Fentanyl Awareness Day is/was May 10th in the United States… Every day can be a fentanyl awareness day. There is help for you here at Talking Sober. The link has general information for all fentanyl users and people around fentanyl users. There is also specific info for people in the U.S.
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NY Times article May 19, 2022
" As Fentanyl Overdoses Rise, How to Keep Loved Ones Safe
Today, we’re going to talk about fentanyl. This is a darker topic than I usually tackle for the newsletter, but it’s a crucial one for us all to understand and discuss. Drug overdose deaths reached record highs in the United States last year, among both adults and teens — even though, according to surveys, the use of illicit drugs other than marijuana has actually declined in recent years among adolescents. These devastating deaths are largely caused by the potent synthetic opioid drug fentanyl.
Why is this drug so deadly? How can you ensure that your loved ones, including your children, stay safe? I spoke with experts to get answers.
Why is fentanyl is so dangerous?
Fentanyl is a lab-made opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and roughly 100 times stronger than morphine. It’s widely (and safely) used in outpatient surgeries because it acts quickly and breaks down rapidly in the body. “Most people who have had a day surgery have had fentanyl,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a researcher with the Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
But fentanyl’s potency and fast-acting nature also make it highly addictive, Dr. Banta-Green said. “It makes you feel really good. And then it goes away really quickly, and you have to use it again and again and again.” And because a teensy bit goes a long way, it’s easy to suffer an overdose. “Fentanyl overdoses can happen in seconds to minutes,” Dr. Banta-Green said. By comparison, overdoses from prescription opioids such as oxycodone and drugs like heroin, he said, “typically take many minutes to hours.”
Put another way, you have a much shorter window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during a fentanyl overdose than a heroin overdose, said Jermaine Jones, a behavioral neuroscientist who studies substance use disorders at Columbia University.
Many people get exposed to fentanyl without knowing it.
Some people seek out fentanyl because it causes such a powerful high, Dr. Banta-Green said, but the scariest thing I learned is that many who are exposed to, or overdose from, fentanyl never had any intention of taking it. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers that are marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin, Adderall, Ritalin and Xanax are often laced with it. About 40 percent of seized fake pills laced with fentanyl contained enough to potentially cause an overdose, according to a small analysis by the Drug Enforcement Administration. That is why it’s so important to only take pills that come from a licensed pharmacy. If you get pills or other drugs that weren’t prescribed by your doctor and weren’t administered by a licensed pharmacy, you should assume they have fentanyl in them, Dr. Banta-Green noted.
Making matters worse, counterfeit pills often look legitimate — they may come in a prescription bottle and match the color and size of the prescription drug. “I’ve talked to crime lab chemists. They look real,” Dr. Banta-Green said. Non-opioid street drugs, like methamphetamine and cocaine, can also be laced with fentanyl.
You can test pills, powders and injectable drugs for fentanyl using testing strips, which are available online or through a harm reduction clinic, but these are illegal to possess or distribute in some states, because they are considered drug paraphernalia. And you have to carefully follow the directions, Dr. Banta-Green said, dissolving the substance in water, dipping the strip into the solution for a certain amount of time and laying it out on a flat surface until results appear.
Talk to your loved ones. Including your kids.
Dr. Banta-Green emphasized that the best way to prevent fentanyl use is to educate loved ones, including tweens and teens, about it. He said that this works better as an ongoing dialogue in short spurts rather than one long, formal conversation. Explain what fentanyl is and warn that it is very dangerous, and that it can be found in pills bought online or from friends — even if they’re sold as something else. (You can even frame your concern as being for your child’s friends, rather than your child, so that it feels less accusatory.)
You may want to explain that sometimes people take these drugs because they’re depressed, are having trouble sleeping or have untreated pain — but that there are better, safer ways to treat these problems, and that they can and should talk to you if they ever need help or have questions.
“Focus on not blaming, not assuming, expressing concern, asking for two minutes to share information,” Dr. Banta-Green said. Josh McKivigan, a licensed adolescent therapist based in Pittsburgh, added that the goal is to “eliminate the taboo and keep conversations happening.” If you feel you can’t have these conversations with your child, ask a trusted adult, such as a coach, family friend or relative, to talk to them for you.
It can also help to find time each week to connect with teens, without nagging them or talking to them about rule-breaking or schoolwork, Mr. McKivigan said. Building connection and trust with kids helps to ensure that if they get into trouble with drugs, they’ll come to you for help. “They know you’re going to be there for them, that you’re invested in hearing them,” he said.
Learn how to spot and handle an overdose.
When someone overdoses from fentanyl, breathing slows and the skin, especially nail beds and lips, often turns a bluish hue from a lack of oxygen, Dr. Jones said. He teaches people to try to rouse individuals by giving them a firm rub with their knuckles in the center of the chest. “If you give them a firm sternal rub and they don’t wake up or respond, then they’re probably in trouble,” he said.
If you think someone is overdosing, “don’t wait — call 911 right away,” Dr. Jones said, again because fentanyl overdoses can cause death so quickly. If you’re concerned that a loved one could be exposed to fentanyl — for instance, if he or she or friends occasionally experiment with drugs that could be contaminated — you may also want to buy naloxone, a medicine that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose. He also recommended getting trained on how to use it, carrying it with you at all times and administering it as soon as possible if a person seems to be overdosing.
There’s a common belief that naloxone doesn’t treat fentanyl overdoses, but that’s not true, said Julie O’Donnell, an epidemiologist and overdose expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Most states protect individuals from liability or prosecution if they dispense or distribute naloxone. Most states also have Good Samaritan Laws that protect those who call 911 from prosecution for drug-related crimes.)
If you fear a loved one regularly uses opiates, whether they are buying them illegally or seeking out fentanyl, they may have opioid use disorder. Dr. Banta-Green recommended helping them find a treatment center that administers medications such as methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone, as these drugs can safely be used to help people recover. "
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By Jan Hoffman
May 19, 2022 NY Times
“# Fentanyl Tainted Pills Bought on Social Media Cause Youth Drug Deaths to Soar”
“Teenagers and young adults are turning to Snapchat, TikTok and other social media apps to find Percocet, Xanax and other pills. The vast majority are laced with deadly doses of fentanyl, police say.”
" Shortly after Kade Webb, 20, collapsed and died in a bathroom at a Safeway Market in Roseville, Calif., in December, the police opened his phone and went straight to his social media apps. There, they found exactly what they feared.
Mr. Webb, a laid-back snowboarder and skateboarder who, with the imminent birth of his first child, had become despondent over his pandemic-dimmed finances, bought Percocet, a prescription opioid, through a dealer on Snapchat. It turned out to be spiked with a lethal amount of fentanyl.
Mr. Webb’s death was one of nearly 108,000 drug fatalities in the United States last year, a record, according to preliminary numbers released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Law enforcement authorities say an alarming portion of them unfolded the same way as his: from counterfeit pills tainted with fentanyl that teenagers and young adults bought over social media.
“Social media is almost exclusively the way they get the pills,” said Morgan Gire, district attorney for Placer County, Calif., where 40 people died from fentanyl poisoning last year. He has filed murder charges against a 20-year-old man accused of being Mr. Webb’s dealer, who pleaded not guilty. “About 90 percent of the pills that you’re buying from a dealer on social media now are fentanyl,” Mr. Gire said."
" The phenomenon has led to disturbing new statistics:
Overdoses are now the leading cause of preventable death among people ages 18 to 45, ahead of suicide, traffic accidents and gun violence, according to federal data.
Although experimental drug use by teenagers in the United States has been dropping since 2010, their deaths from fentanyl have skyrocketed, to 884 in 2021, from 253 in 2019, according to a recent study in the journal JAMA."
" Rates of illicit prescription pill use are now highest among people ages 18 to 25, according to federal data.
Much as drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s seized on pagers and burner phones to conduct business covertly, today’s suppliers have embraced modern iterations — social media and messaging apps with privacy features such as encrypted or disappearing messages. Dealers and young buyers usually spot each other on social media and then often proceed by directly messaging each other."
“The platforms have made for a swift, easy conduit during the coronavirus pandemic, when demand for illicit prescription drugs has jumped, both from anxious, bored customers and from those already struggling with addiction who were cut off from in-person group support.”
" Supplies of tainted pills, crudely pressed by Mexican cartels with chemicals from China and India, have escalated commensurately. Fentanyl, faster and cheaper to produce than heroin and 50 times as potent, made for a highly addictive filler. Last year, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized 20.4 million counterfeit pills, which experts estimate represent a small fraction of those produced. Its scientists say that about four out of 10 pills contain lethal doses of fentanyl.
The result is that new waves of customers are swiftly becoming addicted, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “When you are putting fentanyl in pills that are sold as benzodiazepines or for pain, you are reaching a new group of customers that you wouldn’t have if you were just selling fentanyl powder.”
" In a two-month span in the fall, the D.E.A. identified 76 cases that involved drug traffickers who advertised with emojis and code words on e-commerce platforms and social media apps. The agency has included a feature in its One Pill Can Kill public awareness campaign: a poster called “Emoji Drug Code: Decoded,” with images of drug symbols.
“There are drug sellers on every major social media platform — that includes Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok and emerging platforms like Discord and Telegram,” said Tim Mackey, a professor at the University of California San Diego who runs a federally funded start-up that developed artificial intelligence software to detect illicit online drug sales. “It’s an entire ecosystem problem: As long as your child is on one of those platforms, they’re going to have the potential to be exposed to drug sellers.”
At around 1:30 a.m. on Aug. 15, 2020, Zachariah Plunk, 17, a star high school football player from Mesa, Ariz., contacted a dealer through Snapchat, seeking a Percocet.
As footage from the family’s home security camera would reveal, the dealer dropped off drugs around 3 a.m. Zach went outside, swallowed a pill and fell to the curb. At 5 a.m., a 15-year-old neighbor found him dead.
To Wendy Plunk, Zach’s mother, the ease with which dealers can evade detection is particularly devastating. The man who sold her son the fatal pill remains on Snapchat, she said, adding, “I keep an eye on the guy. Every time he gets kicked off, he changes his name a bit and gets on again, with the same picture.”
In January, parents of children as young as 13 who had died from pills protested in front of the headquarters of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, in Santa Monica, Calif., with signs accusing the company of being an accomplice to murder. One speaker was Laura Berman, a relationship therapist and television host. In February 2021, her 16-year-old son, Sam, bought what he thought was a Xanax through a Snapchat connection, ingested it and died at home of fentanyl poisoning.
Facing a barrage of criticism from law enforcement and grieving parents, social media platforms have been stepping up policing on their sites, shutting down dealers’ accounts and redirecting drug seekers to addiction services."
" On Monday, the Ad Council announced a wide-ranging campaign to roll out this summer, funded by three tech companies — Snap, Meta and Google — to alert teenagers and young adults about the dangers of fentanyl. Social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Twitch and Reddit are expected to provide landing zones for the warnings.
Snap and Meta, the parent of Instagram and Facebook, report they are increasingly interrupting drug exchanges. Snap said it took action on 144,000 drug-related accounts in the United States from July to December last year. That figure doesn’t include the 88 percent of drug-related content that was pre-emptively detected by artificial intelligence software, which monitors terms that could signify drug deals."
" Now, when Snapchat users search for “fenta,” “xanax” or other drug language, the results are blocked. They are redirected to an in-app video channel with content from nonprofit groups and the C.D.C. that addresses “fentapills” — the dangers of purported OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax and Adderall.
According to Facebook’s latest community standards report, it took action on four million drug-related exchanges worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2021. Instagram took action on 1.2 million, figures which represent alerts from both users and pre-emptive detection technology."
" On Instagram, one recent search for Percocet did set off an automatic warning and an offer of help. But it also yielded numerous results, including an account that posted photos of the pills and contact information, with phone numbers on the encrypted messaging apps Wickr and WhatsApp.
And when companies remove dealers from their platforms, many sellers simply leapfrog to another.
“We detect about 10,000 new drug-related accounts a month,” said Dr. Mackey, whose software company detects illicit online drug trafficking for private and public organizations.
Most drug seekers will not baldly search for a drug by name, he said. They may use a hashtag with a celebrity associated with it. Enterprising dealers troll comments for customers, inserting themselves in online exchanges among seekers of pain relief.
During the pandemic, drug use has surged as mental health among young adults and teenagers has deteriorated, studies show. Young people tend to eschew heroin, not only because of its addictive properties but also because of a skittishness about syringes, say experts in adolescent behavior. Pills, with the false imprimatur of medical authority, appear safer. Moreover, to their generation, prescription medications — for anxiety, depression and focus — have become normalized."
" “By the time the kid goes to college, his friends all have prescription bottles in their backpacks — they’re used to sharing pills,” Ed Ternan said. “The drug traffickers know that.” In May, 2020, his 22-year-old son, Charlie, three weeks away from college graduation, bought what he thought was a Percocet for back pain from a dealer he connected with on Snapchat. Thirty minutes after ingestion, Charlie, 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds, was dead from fentanyl poisoning."
" ather than sue Snap for wrongful death, Mr. Ternan and his wife, Mary, asked the company to step up monitoring.
“I said: ‘If the kids were buying real Percocet on Snapchat, they wouldn’t be dying. You guys need to escalate this problem right up to the same level as child sex trafficking,’” Mr. Ternan said.
The Ternans formed Song for Charlie, one of many organizations of families who have lost children to fentanyl. Mr. Ternan has met with federal officials and has connected Snapchat with digital and drug treatment experts. His group creates cautionary content for TikTok and Snapchat.
The rules of engagement in the war on drugs have shifted, Mr. Ternan said, adding: “It’s now about chemistry and social media distribution and encryption. We need different kind of generals, a more collaborative approach between Big Tech and the government.”
To fine-tune prevention messaging, Snap commissioned Morning Consult, the digital market research firm, to conduct a survey of drug knowledge. The results, from a random sample of 1,449 Snapchat users ages 13 to 24, underscore their vulnerability to misusing prescription drugs. They expressed feeling overwhelmed, anxious and depressed but also fearful of the stigma surrounding mental health challenges. “Coping with stress” was the top reason to turn to illicit pills, they said.
But only half the respondents overall, and 27 percent of the teenagers, knew that fentanyl could be in counterfeit pills. When asked to rate the danger posed by certain drugs, nearly two-thirds were likely to rank heroin and then cocaine as “extremely dangerous,” but scarcely a third put fentanyl in that category. Overall, 23 percent didn’t even know enough about fentanyl to rank its danger level, including 35 percent of adolescents."
" That ignorance is what drove Wendy Thomas, a substitute third-grade teacher from Sanford, N.C., to repurpose her grief over the 2020 death of her son from a counterfeit Percocet, and use it to reach teenagers. With her nonprofit, Matthew’s Voice, she has written health-class curriculums about fentanyl for high school freshmen and seventh-graders that are currently under final review by a large North Carolina school district."
" It also motivates anguished parents like Elizabeth Dillender, who is Kade Webb’s mother and the grandmother of his newborn daughter, Indigo Kade. “I’m not naïve enough to think that social media is going away,” she said. “We have to work in conjunction with social media to get the word out to these kids.”
Ms. Dillender has taken her campaign to Spotify, where she has a fentanyl awareness podcast, and to social media platforms like TikTok and Facebook.
Recently, her podcast featured Laura Didier, another mother from Mr. Webb’s hometown, Rocklin, Calif. A year before Mr. Webb died, Ms. Didier’s former husband found their 17-year-old son, Zach, in his bedroom slumped lifeless over his computer keyboard. Zach had bought what he thought was a Percocet from a dealer on Snapchat.
“You think if there’s a problem, you’ll see red flags — their grades are dropping, their disposition and friends are changing,” Ms. Didier reflected recently. “But that’s old thinking about drug behavior. This can happen so quickly without your ability to predict. I just don’t want families to be complacent and think, It can’t happen to us.”
To underscore that message, at least one harm reduction network, the Santa Clara Opioid Overdose Prevention Project in California, has been promulgating the darkly instructive warning: #ExpectFentanyl.
Jan Hoffman writes about behavioral health and health law. Her wide-ranging subjects include opioids, tribes, reproductive rights, adolescent mental health and vaccine hesitancy." @JanHoffmanNYT
article with more pics:
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I’m glad you saw this. I was going to post it on your thread, I searched for it in search bar and this post of mine came up so I put it here.
You’re doing awesome, congratulations on being clean
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Narcan vending machines are going in many places across the country… (the ones I have read about are free)
Fk fent man. That stuff is freaking evil. I love to hate it. Hate to love itttt
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The Download Fact Sheet.
Department of Justice/Drug Enforcement Administration Drug Fact Sheet
A lethal dose of fentanyl
What are common street names?
Common street names include:
• Apache, China Girl, China Town, Dance Fever, Friend, Goodfellas, Great Bear, He-Man, Jackpot, King Ivory, Murder 8, and Tango & Cash.
What does it look like?
Clandestinely produced fentanyl is encountered either as a powder or in fake tablets and is sold alone or in combination with other drugs such as heroin or cocaine.
Fentanyl pharmaceutical products are currently available in the following dosage forms: oral transmucosal lozenges commonly referred to as fentanyl “lollipops” (Actiq®), effervescent buccal tablets (Fentora®), sublingual tablets (Abstral®), sublingual sprays (Subsys®), nasal sprays (Lazanda®), transdermal patches (Duragesic®), and injectable formulations.
How is it abused?
Fentanyl can be injected, snorted/sniffed, smoked, taken orally by pill or tablet, and spiked onto blotter paper. Illicitly produced fentanyl is sold alone or
in combination with heroin and other substances
Fentanyl
WHAT IS FENTANYL?
Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as
an analgesic (pain relief) and anesthetic. It is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as an analgesic.
WHAT IS ITS ORIGIN?
Fentanyl was first developed in 1959 and introduced in the 1960s as an intravenous anesthetic. It is legally manufactured and distributed in the United States. Licit fentanyl pharmaceutical products are diverted via theft, fraudulent prescriptions, and
illicit distribution by patients, physicians, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists.
From 2011 through 2021, both fatal overdoses associated with abuse of clandestinely produced fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, and law enforcement encounters increased markedly.
According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC), overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, excluding methadone were involved in roughly 2,600 drug overdose deaths each year in 2011 and 2012, but from 2013 through 2021, the number of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, excluding methadone increased dramatically each year, to more than 68,000 in 2021. The total number of overdose deaths for
this category was greater than 258,000 for 2013 through 2021. These overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids is primarily driven by illicitly manufactured fentanyl, including fentanyl analogs. Consistent with overdose death data, the trafficking, distribution, and abuse of illicitly produced fentanyl and fentanyl analogs positively correlates with the associated dramatic increase in overdose fatalities.
and has been identified in fake pills, mimicking pharmaceutical drugs such as oxycodone. Fentanyl patches are abused by removing its gel contents and then injecting or ingesting these contents. Patches have also been frozen, cut into pieces, and placed under the tongue or in the cheek cavity. According
to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System - National Estimates Based on All Reports estimates, reports on fentanyl (both pharmaceutical and clandestinely produced) increased from 4,697 in 2014 to over 117,045 in 2020, as reported by federal, state, and local forensic laboratories in the United States.
What is the effect on the body?
Fentanyl, similar to other commonly used opioid analgesics (e.g., morphine), produces effects
such as relaxation, euphoria, pain relief, sedation, confusion, drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, urinary retention, pupillary constriction, and respiratory depression.
What are the overdose effects?
Overdose may result in stupor, changes in pupillary size, cold and clammy skin, cyanosis, coma, and respiratory failure leading to death. The presence of triad of symptoms such as coma, pinpoint pupils, and respiratory depression are strongly suggestive of opioid poisoning.
Which drugs cause similar effects?
Drugs that cause similar effects include other opioids such as morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, hydromorphone, methadone, and heroin.
What is the legal status in the Federal Control Substances Act?
Fentanyl is a Schedule II narcotic under the United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Fake rainbow oxycodone M30 tablets containing fentanyl
www.getsmartaboutdrugs.com
October 2022
(Images removed by moderators)
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One thing that has perplexed me about fentanyl. It would seem dealers would NOT want to kill off their clientele. What is the purpose of lacing a marijuana joint with fentanyl? Is it just fine accidentally? I’ve never understood this. So super scary.
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This drug scares the crap out of me. Bad enough that opiate addicts are willing to use it, but it’s being used to enhance other drugs, so unsuspecting users run the risk of od’ing on something they had no intention of using.
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This has been in my news a lot. Thank you for posting the article. Because it is not an opiate, narcan/naloxone will not pull someone out of it is what is being stressed on my news. Yuck on the flesh eating .
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They don’t want to kill anyone off. At least not right away. They just don’t know what they’re doing. Your average drug dealer isn’t a chemist.
I had jury duty a couple years ago and the defendant was busted with fentanyl. As well as every other kind of drug you can imagine. Long list of charges. He struck me as the type who’d kill someone with it accidentally. For every person like him who gets caught, who knows how many more are out there poisoning their poison.
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Very sad situation. It breaks my heart to hear how many people are turned away from treatment because there aren’t not enough beds. Those pics were hard to look at.
I should have avoided reading the comments. Some of them had my blood boiling like this one…“once someone is in full blown addict, there’s no coming back. Stop giving them narcan and let them die”. If that person had a loved one addicted to fent and living on the streets, I bet they’d have a completely different perspective.
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Just read this. Didn’t know where to post it. So I’ll just leave it here if anyone is interested.
Narcan — the opioid overdose medication — will finally be available over the counter
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