Story in the NYT about Xylazine in the heroin/fentanyl supply in Kensington and its horrible effects

To go around paywall

https://archive.ph/Sv27y

I see that woman on the el all the time.

She lost 3 family members to ODs, got a leg amputated due to the tranquilizer, and she still uses it. I'm prone to civil libertarianism myself, but it's hard to appeal to "freedom" when a person might as well be possessed.

So what does this mean for SIS? 90% tested positive, knocks users out for hours, Narcan isn’t effective… if a user brings in drugs that test positive for this, you then… let them do it… and if they overdose… you hit them with Narcan… and then let them walk out with the rest (if they have any)? If they overdose on the tranq vs fentanyl would they OD at the site?

If they Narcan them twice, it counts as saving two lives that day. Even if the person dies later that day.

There's a British documentary I watched a while ago called The Wet House, basically a dorm for homeless alcoholics in London where they are allowed to keep drinking, basically somewhere they can safely drink themselves to death. It's a grim documentary, but it was better than those people still being alcoholics but homeless instead (one guy in it had horrible scars after somebody set him on fire while he was sleeping in a park)

I honestly feel like we should give that a shot, what we are doing now is clearly not working

As far as I understand people aren't ODing on the tranq. The problem with tranq is

1. The injection sites create abscesses which get infected
2. Tranq's effects look like opioid overdoses, leading to accidental over administration of narcan

lol, it drives me crazy how "overdoses reversed" is considered a significant statistic for SISs, as if the streets aren't already flooded with Narcan.

You can OD on tranq, though. Especially with these street drugs having more of that then the opiate in them. It just sucks because the ODs look the same.

Honestly legalization is the only answer. Have drugs sold by the State like liquor in PA. Have to be 21 to enter, can have safe injection sites l, and have quality control and just sell real heroine. With that you also have huge potential for out reach and the drug money can fund education, health care, and rehab and with drug legalization treatments like Ibogaine can be administered as well as Ayahuasca

A smidge behind the curve here nytimes

So I was a dope fiend in Kensington for a while. This shits been going around for years now. While there is 100% an increased risk for abscesses due to the tranq in the dope these days, a huge portion of that rise is due to the fentanyl itself. Shit kills your veins and addicts are prone to keep trying. With that being said, the biggest cause for abscesses is the complete lack of sanitation and clean supplies for the average street dweller out there. I shot up for years and never once got an abscess cuz I was always on top of myself in most regards. I was one of the lucky ones that was able to maintain some semblance of a normal life while being in the mix down there on a daily basis. Furthermore, while I’m sure it’s certainly possible to OD on the tranq itself, I’ve never actually witnessed somebody that OD’d on tranq as opposed to the fentanyl in everything. It’s just far too potent of an opiate in order for the tranq to strike first. Idk what SIS is but this is an article highlighting a problem that isn’t new and is, quite frankly, small potatoes compared to the effect fentanyl has had down in Kensington. Fentanyl’s arrival completely changed the game down there and while tranq will absolutely nod you the fuck out harder and longer on the sidewalk or while you’re panhandling, the fent is responsible for the deaths

It's just another inconvenient fact about why an SIS in isolation, rather than as part of an actual contingency management program, doesn't do much other than further blight the location its in.

Which the organization composed primarily of bored Mainline idle upper class socialites will continue to ignore, along with the Inquirer who will never run an opposition piece or disclose their massive conflict of interest with it.

As always it comes down to funding and oversight. But I'd prefer my taxes going to something like this over $50B going to Ukraine. Hell, I'd even be ok with splitting it, half to Ukraine, half to addiction services/housing

We already spend it. Except it's going to "the war on drugs" Legalization solves more problems than it creates

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> But I'd prefer my taxes going to something like this over $50B going to Ukraine.

By what I've heard it was way over $120B ($3B more was announced this week), and it hasn't been a full year yet (you can google it yourself, there are different numbers being floated around, but it's mos def over $100B by now).

(You are also comparing spending money on saving people's lives to spending money to have more people die).

I will say it! I do not care about other countries when we are losing at home.

Call me cynical, for a very long time our war spending is to protect wealthy business interests, not human interests.

>You are also comparing spending money on saving people's lives to spending money to have more people die).

Kind of depends on your perspective there. I imagine a lot more Ukrainians would be dead by torture and execution by Russians if it weren't for military support from the West.

Really is classic NYT, parachute into a story that local media has been talking about for years and don't link to any local reporting. Still a good article but late to the picture

I imagine it's only flooded with Narcan in the open drug markets like K&A

> SIS

Safe Injection Site

Thanks for the perspective, glad you got out safe. Def remember reading stories in local media about tranq at least 3-4 years ago

>It's just another inconvenient fact about why an SIS in isolation, rather than as part of an actual contingency management program, doesn't do much other than further blight the location its in.

I don't much about how SIS works in the US.

Are there any proposals for SIS that function only as pure SIS? Don't they usually help connect addicts to rehab resources?

There's also harm reduction. The opioid epidemic is going to get worse regardless and I don't think SIS is gonna make people inject more opioids than the addiction will make them inject. At least maybe we can get less people getting raped.

Put out a bounty on drug dealers with dollar incentives. That’s an answer.

Appreciate it. Yeah, it’s a fuckin mess down there with like little sign of getting better. I have no fuckin idea what to do about it in the short term. Long term I would say invest in properly educating the next generation so they have any ambition at all besides selling dope. It’s a multifaceted dilemma that both sides - addict and dope boy - are all too happy to take advantage of

Generally when people inject their drug they get as high as they will be within a min. It’s pretty rare for someone to be fine then fall out 10 mins later but def can happen if they are really close to overdosing

Legalization is probably the only remaining solution because everything else has been a miserable failure.

> I imagine a lot more Ukrainians would be dead by torture and execution by Russians if it weren't for military support from the West.

Tell me you read only mainstream media without telling me you read only mainstream media. Please...

(This kind of take is my new favorite after reading armchair experts on Israel-Palestine conflict for some years).

Holy shit I had no idea this was going on. It’s even worse than fentanyl.

you wouldn't have to worry about xylazine in your fent if you could just buy hydrocodone at CVS, like maybe with a Chicken Caesar wrap and a pack of Hubba Bubba.

If people were zonked out on Oxy from an orange bottle with pills manufactured by Purdue Pharma, their lives might still be troubled...but not like this.

It's more a matter of known numbers in a short time under war vs unknown numbers over a long time under an authoritarian government. The Kremlin doesn't exactly publish the number of people it throws out windows, etc; most authoritarian regimes don't.

And if mass Graves in Izium, Bucha, and possibly Mariupol are just the tip of the Iceberg of what Russia might want to do to Ukrainians, things can go bad real fast. It took 4 years to kill six million Jews and 100 days to kill 500,000 Rwandans.

How long do you think it will take Putin, who thinks Ukrainine/Ukrainians shouldn't exist and constantly paints them as sub-human Nazis, to kill more than the ~50-200k people that have died during the war before something if anything finally stops him?

Aside from everything I already mentioned and other social benefits. It instantly puts drug dealers out of business freeing up police for other things

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> How long do you think it will take Putin, who thinks Ukrainine/Ukrainians shouldn't exist and constantly paints them as sub-human Nazis, to kill more than the ~50-200k people that have died during the war before something if anything finally stops him?

Yeah, you completely lost me. Don't lay out "facts" like this, when your main source of propaganda is US mainstream media, and you seemingly have little to no understanding of what's been going on in that particular region in the best part of last 100 years.

I am embarrassed to have been a part of this conversation.

> Yeah, you completely lost me. Don't lay out "facts" like this,

Yeah, people like you who don't know history tend not know what's coming.

> your main source of propaganda is US mainstream

I actually don't watch any US media other than listening to NPR for US politics. Maybe some AP news sneaks in there occasionally.

Where do you get your news? Russian state television?

> you seemingly have little to no understanding of what's been going on in that particular region in the best part of last 100 years.

I'd say I understand it pretty well. A lot of what I understand comes from people that actually lived there.

She’s the one with the giant neck tat, right?

There will always be another drug dealer, as we’ve seen for the last 40 years.

Not saying there won’t be drug dealers. Just make it more of a financial incentive to hunt them down vs being the dealer.

Also this is such a defeatist attitude. Make the government the drug dealer? And you really believe no one under 21 would be able to get it?

That’s naive. Oxycodone and Percocet are legal drugs and they are still sold by armed, illegal drug dealers in McPherson Square. So no, it doesn’t put them out of business “instantly.”

I'm not talking about legal by prescription. I talking about legal for recreational use where anyone of age can go buy whatever they want. So yes it does instantly put drug dealers out of business. Also I can almost guarantee you can't buy oxycodone in Mcfoerson square! You can probably buy counterfeit pills made from fentanyl though

Percocet is oxycodone

Of course some people under age would get it. But right now it's easier for a 15 year old to get fentanyl than it is for them to get a beer.

Just like no one sells weed anymore except dispensaries

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I guess anyone who downvotes this wasn’t smoking weed as a teenager when it was illegal for everyone - I definitely remember it being significantly easier to get than underage alcohol. To get alcohol, you actually had to know someone over 21, but everyone had weed.

All US proposals function solely as injection sites. They "offer" help to addicts to connect them with treatment sources however; there is no legal requirement for addicts to use those treatment resources, nor the funding even if they did, nor any consequence for refusing them.

So in practice they effectively just enable addicts, while dressing up the dangers of drug abuse with a veil of safety, and turning the area they're in into an open air drug scene, further blighting the community.

Harm reduction is only meaningfully useful when you have the other major pillars of contingency management in place. Just viewing harm reduction in itself as a solution or helpful in any way is delusional, and is not born out by the data.

Weed isn't federally legal and it did fuck up the street business in places like Colorado

Exactly!!

Well, that's not true-drug users and their loved ones have Narcan. But suburban, housed opioid addicts aren't driving into the city to use a safe injection site, so it's not really relevant either way.

FACTS. prohibition has NEVER and will NEVER work

okay Duterte