Why are they pushing Fentanyl these days? ** I use to remember hydrocodone, oxycodone, and morphine not so long ago and now it seem every thing is Fentanyl these days.
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Every thing was Oxycontin/Oxycodone, hyrdromorphone AND morphine back than!! And sure there where people abusing it, addicts and overdose and people just trying to get high.
But now they are pushing Fentanyl and seems to have done the opposite and now there are hundreds of people overdosing on Fentanyl every month. And Fentanyl causing skyrocketing overdose.
Why did they do that?
Why not go back to giving out Oxycontin/Oxycodone, hyrdromorphone AND morphine?
Just an anecdote but when I was having (minor) surgery, the Fentanyl was by far the most effective pain reliever I was given. I think this is probably why it’s popular in medical settings: it works. This is also why it’s popular with addicts.
Well, for those who sell it illegally, Fentanyl is very potent, and so a very small amount goes a long way. This makes it much easier to transport illicitly as a business, to the point where they can just use the regular postal service.
Of course, that wouldn’t be why doctors might prescribe it more, but helps to explain the rise in its use.
This is also why addicts overdose so easily with Fentanyl; the drug has a very small “therapeutic window”. The amount needed for therapeutic purposes is close to the amount needed to kill you.
That’s pretty simplistic. Not all pain is physical and a lot of addicts started using for pain ( physical and or psychological) relief and self-medication for anxiety and depression - not to “get high”, per se.
I had a painful surgery recently and to be completely honest - anti-inflammatories worked better than opiates for the pain at the immediate surgical site. But the surgery caused me a lot of distress, both physically and psychologically-because on some primal level I was reacting to the surgery as an assault. And the opiates worked wonders on that distress. It felt dangerous. That’s why I stopped taking them. But “getting high” never entered into the equation.
From my own shallow experience, seems to me that most people have a “background radiation” of minor pains that our brain screens out. Opiates wipe them out, so its not so much that any part of you feels so good, like in a bout of hot monkey love, but that generally there are no such signals overall. You “feel good”.
The probably best answer is not pretty, it consists of curtailing the damage. Stop people from dying from addiction and then work on the addiction. Yes, that means giving them drugs. The very suggestion sends some people into paroxysms of outrage, which is why it won’t happen before a lot more people are dead. Alas, and shit!
Fentanyl is used as a transdermal patch placed for three days. The idea is that with a delivery system like that it’s better for someone with constant pain since it won’t have the spikes and dips in the drug levels you get with a short acting tablet. Even a long acting tablet will have more variation in drug levels than a patch. Yes, it’s a drug that needs to be closely monitored and has as much potential for abuse as other opioids, but I’ve also seen several people who have done well with fentanyl after having not done well with morphine or oxycodone.
Who are “they”? Drug dealers? Yes, fentanyl has been increasingly used as a substitute/adulterant in what’s sold as heroin (or here recently, as faux Percocet pills), because it’s cheap, potent, relatively easy to synthesize and smuggle, and its analogues can be purchased from shady chemical suppliers in China.
If by “they” you mean doctors, and if there’s a new epidemic of physicians prescribing Actiq lollipops and fentanyl patches willy-nilly, that’s news to me.
Part of it is that due to a DEA crackdown, getting opioids from a doctor is harder now than in the past. So the black market supply of oxycodone and drugs like that is lower.
Another part is economics. A kilogram of fentanyl is about $2000 from China, and since it is about 50x more powerful than morphine, that works out to about $40 for the equivalent of a kilo of morphine (less than a penny for a dose to get high on). Financially it makes a lot of sense to cut opiates with fentanyl, however cutting them is not easy and it is very easy to OD.
That’s ALL? Damn, I’ll stick with perocet the next time I get injured.
Not for those with chronic pain – a lot of time you work up a tolerance and have to use higher and higher doses to take care of the pain. And then you’re basically dependent on whatever substance it is to function.
I mean drugs like morphine, codeine, Oxycontin/Oxycodone and hyrdromorphone that are tarted as dirty drug because of the pain mills, people getting hooked on it, people using it to get high, kids and teens getting addicted to it and using it to get high and so on.
So are pushing Fentanyl as alternative not realizing it will make things much worse with skyrocketing overdose every month.
There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to the opioid crisis and I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere yet.
Is it actually making things worse? Not to moralize and discriminate against those who do drugs; my own father would not be alive if not for a world-class treatment center. But we all know that stereotypical druggie who would sell his mother’s television for a hit. Drug addicts lead high drama lives and regularly burden our emergency services and our welfare systems.
And now they are dying. In droves. Politicians do not wish to be seen as cynical and careless so they make speeches but every speech really just boils down to “drugs are bad, mmmkay?”
It is exactly the kind of “justice” Americans love, the janitor Mr. Darwin cleaning out the gene pool. Drug addicts are doing what God, their parents and the DEA have been warning them all their lives not to do and when they die as a result of ignoring all this sage advice, who is to blame?
I have seen many posters condemning people to death for making the mistake of doing drugs. Now it is happening, hundreds of druggies dying every day and nothing anyone can (or will) do to stop it. The Tree of Liberty is refreshed by the tainted blood of addicts. And so it goes.
