Blood-Sharing Drug Trend Fuels Global HIV Surge
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yes, this makes sense. People are not actually getting high from this, so I doubt that very many people are trying to get high from injecting other people's blood directly.
> Unusual injection practices in Pakistan include selling half-used, blood-infused heroin syringes. (link to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558668/)
This is the headline, I think. Street vendors sell hits of a syringe that may have already been stuck in someone else. Every time the needle enters a blood vessel, some of the blood goes back into the needle. It's not that users are asking for "blood-infused" syringes, it's that the vendors are sticking multiple people with a single syringe and now 50% of intravenous drug users in Sargodha have HIV.
Many use drugs for pain relief, too.
> The injector injects 3 ml and keeps 2 ml (the scale) as injection fee.
Heroin users will first inject the drug, then immediately draw blood back into the syringe and then reinject that, to accomplish a kind of mixing the drug with the blood in the syringe. The study claims that people leave some of that blood/drug mix in the syringe as a fee.
There’s no drug I can think of that is present in the blood in such great concentrations that a transfusion would communicate the high, certainly not without killing the donator or the donatee. Nor does receiving mismatched blood result in anything resembling a high. I concede that the placebo effect can do many remarkable things.
However, given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy, I’m more inclined to believe this is a rumor that got too big for its britches. Maybe a pharmacist out there can convince me otherwise?
1. HIV in Fiji is up 10-fold from 2014 (that's a lot, but if the starting point was small, then it's hard to say)
2. 50% of people who contracted HIV said they shared needles (common issue, unrelated to "Bluetoothing")
3. "Bluetoothing" is a meme, and it sounds insane, and in some small sample in South Africa, 18% of drug users claimed to have done it.
4. In Pakistan, street vendors are selling pre-used heroin syringes (also insane - but needle sharing, not "Bluetoothing")
I mean, sure, this is news in the sense that it's insane. But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.
Journalists getting news from tik tok.
Don’t forget, people were and still are taking horse dewormer for Covid, despite shitting out parasites not really fixing much other than a parasite problem.
> given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy
Skeptics SE seems unconvinced: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57396
Another modern example would be people who genuinely believe that Portland is a fiery warzone.
Continuing to ignore or make fun of people with polar opposite viewpoints as your own to the point you become complacent will lead to exactly the situation we are in now. I promise you the people you are making fun or are not complacent and are vigilantly being active in having things changed to their liking.
Treating someone as a joke maybe cool at parties of like minded people, but now we are where we are because too many did not take things seriously.
SMH It's not about being funny. It's about the seriousness of their opinion. Rational people think that people's irrational beliefs are as serious as a joke (unserious). This has nothing to do with the political power of the misguided, nor the results of their own poor reasoning. I feel like this is painfully obvious. It also feels a bit like being baited into spelling it out in the face of a politically motivated response.
This is not compelling as to why you have demonstrably misinterpreted the sentiment. It appears you are dead-set on trying to make some preachy political statement that falls utterly flat. Having exhausted that derail, you engage with some hand wavy personal attacks. Good luck with that.
Pointing out the nonserious joke that is the bedrock of far right ideology is something with a long and successful history.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/why-are-nazi...
Jokes can come into power. But that doesn't make them not jokes.
I dunno. Another 300ml of vodka can’t be that much more expensive than the apparatus needed to perform a blood transfusion.
All the news and the company's marketing was implying it was more concentrated by being "dried", like you would concentrate all sorts of things.
Except alcohol is a liquid, and cannot be "concentrated". The powdered alcohol was alcohol soaked into maltodextrin (or similar). By definition, it is less potent. In fact, if you make some and actually try to do things like spike a drink, or even just try to make normal drinks from it, it was flat out useless and worse than just sneaking in a flask to somewhere.
The media that IMO kinda "debunked" the whole thing was WIRED
I guess it is really about the same as "tranq" (xylazine), in the US. That stuff is pretty horrifying.
Back before I quit, PCP was the drug boogeyman. That's almost quaint, now.
Not a great head.
Loooong time ago, though. I quit at 18.
> During 2005, a new blood-sharing practice, “flashblood,” emerged among female IDUs in Dar es Salaam. Flashblood is a syringe full of blood drawn back immediately after initial injection that is passed to a companion to inject. Those practicing flashblood believe that the syringe full of about 4cm3 of such blood contains enough heroin to avoid the pains of withdrawal.
Makes me wonder why paywalled articles are allowed in the first place, when most are the visitors aren't gonna be able to read it even.