Those are all really good points
@4DQSAR
The question of the ¨right treatment¨ for the Fentanyl-age is running through my mind constantly. Case in point here, up in Canada, there are people who can access what I would define as oodles and oodles of free, pharmaceutical grade, injectable Hydromorphone tablets. See, when I was using Heroin, if someone had told me, ¨hey, just stop using Heroin and I´ll give you free Hydromorphone¨ I would have jumped at the chance.
What we see now though are many cases of these users selling their tablets so they can go buy Fentanyl with the money. I know this is a downer, but, here in the United States, we have not even begun to consider an option of this magnitude and likely won´t in the near future. The point, Canada did years ago and it´s starting to look like they were already too late in rolling out this program.
For the record, the common dose for Methadone was historically 80mg-120mg per day. Anything less, you´d be considered on the ¨lighter¨ side and any more, you´d probably consider that a ¨heavier¨ dose.
Since Fentanyl really took hold, I´ve seen people at the Methadone clinic get raised up to previously unheard of levels. I have seen very few people ¨get better¨ from this practice. I think it was the only thing they had available that could possibly make a difference. Methadone previously was only enough to take the place of Heroin and fix your life if you also were willing to put the work in on yourself.\
So many of these people are out on the street, hustling and freezing every waking moment, it´s not like they have an easy way of sitting down and being mindful of their lives. For those of them who haven´t sold their medicine, I feel it has just raised their tolerance to Opioids in general and made things worse.
We used to talk about withdrawing from 100mg Methadone in jail like the ultimate hell a person could experience in this life. Now you´re on 300mg Methadone, using Fentanyl and maybe even drinking Alcohol too... fuck... how are you supposed to fix that problem.
There needs to be something drastically implemented very soon or many of these people are going to die, whether it´s freezing, starving, seizing or dying from a terrible injection-related infections. Yea, this topic gets me worked up. When you see all of these people in wheelchairs and shit because they couldn´t stop injecting this poison. How does that not piss you off when other countries have literally ¨solved¨ their Heroin problem i.e. Switzerland. The politicians swear they would change it if they could, if only they had the answer, well, someone does have the answer and they´ve been there and done that decades ago.
If we would have implemented a Heroin prescribing scheme before Fentanyl, who knows how this could have gone.
