What are recent events going to do to the price of heroin?

Today's Guardian has an article by Giles Foden which quotes a book by Michael Griffin called 'Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan' (Pluto, £19.95). According to Griffin, the 'studied incompetence of the FBI, CIA and other American intelligence agencies in addressing the alleged threats posed to the US by Osama bin Laden and his network' are related to the Bush family's links with the US energy industry, most notably Unocal, which wanted to put a pipeline across Afghanistan to prevent the Russians controlling the region's oil. Among their partners in the venture were BP and the Saudi royal family. Story here.

Have yet to discover exactly what George W. Bush's role in Unocal was.

'Prodded on by Washington and helped by the Saudis and a sundry of Arab emirs, Islamabad let loose the Taliban. And with dreams of oil and gas riches, California-based Unocal was in line to support the new militia. While the extent to which Unocal helped Pakistan's new venture is still unknown, the company did admit to donating to the Taliban "administration" some fax machines and such -- but it's yet unclear what kind of fax machine is capable of firing salvos intended to kill and destroy.'

BY

JOHN J. MARESCA

VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

UNOCAL CORPORATION

TO

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

FEBRUARY 12, 1998

WASHINGTON, D.C.

I thought these two articles were interesting – about nalaxone, a drug that can save someone's life by stopping an overdose; it immediately stops your brain's opiate receptors from working. Also covers the whole oxycodone --> heroin user thing that's been happening in the U.S. lately.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/2/a-lazarus-drug-goesmainstreamingeorgia.html
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/3/on-the-ohio-kentuckyborderoverdosepreventionfollowstheherointrad.html

Sorry if this was a weird thread to revive to put these articles on!

there's a lot of stuff about this general topic going around -- the center for investigative reporting has done a big thing about opiate prescriptions and the chicago reader did a series about heroin in the chicago area. seems like a lot of people dismiss the stories because "boo hoo suburban white kids on heroin" but knowing that it starts with prescription drugs is the key part of that. reading barry meier's book about oxycontin was illuminating. apparently there's another super-strength painkiller about to go on the market too. i dunno, it seems like another huge ugly mess of drugs and capitalism that cannot be dismissed as easily as "boo hoo suburban white kids on heroin" because that's not even the most significant part of the story.

the whole thing makes me sad in a major way, but at least people are talking about it

Also covers the whole oxycodone --> heroin user thing that's been happening in the U.S. lately

You mean the Percocet pills I was given a few weeks ago after getting a tooth pulled could turn me into a herion addict?

I would have never noticed any potential recreational use for oxycodone. Now, Ambien, that's another story....

the high school i went to, along with a couple other private, catholic schools in the same city, are implementing mandatory, random, hair sample drug tests for all students this year, citing the opiate epidemic as a reason

i don't know if it's different now but alcohol was a much bigger problem than any other type of drug. they are not testing for alcohol consumption

kind of crazy. i smoked a lot of pot in high school. to think it could've been different.

Wait, what is this "boo hoo suburban white kids on heroin" dismissal? Are people actually like that?

reading barry meier's book about oxycontin was illuminating.

I started reading that the other night and I thought "uh-oh this is making oxycontin sound pretty awesome" so I stopped. :/

You mean the Percocet pills I was given a few weeks ago after getting a tooth pulled could turn me into a herion addict?

― Lee626, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 7:27 PM (41 minutes ago)

As overdose deaths skyrocketed across the country, law enforcement cracked down on predatory pain clinics, or “pill mills,” squeezing one end of the opiate supply. The void was filled by a chemically identical drug, available for a fraction of the price: heroin. By making home deliveries and selling it for $10 or $20 per bag, compared with $40 for one prescription tablet, depending on the variety, dealers enticed suburban and rural users to go from swallowing and snorting pills to shooting heroin directly into their veins.

Anyway, the whole thing IS a major bummer, but I had *no* *idea* there was a drug that stopped overdose deaths in their tracks. I think that is good, and good to know about. I respect and admire the people in the article who work on harm reduction.

i've heard people say or imply that heroin only becomes a problem when it's young white suburban ppl, why are you ignoring the other ppl who have chronic heroin addiction

also being addicted to oxycontin sounds like hell on earth, and the circumstances of its development/rollout make it even worse -- pretty sure you're not going to want to have anything to do with it if you read that book, c-rabbits! agree with you about that anti-OD drug. friends might still be alive if it had been more widely used ;_;

my wife had a few leftover bottles of oxycontin hanging around the apartment after her cesarean from two years ago. it was a little alarming having them around, so we disposed of them. i don't have any addiction issues but it's been tempting to pop one to see how it feels. fuck, though, if anyone sets out wanting to be come an addict after popping a pill or two, and we know enough people who became heroin addicts after starting on prescription opiates that i wasn't going to touch them.

this reminds me of burroughs in naked lunch (i think?) where he has a few paragraphs about all the various ways he's ingested opiates in his life. like the perception is that heroine is this special snowflake drug that only 'others' have access to / dependency on when in reality anyone that's hooked on medically prescribed opiates is a heroine addict with some money left.

like when i think of the fact that a company was literally marketing an opiate for the masses, it makes me want to shoot fire out of my eyes

the fact that cannabis remains illegal at the same time as this toxin is prescribed is similarly bonkers

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/antidote

Ian Frazier's article on naloxone use in Staten Island covers some of the same ground as those Al Jazeera articles.

This line made me clench my teeth:

It used to be that the medical profession undertreated pain.

"undertreated" based on what?

Not giving people all of the pills available onsite?

It's hard to believe the New Yorker can publish this article without mentioning:

-- the well-documented role of Pharma in promoting the use of chronic opioids for non-cancer chronic pain (the idea that chronic pain is undertreated was a marketing slogan, a successful example of disease mongering in an effort to widen the circle of acceptable or standard prescribing practice)
-- the increasingly well supported evidence that chronic opioid use can and does paradoxically worsen chronic pain, to the point that ongoing use is counterproductive. The Wikipedia article is brief but makes the point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid-induced_hyperalgesia

Instead the article leads with the idea that the use of opioids increased purely because of clinical need (pain was "undertreated" in the bad old days) and does little to challenge the idea that some prescriptions for opioids (I'd say "many", but in an article like this I'd settle for "some") are unnecessary, counterproductive and actually harmful to the patients who are taking them.

It talks about "overdose" and "misuse" of prescription meds, and implies that many or most of the harmful outcomes come from "addicts" and from those buying the pills from dealers. It barely attempts to show the potential downsides to routine use by prescription under a doctor's supervision -- itself a major risk for accidental overdose (usually non-fatal, but not always), for other forms of harm (accidents, falls, injuries), and a proven independent risk factor for increased all-cause mortality. It also doesn't present evidence showing what percentage (let alone absolute numbers) of people have been iatrogenically brought to a point of opioid dependence and/or addiction (and thereafter turned to illegally obtained pills, etc).

Better yet, the article goes on and on about a new delivery form of Narcan, as if the older method of Narcan administration by IV was somehow a major barrier to successful resuscitation of overdosed patients over the years. Nasal sprays are convenient, but the evidence shows they're roughly equivalent in benefit to IV -- faster and easier to administer, but a little slower to take effect, so the net effect is comparable -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19731165

It's nice that good people are trying to save lives on the front lines, and seeing some good results with getting Narcan into the hands of opioid users ahead of time, but that's a weird focus for an article that could otherwise do a much more comprehensive job of showing what a huge problem has developed in opioid use and abuse over the last 30 or so years.

Of course, doing that would invite outrage from the (I'm sure) many New Yorker readers who are taking opioids for chronic non-cancer pain, and who might not taking kindly to the idea that that might be part of the problem.