Sad that the message of this piece will likely be discounted and discredited. It amazes me the blasé attitudes towards drugs in the tech world. Hearing even high-profile tech leaders extoll the 'virtues' of getting high while ignoring the huge toll it takes on individuals and their families seems selfish to me.
Fentanyl, a stealth killer
21–30 of 153 posts
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#22The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait. Fentanyl is pretty well known amongst opiate addicts (and has been for a while). Everyone knows it's dangerous, including dealers, who like to avoid killing their customers and catching murder charges, believe it or not. Aside from that and a bit of gateway drug BS towards the beginning, this is a solid and somewhat moving, if long, account of the standard Heroin story,…
Hate to break it to you but your dealer does not give a fuck about your health. It is extremely difficult for the police to find the dealer of a dead person, and then very difficult to prove the elements needed for a murder charge.
The police do not even try to find dealers of drug deaths, unless the victim is a celebrity.
Furthermore, every heroin dealer knows that each of their clients is likely to go into a downward spiral and become a liability. Thus, they treat their clients as expendable.
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#23There would be far, far fewer deaths from overdose if all drugs were legal. There may be more addicts if they were legal, I don't know - but there would be a lot fewer deaths.
I'm not against legalization, but have you done the research to back this up? We have plenty of alcohol-related deaths (both indirect (traffic, etc), and direct (alcohol poisoning).
i mean look at this statement
"A study showed patients prescribed high dosages of
opioids long-term (>90 days) had 122 times the risk
of opioid use disorder compared to patients not
prescribed opioids"
from the cdc to drs here http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/pdf/guideline_infographic-a....
So people taking opioids have are at more risk of opioid use disorder than people who dont take them. -YA THINK. And finally look at how they garble the data here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6450a3.htm they are finally getting to where they can see the drugs are from illegal sources and not dr regulated rxs.
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... > Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72), with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) in second and third places.
This study comes up time and again but is really not founded very well. I couple of members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs - whatever exactly that is - sat together and scored a selection of drugs on a selected set of criteria. That's it, there is really no data behind this study other than the opinions of those people. Those opinions might be correct but they may as well be biased or even totally w…
Yes. From the abstract:
>Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.
You could make the scores come out however you wanted based on the people you chose for the "1-day interactive workshop" and the criteria you used as the basis for the analysis. This isn't something you'd ever want to use as a basis for policy.
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There would be far, far fewer deaths from overdose if all drugs were legal. 2/3rds of all overdoses are opiate related. The biggest impactor to preventing overdose death is the drug Naloxone which is an opioid blocker. Putting naloxone in the hands of at risk drug users, and as standard kit for police officers/EMTS, is the most effective way to save lives.
Many (if not like more than half, I forget the statistic..) of those overdose deaths result from combining a GABAergic like alcohol or especially benzodiazepines with an opioid.
and SSRI's, if someone takes herion, zoloft, and xanax and OD's from zoloft, it gets placed in the prescription and illegal category. Instead of quantifying the actual numbers and being precise. So even though zoloft killed them, it will go under opioids.
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#26I just want to say that that I lost one of my close friends Thom Simmons last April due to Fentanyl overdose. He was a young, voracious autodidact prodigy that was always way ahead of the curve especially with technology. I met him through the #django irc channel about 7 or 8 years ago when I was starting out with python and django and we developed a friendship that lasted until he overdosed on fentanyl and died in a motel room alone last year. I had reconnected with him in his final weeks as he struggled to get clean and desperately wanted out of his situation but he felt trapped, afraid, alone, and hopeless. He broke down crying to me over the phone a few days before he died, after I helped pay for a night in his motel room because he had run out of money. I didn't realize the full gravity of the situation or know that he had already relapsed at that point and he was dangerously close to the end. I believe that Thom knew it was his last week on Earth and he was saying goodbye to me. He told me what a special friendship we had and how much that meant to him, how he hadn't met many people in his life that he could trust. We laughed a lot about the many memories of late nights programming, scheming on grand ideas for the next major social platform we wanted to build. He showed me Reddit when no one knew what it was, he showed me hackerne.ws before it was known, he helped me set up a trixbox server and program asterisk with voip connections, we built a custom PLC software for a startup and worked on other various projects. We also shared the disease of addiction and unfortunately he couldn't get the help he needed to stay clean and sober. Upon his death all he got was a short blurb in a rural Texas local newspaper, not a word about the amazing person, friend, genius he was. I later found out that 15+ people died of fentanyl overdose in his town that weekend, all of them addicts that lost the battle.
I had to get that out because every time I hear about fentanyl it reminds me of Thom and I hope that our society finds solutions to help addicts overcome the extremely dark and twisted pull of drugs and addiction so that other amazing people like Thom don't meet the same fate.
I'll never forget his memory and the amazing person he was, and that the very fact that I met him and we became friends was because of the same technology he was so fond of.
(http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pearland/obituary.aspx?pid=...)
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against legalization, but have you done the research to back this up? We have plenty of alcohol-related deaths (both indirect (traffic, etc), and direct (alcohol poisoning).
It is hard to get true data, when the only supposedly creditable source (CDC), mixes its data to include all prescription drugs including SSRI's and illicit fentanyl from china. Opioids can be used in VERY high doses as a person becomes more dependent. What is clear is that people are use to heroin and then take the higher dose without knowing and OD. This is the current trend. It is cheaper to get the Fent from Ch t…
You could take a look at the results in Portugal:
https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decr...
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#28Sad that the message of this piece will likely be discounted and discredited. It amazes me the blasé attitudes towards drugs in the tech world. Hearing even high-profile tech leaders extoll the 'virtues' of getting high while ignoring the huge toll it takes on individuals and their families seems selfish to me.
I have never heard of any high-profile tech leaders defending the recreational use of opioids, nor is it a popular position on HN. What's often praised, however, is education (eg. not throwing all drugs into the same bag).
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#29The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait. Fentanyl is pretty well known amongst opiate addicts (and has been for a while). Everyone knows it's dangerous, including dealers, who like to avoid killing their customers and catching murder charges, believe it or not. Aside from that and a bit of gateway drug BS towards the beginning, this is a solid and somewhat moving, if long, account of the standard Heroin story,…
Hate to break it to you but your dealer does not give a fuck about your health. It is extremely difficult for the police to find the dealer of a dead person, and then very difficult to prove the elements needed for a murder charge. The police do not even try to find dealers of drug deaths, unless the victim is a celebrity. Furthermore, every heroin dealer knows that each of their clients is likely to go into a downwa…
[deleted]
Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer
#30Sad that the message of this piece will likely be discounted and discredited. It amazes me the blasé attitudes towards drugs in the tech world. Hearing even high-profile tech leaders extoll the 'virtues' of getting high while ignoring the huge toll it takes on individuals and their families seems selfish to me.
I don't remember ever hearing a 'high-profile tech leader' extoll the virtues of getting high on opiates. Yes, Steve Jobs talked about his experience with LSD in positive terms, but LSD is as similar to fentanyl as Advil is to Viagra or alcohol is to coffee. They really have nothing in common other than being labeled 'drugs', which at this point is a term just as empty of meaning as 'chemicals'.