Originally Posted by
Paul Sharp
Sorry for your loss breakingtime91. Heroin is evil.
During my time as an undercover I saw the trend slowly moving towards heroin. My group had moved into prescription drugs and the "party" drugs so I wasn't really seeing what the guys working street drugs were dealing with, until those worlds came together in heroin. When we would get to together to deconflict there would be a lot of, "Holy shit, you're working xxxx too?" Yeah, but we're working him/her for heroin. "So are we!". We started to see a trend... My last year in the unit we saw the soccer moms that were taking their kids ADHD meds, and the folks going from doc to doc getting their pain scrips filled, start to move towards heroin. It's cheaper, easier to get, with less hands involved in the transaction. As we started to pick off more docs selling scrips, it became more difficult for the opiate addicted people to get their drug of choice. I believe heroin filled that void. My contacts went from a doctors office in xxxxx to some dude on the west side of Chicago. It wasn't overnight but gradually we were no longer looking for the guy in the Tesla parked in front of the Whole Foods, now we were looking for the dude in a hoodie wearing a red St Louis Cardinals cap sitting on a bus stop bench across from a church.
I think a couple things happened. Doctors, and staff started getting popped off for selling prescriptions. The ones that were involved but didn't get caught up yet, stopped before they got caught. Then legislation was passed that made it more difficult for folks to get opiates. The docs could no longer call in your opiate refill, you had to go see the doc to get a refill. The various docs and pharmacies implemented a computer system that allowed them to see that this patient just got a Vicoden refill from their dentist last week, so no vicoden for you. That source started to dry up fast. This created a void, heroin filled that void.
The frequency of OD now has a lot to do with drug quality, misinformation, and voodoo BS the users pass along to each other regarding what to do when someone is OD'ing. With pharm grade opiates they knew what they were getting. There would occasionally be an OD due to opiates but that was rare and usually in conjunction with alcohol. With heroin, folks just don't know what they're getting. There is probably some heroin in there but there is also a lot of bad stuff. We had a string of deaths in Chicagoland after a bad batch of heroin came out of the westside. It didn't slow the end users down, they just tried all kinds of juju to figure out if the bag they just bought was the bad stuff or not. The other issue is strength, which also relates to purity/quality. For example, a guy has been buying a stick that's 1/3 heroin, 2/3 filler/bunk. He hooks up with a dude that sells him a stick that's 9/10 heroin? It's going to wreck him. Then his buddies decide the best way to bring him out of it, (if they don't freak out and leave him for a few hours before they actually do anything to help him), is something some guy at the Phish concert told them to do if they ever OD... By the time an officer or paramedic shows up with some Narcan, and can transport the guy to the ER, he's been under a long time. This contributes to the lethality of the ODs we're seeing.
I think the way forward is education. Prohibition doesn't work, just like the thread about taxing soda. Come on man, do we as a society still believe you can hit someone with a stick to make them change behavior that's generated by internal issues? All it does is make them find ways to get what they want while avoiding the stick. If we figure out how to fix the internal issues they won't need the thing to fill that void. I always think about a CI that was sitting in my car constantly looking at his watch, getting more antsy by the second. Finally I said, dude settle down, you're starting to freak me out. He said, "I'm supposed to be in the gym in 20 minutes. I can't be late." I said okay dude, it's just a workout. We'll get you there as soon as this is done. He said, "you don't understand, I can't be late. It's what I do now instead of yayo." I said okay dude, we'll get you there but you had me worried. You're acting like you're using again. He said, "I'm always going to get high, now I get high on getting yoked." That was the moment I really got it, this is something legislation, and enforcement can't fix. This is an internal thing, that folks are going to fill one way or another until they figure out how to fix it.