Zaza is a "proprietary" blend with Tianeptine. So, you have no idea of dosage and I think you're getting other stuff in there, too.
Tianeptine, for me, resulted in a high which felt like a dirty Hydrocodone but began fading immediately after feeling it. It was going away as soon as it was coming on. I could see how someone would dose compulsively.
I only did it a couple times because I could see the pitfalls, but mostly because I read somewhere that taking it any period of time would jack your Kratom tolerance through the roof (permanently?) I do Kratom no more than once week and it's great for getting a tedious job done. I don't want to lose that.
Zaza doesn't show the dose of tianeptine, but the brand Tata does. It's listed at 73mg of tianeptine per capsule (doesn't say which salt but it is clearly tianeptine sodium).
Here's a picture of the label:
The thing is, I have a ton of experience with tianeptine (in pure powder form, including tianeptine sodium, sulfate, ethyl ester, and even the rare and highly potent 3-iodo tianeptine ethyl ester -- which is multiple times more potent than even tianeptine sodium and feels like an actual narcotic).
So from that experience with tianeptine I can say with certainty that the above pills don't contain 73mg of tianeptine sodium. More like 30mg. The Zaza red are stronger but inconsistent. In anycase, these smokeshop tianeptine brands are all stupid since they cost many times more than tianeptine sodium powder (which you can at least measure since you know what you have). For me, a good dose of high quality tianeptine is 500mg+, so a full bottle (15 pills) of the above pictured "TaTa" wasn't enough, since it definitely wasn't 500mg. Two bottles did get me pretty fucked up (for about 4 hours). It felt like maybe 800mg of tianeptine, but the price of those two bottles was more than 5 grams of pure tianeptine powder. So even if you don't buy powder tianeptine in bulk quantities, this smoke shop shit is at least 10 times more expensive. These rednecks maxing out credit cards, robbing houses and breaking into cars so that they can afford their $4,000/month smoke shop tianeptine habit could be paying $400/month if they simply did a google search (and even less when bought in bulk). That said, if these people did come access pure tianeptine, they'd probably measure it with spoons and develop outrageous habits. Its hard to develop a 5 gram a day tianeptine habit with smoke shop tianeptine, but with pure tianeptine powder.
I simply bought these product out of curiosity: to see what smoke shop tianeptine is like (how strong it is, ths quality of tianeptine being used etc). I had always figured Zaza etc was a southern/midwest thing, so when I saw it at a random local smoke shop I was shocked, and had to try it. Was even a little worried because I thought, oh shit, now I have tianeptine being sold a short drive away, and my addict ass will hear it calling my name (its alot easier to just impulsively drive down the street and buy some in a moment of stress rather than buy it online and wait a few days to get it). But the quality and potency of stuff like Zaza, Tata, Tianna etc was so low that it will be easy to avoid purchasing it. The consistency is also horrible, and tianeptine content varies wildly by bottle, with some being significantly stronger than others, so its a crap shoot. Not appealing to me, fortunately.
But it is beyond fucked up that some store owners give out free samples to hook people. If I came across someone like that I'd stand by their car waiting for their shift to end and have a *talk* with them about the practice. Its a predatory behavior, and it could derail someones life.
To preface, this Vice article is shock journalism, tianeptine isn't heroin, nor is the withdrawal as bad. That said, it is extremely addictive and the withdrawal is rough (but short and more forgiving than say oxycodone -- which tianeptine is like the baby version of):
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3vvq/gas-station-heroin-tianeptine-zaza-pills