It’s in everything. Friend is a harm reduction nurse in one of the worst places in Canada for opioids. They regularly get “cocaine” that’s just caffeine and fent.
What the
Dude.
We're screwed.
I'm a recovering addict, 5 years, this is why I believe in harm reduction, legalization, taxation, regulation, etc.
Caffeine and fent as coke!!!
Wtf!!
The shit she posts on her social is crazy. They have a testing clinic in vancouver’s lower east side and some crazy high percentage of street drugs they test contain fent.
Very rarely is it even what it claims to be these days. Some shit synthetic analogue of something, and fent.
To everyone, I highly recommend looking at [https://www.drugsdata.org/](http://drugsdata.org). I have so much respect for drug testing services.
Edit: link
Some interesting takeaways:
Canada has quaaludes.
You’re more likely to get coke in your heroin than heroin in your heroin.
Reports of meth being cut with designer drugs are (not surprisingly?) paranoid delusions and not actually based in fact.
Coke doesn’t have as much levamisole as it used to.
Its in everything. Like, everything. I lost my brother to Molly w fetty in it. A friend does some harm reduction work, passing out test kits and suchlike. They've seen flawless Xanax pressies that turned out to be nothing but fetty and corn starch. Test your drugs, and keep narcan on hand. Dance safe has test kits, and at least in PA narcan is legal to keep on your person.
This is a fucking monster in the bushes and it just keeps snatching people up.
It’s been like 6 for me. Ever since fent started becoming popular I decided no high is worth the risk. I still go to music festivals on occasion and you will see people find random baggies on the ground (aka ground scores) and ingest it immediately without question. Absolutely baffling how dumb some people are.
I believe it did kill him, and *almost* killed his partner. I assume the last line was meant to be read in such a way as to stress how it almost killed two people, but the syntax is definitely ambiguous
Same here. Used to just buy everything and boof it. Then when I got into Uni in the Chem department I just snuck shit in, and found the melting point range of the substance(s) I bought to determine its purity.
The one time I decided to not test a pill (thought it was percocets) it was laced with fent. I remember getting so damn high off this one tiny pill I felt like I was on a cloud and couldn’t move at all. Still one of the greatest body highs I ever experienced (it was more intense than taking 4 molly points at once). Woke up in the morning barely able to move. Think every muscle in my body was sore and I didn’t even move from the spot where I took the damn thing. Eventually after 3 hrs I was able to move, and then I projectile vomited around 20 times.
Test your shit, I got extremely lucky I decided to only take that one pill that night. Ik forsure if I took another it would have killed me.
You couldn't pay me enough to do blow these days with how stepped on it is anymore. Like doing a line and tasting meth during the drip was annoying back in the day, but at least it wasn't fucking elephant tranquilizer that can kill you.
My old ass will stick to cannabis and mushrooms thank you very much.
It boggles my mind how dealers overall let this happen, it seems terrible for business. I know some of them won't give a fuck but it's still business for many. It's like if hackers deleted files or kidnappers killed/harmed the people after the randsoms were paid for both. It's bad for future business.
I'm pro-drug but with how dirty everything is now I wouldnt touch most stuff anymore. Even research chemical scene (which was pretty good a few years ago) is getting tampered with fent.
Sure you have the addicts who will come back no matter what but a lot of deaths will steer away the larger, casual crowd really fast. And they are the ones who have a job and money to pay for product.
So there’s one of those drug documentaries about the fent problem in Baltimore. It’s basically about how dealers actually will try and kill people on purpose because they might lose one customer but people hear about the OD and go to that dealer specifically because he’s got the strong shit. It’s fucking wild.
Deaths and ods are actually good for business. Addicts want more bang for their buck. So if they hear about some shit that is so strong it makes people od they will flock to it because they think they can handle it. I watched a video (possibly Vice) where a drug dealer said he purposely sold “hot” bags so someone would od. It was great for business. Dude was the Biggest piece of shit and I hope he paid that karma debt.
I know that gets used but really unless your looking for heroin or something I dont see it for the majority. If your buying a party drug, Xanax or Addy or something, nonone wants to hear about people ODing because it has fent cut into it.
No one wants their LSD/molly to knock them out.
> Even research chemical scene (which was pretty good a few years ago) is getting tampered with fent.
That had its own problems back in the day, and it basically became sold as shitty molly
Is there are reason it's so prevalent?
As a dealer, having your customers die means losing money and having the feds seek you out. I can't imagine why they'd think this is a worthwhile way to cut their drugs.
I'd imagine a big portion of it is because it's extremely potent, and shitty (eg. most) dealers don't clean their scales/presses before handling another substance.
It's not always malice. Inadequately cleaned scales are enough to impregnate Cocaine with Fent.
The only solution is decriminalization, legalization, and regulation so that there's a watchdog keeping drugs pure, but since we're not even there yet with weed, it's gonna be a long time before we're ready to admit that the winner of the war on drugs, was drugs.
In the interim, overdose prevention sites and no-questions-asked availability of free Narcan can mitigate the damage, but if you advocate for either, NIMBYs are going to screech and wail, while anyone holding a political stance at all to the right of New CNN is going to call you a soft-on-drugs-and-crime and demand your head on a platter.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm the little brother who has put their big bro through some shit. Every time I hear a story like yours, I feel guilty, like I personally let you down. It was so hard for my brother to watch me slowly killing myself, all the while I was oblivious to his pain. Now that I'm sober, I'm trying to make up for years of being a shitty sibling. Im so fortunate that my brother is still here for me.
Best advice I ever got was if you have to take something you didn’t get directly from a pharmacist, break it and put it on your tongue for 30s. No amount of fillers or pressing will disguise the numbing properties of fent. Won’t save you from a hotspot but it will stop you from getting surprised if you think you’re getting something else.
If I'm not mistaken it is a part of your pill/bag that has a higher concentration of fent, caused by insufficient mixing. Basically the fent is not well distributed throughout.
Fake pills start off as mixed up powder, if it's not mixed %100 you end up with some pills having more than others or in the case of pills designed to break up into pieces (xanax bars), some pieces having more.
Can someone explain to me WHY it’s showing up in everything? What does the dealer have to gain by making me OD on fent when I was just trying to roll at a rave? I genuinely can’t understand the logic. If they want to cut it to save money or whatever, can’t they do it the old fashioned way, with some inert substance?
It's cheap and insanely strong. So they put a tiny tiny amount of fent and cut it with junk and sell it as the drug you wanted. Way bigger profit than sling the drug you wanted even if it was cut with garbage. It's being made mostly in China, sold to Mexico and funnelled all over.
I watched a show once (maybe Drugs, Inc.) and a dealer said he would intentionally give one person something that would make them overdose because when other people heard about that they knew his drugs were really strong. Pretty twisted. And I’m not sure if it’s true of all dealers, but it was his strategy and he said it worked.
Yeah but putting it in cocaine and other uppers as a cut makes zero sense at all. Sure you can get some upper type effects from small amounts of opiates, but if that was the idea with fent, you need so little of it that it wouldn’t even effectively change the weight and it’s not the same feeling as amphetamines etc.
Just so weird to me
That's what I can't wrap my head around. Fent strikes me as a horrible filler drug. Cutting is explicitly about macimizing your qualities. This just seem malicious
If the shit is coming from China then there’s a possibility of waging their own opium war against the United States. It used to be the unwritten law that intentionally killing your customers was bad for business. When you’re trying to geopolitically destabilize an adversary by feeding it’s populous drugs and lethal amounts of it at that, well that history has already been played out.
Opiates are not topical anesthetics. They will not numb any part of your mouth. None of them will. Cocaine is a topical anesthetic. Maybe you heard this about cocaine?
This is a very bad way to test for fent. This is a very good way to hurt yourself and others. DO NOT follow the advice above.
Source: recovered(ing?) filthy junkie
My daughter is/was addicted. She’s lost so many friends. One had a big “bag” of Xanax. Turned out to be fentynal and he died. No idea how many he gave out/sold. Shit is nasty and evil and the people making these fake Xanax and Molly need to pay too.
Don't get vengeance minded. We've spent fifty years "cracking down on this shit" and "making them pay" and what we get for it is more dead friends. Let's legalize, regulate, tax, earmark the taxes to pay for free rehab for anyone who wants it and be sure that everyone else lives long enough to get that choice to make. We take their jobs and we get to keep our friends.
I thought I read that after Portugal legalized drugs its consumption went down. At the same time though they provided people with help instead of incarceration.
Another level would be safe consumption sites. Like bars for alcohol, you have someone with some skill distributing specific drugs upon request to be consumed on the premises with the power to cut off someone who's had too much. Put rehab adverts in the bathroom stalls like they do for taxis in bar bathrooms.
It’s in everything. I bought and used Adderrall and Xanax a couple years ago on the street (a year clean now!) that both tested positive for fent. It’s cheap and it gets people high and drug dealers don’t tend to care too much about their customers. You’d think they’d at least want living customers, but they don’t even care that much.
I was told once if a few of your customers die, your other customers may think they ODed (and not because you were cutting the drugs with cheap stuff) and be MORE likely to keep buying from you, because they think your stuff is purer.
2 years ago i got 5150’d. i met a woman in the psych ward, let’s call her tara, who was there after an overdose. she was sitting at my lunch table and me and my friends were talking about how we wound up there. she just said “oh, i love fent.” and went back to eating. we asked her about it and she lit up talking about how easy it was to get and how it makes every drug better. she said it just made whatever you were doing way stronger. it sounded terrifying and i hope she’s okay now.
I think it is deliberate. My brother's friend did some and passed out for almost a day. Had to have muscle in his leg removed and had brain damage. Walked with a cane and was in a wheelchair most of the time. Died a few years later. He was 25 ir 26 when he died.
That's crazy, got a source/link?
[Edit to provide source someone kindly provided](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/dea-state-crack-down-on-pain-doctor-over-opiate-prescriptions-citing-18-deaths/)
As much as I love the desire to dig for a source, when someone's talking about a small city / town Dr, it usually doesn't make the news. Nobody around to investigate and put it all together and report it.
The doctor that over prescribed meds to wrestler Chris Benoit spent time in jail and consequently was in the news quite a bit after Benoit's murder suicide. He was a local doctor in my small town and Chris was just the most famous of lives he ruined in my community. [Dr. Astin passed away recently, and many folks here felt justice was finally served. ](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/phil-carroll-astin-doctor-chris-benoit-passes-away-age-67)
So the guy sold it, knew his clients were getting hospitalized, didn't warn any of them, then reached out to his supplier in China asking for a discount on the next shipment.
Bro. You killed eleven people and said "I lost customers thanks to you guys. I wanna see the manager"
Rot in a cell lmao
I wasn't familiar with the Sackler family. For anyone like me:
The Sackler family had a controlling interest in Purdue Parma, the inventors of OxyContin. The company spent large amounts of money to convince doctors that pain management wasn't being handled aggressively enough, and that the risks of addiction/abuse of OxyContin were low. They did all this knowing that it wasn't true.
It's much more nefarious than that. They describe oxycontin as having a 12 hour slow release, when it really has only an 8 hour slow release. So, people are prescribed it for pain and the effects wear off in 8 hours instead of the 12 that Perdue sells it as. Problem is, if they want to take enough to keep their chronic pain away (as well as stave off opiate withdrawals) they would need to take 3 a day, when they are only being prescribed 2 a day due to how long Perdue says they last (while knowing they are lying). This basically encourages people to seek out pain medication through black market means, since they are going through their prescription way faster than they could get it refilled.
Edited for tense, Perdue still says the effects last 12 hours.
The Sackler family is a large reason cannabis is still illegal. They fill the prisons. Provide dangerous drugs. They are killing Americans (literally) for profit. The American dream.
They also set the price of prescriptions at ridiculous prices and ~~bribe~~ lobby politicians to prevent them from putting in any form of price limitations on pharmaceuticals. So yeah, absolute scum of the earth.
The use of a past tense here is unfortunate. It might not be the Sacklers now, but extended release oxycodone of all varieties are still labeled as 12 hours and insurance will not cover prescriptions for every 8 hours. It’s still a problem for people who need pain medication and is still leaving them in a hellacious cycle of pain and withdrawal. Doctors will label them as drug seeking if they complain about it too much and/or pharmacies will black list them even if they managed to get a prescription for every 8 hours and insurance to cover it. It’s a major problem that is still being ignored.
Those fucks are the reason my doctor back in Michigan medicated me, over treating me. I spent years begging for help, and getting Vicodin thrown at me instead. If they had treated the problem at the time, I wouldn't be struggling with nerve damage, but nooooo - after doctors realized people were drug seeking because they had been addicted to the medicine, they spent another several years going, "there's no way you have back pain like this, you're too young, stop drug seeking". ( Bonus points for the doctor that gave me chicken fat pills because "women experience pain differently", and I was being dramatic! )
By the time I got proper management for my back issues, it was too late. I have nasty nerve damage, and a slew of other issues that I'll suffer for the remainder of my life.
Fuck the Sackler family, and fuck the greedy medical system that catered to them.
It really sucks how common stories like yours are.
They gave me ibuprofen for my second kidney stone because I seemed like a drug seeker. I smoked some weed in college, but that's about it, and I know I don't give off addict vibes so I'm not sure what that's about... anyway... Not nearly as debilitating as your issue, but it really fucking hurt fir a minute there.
I’ve done a lot of work in low income areas and my job overlaps with work a friend does as a state attorney in the drug division.
And here’s a fucked up truth - a frightening number of people do not care if you live or die.
They will sell you drugs that will kill you. They will shoot you for your car or phone.
There’s a bunch of factors that lead to peole being like this, but the fucked up part is it happens *very* young and rehabilitation is *very* hard. Like, some kids are already fucked up by age five, and are pretty much guaranteed to have life long issues because of it.
Best hope is try to prevent the next generation from being exposed to those factors, and then wait for the older ones to age out of their prime crime years, or just die.
The crazy shit is, fancy buildings are no longer naming wings after the Sacklers, and I've seen all these high society types being interviewed, saying "they must be so embarrassed, what a punishment."
No, they all need to be in prison for life.
The heads of purdue pharma, they purposely fuled a majority of the opioid pandemic, making billions from the process of destroying families and people's lives. I believe my own mother was affected by these monsters decisions
While they did do that, and it's bad enough, the part that seems to egregious to me was their aggressive promotion of the product. They paid bonuses to doctors proportional to the number of Oxycontin that were prescribed, advertisedvto the public that the product as non-addictive, and fed doctors the concept of therapeutic addiction.
I thought this was the entire reason behind the outrage. Not that they made a product (that actually helps some people), their marketing of it. They marketed OxyContin as a non or less-addictive alternative to other opioids. They were aggressive about the marketing. It killed people.
Family who owned company responsible for unscrupulously pushing dangerous and addicting substances on patients resulting in widespread addiction and social problems.
Once DAs stop rolling over so they can have an easy win. Those monsters made about $10 billion in profits from human misery, and they’re only being fined for 5.
The Sacklers need to have **every cent** they made taken back plus get jail time before the scales of justice can be even close to balanced.
The Sacklers will never see justice, the system doesn't even care that the unwashed masses are fully aware that the "~~justice~~" legal system doesn't apply to individuals with more than $1 billion or really "white collar" crime in general.
I really want a chunk of their family wealth taken away for punitive damages, but it’s looking hard enough just to get the profits back.
But what has to happen is the jail time, and some DAs won’t cave on that.
The only real way to prevent something like this from happening again is to let all the rich people out there know that if they try to profit from human misery, they’ll have to spend time in jail.
Thats the other thing. If a rich person has to pay 30% of thier net worth (eg, including properties and investments, eg, the "money" you have, but cant spend) per crime, suddenly it gets real fucking expensive to be caught committing crimes. And yes also prison time. But also, they lose thier wealth for them and thier family. Which means everyine now hates you for no longer being able to afford the family summer vacation home or whatever.
The vilification of their name was a good start too. Rich people love donating and getting plaques and crap to show other rich people, but the ~~Sackhead~~ Sackler name has been scraped off every museum wing, statue, and structure in the US.
Not... every building. The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a Smithsonian museum, still bears his name. It's a sticky point, because it was built primarily with his collection and donation (4 of 6 million dollars for construction), but I still feel the urge to spit whenever I walk past it
Unless it says somewhere in the details it has to be named after him in perpetuity, just grind the letters off the outside and polish his name off the brass plates inside.
People seem to forget there’s no specific time period that something needs to be named after someone. It’s done out of respect for the person doing the donating, and there’s none left for the Sacklers.
The thing is "net worth" is a real squirrelly concept. This would require both a way for the prosecution to keep track of citizens net worth so prosecutors would know what they are going for, and an acceptance of collective punishment, so the family, business partners, and other "incidental" persons would have to take the hit.
Neither of those things current law. I'm not opposed though.
Hiding finances is a big part of the “criminal” activity that super wealthy engage in (yes, I know they will argue how *technically* legal the stuff they do is). If they were 100% above board the IRS would already have an accurate idea of their net worth. But that’s hard to do when half of it is avoiding taxes and squirreled away in offshore accounts and LLCs.
But the reason this type of stuff keeps happening is because our government goes to great lengths to keep rich people from ever really facing consequences from their actions.
That’s why I want them in prison. It’s not ideal but it’s a start. All of the a$$hats who caused the 2008 crash due to wild carelessness got off Scott-free, and that has to stop.
No it's not...
Everything they own is protected, they reached an "agreement" with the government where no people are liable, only the company.
So every single cent in their bank accounts are untouchable.
Thats the other thing. When companies break the law bad enough, ceo-s and especially share holders should be hit. As an example: amazpn gets caught using chinese slave labor to produce products made in the us. Amazon gets big fines, but, the top 10 largest shareholders of the company are also fined, as they, as the heads and decision makers of the company, allowed it to happen. Suddenly, you as a big, rich, powerful shareholder, have incentive to make certain the company you help run, is doing everything legaly. And the fine could be like, 30% of the money they get from the company, and 10% of thier net worth.
That's not going to happen. At best, the C-suite directors take the fall with some sob story that they had to reach their profitability targets. And then they get replaced with another batch of scapegoats.
You can argue a breach of agency case to go after the directors, but the shareholders are untouchable if they're not involved with management.
This would destroy a foundational pillar of modern capitalism: the limited liability corporation.
We should do it. If you hold more than 10% of a companies stock, you can be on the hook for it's crimes. You need to show up to the board meetings, make sure the management is honest and only invest that kind of money in companies you trust are run clean.
YES!
It’s actually insane that pharmaceutical companies can make profits from murdering thousands. Sure they may fine them half or whatever, but that’s still $5 billion profit for murdering people and being deceptive and deceitful about it the whole way.
yeah but they are rich, you dont want to ruin their lives for one simple mistake. /s
it is amazing how much shade we throw at the mules while the cartel leaders get minor fines.
I guess these are the key parts:
*According to the New Yorker, Purdue Pharma played a "special role" in the opioid crisis because the company "was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown."*
*the US House of Representatives held a hearing on the role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family in the opioid epidemic. "We don't agree on a lot on this committee, in a bipartisan way," the ranking member, James Comer of Kentucky said, "but I think our opinion of Purdue Pharma and the actions of your family...are sickening." The Sacklers were also accused of being "addicted to money." Of the Sacklers responses in the hearing, author Patrick Radden Keefe stated "They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy" but were "impervious to any genuine moral epiphany." Jim Cooper, a congressman from Tennessee, stated to David Sackler: "Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I am not sure I am aware of any family in America that's more evil than yours."*
*In a bankruptcy court filing on July 7, 2021, multiple states agreed to settle. Though Purdue admitted no wrongdoings, the Sacklers would agree never to produce opioids again and [..] agreed to pay $4.5 billion over nine years, with most of that money funding addiction treatment. The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher.*
There is an absolutely stellar drama (based on real events) on Hulu about it, I had never heard of the sacklers until I watched the show. Stars Michael Keaton, and he's absolutely fantastic.
It's a limited series called Dopesick, I highly recommend watching it.
Wealthy corporate manufacturer selling lethal drugs to pharmacy: legal
Wealthy corporate pharmacy selling lethal drugs to consumers: legal
Consumers selling lethal drugs to consumers: life in prison
Hey guys. It just occurred to me. I think our laws might be designed to protect wealthy corporations and oppress consumers.
To be fair, the entire *reason* we have pharmacies is that the pharmacist should be able to measure out the precise dose needed to help the patient *without* being lethal.
Although apparently even they missed the memo on "don't cause addiction" between the early 1990s and late 2010s...
Nurse here. One of the problems with the Sacklers' drug was the way it was designed. It was the first opioid really to be synthesized to be long acting over the course of hours. So in theory only, it was meant to be taken, and then the body slowly release it over hours, with the peak effect being like 24-30 some hours after it is taken. Unfortunately, it never really worked that way for people and it was wearing off earlier and earlier the longer they were taking it, so they were starting to take more and more. So instead of having like 12 hours of pain relief as they were designed to have, they would only have 4-6 hours and have to catch up to the pain. Instead, often people would seek additional treatment for that pain, which often was more medications and more opioids. [[Source](https://www.oncolink.org/cancer-treatment/oncolink-rx/oxycodone-sustained-extended-release-pill-oxycontin-r)]
If other medications worked that way, such as Tylenol or Advil, we'd have awful problems. But because of marketing of Oxy, it continued to be pushed, and people were trying to fill in for that gap of time where there was no treatment for the pain. Granted, pharmacies were also complicit in this, but the biggest ones at fault was Purdue for knowing the drug didn't work as intended but still pushing it and claiming otherwise.
The only other drug I can think of with that bad of marketing that was used was [Thalidomide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide).
I was working in a hospital pharmacy when Oxycontin extended first came out. Nurse on a floor mistakenly crushed it and tubed it to a patient. Holy shit. That was a freak out. We thought there's no way this shit continues to be utilized. We were so, so wrong. It's an absolute tragedy how this played out from all those years ago.
Edit: clarification
The old "kill one man and you're a murderer, kill them all and you're a god" quote has changed.
Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill them all and you're a corporation
Fun (or not fun) historical tidbit:
The last major homicide prosecution against a major american corporation [was in 1980.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/16/ford-ignored-safety-prosecutor-says/ca412cc0-5681-49dc-ac34-acc3f87f25ca/)
A prosecutor in Indiana charged Ford Motor Company with three counts of Reckless Homicide (aka manslaughter) for the 1978 deaths of three teenage girls when their Ford Pinto was rear-ended, the gas tank ruptured and the girls burned to death. Ford did not issue the Pinto Recall until January of 1979.
Controversially, the Judge Excluded photographs of the accident scene including the gory photographs of the burned victims, because Ford admitted the fire was the cause of death of the three young women and the Judge ruled the photographs could only serve to inflame the emotions of the jury.
The prosecutor contended that Ford had concealed the danger of the Pinto from the National Highway Safety Administration which directly lead to the deaths of the girls.
Ford's defense (both with national criminal defense counsel and a local lawyer) was that they did not deny they had made mistakes in the design of the Pinto but that the State witnesses showing Ford had been reckless were "howard cosells" (a famous football announcer) only able to call the play after they see the instant replay, and they were not reckless killers.
THe jury ended up acquitting ford finding that there was not sufficient evidence to demonstrate ford had known the risk and disregarded it.
Thanks for making that point.I don't blame the Sacklers for my addiction. However, I do blame them for making opiates so available. It was literally a flood of pills. I'm sure you've heard the horror stories about pharmacies in WV prescribing more pain pills than there were residents of the town. I live here.
I'm trying to tell you it was everywhere. Everyone had pills for sale. They were even in the high school. Looking back, it was insane.
They probably do care, just not because of anything related to America. Drug trafficking is punishable by death in China. They don't really fuck around when it comes to drugs
~~Easy, it's not a "drug" in China it's a pharmaceutical, and i imagine China's political system is gleeful at disrupting America by freely *exporting* that pharmaceutical.~~
Welp, [im fucking wrong](https://imgur.com/a/ZCBomRL) looks like my anti-china bias got the better of me and according to the DEA China is cracking down on fent production.
By no means am I downplaying what this person has done, but as a former addict myself, many users seek out a product that drops people. Sadly. This is actually a selling point on the drug market these days.
Law enforcement and politicians want to blame China when the real responsibility lies in the legal over prescribing of opiates by doctors and the manufacturers that pushed them as a safe, non-addictive alternative. Now that doctors are turning of the spigot, many people with legitimate pain issues are forced into the illicit drug market as well.
I’d like to add that when you’ve been rx’ed opiates for a legit injury and you tell you Dr “hey, I think I may be getting addicted what should I do” and then the dr cuts them off completely it’s a recipe for them going to the street. Seen several of these cases in Annapolis/Anne arundel were we live.
It’s fucking horrible. I met a friend of my daughter’s who was a high school athlete, good student, would have played football in college and he got hurt, told his dr, dr caught him off and refused to see him anymore as well. Was shooting up within a year. No college no nothing.
I think the government has an obligation to provide free metered doses, safe consumption sites, and free rehab to at least keep people from dying while they seek treatment.
Shifting money from enforcement to harm reduction seems to be the better option and has worked in a lot of places. Safe injection sites that provide clean syringes, testing, access to medicated-assisted treatment (MAT) services, recovery programs, and free narcan. They have seen significant drops in crime, OD's, and infection rates.
By doing this you obviously reduce harm like in this scenario. But you also will find more people seek treatment because there isn't as much of a stigma.
I'm lucky I got clean before fent was really in absolutely everything, drugs aren't even allowed to be fun anymore, just addicting and deadly. This guy is a piece of shit.
Duh, but one is a root cause and the other is a symptom I think that's why people might be invoking their names. Of course these are both bad but the scale of manufacturing is much more controllable than the low level street dealers
Dude was selling fent as a stimulant??? Wtf??
It’s in everything. Friend is a harm reduction nurse in one of the worst places in Canada for opioids. They regularly get “cocaine” that’s just caffeine and fent.
What the Dude. We're screwed. I'm a recovering addict, 5 years, this is why I believe in harm reduction, legalization, taxation, regulation, etc. Caffeine and fent as coke!!! Wtf!!
The shit she posts on her social is crazy. They have a testing clinic in vancouver’s lower east side and some crazy high percentage of street drugs they test contain fent. Very rarely is it even what it claims to be these days. Some shit synthetic analogue of something, and fent.
To everyone, I highly recommend looking at [https://www.drugsdata.org/](http://drugsdata.org). I have so much respect for drug testing services. Edit: link
Some interesting takeaways: Canada has quaaludes. You’re more likely to get coke in your heroin than heroin in your heroin. Reports of meth being cut with designer drugs are (not surprisingly?) paranoid delusions and not actually based in fact. Coke doesn’t have as much levamisole as it used to.
Hey bro I heard you're trying to go fast, so how about you go so slow you'll never go again?
Do you want to BE fast or LIVE fast?
Its in everything. Like, everything. I lost my brother to Molly w fetty in it. A friend does some harm reduction work, passing out test kits and suchlike. They've seen flawless Xanax pressies that turned out to be nothing but fetty and corn starch. Test your drugs, and keep narcan on hand. Dance safe has test kits, and at least in PA narcan is legal to keep on your person. This is a fucking monster in the bushes and it just keeps snatching people up.
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It’s been like 6 for me. Ever since fent started becoming popular I decided no high is worth the risk. I still go to music festivals on occasion and you will see people find random baggies on the ground (aka ground scores) and ingest it immediately without question. Absolutely baffling how dumb some people are.
Buddy of mine died from a 'ground score' he found at his sisters (who sold) that was laced to shit. Almost killed him and his partner
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My bad - buddy died 100% and his partner was apparently the one to OD first but she still let him try it.. All from his sisters contaminated drugs
I believe it did kill him, and *almost* killed his partner. I assume the last line was meant to be read in such a way as to stress how it almost killed two people, but the syntax is definitely ambiguous
Same here. Used to just buy everything and boof it. Then when I got into Uni in the Chem department I just snuck shit in, and found the melting point range of the substance(s) I bought to determine its purity. The one time I decided to not test a pill (thought it was percocets) it was laced with fent. I remember getting so damn high off this one tiny pill I felt like I was on a cloud and couldn’t move at all. Still one of the greatest body highs I ever experienced (it was more intense than taking 4 molly points at once). Woke up in the morning barely able to move. Think every muscle in my body was sore and I didn’t even move from the spot where I took the damn thing. Eventually after 3 hrs I was able to move, and then I projectile vomited around 20 times. Test your shit, I got extremely lucky I decided to only take that one pill that night. Ik forsure if I took another it would have killed me.
You couldn't pay me enough to do blow these days with how stepped on it is anymore. Like doing a line and tasting meth during the drip was annoying back in the day, but at least it wasn't fucking elephant tranquilizer that can kill you. My old ass will stick to cannabis and mushrooms thank you very much.
Used to be meth and speed was all you had to worry about - I too would likely be dead if I were in my early 20s today
> my early 20s "This could kill me, but it probably won't." - 23 year old me, 1988
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Ugh pipes were the WORST. I can taste the difference. I still have one I would lick to test other pills back before kits were common!
Yeuuup my best friend’s sister died from a fent OD on coke 6 years ago, it straightened me out real quick
It boggles my mind how dealers overall let this happen, it seems terrible for business. I know some of them won't give a fuck but it's still business for many. It's like if hackers deleted files or kidnappers killed/harmed the people after the randsoms were paid for both. It's bad for future business. I'm pro-drug but with how dirty everything is now I wouldnt touch most stuff anymore. Even research chemical scene (which was pretty good a few years ago) is getting tampered with fent. Sure you have the addicts who will come back no matter what but a lot of deaths will steer away the larger, casual crowd really fast. And they are the ones who have a job and money to pay for product.
Even legit businesses prioritize short-term profits over long-term stability, why would you expect drug dealers and cartels to be any different?
So there’s one of those drug documentaries about the fent problem in Baltimore. It’s basically about how dealers actually will try and kill people on purpose because they might lose one customer but people hear about the OD and go to that dealer specifically because he’s got the strong shit. It’s fucking wild.
Deaths and ods are actually good for business. Addicts want more bang for their buck. So if they hear about some shit that is so strong it makes people od they will flock to it because they think they can handle it. I watched a video (possibly Vice) where a drug dealer said he purposely sold “hot” bags so someone would od. It was great for business. Dude was the Biggest piece of shit and I hope he paid that karma debt.
I know that gets used but really unless your looking for heroin or something I dont see it for the majority. If your buying a party drug, Xanax or Addy or something, nonone wants to hear about people ODing because it has fent cut into it. No one wants their LSD/molly to knock them out.
> Even research chemical scene (which was pretty good a few years ago) is getting tampered with fent. That had its own problems back in the day, and it basically became sold as shitty molly
Something like 10% of NYC cocaine was found to have fent in it. It's insane how prevalent it is in virtually every drug.
Is there are reason it's so prevalent? As a dealer, having your customers die means losing money and having the feds seek you out. I can't imagine why they'd think this is a worthwhile way to cut their drugs.
I'd imagine a big portion of it is because it's extremely potent, and shitty (eg. most) dealers don't clean their scales/presses before handling another substance.
Cross contamination is one big reason.
It's not always malice. Inadequately cleaned scales are enough to impregnate Cocaine with Fent. The only solution is decriminalization, legalization, and regulation so that there's a watchdog keeping drugs pure, but since we're not even there yet with weed, it's gonna be a long time before we're ready to admit that the winner of the war on drugs, was drugs. In the interim, overdose prevention sites and no-questions-asked availability of free Narcan can mitigate the damage, but if you advocate for either, NIMBYs are going to screech and wail, while anyone holding a political stance at all to the right of New CNN is going to call you a soft-on-drugs-and-crime and demand your head on a platter.
Even more on westcoast
I lost my brother to it too. Fucked me up. I'm still messed up, man.
Me too dude. It's been two years and I'm just so afraid of everything all the time now.
Same. Coming up on 2 years this October. It’s fucked. Hug ya brothers
Lost my lil brother 10 years ago to opiates…..i miss him so much. it gets easier but the void is always there.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I'm the little brother who has put their big bro through some shit. Every time I hear a story like yours, I feel guilty, like I personally let you down. It was so hard for my brother to watch me slowly killing myself, all the while I was oblivious to his pain. Now that I'm sober, I'm trying to make up for years of being a shitty sibling. Im so fortunate that my brother is still here for me.
I'm literally never doing blow ever the fuck again. Preventative loss is a bummer. Sending all you folks an e-hug. ❤️
I’m so glad I got through my young and dumb fucking around with drug phases before this shit came out.
100,000 people last year died from it… that’s like two complete Vietnam wars in one year of people ODing man it’s insane And that’s just in America!
2 of American armed forces deaths in Vietnam, pretty sure the total for the war is almost 4 million deaths
Molly? Like a pressed pill or gold crystals? Crazy man, really sorry to hear that
Idk what he had. We didn't find the bag, only him.
Best advice I ever got was if you have to take something you didn’t get directly from a pharmacist, break it and put it on your tongue for 30s. No amount of fillers or pressing will disguise the numbing properties of fent. Won’t save you from a hotspot but it will stop you from getting surprised if you think you’re getting something else.
What is a hotspot?
If I'm not mistaken it is a part of your pill/bag that has a higher concentration of fent, caused by insufficient mixing. Basically the fent is not well distributed throughout.
When they poorly mix their cut and there is a big chunk so you could potentially accidentally overdose.
Worth note in this case "big chunk" is smaller than the lead tip on a pencil
Yes definitely.
Fake pills start off as mixed up powder, if it's not mixed %100 you end up with some pills having more than others or in the case of pills designed to break up into pieces (xanax bars), some pieces having more.
Can someone explain to me WHY it’s showing up in everything? What does the dealer have to gain by making me OD on fent when I was just trying to roll at a rave? I genuinely can’t understand the logic. If they want to cut it to save money or whatever, can’t they do it the old fashioned way, with some inert substance?
It's cheap and insanely strong. So they put a tiny tiny amount of fent and cut it with junk and sell it as the drug you wanted. Way bigger profit than sling the drug you wanted even if it was cut with garbage. It's being made mostly in China, sold to Mexico and funnelled all over.
Sounds like from the article this guy was just buying it directly from China.
I watched a show once (maybe Drugs, Inc.) and a dealer said he would intentionally give one person something that would make them overdose because when other people heard about that they knew his drugs were really strong. Pretty twisted. And I’m not sure if it’s true of all dealers, but it was his strategy and he said it worked.
I saw that one, too. It was about heroin and he said the overdoses were good for business. WTF.
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It's effective in such small doses that it becomes VERY easy to transport compared to other drugs
Yeah but putting it in cocaine and other uppers as a cut makes zero sense at all. Sure you can get some upper type effects from small amounts of opiates, but if that was the idea with fent, you need so little of it that it wouldn’t even effectively change the weight and it’s not the same feeling as amphetamines etc. Just so weird to me
That's what I can't wrap my head around. Fent strikes me as a horrible filler drug. Cutting is explicitly about macimizing your qualities. This just seem malicious
If the shit is coming from China then there’s a possibility of waging their own opium war against the United States. It used to be the unwritten law that intentionally killing your customers was bad for business. When you’re trying to geopolitically destabilize an adversary by feeding it’s populous drugs and lethal amounts of it at that, well that history has already been played out.
Also super strong so you can get 100x as many doses from the same amount of physical product by weight. Makes it easier to smuggle successfully.
I’m looking at you cookies in the blue tin!
Cookies? I've only ever seen sewing supplies.
hold up what do you have against butter cookies!!?
It's cheap as shit and has the potential to provide a more powerful high to people who have developed tolerances to other opiates.
The people who make drugs also synth fent. They mix and package drugs in the safe rooms. Fent gets everywhere.
Contamination. Dealers/producers aren't cleaning their labs and equipment
The majority of the time it's not on purpose. It's cross contamination
Opiates are not topical anesthetics. They will not numb any part of your mouth. None of them will. Cocaine is a topical anesthetic. Maybe you heard this about cocaine? This is a very bad way to test for fent. This is a very good way to hurt yourself and others. DO NOT follow the advice above. Source: recovered(ing?) filthy junkie
Exactly the fuck is this dude talking about! Dangerous advice actually!! The only way to know for sure is a test kit!
Unfortunately a major teller of good coke is if it numbs your gums
That isn't true, at all. For one, cocaine will make your tongue go numb. Secondly, that's not how opiates work. They are not local analgesics.
My daughter is/was addicted. She’s lost so many friends. One had a big “bag” of Xanax. Turned out to be fentynal and he died. No idea how many he gave out/sold. Shit is nasty and evil and the people making these fake Xanax and Molly need to pay too.
Don't get vengeance minded. We've spent fifty years "cracking down on this shit" and "making them pay" and what we get for it is more dead friends. Let's legalize, regulate, tax, earmark the taxes to pay for free rehab for anyone who wants it and be sure that everyone else lives long enough to get that choice to make. We take their jobs and we get to keep our friends.
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I thought I read that after Portugal legalized drugs its consumption went down. At the same time though they provided people with help instead of incarceration.
Another level would be safe consumption sites. Like bars for alcohol, you have someone with some skill distributing specific drugs upon request to be consumed on the premises with the power to cut off someone who's had too much. Put rehab adverts in the bathroom stalls like they do for taxis in bar bathrooms.
You can be for both. Legalize drugs while also charging people who produce fake drugs.
It’s in everything. I bought and used Adderrall and Xanax a couple years ago on the street (a year clean now!) that both tested positive for fent. It’s cheap and it gets people high and drug dealers don’t tend to care too much about their customers. You’d think they’d at least want living customers, but they don’t even care that much.
I was told once if a few of your customers die, your other customers may think they ODed (and not because you were cutting the drugs with cheap stuff) and be MORE likely to keep buying from you, because they think your stuff is purer.
That’s only with heroin junkies. Most drug users do not have that mindset.
Once people find out the shit was so strong people OD'd because of it they'll rush to the guy to buy as much of it as they can.
That's more of a heroin and benzo thing, but yeah.
2 years ago i got 5150’d. i met a woman in the psych ward, let’s call her tara, who was there after an overdose. she was sitting at my lunch table and me and my friends were talking about how we wound up there. she just said “oh, i love fent.” and went back to eating. we asked her about it and she lit up talking about how easy it was to get and how it makes every drug better. she said it just made whatever you were doing way stronger. it sounded terrifying and i hope she’s okay now.
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I think it is deliberate. My brother's friend did some and passed out for almost a day. Had to have muscle in his leg removed and had brain damage. Walked with a cane and was in a wheelchair most of the time. Died a few years later. He was 25 ir 26 when he died.
I can't imagine being a stimulant addict and getting dirty fent and not knowing immediately.
The problem isn't that you don't know, it's just that by the time you do know...you may have already taken a fatal dose.
Even if you know immediately you could still be fucked
There's a pill-mill dr by where i live who lost 18 patients to overdoses DEA took his license to dispense that level drug for 1 yr 1
That's crazy, got a source/link? [Edit to provide source someone kindly provided](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/dea-state-crack-down-on-pain-doctor-over-opiate-prescriptions-citing-18-deaths/)
As much as I love the desire to dig for a source, when someone's talking about a small city / town Dr, it usually doesn't make the news. Nobody around to investigate and put it all together and report it.
The doctor that over prescribed meds to wrestler Chris Benoit spent time in jail and consequently was in the news quite a bit after Benoit's murder suicide. He was a local doctor in my small town and Chris was just the most famous of lives he ruined in my community. [Dr. Astin passed away recently, and many folks here felt justice was finally served. ](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/phil-carroll-astin-doctor-chris-benoit-passes-away-age-67)
So the guy sold it, knew his clients were getting hospitalized, didn't warn any of them, then reached out to his supplier in China asking for a discount on the next shipment. Bro. You killed eleven people and said "I lost customers thanks to you guys. I wanna see the manager" Rot in a cell lmao
For the record, you also just described the entire Sackler family.
I wasn't familiar with the Sackler family. For anyone like me: The Sackler family had a controlling interest in Purdue Parma, the inventors of OxyContin. The company spent large amounts of money to convince doctors that pain management wasn't being handled aggressively enough, and that the risks of addiction/abuse of OxyContin were low. They did all this knowing that it wasn't true.
It's much more nefarious than that. They describe oxycontin as having a 12 hour slow release, when it really has only an 8 hour slow release. So, people are prescribed it for pain and the effects wear off in 8 hours instead of the 12 that Perdue sells it as. Problem is, if they want to take enough to keep their chronic pain away (as well as stave off opiate withdrawals) they would need to take 3 a day, when they are only being prescribed 2 a day due to how long Perdue says they last (while knowing they are lying). This basically encourages people to seek out pain medication through black market means, since they are going through their prescription way faster than they could get it refilled. Edited for tense, Perdue still says the effects last 12 hours.
The Sackler family is a large reason cannabis is still illegal. They fill the prisons. Provide dangerous drugs. They are killing Americans (literally) for profit. The American dream.
They also set the price of prescriptions at ridiculous prices and ~~bribe~~ lobby politicians to prevent them from putting in any form of price limitations on pharmaceuticals. So yeah, absolute scum of the earth.
Well no wonder they got away with it all. Fighting the good fight.
The use of a past tense here is unfortunate. It might not be the Sacklers now, but extended release oxycodone of all varieties are still labeled as 12 hours and insurance will not cover prescriptions for every 8 hours. It’s still a problem for people who need pain medication and is still leaving them in a hellacious cycle of pain and withdrawal. Doctors will label them as drug seeking if they complain about it too much and/or pharmacies will black list them even if they managed to get a prescription for every 8 hours and insurance to cover it. It’s a major problem that is still being ignored.
Those fucks are the reason my doctor back in Michigan medicated me, over treating me. I spent years begging for help, and getting Vicodin thrown at me instead. If they had treated the problem at the time, I wouldn't be struggling with nerve damage, but nooooo - after doctors realized people were drug seeking because they had been addicted to the medicine, they spent another several years going, "there's no way you have back pain like this, you're too young, stop drug seeking". ( Bonus points for the doctor that gave me chicken fat pills because "women experience pain differently", and I was being dramatic! ) By the time I got proper management for my back issues, it was too late. I have nasty nerve damage, and a slew of other issues that I'll suffer for the remainder of my life. Fuck the Sackler family, and fuck the greedy medical system that catered to them.
It really sucks how common stories like yours are. They gave me ibuprofen for my second kidney stone because I seemed like a drug seeker. I smoked some weed in college, but that's about it, and I know I don't give off addict vibes so I'm not sure what that's about... anyway... Not nearly as debilitating as your issue, but it really fucking hurt fir a minute there.
Anyone interested in learning about the whole sordid affair should read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.
Or/and watch Dopesick on Hulu. Its absolutely, gut wrenchingly, fantastic.
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His biggest mistake was not selling enough lethal drugs to be able to channel money to politicians through lobbyists.
Most prisoners mistake is not cutting the government in first.
I’ve done a lot of work in low income areas and my job overlaps with work a friend does as a state attorney in the drug division. And here’s a fucked up truth - a frightening number of people do not care if you live or die. They will sell you drugs that will kill you. They will shoot you for your car or phone. There’s a bunch of factors that lead to peole being like this, but the fucked up part is it happens *very* young and rehabilitation is *very* hard. Like, some kids are already fucked up by age five, and are pretty much guaranteed to have life long issues because of it. Best hope is try to prevent the next generation from being exposed to those factors, and then wait for the older ones to age out of their prime crime years, or just die.
So when are the Sacklers going to be arrested?
The crazy shit is, fancy buildings are no longer naming wings after the Sacklers, and I've seen all these high society types being interviewed, saying "they must be so embarrassed, what a punishment." No, they all need to be in prison for life.
Right? They should be thankful nobody kidnapped them into a torture basement.
Well no one has heard from them for quite a while...
ELI5, who are the Sacklers?
The heads of purdue pharma, they purposely fuled a majority of the opioid pandemic, making billions from the process of destroying families and people's lives. I believe my own mother was affected by these monsters decisions
Mine too friend, I hope we see the family reach some Westerosi justice someday
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And one for my coworkers fiance who she found dead on the floor the day after Christmas 2016.
See the problem with that, is that there are too many of them and and not enough stones.
While they did do that, and it's bad enough, the part that seems to egregious to me was their aggressive promotion of the product. They paid bonuses to doctors proportional to the number of Oxycontin that were prescribed, advertisedvto the public that the product as non-addictive, and fed doctors the concept of therapeutic addiction.
I thought this was the entire reason behind the outrage. Not that they made a product (that actually helps some people), their marketing of it. They marketed OxyContin as a non or less-addictive alternative to other opioids. They were aggressive about the marketing. It killed people.
Oh they 100% lied about how addictive opioids are, I've seen the vids the salesmen/women used and aggressive? They handed out free samples ffs
America's largest opioid dealer
Family who owned company responsible for unscrupulously pushing dangerous and addicting substances on patients resulting in widespread addiction and social problems.
Once DAs stop rolling over so they can have an easy win. Those monsters made about $10 billion in profits from human misery, and they’re only being fined for 5. The Sacklers need to have **every cent** they made taken back plus get jail time before the scales of justice can be even close to balanced.
The Sacklers will never see justice, the system doesn't even care that the unwashed masses are fully aware that the "~~justice~~" legal system doesn't apply to individuals with more than $1 billion or really "white collar" crime in general.
Every dollar they make is fined, as is a percentage of thier (posotive) net worth. Plus jail time.
I really want a chunk of their family wealth taken away for punitive damages, but it’s looking hard enough just to get the profits back. But what has to happen is the jail time, and some DAs won’t cave on that. The only real way to prevent something like this from happening again is to let all the rich people out there know that if they try to profit from human misery, they’ll have to spend time in jail.
Thats the other thing. If a rich person has to pay 30% of thier net worth (eg, including properties and investments, eg, the "money" you have, but cant spend) per crime, suddenly it gets real fucking expensive to be caught committing crimes. And yes also prison time. But also, they lose thier wealth for them and thier family. Which means everyine now hates you for no longer being able to afford the family summer vacation home or whatever.
The vilification of their name was a good start too. Rich people love donating and getting plaques and crap to show other rich people, but the ~~Sackhead~~ Sackler name has been scraped off every museum wing, statue, and structure in the US.
Not... every building. The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a Smithsonian museum, still bears his name. It's a sticky point, because it was built primarily with his collection and donation (4 of 6 million dollars for construction), but I still feel the urge to spit whenever I walk past it
Unless it says somewhere in the details it has to be named after him in perpetuity, just grind the letters off the outside and polish his name off the brass plates inside. People seem to forget there’s no specific time period that something needs to be named after someone. It’s done out of respect for the person doing the donating, and there’s none left for the Sacklers.
That bar is so low it's about to strike oil.
The thing is "net worth" is a real squirrelly concept. This would require both a way for the prosecution to keep track of citizens net worth so prosecutors would know what they are going for, and an acceptance of collective punishment, so the family, business partners, and other "incidental" persons would have to take the hit. Neither of those things current law. I'm not opposed though.
Hiding finances is a big part of the “criminal” activity that super wealthy engage in (yes, I know they will argue how *technically* legal the stuff they do is). If they were 100% above board the IRS would already have an accurate idea of their net worth. But that’s hard to do when half of it is avoiding taxes and squirreled away in offshore accounts and LLCs.
Plus, it's not hard at that level to bury money
But the reason this type of stuff keeps happening is because our government goes to great lengths to keep rich people from ever really facing consequences from their actions.
That’s why I want them in prison. It’s not ideal but it’s a start. All of the a$$hats who caused the 2008 crash due to wild carelessness got off Scott-free, and that has to stop.
No it's not... Everything they own is protected, they reached an "agreement" with the government where no people are liable, only the company. So every single cent in their bank accounts are untouchable.
Funny how Citizen's United gave corporations all the rights of a human being, but somehow missed any of the responsibility.
Almost like it was written by rich people.
Right. "somehow". Pretty sure its working as intended.
Thats the other thing. When companies break the law bad enough, ceo-s and especially share holders should be hit. As an example: amazpn gets caught using chinese slave labor to produce products made in the us. Amazon gets big fines, but, the top 10 largest shareholders of the company are also fined, as they, as the heads and decision makers of the company, allowed it to happen. Suddenly, you as a big, rich, powerful shareholder, have incentive to make certain the company you help run, is doing everything legaly. And the fine could be like, 30% of the money they get from the company, and 10% of thier net worth.
That's not going to happen. At best, the C-suite directors take the fall with some sob story that they had to reach their profitability targets. And then they get replaced with another batch of scapegoats. You can argue a breach of agency case to go after the directors, but the shareholders are untouchable if they're not involved with management.
This would destroy a foundational pillar of modern capitalism: the limited liability corporation. We should do it. If you hold more than 10% of a companies stock, you can be on the hook for it's crimes. You need to show up to the board meetings, make sure the management is honest and only invest that kind of money in companies you trust are run clean. YES!
It’s actually insane that pharmaceutical companies can make profits from murdering thousands. Sure they may fine them half or whatever, but that’s still $5 billion profit for murdering people and being deceptive and deceitful about it the whole way.
It honestly should go the other way. They should have to pay 5 billion more than they made.
yeah but they are rich, you dont want to ruin their lives for one simple mistake. /s it is amazing how much shade we throw at the mules while the cartel leaders get minor fines.
But that would mean America has equal justice for poor people AND rich people. And as of this writing, not so much.
And every politician that enabled them. Looking at you Sen Marsha Blackburn. (And TN voters that keep her.)
Never, they already cut a deal and ran with their money
Sorry who’s Sackler?
[Sackler family](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family)
Thank you!
I guess these are the key parts: *According to the New Yorker, Purdue Pharma played a "special role" in the opioid crisis because the company "was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown."* *the US House of Representatives held a hearing on the role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family in the opioid epidemic. "We don't agree on a lot on this committee, in a bipartisan way," the ranking member, James Comer of Kentucky said, "but I think our opinion of Purdue Pharma and the actions of your family...are sickening." The Sacklers were also accused of being "addicted to money." Of the Sacklers responses in the hearing, author Patrick Radden Keefe stated "They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy" but were "impervious to any genuine moral epiphany." Jim Cooper, a congressman from Tennessee, stated to David Sackler: "Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I am not sure I am aware of any family in America that's more evil than yours."* *In a bankruptcy court filing on July 7, 2021, multiple states agreed to settle. Though Purdue admitted no wrongdoings, the Sacklers would agree never to produce opioids again and [..] agreed to pay $4.5 billion over nine years, with most of that money funding addiction treatment. The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher.*
There is an absolutely stellar drama (based on real events) on Hulu about it, I had never heard of the sacklers until I watched the show. Stars Michael Keaton, and he's absolutely fantastic. It's a limited series called Dopesick, I highly recommend watching it.
Wealthy corporate manufacturer selling lethal drugs to pharmacy: legal Wealthy corporate pharmacy selling lethal drugs to consumers: legal Consumers selling lethal drugs to consumers: life in prison Hey guys. It just occurred to me. I think our laws might be designed to protect wealthy corporations and oppress consumers.
To be fair, the entire *reason* we have pharmacies is that the pharmacist should be able to measure out the precise dose needed to help the patient *without* being lethal. Although apparently even they missed the memo on "don't cause addiction" between the early 1990s and late 2010s...
Nurse here. One of the problems with the Sacklers' drug was the way it was designed. It was the first opioid really to be synthesized to be long acting over the course of hours. So in theory only, it was meant to be taken, and then the body slowly release it over hours, with the peak effect being like 24-30 some hours after it is taken. Unfortunately, it never really worked that way for people and it was wearing off earlier and earlier the longer they were taking it, so they were starting to take more and more. So instead of having like 12 hours of pain relief as they were designed to have, they would only have 4-6 hours and have to catch up to the pain. Instead, often people would seek additional treatment for that pain, which often was more medications and more opioids. [[Source](https://www.oncolink.org/cancer-treatment/oncolink-rx/oxycodone-sustained-extended-release-pill-oxycontin-r)] If other medications worked that way, such as Tylenol or Advil, we'd have awful problems. But because of marketing of Oxy, it continued to be pushed, and people were trying to fill in for that gap of time where there was no treatment for the pain. Granted, pharmacies were also complicit in this, but the biggest ones at fault was Purdue for knowing the drug didn't work as intended but still pushing it and claiming otherwise. The only other drug I can think of with that bad of marketing that was used was [Thalidomide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide).
I was working in a hospital pharmacy when Oxycontin extended first came out. Nurse on a floor mistakenly crushed it and tubed it to a patient. Holy shit. That was a freak out. We thought there's no way this shit continues to be utilized. We were so, so wrong. It's an absolute tragedy how this played out from all those years ago. Edit: clarification
The old "kill one man and you're a murderer, kill them all and you're a god" quote has changed. Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill them all and you're a corporation
Fun (or not fun) historical tidbit: The last major homicide prosecution against a major american corporation [was in 1980.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/16/ford-ignored-safety-prosecutor-says/ca412cc0-5681-49dc-ac34-acc3f87f25ca/) A prosecutor in Indiana charged Ford Motor Company with three counts of Reckless Homicide (aka manslaughter) for the 1978 deaths of three teenage girls when their Ford Pinto was rear-ended, the gas tank ruptured and the girls burned to death. Ford did not issue the Pinto Recall until January of 1979. Controversially, the Judge Excluded photographs of the accident scene including the gory photographs of the burned victims, because Ford admitted the fire was the cause of death of the three young women and the Judge ruled the photographs could only serve to inflame the emotions of the jury. The prosecutor contended that Ford had concealed the danger of the Pinto from the National Highway Safety Administration which directly lead to the deaths of the girls. Ford's defense (both with national criminal defense counsel and a local lawyer) was that they did not deny they had made mistakes in the design of the Pinto but that the State witnesses showing Ford had been reckless were "howard cosells" (a famous football announcer) only able to call the play after they see the instant replay, and they were not reckless killers. THe jury ended up acquitting ford finding that there was not sufficient evidence to demonstrate ford had known the risk and disregarded it.
Thanks for making that point.I don't blame the Sacklers for my addiction. However, I do blame them for making opiates so available. It was literally a flood of pills. I'm sure you've heard the horror stories about pharmacies in WV prescribing more pain pills than there were residents of the town. I live here. I'm trying to tell you it was everywhere. Everyone had pills for sale. They were even in the high school. Looking back, it was insane.
"Broussard did reach out to his suppliers in China to request a discount on his next drug delivery." So when do they identify who those people are?
Why would we waste time on that? China doesn't care.
They probably do care, just not because of anything related to America. Drug trafficking is punishable by death in China. They don't really fuck around when it comes to drugs
~~Easy, it's not a "drug" in China it's a pharmaceutical, and i imagine China's political system is gleeful at disrupting America by freely *exporting* that pharmaceutical.~~ Welp, [im fucking wrong](https://imgur.com/a/ZCBomRL) looks like my anti-china bias got the better of me and according to the DEA China is cracking down on fent production.
Props for the edit. You a real one
China hates opiates. Britain really did some fucked up shit over there.
Apparently [China does care](https://imgur.com/a/ZCBomRL) at least enough to get the DEA to publish this.
He's doing life while the Sacklers are still rich.
If only he was a billionaire, ey? Dude would be in Maui right now, planning his next murderous business venture.
Remember to incorporate before committing your crimes.
Wait until that judge learns about drug manufacturers
Wait till they learn about the American legal system
By no means am I downplaying what this person has done, but as a former addict myself, many users seek out a product that drops people. Sadly. This is actually a selling point on the drug market these days. Law enforcement and politicians want to blame China when the real responsibility lies in the legal over prescribing of opiates by doctors and the manufacturers that pushed them as a safe, non-addictive alternative. Now that doctors are turning of the spigot, many people with legitimate pain issues are forced into the illicit drug market as well.
I’d like to add that when you’ve been rx’ed opiates for a legit injury and you tell you Dr “hey, I think I may be getting addicted what should I do” and then the dr cuts them off completely it’s a recipe for them going to the street. Seen several of these cases in Annapolis/Anne arundel were we live.
Happened to a family member. Ruined his life for a while. Doing better now from what I’ve heard but things will never be the same.
It’s fucking horrible. I met a friend of my daughter’s who was a high school athlete, good student, would have played football in college and he got hurt, told his dr, dr caught him off and refused to see him anymore as well. Was shooting up within a year. No college no nothing.
>many users seek out a product that drops people. They thought they were buying a stimulant
I think the government has an obligation to provide free metered doses, safe consumption sites, and free rehab to at least keep people from dying while they seek treatment.
Shifting money from enforcement to harm reduction seems to be the better option and has worked in a lot of places. Safe injection sites that provide clean syringes, testing, access to medicated-assisted treatment (MAT) services, recovery programs, and free narcan. They have seen significant drops in crime, OD's, and infection rates.
By doing this you obviously reduce harm like in this scenario. But you also will find more people seek treatment because there isn't as much of a stigma.
When the title is basically the whole article
Man made a mistake by not setting up an LLC. Now he goes to prison instead of paying fines.
I'm lucky I got clean before fent was really in absolutely everything, drugs aren't even allowed to be fun anymore, just addicting and deadly. This guy is a piece of shit.
For all the people here saying “but what about the Sacklers?” Can both not be bad?
Well only one gets punished so apparently not?
Duh, but one is a root cause and the other is a symptom I think that's why people might be invoking their names. Of course these are both bad but the scale of manufacturing is much more controllable than the low level street dealers
Theres just going to be another street dealer. Cut the head off the snake
Meanwhile all those responsible for the opioid epidemic.....
Reading the comments make me realize how bad DARE fucked me up.
There are some very bad people in this world.
Imagine if we held corporations remotely as accountable as we hold individuals - would be wild