[TaylorGood]

Sorry to hear. Partaking in heavy drugs to any degree invites those dark unknowns. The number of hands these drugs pass through to reach the end-user is more than a couple. I recall on average it's 8 different turnovers. Each time, likely being cut down. They operate a margin business without concern for where it ends up. It's likely safe to say that a vast majority of drugs are cut these days.

A friend I grew up with just shot himself to death. He was on a TV show, model and had it all going for him..until the night he tried black tar heroin through a needle, off a spoon. An older friend convinced him and four others to try it one night at a wrap party for the TV show. Grew up affluent but drugs immediately nosedived his life. Ended up in and out of jail, losing it mentally, mental institutions, broke every window at his parents house, just living a really rough existence. The part that got me: the older friend who introduced him to it showed up to his funeral.

The other one of the four is on his third strike for heroin, just got his second DUI trying to "live it up" – drugs i.e. heavy drugs, are a game that you do not win.

[Alex3917]

> Each time, potentially being cut down.

Drug potency follows something like an S-curve. As enforcement increases a drug will get increasingly stepped on, until the purity is low enough that the drug gets replaced with a more potent analog. Consumer Reports wrote about this in their guide to drugs from the 70s.

[kakarot]

> Consumer Reports . . . guide to drugs

Whoa. Care to further elaborate?

[Alex3917]

It’s free online: The Consumer Union guide to licit and illicit substances.

[kakarot]

I will check it out today, thank you!

[matwood]

I can see how people move to something like heroin after being on pain meds and getting addicted, but who really just 'tries' heroin? At this point, the mix danger and addiction danger is well known and publicized. I'm asking, because I cannot mentally put it together, particularly if someone has life going in the right direction.

[jstarfish]

Chronic pain escalation, sure, but also: kids.

I've come to realize that the concept of gateway drugs is bullshit. Kids are going to try whatever they have available. If heroin suddenly enters the scene, then heroin is what they're going to try. Same thing for meth.

Also, it's a different sort of high. When you want to get drunk, you drink. When you want to feel stupid, you smoke weed. But when you just want to feel like everything is beautiful and nothing is wrong, you try opiates (or amphetamines).

[saiya-jin]

> But when you just want to feel like everything is beautiful and nothing is wrong, you try opiates (or amphetamines).

Interesting, this is exactly what weed is giving me, without any nasty effects and addictions of hard drugs. If in nature, this effect is super strong. I came up with most important decisions in my life when high, and they are still solid and best choices possible, even when looking back after 10 years. Different perspective on situations, in some cases really proactive thinking and resolving issues before they arise and so on...

I guess it really affects us differently. I've seen few people get weird/aggressive on it, but then again I would never want to drink with them either. Something badly broken deep inside, with no real chance of fix, ever.

[jgtrosh]

This is just a specific model of how people act you just conjured up in your head. People in many situations try heroin all the time, whether or not it seems coherent.

[jakevn]

There are people that do base jumping that are otherwise well adjusted adults. It’s very dangerous and no level of expertise reduces that danger.

Some people are just attracted to the crazy unknown. Many can’t believe they could become addicts because they’ve never been addicted. Others still don’t care because they’re just one step removed from suicide.

[erasmuse]

>Some people are just attracted to the crazy unknown

Yes. "Find what you love and let it kill you" somebody said. And most people don't feel safe unless they're living fearfully close to the edge of what is possible for them. In the past men worked till they dropped dead in their 40s to keep their families alive through the winter; women had baby after baby until they died or couldn't otherwise cope.

The strange thing is that, absent those harsh historical conditions, people still want the feeling of an edge, an existential risk. So they gamble, they do drugs, etc.

But these aren't good edges to be on. There are many real, urgent problems the world faces that could benefit from obsessive, risk-seeking commitment to the 'crazy unknown'. Addiction-level commitment. It shouldn't have to be to drugs. How do we funnel ourselves towards these problems?

[BenchRouter]

It's also worth noting that you can smoke heroin, which probably requires a significantly lower mental barrier to cross.

And once you're in the throes of addiction from smoking it, I'm guessing injection seems less and less objectionable.

[DanBC]

You know that people made unable to assess risk. This is why children are driven everywhere, and why we have to take our shoes off to board a plane.

Heroin, tried once, is not instantly addictive for most people.

[hackermailman]

Drug users often take as a group, so if the group has no money to buy their regular drugs that day and one of them has heroin to snort or inject they will do it. That's how most addicts I met while living in a shitty drug filled area got addicted. Heroin is the cheapest street drug here right now too since it's cut with dirt cheap and easy to import fentanyl. For years it wasn't even illegal to export it from China, so anybody could get it direct off sites like Alibaba and try and smuggle it in.

[selectodude]

Alcohol is the biggest gateway drug and it's not really close.

[TaylorGood]

As someone posted below on his usage, his misunderstanding was thinking Heroin fell into same category of drugs "ok to try" .. but, it isn't just one trip. It's a shift chemically unless I'm mistaken.

[throwanem]

I think it is, but how quickly it occurs seems to depend on the person. I've known people who tried heroin once or a couple of times and never touched it again - one such person once said she stopped when she did because she knew that after another time she wouldn't be able to stop. With others, it's one and done - instant addiction. I don't really have a metric, but the existence of the variation is interesting in its own right.

Terrifying stuff. I've had a run-in with it myself, when someone slipped me a cut pill of molly, in my younger or dancing-at-parties days lo these many years ago; luckily I had friends there who realized something was up and looked out for me, or almost missing a flight the next morning would no doubt have been far from the worst consequence. I've never had the urge to go back to that particular well, but what I remember of the experience makes it easy to understand why someone would; there is that about it which, while under its influence, makes it impossible for the world to touch one in any meaningful way. Of course, when not under its influence, the opposite is true and very emphatically so, which I think is in large part what keeps people going back even when they're as dedicated as they can be to the goal of kicking.

[swendoog]

> "but who really just 'tries' heroin"

Natural. Selection.

[loverofcode]

PLEASE READ AND PUSH TO THE TOP!! this is a direct result of the war on drugs. the fentanyl and carfentanil coming from china are responsible. before these two were being imported at such high rates opioid deaths were 4,000 per year vs 400,000 for alcohol. Which at first was being blamed on fentanyl being prescribed legally, but was incorrect data. Check the numbers yourself at wonder cdc. attached is the screenshot form cdc data. https://imgur.com/a/fFBTe

[dang]

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis, please don't post the same comment more than once, and please don't ask people to upvote, even when the topic is important.

[jstarfish]

> Sorry to hear. Partaking in heavy drugs to any degree invites those dark unknowns. The number of hands these drugs pass through to reach the end-user is more than a couple. I recall on average it's 8 different turnovers. Each time, likely being cut down. They operate a margin business without concern for where it ends up. It's likely safe to say that a vast majority of drugs are cut these days.

Drugs have always been cut. Historically it was just cut with OTCs or detritus, which was a problem that could be solved in most cases by simply doing more.

The problem as of late has become when they lace it with things like fentanyl, which is a cheap filler that actually improves the high (thus encouraging repeat business) but can be lethal in large doses.

[BenchRouter]

> Historically it was just cut with OTCs or detritus, which was a problem that could be solved in most cases by simply doing more.

Well, until you get a more pure batch and you try to do the same amount you do with the dilute batch.

[toyg]

This is how prohibition is killing people: by removing any sort of quality control for the customer. You can die by drinking bad wine or eating contaminated food, but we have processes and laws that make sure wine is done properly and food is not contaminated, so the consumer knows that, when she buys pasta, it's going to be pasta, not a bunch of random chemicals that look like pasta and might taste somewhat like pasta. Can you imagine buying unlabeled pasta from a shady guy in an industrial estate near a plant manufacturing yellow plastic? That's what buying drugs is today, thanks to prohibition.

[Maarius]

Unfortunately "larger doses" in terms of Fentanyl is not that much: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/29/fentanyl-heroin-photo-fa...

[narrator]

Yeah, people think they're too good to have a problem with this stuff, but there's a real physical damage going on that is not something that one can shake off.

I lost a relative to drug abuse. I think one of the reasons they got into it was she they were very intolerant to boredom and just scoffed at everything. Nothing was serious, everything got a do over.

[icantdrive55]

I do wonder how fentynl is getting in, or is it being made here?

If a chemist is reading this, I would love your imput. I was under the assumption fentynl complicated to produce.

That said, my wish is the government would provide generic bupenorpine to any person that wants the drug. It needs to be easily available to anyone. No b.s., just give out the drug. Save all the drama. Give them a long half life drug that will get them off the hard stuff. Let them taper off the bupenorpine when they see fit.

Now--they will say the addict needs counseling, nalaxone, and blah, blah, blah.

Just give out generous bupenorpine. It has a long half life, and you have to be determined to overdose on it.

I will be shocked if anything is done for most addicts.

Hell--when my psychiatrist retires, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. I'm on two very controlled substances, and so tired of hearing the experts opinion, and their outlandish prices.

So yes, we will see commercials, etc., but just give out bupenorpine. Most addicts don't need extensive counseling--I believe. They are just afraid of widhdrawls. Withdrawals that might be less severe than they imagine?

[jstarfish]

> I do wonder how fentynl is getting in, or is it being made here?

Imported from China. Wasn't regulated at all there until recently, then the producers started messing with the formula.