El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
esquire.com
esquire.com
Instead of reacting to the symptoms we need to look in the other direction.
* Cartels are a symptom of opportunity for profit that isn't being serviced in a legal way.
* Drug addiction is a symptom of a sick society.
* People chemically (or psychologically) addicted to the affects of drug treatment are a symptom of incomplete medical treatment.
Maybe if everyone had a place to be and a job they could do, a sense of security in work and health, as well as the opportunity to have a life worth living we could actually win the 'war on drugs'.
One of my friends in university got hooked on pills his doctor prescribed for his back pain. The guy was 300+lbs, maybe that had something to do with the pain? Who cares, pump him full of pills! A year later he was on heroin. Three years later he was dead.
Nobody but a complete degenerate wakes up one day and says "You know what, I think I'm going to mainline some heroin." Opioid addiction starts with pills. If you take heroin out of the equation, they're going to start making krokodil or some other shit. You can't solve the drug problem until you solve the doctor problem.
It doesn't have to be pills. Snorting and smoking opioids is another way to start as well.
The rest of your comment checks out though. I can't even stand getting a flu shot so the thought of shooting up heroin gives me chills.
One day about each 30 minutes, the pain was awful. Eventually the explanation was that the bacteria generated CO2; that built up pressure inside the tooth and pressed on the nerve; at the peak of the pressure and pain, finally the CO2 escaped out the crack and the pain went away for another 30 minutes or so.
I tried this and that. It was a weekend, and I had a dental appointment on Monday, but for the weekend the pain was beyond belief. I called around, and eventually a sympathetic person in a hospital emergency room explained that people commonly rushed in for opioid prescriptions. No such thing occurred to me at all.
But eventually I just drove to an emergency room and said "I'm fine now, but in about 30 minutes I will be climbing the walls in pain."
They let me stay and wait. When the pain started, right away the attending physician dipped a Q-tip or some such and painted my tooth. Pain gone.
He explained that he just used benzocaine which is the same as dentists use just before giving an injection of a stronger local anesthetic and is over the counter and not very expensive. GOOD!
The dentists had told me to take one of the standard aspirin alternatives -- I did; took enough to threaten damage to my kidneys; and it was useless. Not good dentists.
So, I left the emergency room with a bottle of benzocaine and a prescription. I looked at the prescription -- it had lots of super serious markings about a controlled substance, special numbers, etc. Okay, maybe it was an opioid. No thanks.
I rushed to a pharmacy and stocked up on little bottles of benzocaine and Q-tips and didn't suffer again. At the dentists on Monday, I still didn't like their work and walked out.
In a few days, the pain quit. A week or so after that, the tooth was loose. A few days after that, an oral surgeon extracted the tooth. No problem.
So, sometimes, really, whenever possible, to heck with opioids. Instead, just get some benzocaine for the night or the weekend and then go for some good medical care. As far as I know, I never took an opioid. Dangerous stuff.
Is Benzocaine usually available (in the USA) without a prescription?
Did you know when he made the transition to heroin? Did he ever try to stop at any point? Did you even know that he was on it before it was too late? Were his doctors aware that the Xanax that was being prescribed was being abused? Did they cut that off at any point, potentially leading him to fill the gap with other substances? Did this guy have a good support system in general?
Why didn't he move to OxyContin, morphine, methadone, oxymorphone, etc.?
"Krokodil" is also an alright medication on its own. Just another morphine-related molecule. The big complaint with it is, once again, unregulated producers making incredibly unsanity products. Which, if you shove it into your arm, will cause all sorts of infections.
If we had to buy vaccines from some guy making them in a barn, we'd probably see a huge incidence in infections from vaccinations.
I'd also disagree that no one wants to inject heroin. I've been on IV morphine once, due to an injury, and it was _fantastic_. Unbelievably great. I fail to see why someone wouldn't want that, if they could afford it, have proper healthcare and equipment, etc. It's just a weak form of wireheading.
Doctors aren't the problem. The legal penalties for seeking medication are. The social views that addicts are inherently a problem -- that's a problem. The high cost of medications due to gatekeeping is a problem.
Allow people to buy the medications they want (if only on personal liberty grounds!). Then engage in adverts, education, sell help, etc. if it's really a problem. Opiates are so cheap that even a part time job can easily afford to be high all the time -- if they were in a proper competitive market.
don't expect much beyond +-weed legalization anytime soon, and even that might be rolled back at one point.
So, that's how it happens. Now, there's a lot of places this can go off the rails. If you don't have a good job, and the ability to keep working at it, then you're going to have problems. And if you don't keep up appearances, people will start to wonder what's up, so you have to work pretty hard at hiding the drugs and the habit - if your boss or colleagues find out, no more job, money and there goes the funding for your habit.
Not sure what my point is, except that a heroin habit can get hold of someone quite easily, even people you probably wouldn't expect.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-First-Last-Drugs/dp/16...
The war on drugs really are the crowning achievement of anti-scientific public policy. Decades of ignoring the results and continuing to try the same thing.
The west isn't the only one with this problem. The DEA has been exporting this failed strategy to other countries for decades. The Philippines has taken the American style war to the extreme: http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-philippines-war-on-drugs-deal...
They've demonstrated that the only way to actually win it like a war is via death squads and the total destruction of human rights. Otherwise governments have to face reality and accept it doesn't work.
Never was a problem. Probably led to some of the spirituality and mathematics of ancient India.
However, it was the natural variety. Not the genetically optimized powder keg stuff available today.
He also changed my opinion about legalization. I was on the fence before but this book, combined with books about violence in Mexico since 2006 (60K+ dead) have just pushed me over the edge. Other countries/cities have experimented with "legalization" of hard drugs (Switzerland, Vancouver, Portugal, UK back in the 50s?) and it works. When people can buy their daily fix and are treated like humans instead of junkies they are able to change their lives around.
That seems like an unfair potshot. Why not emphasize: "An increasing number of Americans were addicted to prescription opioids such as Oxycontin."
And even THAT is an unfair potshot. Oxycontin specifically has problems that practically induce addiction.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with pot.
For example, Adán Barrera—the main antagonist in The Cartel—is based on one of the Arellano Felix brothers in The Power of the Dog, but then takes on Chapo Guzman's persona in The Cartel.
But when you realize that a lot of what Winslow describes actually happened in real life it puts a lot of things into perspective—especially the US's involvement on both sides of the coin.
It's a really terrible drug.
If you have been given opioids for pain, did they work? I ask because for me they don’t. I get buzzed, euphoric, but they don’t do squat for pain for me. Same with marijuana. No effect on my pain at all.
In fact, for me, marijuana makes me even more accutely aware of physical discomfort. Am I just an oddball?
Nope. It's the same for me. What I eventually worked out (I'm not 100% sure of this but I'm pretty certain) is that the strain of marijuana is important. Unfortunately I don't get to choose in my country :) But if it's a strain that gives a body high I become more aware of the pain, if it's not I become less aware.
Edit: If someone with knowledge on this matter can confirm (or refute) my assumption I'd appreciate it.
I'm curios if Federal research grants can be allowed to study the medical benefits of Marijuana? I know states have made medical marijuana legal but most funding in research comes from Federal agencies.
They make a huge difference to my current near-constant headaches (cause unknown). Non-opioids (high dose ibuprofen, naproxen, amitriptyline etc.) make little to no difference, but fairly weak opioids (codeine, tramadol) make a noticeable difference. I generally react well to them - low doses have a pronounced analgesic effect without side-effects (euphoria [obviously it is noticed at higher doses, but I don't need that for adequate pain relief] etc.), and they don't cause dependence (stopped the tramadol cold turkey after ~1 years use, and was completely fine other than the headaches returning).
As with pretty much any drug, the individual effects are fairly variable. I tried zopiclone for insomnia, and it produced unpleasant side-effects (rooms looked to be filled with yellow light, even during the night, and memory issues - being in one room then suddenly finding yourself in another with no memory of the intervening minutes is extremely unnerving).
"You can't make this shit up ...",
"The story's goes ..."
"The Mexican authorities had a line on the little bastard."
This is like listening to a person in a bar recounting a story.
Second, the increasing legalization marijuana in the US and the current flow of heroin into the US are orthogonal. Legalization of marijuana is not the cause of an influx of heroin. Mexican marijuana has always been considered cheap and inferior quality. The fact is that US has developed a taste for highly cultivated quality weed, the same as the US has with coffee and craft beer. Its "conspicuous consumption", quality weed, is a status symbol - a sign of discerning taste. The people that were hurt by the legalization of marijuana were the small time neighborhood dealers not the Mexican cartels. Mexican cartels most significant revenues have always been Cocaine which needs to transit Mexico to get to the US. While Cocaine production is still centered in South American the trafficking and logistics were taken over from the Colombian Cartels by the Mexican Cartels after the demise of the Medellín Cartel in Colombia.
The real reason the US is seeing an uptick in Mexican heroin is because there has been a market created for it by those who have become hooked on prescription opioids. When they run out or can no longer obtain their Oxycodone or Hydrocodone they satisfy their withdrawal with street dope.
OR, OR, they could stop manufacturing poison and perhaps get a legitimate job and stop making money off of people with serious problems.
Weed doesn't kill.... heroin does nothing but kill. I guess I can't lay the blame totally on the manufacturers, but my god.... quit acting like their careers somehow deserve to exist one way or another and it's the USA's fault.
As far as I could tell it was common knowledge that the cartels would turn to some other source of income if cannabis was legalized in the US. It was unclear exactly what, but corruption and violence would still play a part as they were large parts of how the cartels functioned.
Not at all. There are plenty of people using heroin that are not your typical junkie, just like there are many recreatioal weed users that aren't unemployed stoners. Take me - I've been working in IT for twenty years, and have been a heroin addict for just about the same length of time. My career is going pretty well, I'm in charge of a team of engineers, I speak about my particular subject at conferences around the world regularly, I have plenty of work up on GitHub that people use.
What does kill people is stigmatizing addicts, and preventing them from getting the help they need to allow them to live a normal life and become usefully employed. Instead, attitudes like yours mean they are forced to become criminals and marginalized.
> If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week
About 3,000 people died today and about 60,000 got seriously injured in car accidents TODAY, according to ASIRT. I think the word "grips" is a bit of stretch here, no?
> take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels.
How is that legalizing sales of Apples will somehow made Oranges' lovers to switch? Hard to believe. Any proof of that??
Tesla is trying to solve the car death problem, others are trying to stop deaths from super potent mexican heroin.
Both are noble pursuits and will save thousands of lives.
No, because there isn't a $50bn domestic and >$10bn international market in car deaths. There isn't a massive machine that perpetuates car deaths; indeed, quite the opposite.
> Hard to believe. Any proof of that??
Yes: a 40% drop in profits from marijuana, and a corresponding spike in the rate of production (and because supply/demand, a drop in the price) of heroin in (and from) Mexico.
You really should have kept reading.
For a while, I tried a wireless mouse, but it seemed to eat through a lot of batteries and otherwise didn't work very well. I returned to a wired mouse connected via USB.
My laser printer? Connects via USB. My old daisy wheel printer (great for envelopes) connects via async serial.
I just don't have any wireless. So, that's a lot of system management, monitoring, maintenance, security, etc. surface I don't have to worry about.
Apparently a lot of the interest in wireless is having computing devices growing around the home or office like weeds for a lot of toys. I have no interest in such things and am concentrating on my startup.
Gee, a lot of HNers got really, really, really totally off the top of the charts PISSED OFF at me. Strange.
WPA stands for what, the old Great Depression Works Progress Administration? I know; I know; in computer land supposed to use TLAs (three letter acronyms) as much as possible.
For all I know, all Microsoft patches for later Microsoft operating systems are only for bugs in those operating systems and not for bugs in the XP version I am running.
I have no even reasonable information that there are any security bugs in the XP installation I have.
I have no reason to believe that Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 is more secure than XP; as far as I know, XP is more secure than those operating systems.
And similarly for Windows Server.
How the heck Flash could give malware to my XP system is beyond me, and I've seen no explanation.
XP should be able to run any user mode software at all safely. I have heard no claims that it can. It it cannot, then I very much want to know why not. For decades several time sharing systems apparently could run any software at all, including operating systems, safely.
These systems are essentially all multiple virtual memory systems built on the Intel x86 architecture with hierarchical file systems with capabilities and access control lists. If there are security holes, I sure as heck want to know why; but apparently there have been security holes, and I never got even reasonably good information on why.
A few years ago, I saw that Microsoft had patched a security hole caused by a buffer overflow bug. Outrageous that Microsoft should still have buffer overflow bugs.
I intend to bring up an instance of a recent version of Windows Server, but I have no solid information or even an idea, none, not even zip, zilch, or zero, what the situation is on bugs or security.
I would have no idea at all on how to run a secure Windows system attached to the Internet.
Looking around at my XP system, I was just outraged to the point of screaming to discover that Microsoft had started some message service that was later seen to be a security risk. I didn't ask for that message service. I wasn't informed that it was running. I wasn't using that message service. I had no intention of using that message service. What the heck other obscure, hidden, secret software is Microsoft starting, not telling me about, and that could infect my system? I'm torqued. But there isn't much I can do about it.
To me, that moving to Windows 10, that apparently keeps phoning home, would solve security problems instead of causing them is a really bad joke. Windows 10 apparently has a lot of new software that likely has bugs. That new Microsoft software, I want nothing to do with it.
Also I have long been totally torqued off, even screaming, as I clicked and clicked and clicked and said over and over and over, for years, to NOT, under any circumstances at all, NEVER but NEVER, ever, read any removable media unless and until so instructed. Don't look at it. Don't check it. Don't permit even a single bit to be read at all. Of course, if you automatically read and execute software from removable media, you should be dragged by two horses in opposite directions. But such screaming didn't work.
Yup, USB thumb drives are a special case.
Instead, of course, I want IP port by port, program by program, each DLL one at a time, and anything and everything else, what the heck is running on my system, why, and what the heck the risks are. But I have no reasonable way to get such information.
For my startup and its Web server, for now it will store nothing or next to nothing on users -- no cookies, user IDs, user passwords, etc. My site makes no use of cookies. Users don't login or give passwords. Users don't give e-mail addresses. Yes, the Web site log file likely has the user's IP address, but actually that does not much identify a user.
Maybe at a high end site, are supposed to put outside of a computer running Windows some special boxes. All IP, maybe even all Ethernet, traffic flows through these boxes, and they check, track, and analyze the heck out of every packet, every bit, that flows through. That data plus some more such tracking on Windows may be enough. But I have no idea what such boxes or associated Windows programs might be.
Of course, the server should make no use of wireless. That a server could get malware from a USB drive is outrageous.
A "stronger border" and "higher walls" are nothing but campaign slogans.
> This is still an active smuggling route, especially for drugs.
I'm a little confused as to how this article supports the argument that building a wall helps limit drug smuggling. Care to explain?