exact limit) of the combination products, possession ould get you arrested, while you can go and buy packets with a total of 64 pills (32 each of ibuprofen and paracetamol combined with codeine) at the time from your local pharmacy no questions asked. Basically there seems to be a bizarre belief that addicts will act as rational actors when faced with the knowledge of this mix, despite the fact that most other drug policy is based on the assumption that drug users - addicts or not - are incapable of making decisions about harm on their own. This becomes even more bizarre in places like the UK, where there have been restrictions on the number of paracetamol pills that can be sold per transaction because of the amount of harm caused by accidental or intentional paracetamol overdoses.