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Can anyone tell me what life was like before fentanyl?

ChipTrippyFox

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Dec 25, 2013
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Long time since I’ve posted.. and sorry if I’m rambling


I’ve just been wondering a lot lately;
Can anyone tell me what life was like before fentanyl? And what I mean by that is.. I’m dumbfounded how fast I’ve seen a rapid decline in homelessness and clear blatant drug use to the point of zombies roaming the streets (sorry to use a common term but..)

I’m not a opioid user myself; outside of medically prescribed pain reduction; so I just don’t get it maybe. What’s the appeal? Was heroin a good sub for this?
How many people have gotten hooked on ox, then H, and then fent??
Are a lot of people looking for fent or would they just get good H if it was available???

Fent scares the shit out of me to be honest..


I guess I’m just asking for an open dialogue of the comparison between an era of opioids that once did not include fentanyl but now does; please discuss


((PS I am not judgemental; simply curious. My DOC is dissociative drugs or basic shit))
 
Let me say from the start I am from England & we are just starting to see Fent & other Synth-opiates arrive over here BUT I've done Heroin since 2001 & have smoked Fent a few times & also had it I.V. when in Hospital (250mcg I.V. with a 60mg Oral Morphine Chaser)

Many reasons why Fent took off in Canada & USA so badly, some are down to Mexican Drug Lords but before that it's down to the Health Care system you lot have & the honest scam that was pulled on people with Oxy.

As I don't live in The Appalachian Mountains or East Coast I shall be silent upon this issue & leave it to those on the ground to comment with LIVED experience of it.

I will say Afghan #3 Heroin is NOTHING like Fent in any form, you can smoke both or shoot (I.V.) both & you'll KNOW the difference right away, Fent is way more Cold & feels like some kinda anesthetic, when you Inject good Afghan Heroin you get a rush at the start as it hits the brain but with Fent I never got that feeling at all, it felt cold & if I had to put it to anything in the Disso family I would say it felt a bit like the start of a good line of Ketamine or 4-MeO-PCP.

If Afghan #3 Heroin vanished from UK streets 100% & all my option was Medical fent or Bath-tub cooked Fent I'd quit it 100% & never look back, NEVER mix Heroin together with Fent.
 
The post important summary is that opioid addicts could generally maintain a job and be productive due to the low cost of pharma opioids and their long duration of action. Fentanyl ended all that and made them useless zombies

it was much different because heroin and oxycodone aren’t as sedative as fentanyl and they last all day.

Fentanyl is a much harder drug to function on because it puts people unconscious rather than stimulates them like oxy or heroin (which are hard to sleep on imo).

The getting sick after only two hours makes working a job much harder on fentanyl vs its predecessors
 
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I would likely pick up my heroin habit again if ever I saw its comeback to the Northeast. Fent sucks in my opinion. Short-acting, zero euphoria, none of the glorious warm, sappy melt down your back after a shot. I recall this now because I haven't had any 'real' heroin since 2019. Since, it was purely fenta-dope or the dirty 30's I started snorting. Gave that shit up 2 months ago and not trying to look back.
 
I am 45, and only briefly dabbled in the opiate scene (primarily pharmaceuticals then later fent when it started coming around). Truthfully if I could ever get my hands on H, real stuff, I would experiment but I’d never touch fent again not even in a controlled medical environment. I can’t even articulate how much this drug has changed the game. People are out here really dying and starting over the next day. I personally did OD once after years of being opioid-free I decided to snort a small amount of fent. So did my bf at the time. He fell asleep and woke up to my struggle to breathe. After narcan, he called the paramedics but I was already waking up. Anyways, I digress. It’s not even pleasurable or a euphoric high like I imagine h to be. It’s 10 mins of nodding out then another ten minutes before needing more. I didn’t even sleep for months because I had to stay awake all night snorting shit. I was one of the lucky ones. My psych doc put me on a short taper of suboxone, while I was hospitalized and took me off it before discharging me. Told me to come into her office if I wanted to be outpatient. I didn’t even have the energy to drive across town and see her so I just suffered for months with PAWS. I am now nearly 3 years free of opiates, but it’s been about 9 since I was in active addiction. I’ve read a lot about this subject, and this post really spoke to me. I wish we could go back.
 
Long time since I’ve posted.. and sorry if I’m rambling


I’ve just been wondering a lot lately;
Can anyone tell me what life was like before fentanyl? And what I mean by that is.. I’m dumbfounded how fast I’ve seen a rapid decline in homelessness and clear blatant drug use to the point of zombies roaming the streets (sorry to use a common term but..)

I’m not a opioid user myself; outside of medically prescribed pain reduction; so I just don’t get it maybe. What’s the appeal? Was heroin a good sub for this?
How many people have gotten hooked on ox, then H, and then fent??
Are a lot of people looking for fent or would they just get good H if it was available???

Fent scares the shit out of me to be honest..


I guess I’m just asking for an open dialogue of the comparison between an era of opioids that once did not include fentanyl but now does; please discuss


((PS I am not judgemental; simply curious. My DOC is dissociative drugs or basic shit))
Yeah, there was good H around to be enjoyed. Now? Forget it. I've OD'd 4 times. Fuck fentanyl I hate that shit
 
I used heroin from 2004-2008, prior to that I dabbled with oxy and hydrocodone (it was possible back then to find shady online doctors to prescribe hydrocodone to you). I even had a mail order source for codeine tablets out of the UK.

Oxy and heroin were problems, but you didn't have the rampant overdose death and rapid decline of a generation of users in the same way. As someone else mentioned, people (generally) could hold down a job to some degree (though I only lasted so long before my use started to really interfere with employability). The population of users was less obvious, though still apparent if you knew what to look for - you didn't have quite the same issue with homelessness during that time, and if you wanted to get into treatment it was generally available.

Having worked through the rise in fentanyl within a suboxone program I can say that the biggest things I've noticed are the crippling addiction, the lack of enthusiasm for it's use, and its incompatibility with buprenorphine. Fentanyl analogues and metabolites linger far longer in the system than heroin did, so getting started on bupe sometimes takes several days of careful dosing before you can establish. I had plenty of times where I could start buprenorphine within 12-16 hours of doing heroin and be fine. I experienced precipitated withdrawals once but it was because I took a suboxone and then used heroin within an hour from that moment. Worst experience I've ever had.

You also have to look at a few additional factors that have contributed to the zombie-like masses that the modern street scene can resemble. Cost of housing has risen dramatically since then, and the ease of falling into homelessness has dramatically increased. Public health has been decimated by burnout over the past 20 years, with less and less people enthusiastic about wanting to go into addictions as a focus. Also, the rise of a number of various designer drugs with limited history of human use have further complicated things. Synthetic cannabinoids popped up around the same time as fentanyl, and had a huge market on the street due to how cheap it was. Some of the most difficult patients I've worked with were caught up with that stuff, suffering apparent neurological dysfunction, and a crippling addiction to the stuff. Meth also became far more prevalent throughout the US due changes to how it was manufactured, allowing for massive increases to production which could feed markets from coast to coast.

The problem is multivariate and crosses multiple systems - as best as I can tell, it started in 2006 with the first modern illicit fentanyl lab pumping it into the east coast supply (something that was discussed at the time on usenet groups, mentioned in the TV show 'The Wire', and noted by NFLIS reports published by the DEA). That lab lasted for about 6 months, serving as a likely beta test for the product, and was eventually busted late 2006 or early 2007 IIRC. We may never know why, but my sense is that Chinese organized crime approached the cartels with an offer to teach them how to move from organically produced heroin to synthetically produced fentanyl. The idea was eventually tested out in 2006, there was enough market saturation, and a successful operation was devised in the late 2000s early 2010s. Fentanyl started to really emerge in 2011/2012, then outpaced illicit opioid production in the years that followed. We even had to update our labs in the clinic because there came a time in 2013/2014 where our drug tests would detect no opioids present despite the person being obviously dopesick and begging for buprenorphine. We also adjusted our intake guidelines to work towards same-day dosing as many folks couldn't make it for a week or two until we could schedule their induction (which had been pretty standard when dealing with heroin).

Now I hear the stuff is drying up across the country - seems the cartels have finally agreed to stop supplying fentanyl (at least to some degree). The word on the street reminds me of the times when heroin would dry up and all of the product would get super weak. It has been a long time since I've heard of weak dope on the streets, but lately it's been mentioned quite a bit. Times they are a changin!
 
Yeah, I agree with the last bunch of posts. I often use the jazz musicians as an example. Back in the 40s and 50s, these guys could get addicted to heroin and still maintain their art. In fact I challenge anybody to play as well as Coltrane did when he was active. Doctors and productive people were addicts to heroin too. I very much doubt people can do their art or be productive while maintaining a fentanyl habit. I mean to me it’s like saying they can maintain their art with a propofol habit.

I stopped with the street stuff in 1991. Once I found Poppy tea I found what I needed at least at that time. Family owned a florist and I got them from all over. But when I did use the streets the East Coast had the nice white heroin, the West Coast had tar and brown powder from what I remember when I lived on each coast.

What I am seeing today is something different. But then again I am naive. We have people say H is in the US but people want fentanyl. Others say there is no H at all. I really have no idea.
 
For opiate users?

LONGER, for a start.

A while ago I read a paper that suggested that around 1% of active heroin users in the UK fatally ODed per annum. I was shocked but was assured the figure wasn't inaccurate.

A large cohort study in New South Wales noted that in a 10 year study, 9.8% of the users had died - which again, is roughly 1% per annum.

In both cases it reduced average life-expectancy by around 25 years.

But fentanyl in the USA? I have no idea what the average life expectancy is. Possibly it's not been studied for long enough to provide a full dataset but I suppose US users will know how often deaths occur. I knew a few users but one one ever died in a single year. But that was H.
 
Opioid addicts were much more functional and able to keep jobs and houses etc.

Opioids like oxy and fent aren’t so sedative so you can work on them and they last alll day so you dont get sick in the middle of work.

They were also very affordable of a habit to have, especially oxy in the beginning. Legal if you had a script so ppls lives didn’t fall apart due to legal problems.

The only problems with opioids really open happen when they are scares. Although fent isn’t ideal bc it only lasts 2 hrs and is so sedative like
 
The sedative activity and short action of fentanyl is why it was initially used as part of general anaesthesia. At the time, Janssen was marketing other synthetic opioids better suited to the treatment of severe pain, so finding analogues that solved those issues was not a priority.

There are many reasons why fentanyl became the choice of the Mexican cartels but once it became the de facto standard, it would be in the interests of nobody to try introducing other products.

I don't know the price of fentanyl.

It's interesting that the nitazenes don't seem to have turned up in the US outside dalkweb buyers.
 
It's worth noting in this thread that the US military's rapid pull out of Afghanistan left the Talbian realizing they could profit more from growing ephedra as a methamphetamine precursor, whereas they'd historically been the source of the opium poppies necessary to synthesize significant amounts of heroin. Fentanyl is synthetic but its precursors are the same things that are found in common natural sources like black pepper, so the precursors could be easily handled and created in huge amounts without attracting serious suspicion, though I'm sure that now people have caught on. Cartels and the sort preferred to move fent compared to heroin because it's DRAMATICALLY more potent by weight, much like acid it's easier to move something that's a full dose in the microgram range so that it can just be cut in the city it's being sold in, and then your smugglers have a significantly easier time getting things across borders. Pure fentanyl is quite potent between 50-150 micrograms, aka a single gram is ~10,000 doses. It obviously gets cut to hell and back before it's sold, but lab grade fent is administered in doses often smaller than acid, a notoriously powerful compound by weight.
It's interesting that the nitazenes don't seem to have turned up in the US outside dalkweb buyers.
Nitazenes are a notable problem in Maine right now. I can't speak for elsewhere, but all the fentfans lost their minds because nitazenes make them kind of bug out compared to how sedative fent is. Oddly enough, nitazene usage often doesn't necessitate the presence of an "up" (meth) for their "down" (fent).
 
Nitazenes are a notable problem in Maine right now. I can't speak for elsewhere, but all the fentfans lost their minds because nitazenes make them kind of bug out compared to how sedative fent is. Oddly enough, nitazene usage often doesn't necessitate the presence of an "up" (meth) for their "down" (fent).

'Bug out' is the bon mot to describe the reports I've read.

But as I have pointed out, nitazenes are a class so it's hard to know if people react differently to the same drug or if the reports deal with different compounds.

I believe in Russia many fentanyl analogues turned up in the 90s and users were told which analogue they were buying - cache in trying the 'latest'? I don't know.

But I know that alpha methyl fentanyl, the same compound George Marquandt had been making in the early 80s was not favoured due to it's lower therapeutic index. I ASSUME Marquandt intended it to be cut with H (since aMF has the same duration of action) but apparently if taken the way people apparently take fentanyl, it got a bad name for killing people.

Something HAS to be bad to be considered toxic compared to fentanyl!

While many analogues have turned up, it seems like Mexico is producing what I always term 'plain vanilla' fentanyl. This proves obtaining precursors isn't an issue and is much better for them since cooks, wholesalers, dealers and users all know what to expect. Standardization is a key to making a product a HUGE success.
 
I ASSUME Marquandt intended it to be cut with H (since aMF has the same duration of action) but apparently if taken the way people apparently take fentanyl, it got a bad name for killing people.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but in a podcast Hamilton Morris claimed Marquardt was making this as a more cost effective way to get off of heroin when compared to traditional rehab in the 90's.

While many analogues have turned up, it seems like Mexico is producing what I always term 'plain vanilla' fentanyl.
Many samples from Mexico are normal fent, some are testing as weird analogs in public databases. I suspect that there are probably differences in the different cartel production operations, and some stuck with traditional fent while others branched out more into analogs? I'm not positive about this point either but it's just been my running assumption for a hot minute now.
 
I have no way of knowing for sure, but in a podcast Hamilton Morris claimed Marquardt was making this as a more cost effective way to get off of heroin when compared to traditional rehab in the 90's.


Many samples from Mexico are normal fent, some are testing as weird analogs in public databases. I suspect that there are probably differences in the different cartel production operations, and some stuck with traditional fent while others branched out more into analogs? I'm not positive about this point either but it's just been my running assumption for a hot minute now.

Given the properties of aMF, I don't see how it could make things any better for someone dependent on opioids. Also, it was sold AS heroin.

My take on the analogues turning up is that once they are detected, they are added to a list and never removed. As best as I can make out, they were all made in China (where they were still legal) but I read a DEA paper and the analogues all turned up many years ago. I didn't read widely but if you know of a 'new' analogue, that would be of interest.

But seeing how Mexico uses unskilled 'cooks' would mean a standard product would be important for them. I mean, burning a sample and saying 'if it smells like popcorn, you have fentanyl' isn't very scientific. I mean, I presume THEY could buy test strips!
 
Heroin was ok if you knew someone connected . The East cost , new Orleans, parts of the Southern border states , parts of the west Coast. It was really good overseas and still kinda is.
But years of the war on drugs handing down life sentences to heroin dealers had people cutting their products with a plethora substitutes.

We were getting worse and worse quality control at the mid level dealing since demand was outpacing supply. They were putting everything in street cocktails. Something had to give.

Someone or some organization that was experimenting with various cutting agents got their hands on raw fentanyl and mixed it into that first batch of h. I don't know where these first keys started flowing. It seemed like the normal metro areas were hit first.

Still flying under the mainstream radar, these trends took hold. It made sense from a trafficing point of view. Heroin needs miles of farmland to grow poppies, and a whole network of drug smuggling to get it to where it needs to go.

Fentanyl as strong as it is a schedule ll drug. So slightly less penalty with 50 times the potency. That and you don't need thousands of acres to grow poppies anymore, just a lab and a chemist , some chemicals from China.

So what started as a cutting agent to boost effect on batches of H , took over to totally eclipse the organic heroin market.

In conclusion, it was a perfect storm of laws, demand, market economy, technology, and a lack of understanding addiction that got us here.

Not even talking about bootleg pill presses yet.
 
I understand why fentanyl has replaced H in many places - it's more or less the only option.

But it's also the case that there exist opioids which are even more potent and are much more like H subjectively.

I keep reading fentanyl is very cheap and I can see someone moving to offer one of the alternatives at a premium price.

In Canada carfentanil labs have been found and as I understand it, it's uses as an active cut for fentanyl, but totally different scaffolds exist. There is simply no obvious advantage UNLESS you have something so much better that given the option, people WILL pay that premium.
 
But it's also the case that there exist opioids which are even more potent and are much more like H subjectively.
Production issues and convincing addicts to use a new drug are the biggest barriers here imo, but you're certainly right. I'm shocked there aren't large turkish poppy operations cranking out super clean oxycodone to sell at bougie prices. H could result from the same production process.
I keep reading fentanyl is very cheap and I can see someone moving to offer one of the alternatives at a premium price.
It certainly was cheap, but man is it drying up quickly. I recently moved from an area where I'd seen more hand-to-hand transactions of huge amounts of fent than I would believe if anybody described it to me. Once fent started getting replaced by zenes (and the cartel meth connect dried up) there were people on the street trying to sell me sub strips and Ritalin, it was such a dramatic change. Tragically, the real issue in that area is spice though and very little can halt the production and trade of the more dangerous ones.
In Canada carfentanil labs have been found and as I understand it, it's uses as an active cut for fentanyl, but totally different scaffolds exist. There is simply no obvious advantage UNLESS you have something so much better that given the option, people WILL pay that premium.
As far as I'm aware (and based on the study with this doi: 10.1007%2Fs12630-019-01294-y) carfent is estimated to be 20-100 times as potent as fentanyl. If this is true, the same way that fent was used to cut H to make it more potent yet also more dangerous, carfent is in the same position relative to fent.
 
I had fentanyl prescribed to me long before fentanyl actually became a popular drug of abuse. I did eat, smoke and snort the frozen gell though. I learned early though that fent doesent give you any euphoria. It sucked so much compared to morphine and dilaudid. However i kept taking it because i was taking it for pain technically and not to get high. I stopped being able to afford the patches though so i had to go back to mscontin
 
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