Emergence of Medetomidine in the NYC Drug Supply (Carfentanil as well)

[Damnit_Wonda]

I haven't done dope since 2008. The only opioid (aside from kratom) I've used since then was hydrocodone after getting a nasty cough when I had covid. It was so liberating to be able to appropriately use tussionex with my doctor and my wife aware that I was taking it and for what purpose.

Earlier this year I obtain some live poppies and have been growing them and recently harvested some pods to make opium tea with. It's the only recreational use I'll probably invite at this point. I say this all to say that we can find ways to recover and improve and eventually develop new relationships with substances if we do the work we need to do to change.

Heroin is a no no (maybe when I'm old and want to fade away after a life well lived I will reconsider this).

Curious if you have gone through with this poppy experiment and if so, are you still in the same place mentally regarding opiates use? (I hope so!!)

I have only been clean for 3 years now from all H and Xylazine (still coming down on my mg on methadone --sloooowly) but there is absolutely now way that I would consider taking any opiates again ever after my last experience. I had quit once before from pain pills and was good for a few years but decided to fuck around with percs and vikes. Thought, oh I can just take them every once in a while. Fast forward a few months and I'm dating a dealer who was abusive... fast forward another 2 years and I leave him, but I'm now broken/mentally scarred, and still addicted, which then lead me down a very rough patch for the next 7 years. Oof. Xylazine ended up slipping into our supply when I was at my worst and I ended up hooked on a fent/xyla combo. After that experience, I never want to put another opiate of any form in my body ever again.

 

[tryptakid]

Curious if you have gone through with this poppy experiment and if so, are you still in the same place mentally regarding opiates use? (I hope so!!)

I have only been clean for 3 years now from all H and Xylazine (still coming down on my mg on methadone --sloooowly) but there is absolutely now way that I would consider taking any opiates again ever after my last experience. I had quit once before from pain pills and was good for a few years but decided to fuck around with percs and vikes. Thought, oh I can just take them every once in a while. Fast forward a few months and I'm dating a dealer who was abusive... fast forward another 2 years and I leave him, but I'm now broken/mentally scarred, and still addicted, which then lead me down a very rough patch for the next 7 years. Oof. Xylazine ended up slipping into our supply when I was at my worst and I ended up hooked on a fent/xyla combo. After that experience, I never want to put another opiate of any form in my body ever again.

I did - it was nice to have a few cups of tea once harvested, but it didn't trigger a relapse. It was obviously taking a risk and I will say that it was reminiscent of when I used opioids in the past and in some ways it maybe triggered a fleeting urge for 'more' but it was pretty easily ignored given that I knew going in that if I felt an urge to order a ton of poppy seeds or something, that I needed to be conscientious about not feeding that urge. WIthin a short while I forgot about it and eventually went to bed.

My hard rules are that I won't take any pharma opioids, but if I were living somewhere where I could reliabily grow poppies year after year, I might give it a shot. The amount of work required for a few doses makes it hard to imagine developing anything more than a passing interest once or twice a year.

In some ways, it's almost like a personal challenge. Still, it's one that at this point in time I have no interest in re-engaging with as it's an unnecessary risk. I've also had a bit of a detox year from other things such as sleeping pills (ambien), nicotine/zyns (still using lozenges) and alcohol (no drinking at home, only drinking while out). My trajectory is to work towards abstinence from most things as time goes on. Some things are just increasingly not worth the hassle.

I am grateful to have dodged the bullet of Fetty and tranq. I got clean a few years before fetty hit and was working as a social worker in addictions by that point. I spent 12 years working in public health programs that focused on treating opioid use disorder (mostly bupe or bupe adjascent). Lost so many people during that time. There was definitely a lot of pain and trauma that came from being around that for as long as I have been. The last few years I've been working on my own practice and away from the drug scene for the most part. Been good to get some space from it. I still try to help out in different ways (such as by being a moderator here).

Glad to hear that you've come through what you have and I can totally understand your desire to never go down that path again. I can't imagine what fetty and tranq addiction is like, just that it seems insanely difficult to emerge from. You're fortunate that you did, as I"m sure you know. I hope you have ways to process the trauma that you've been through because you've certainly been through a lot. Part of what is interesting is that when we're addicted to drugs like dope, we become numb to the awful shit that we live through and in some ways it can feel as though we aren't impacted by it when, in fact, we are. Those traumatic memories can embed themselves in our psyche in a way that we don't always notice because we were anesthetized to what we were feeling during addiction. Suddenly, you realize you're crying at the thought of someone helping another person out of the kindness of their heart, or you're angrily reacting to ignorance related to drug users in a way that you realize is over-the-top - that's how I can be with my own baggage from the years of using and the years of working with drug users. Sometimes I'll suddenly become aware that I've been experiencing triggers for some time and only noticed it after time had gone by. Therapy helps, recovery fellowships help, talking about it and being of service to others helps, even psychedelics can help sometimes (in the right context). I've done all of those things over the past (nearly) 18 years.

Good on you for getting through, and thanks for checking in - it means a lot.

 

[Them Witches]

There are many ways to destabilize a country. Poisoning the drug supply is a fantastic way to way do it.

truth, truth, truth

 

[4DQSAR]

Last week I flagged that etomidate and it's analogues were becoming a specific problem in Hong Kong, and was usually sold as 'Moon Oil' in vapes. Typically people were ending up in ERs with the typical effects associated with chronic use i.e. tachyphylaxis due to that short duration of action so users were vaping every few minutes simply to avoid AWS. UNTIL toxic levels saw them collapsing.

These are an ultrashort-acting intravenous anesthetics and are in fact a fragment of the triazolobenzodiazepines but far less selective. So it's cheap, it's onset fast, it's duration short. But mixing it with an opioid is a terribly bad idea.

Last year I flagged that one extremely large carfentanil network in Canada had seemingly been dismantled BUT it's one of those things - you cannot uninvent something and I suspect carfentanil has turned up not only because of it's extreme potency but just like the nitazenes, researchers telescoped the synthesis down to just three steps and mostly avoids watched precursors. To be fair, in the case of carfentanil, the real goal was a cheaper synthesis of remifentanil but it works for both.

What someone else flagged and something I think we need to beware of is that a group of researchers took remifentanil (so short-acting that it's unlikely to be sold as dope) and tried out a variety of different esters - it turns out that the tert butyl ester is not only vastly more potent but also has a duration even longer than plain vanilla fentanyl. For now carfentanil is still preferred (for the sheer potency) but tert-butyl remifentanil isn't all that far behind and avoids the one precursor that IS supposedly controlled.

It's a war in which US citizens are the victims. Maybe I'm being unfair but I would classify any opioid in that range of potenty as a chemical weapon as they are in fact more toxic than nerve agents.

Indulge me - I have a hypothesis that receptor-occupancy time is inherently linked to subjective euphoria so you can have euphoric OR potent, but not both. It's the binding-unbinding cycle that modulates dopamine release hence fentanyl more or less just preventing the severe AWS associated with it's use. WSB noted 'all pleasure is relief' and so when a user claims fentanyl euphoria, all they really mean is that compared to how they felt BEFORE taking the stuff, they feel so much better To the starving man, a crust of bread is more delightful than steak eaten daily by the well fed man.

Mark you, the very first example of a fentanyl homologue was aMF which was only ever intended to be an active cut for H. After all, it's duration is similar to H. But oddly, I have never heard of aMF being made in Mexico in spite of BMK (used to make methamphetamine) is also used in it's synthesis. I assume the reason is that people dependent on fentanyl require more of the stuff i.e. aMF would be less profitable.

 

[Damnit_Wonda]

I did - it was nice to have a few cups of tea once harvested, but it didn't trigger a relapse. It was obviously taking a risk and I will say that it was reminiscent of when I used opioids in the past and in some ways it maybe triggered a fleeting urge for 'more' but it was pretty easily ignored given that I knew going in that if I felt an urge to order a ton of poppy seeds or something, that I needed to be conscientious about not feeding that urge. WIthin a short while I forgot about it and eventually went to bed.

My hard rules are that I won't take any pharma opioids, but if I were living somewhere where I could reliabily grow poppies year after year, I might give it a shot. The amount of work required for a few doses makes it hard to imagine developing anything more than a passing interest once or twice a year.

In some ways, it's almost like a personal challenge. Still, it's one that at this point in time I have no interest in re-engaging with as it's an unnecessary risk. I've also had a bit of a detox year from other things such as sleeping pills (ambien), nicotine/zyns (still using lozenges) and alcohol (no drinking at home, only drinking while out). My trajectory is to work towards abstinence from most things as time goes on. Some things are just increasingly not worth the hassle.

I am grateful to have dodged the bullet of Fetty and tranq. I got clean a few years before fetty hit and was working as a social worker in addictions by that point. I spent 12 years working in public health programs that focused on treating opioid use disorder (mostly bupe or bupe adjascent). Lost so many people during that time. There was definitely a lot of pain and trauma that came from being around that for as long as I have been. The last few years I've been working on my own practice and away from the drug scene for the most part. Been good to get some space from it. I still try to help out in different ways (such as by being a moderator here).

Glad to hear that you've come through what you have and I can totally understand your desire to never go down that path again. I can't imagine what fetty and tranq addiction is like, just that it seems insanely difficult to emerge from. You're fortunate that you did, as I"m sure you know. I hope you have ways to process the trauma that you've been through because you've certainly been through a lot. Part of what is interesting is that when we're addicted to drugs like dope, we become numb to the awful shit that we live through and in some ways it can feel as though we aren't impacted by it when, in fact, we are. Those traumatic memories can embed themselves in our psyche in a way that we don't always notice because we were anesthetized to what we were feeling during addiction. Suddenly, you realize you're crying at the thought of someone helping another person out of the kindness of their heart, or you're angrily reacting to ignorance related to drug users in a way that you realize is over-the-top - that's how I can be with my own baggage from the years of using and the years of working with drug users. Sometimes I'll suddenly become aware that I've been experiencing triggers for some time and only noticed it after time had gone by. Therapy helps, recovery fellowships help, talking about it and being of service to others helps, even psychedelics can help sometimes (in the right context). I've done all of those things over the past (nearly) 18 years.

Good on you for getting through, and thanks for checking in - it means a lot.

I'm glad to hear that the tea experience has been nothing but positive for you! I don't blame you from distancing yourself from the drug scene. Burnout is not a good state to be in for all kinds of reasons and at that point you aren't going to be able to help the way you want to or need to anyway. I am actually in the process of looking for funding to go to back to school to be a drug and alcohol councellor atm...

I finally am in a decent place mentally now that I see a therapist and have a good support system. I am very fortunate to make it out on the other side, especially when I think back on where I was and how I was living. Xylazine withdrawal is such a scary feeling and it starts happening so fast and so soon. I would almost be torturing myself because I would dose myself a bit before work, sleep like a half hour (because it makes you too tired/out of it to do anything else) and then go to work for 7 to 9 hours. By the end of my shift, there were times that I thought my heart was going to explode and my hands would shake so much that it made dosing myself after work almost impossible. And then knowing that there really wasn't much that they did for Xylazine specifically in rehabs, other than clonidine for 3 or 4 days which was not enough.

That shit was definitely traumatic... and not something that you can just open up to anybody about. I remember one day at my clinic, about 2 years after I got clean, running into an old classmate from high school. He had recently relapsed after like 15 years sober and was trying to get clean again. He was just happy to talk to someone who understood what he was going through. That shit matters a lot.

 

[4DQSAR]

I didn't know xylazine produced such a profound AWS. I suppose it makes even more sense if it's a cheap, active AND dependence-forming cut! I've read single case studies but haven't found a large study or (best of all) a meta-analysis.

 

[$park]

The fetty around here is like $30 a gram.
It's clean and gets the job done.
Why are you smoking it or shooting it?