Chemical escapism in a harsh world is entirely understandable. Heroin is a dark and dangerous method to satisfy the need to escape. Maybe more managable narcotics like marijuana should be permitted to lessen usage of more harmful methods like black tar heroin.

I’ve had a history with black tar heroin. In 1998 a guy moved into our flat in San Francisco who was a heroin addict. We didn’t know it. He was extremely functional and used it in the nose through an eye dropper. In a matter of months 5 of the 6 people in the flat became addicted to black tar. I started in February 98 and by July 98 I had lost my job, had 8 deep abscesses that disfigured my 6ft, blonde hair, blue eyed body. I was a competitive swimmer my whole life and a generally good guy. The drug ruined me. I’ve had a 12 year battle with the drug. I was clean from 98-2000 and then relapsed. Then clean from 2000-2005. In that time I ran 4 marathons and rebuilt my life and was working a stable good paying job in the financial district. I had a sponsor and sponsees in AA and one night I was walking home through the Mission District and someone offered it to me and next thing I knew I was using it again and I went on a 3 month run and ended up on Methadone which is a nightmare in itself. It’s been truly a horror. I was in my late 20’s when all this started and I’m turning 40 this year and I’m still addicted to opiates. It sucks. I wish they could crack down hard on the sale of it. Its EVIL.

My cousin died from black tar heroin.
He was an extremely hard working and responsible person. But he suffered from terrible anxiety and pain from an old orthopedic injury.
He did not have any health insurance thus he had no doctor looking out for him to provide him with more sophisticated remedies for his problems in a long term way.
He successfuly completed drug rehab. But drug rehab does not cure pain or anxiety. He relasped and died.
Let’s hope we can provide all americans with health care so they can stay alive and contribute to our country

Is this a real addiction like sex addiction?

Some hope could be found with long period opiate blockers ( http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=brainBriefings_opiateAddiction )

IMO – Our efforts to protect the opiate fields of Afghanistan for the pharmaceutical corporations and others has proven successful, and the spigot is now wide open. The Taliban had done the one true crime moral crime of restricting the massive flow of cash, because they shut down the opiate trade.

I volunteer at a clinic and I have been shocked (although less so over time) the amount of well spoken young women who come in who are heroin addicts. Recently we had a young woman who was a teacher who was active addict. What has surprised me is how normal many of these people are until you look closely at their arms and legs.

I retired from the criminal justice system after 35 years. I started my career in the late 60’s and have watched idea after idea fail. We might as well accept the fact that there will always be drugs and people abusing them. The court/prison system has long since been overwhelmed. Increased penalities will not help (in China they execute hundreds of people for drug dealing each year w/o effect). In summary, drugs (including alcohol) are a part of our society, as is the free market system. What to do: UNTIL YOU TAKE THE PROFITS OUT OF DRUGS NOTHING WILL CHANGE!!! I’d like to hear comments about this.

Great topic but why is focus on the “process of selling”? Why are we not talking more about why people partaking and how to limit that?

This is a public health issue, not just a “crime” or “border security” one. WHile those latter items can be a huge factor, there would be no trafficking if people did not have a need. Figuring out why individuals are so susceptible, and why families/friends do not immediately intervene, is the key. Teach people how to combat, and deal with addictions will go farther in drying up rampant spread.

I live in South Carolina, two doors down from a rental house. It’s rented by some twenty something aged folks that seem pretty down to earth. Two days ago they had a small party and woke up to find a friend dead on their couch. An overdose is suspected. I have tried to get information from the police because I’m concerned about what type of drug use and drug seller is in my neighborhood. So far, no response. How can I get the information I need to keep my family safe? We live right behind an elementary school.

In response to Steve V…I agree, in that we have had a war on drugs basically my entire life, with very little change in usage, other than commercially-driven changes.

It appears to me that criminalization is a complete, expensive, disastrous failure and we should look at other ways to deal with it.

However, as soon as any politician mentions this he loses in the court of public opinion.

It might be accurate, if over-simplistic, to suggest that our War on Drugs approach, which has failed so extravagantly, is primarily a supply-side one. In line, then, with the conservative economic policies which have predominated in the U.S. since the 70’s.

Maybe a “demand side” approach, dealing with the addicts themselves as people with a disease that needs treatment, will be more effective. Indeed, drug addiction is a public-health problem, whereas the criminal justice problems arise from the black-market economy that services the addicts’ demand for drugs.

They guy from Maine is right. I know people who grow poppies in NY. They make opium, but I am sure it could be processed into heroin if they wanted to.

Opium poppies can not only be grown in Maine, they can be grown in the much harsher climate of Alberta, Canada – one man was arrested for growing it in his back yard for his own use – see http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=ded7c710-9473-4376-a6d5-556f8974db48&k=39073

I have two close friends who OD’d from heroin. Both of them were in the process of trying to quite and went successfully for several weeks. The problem for them was their tolerances. They both relapsed once, probably doing an amount they did a hundred times, and it killed them.

I agree with Steve V–Trying to address this problem through enforcement of ineffective drug policy or treating it as a border-control issue is pointless and displays a shocking and embarrassing lack of wisdom and imagination on the part of American society. We are allowing our ignorance of human behavior and motivation to mis-guide us. Some people will seek out experiences which are dangerous to their health and potentially fatal. There is nothing we can do to change that. We’ve been celebrating this past week while people race down ice tracks on small sleds, and we know it is incredibly dangerous–we even watched a man die while doing it. But there is no hue and cry to outlaw luging! Decriminalize all drugs, take the criminal aspect out of it, focus on educating our citizens to think clearly and critically, and let people make their own choices.

After 20 years in social services including drug and alcohol rehab plus time as a legal professional it us clear to ne that (1) we lost the war on drugs years ago, (2) we will not prevail in legislating against addiction and (3) legalization and regulation in the same manner as tobacco and alcohol is the only viable option.

Does this seem odd to anyone that Mexico seems to have this abundance of desperate farmers willing to grow heroine after NAFTA allowed the US to ruin their corn farmers by dumping out glut of subdidized corn and corn products on Mexico? Or poetoc justice?

Great show…

It is sad that in many aspects of our public life, such as the drug problem, health care, environmental issues, etc; we have become increasingly powerless to actually get any real things done. We seem to spit and claw at each other, resulting in inertia and inaction.

Any public official who actually proposes solutions gets attacked as a socialist or something.

“In the industrialized world, the USA is the world’s biggest consumer of prescription opioids…” – Wikipedia

“In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan.” – Wikipedia

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan )

I have always suspected that “The War on Drugs” was always meant to be a market control diversion. For over 30 years we have been “winning” in the war on drugs.

Observe the profit centers and the results, and in many aspects the war has indeed been won. Why would a “war” be continually fought for 30 years in the same manner, with the same results, and ever increasing casualties?

Some hope could be found with long period opiate blockers ( http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=brainBriefings_opiateAddiction )

The problem with opiate blockers is that opiate receptors in the body exist for a REASON. There’s no way to block it without unpleasant side effects. A really big medical problem with recovering opiate addicts is treating pain since almost all painkillers strong enough for serious pain like fractures or postsurgical pain bind to opiate receptors.

In summary, drugs (including alcohol) are a part of our society, as is the free market system. What to do: UNTIL YOU TAKE THE PROFITS OUT OF DRUGS NOTHING WILL CHANGE!!!

Then why do some societies have dramatically higher rates of drug and alcohol addition than others?

peter which ones? From what I see it seems every society has some sort of drug or drink they use. I suppose we could say the Bushman don’t but they are an endangered society. The ones that move into urban areas become addicted just like the rest of the population in these areas.

If you have to work long hours or live in a more open plan kind village I can see this is not an issue. But we don’t.
Making drugs legal is one way to go, it’s not the best answer. If you look at some countries, such as the Netherlands, you do see the results of legalization. They do not have the same amount of young people smoking marijuana or taking drugs than we do. So the question is does this work?

A good film on this subject is Drug Store Cowboy, by Gus Van Sant. James Fogle wrote it and he was a drug addict.

Both the book and the film book Trainspotting is well worth checking out. Irvine Welsh adds a glossary of the Scottish slang used in the book.

I never met a drug I didn’t like and will tell you I never had an addiction until I met Charlie through a friend. It lasted a couple of years. Quitting was one of the hardest things I ever did, and I didn’t even shoot it.

I too wished my dealer would get arrested or killed.

For me there were two keys to getting off dope. First you have to want to. Then you need something like suboxone to take the sickness away. Without that I don’t know how anyone ever got out with their life. (BTW the best movie about this drug is TRAINSPOTTING.)

For food, medicine and pleasure, people have been using poppies forever. But I agree that this drug is evil and perhaps it has something to do with the source, Bayer, who synthesized a super potent opioid drug, called it Heroin, and sold it over the counter as cough medicine. Now how much testing do you think they would have had to do to know how desperately addicting it was? Just go have a look at the controversy surrounding this company and you will be hard pressed not to see just a hint of pure evil guiding its actions. But of course that was all in the past and everything is fine now that they’re involved in genetic engineering, agriculture, chemicals, health care and birth control.

It is sad that in many aspects of our public life, such as the drug problem, health care, environmental issues, etc; we have become increasingly powerless to actually get any real things done.

I wouldn’t put those in the same category. WRT healthcare we have plenty of concrete, real-world examples of systems that WORK. (Way cheapers than our, universal coverage, good or better outcomes than ours), Americans just don’t want to adopt those systems.

In the case of drug policy we don’t know what works. We know that there are other advanced industrial societies that have much lower rates than ours but we don’t know why. Some have stricter laws, some have laxer laws, they all have different cultures – it’s just not clear what could do to fix this problem.

Unlike health insurance or environmental policy which can be debated on technical grounds, drug addiction is an existential problem. You can’t solve it until you can explain why a person in America who has never used heroin before is MORE likely to stick a needle in his arm than, say, someone in Japan. Or even why there are wide differences between say Denmark and Scotland?

When you look at worldwide heroin (or all illicit opiate) use there’s no obvious pattern WRT say poverty or hopelessness.

Peter, I’m not very much concerned about other societies. Of course every culture is different, much more so in some than others. I’m looking for an approach that works in our country and so far all I’ve seen are minimal treatment programs (at best) and a court system that, if it were a Fortune 500 company, would have folded years ago. How long would the Mexican cartels remain in business if not for the profits? Make the profits disappear and they will as well.
Ah, but how to accomplish this? That is a subject we’re not even allowed to debate. And until we do nothing will change. Nothing.

I worked for for years the Dept. of MHMRSAS (mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse sevices). While my end was the MH part, I was involved with the SAS part in that they (all parts) often overlapped.

One of the problems in the US system is that people who seek help for substance abuse have little choice in what is available to them in the way of therapy. As peter nelson pointed out, there is scant data on which therapies truly work, for one thing. And, any data that is available is skewed because the statistics revealing what doesn’t work get thrown out.

Another problem is funding. While some have benefitted from AA or NA (and that form of recovery should be there for those it can help), it does not prove helpful to many; however, it is the ONLY “therapy” funded by federal, state, and local-governmental, funding-stream sources. Also, it is the most prominent approach offered, any alternatives are hard to find. So, too bad of it doesn’t work for you, suck it up! This is kind of the unspoken message.

AA is notorious for keeping their statistics of success under wraps, and anyone who is not successful is not counted, as is the case in NA. Many other therapies, often not offered at all, and certainly not funded–except on a private, for-profit level–do the same with their statistical data on success.

Peter, I’m not very much concerned about other societies. Of course every culture is different, much more so in some than others. I’m looking for an approach that works in our country and so far all I’ve seen are minimal treatment programs (at best) and a court system that, if it were a Fortune 500 company, would have folded years ago

I think we’re addressing two different questions. As I said on another thread today, the big problem WRT treatment is that the science is just plain AWFUL. We wanted to put a relative in a private drug/alcohol program so I did a literature survey and was appalled at the low quality of the research – small n, no controls, poor (or no) selection criteria, poorly defined metrics, short followups. If I had submitted proposals for studies like that when I was in school I would have been SO laughed-at. I can’t imagine how they got funding!

But the question I was addressing with the country-comparison comments was why people start in the first place. If we didn’t have so many people using drugs we wouldn’t need so much treatment. But when I looked at the US country-comparisons there was no obvious pattern – poor, hopeless places and rich happy places both above and below us in drug use.

So what I’d like to know is when someone goes to stick a needle in his arm for the first time, why then and there? And why him, when someone in another country who feels just as hopeless or desperate doesn’t make that choice?

One of the issues that was skirted around is the relationship between prescription drugs and heroin addiction. What responsibility do the medical and pharma industry bear for our addictions? What hand do they play in creating and prescribing drugs that guide use straight to heroin? Both Sam Quinones and the Dallas enforcement officer said that opiates and especially Oxicontin are a gateway drug for heroin. Our medical system is overreliant on prescription medication and I know so many people who are struggling with prespription medication addiction. This issue is becoming a huge problem, and it’s exploding in high school campuses where, according to our police dept, kids get it for free from their parents medicine cabinets. We seem to treat tour medical system as the holy cow and we need to start holding them responsible for the overeliance on addictive subtances. Sonia DeMarta

Our medical system is overreliant on prescription medication and I know so many people who are struggling with prespription medication addiction.

Speaking as someone whose wife recently recovered from major cancer surgery, I totally disagree.

These simply IS no alternative to synthetic opioids like oxycodone for major post-surgical pain. OTC drugs are just not powerful enough (they also have serious safety issues). There simply isn’t any other class of drugs to draw on – the first person who invents one will win a Nobel prize in medicine.

That said, you are right that opiates are addictive. If you have really major surgery where you’re on it for a month or two you will have withdrawal effects and have to taper off slowly. And unfortunaly the synthetic opioids exhibit a pretty high degree of cross tolerance so trying to switch to something else won’t help much.

But I disagree that medicine over-relies on these – they work better than anything else available that has decent science behind it.

I agree, peter, and narcotic analgesics have been shown to help promote better healing after surgery. People have to take opiates responsibly, and doctors have to prescribe responsibly; but, I find the trends over the last twenty years have been for doctors to under-prescribe narcotic analgesics when they would be appropriate. (Many fear DEA scrutiny in having their schedule-II licenses revoked.) There are doctor feel-goods out there, but in the last twenty years there has been a very tough crack down on those doctors.

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=431607

At least there’s a community out there… (sarcasm)

Just finishing up this show. This is appalling. I’m a fairly progressive guy, but we should drop bombs on Xalisco. Flatten it, and then bomb every other town or operation in Mexico until we see the trade slow or stop. Again, I’m a lefty, but I’m a left with 2 young children.

If Mexico complains, too bad. They’re are invading our country with that crap. Carpet bomb!

I don’t see what else would work. We can’t solve Mexico’s economic problems, so….I don’t know. Sad.

In the era of the Vietnam war, in certain college campuses, if you wanted to socialize, what you did was “hang out,” which did not mean meaningful discussions, flirting, otherwise sizing people up. It meant doing drugs. One was informed that one was hopelessly stuck in the mud, with a closed mind, without vision, if one did not uses “substances.”
My own view at the time was that I had plenty of highs and lows, fireworks, without “substances,” and I thought that for me “substances” would be suicidal. I wasn’t tough enough. Some folks could use or not use, it seemed, but my body/mind were not together enough for even experimentation. “Are you trying to kill me??” No, just that that’s their “group.” Other groups have other flaws, but the “user” groups were, so they thought, vastly more broad-minded, vastly more enlightened. They were the Himalayas of conceptualists; I was the worm.
Until OnPoint fixes their comments for Monday, I propose we discuss Timothy Leary and spirituality here.

Every time I hear a show about the “drug war” in the United States I pretty much tune out. Until the completely senseless criminalization and persecution of people that use a drug that is far less harmful than the drug of alcohol stops then I have no time for caring about the seriously hard and harmful drugs. My house was raided and I’m now a convicted felon because I was growing pot for my personal use. We’ve recently been exposed to a 14 time Olympic gold medal winner and a 2 time Cy Young winner who we know to smoke pot. Should I start with successful musicians, actors and entertainers who admit to smoking pot? Soon after my house and privacy were raided by four strangers, I moved from the house I was living in and three of my neighbors expressed that they were sorry to see me moving. I wonder if I was a drunk driving slob with no control over my life like I’ve seen on A&E’s Intervention countless times if I would have endeared myself to those strangers who lived right at the end of my own property? I doubt it. Anyhow, I see the DEA and the perpetuation of the “Drug War” as simply a means for certain individuals to continue funding their positions of power with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of tax payer money and nothing more. If the completely unjustifiable oppression and persecution of people who use a drug far less harmful than the culturally pervasive and accepted drug peddled with ultra-hip beautiful people in constantly circulated television commercials stops then I’ll start taking the talking points of people like your guests today seriously. Until then, it is all suspect and tagged as “double talk” as far as I’m concerned. You might want to point to “facts” to back up your agenda but, you see, “facts” don’t seem to matter when it concerns the no-brainer of decriminalization of pot when put in light next to the enthusiastically encouraged usage of the far more destructive drug of alcohol. Should I cite the facts of DUI deaths? Deaths attributed to alcohol each year on college campuses? Membership in Alcoholics Anonymous across the country? Ever hear about someone jumping the wrong way on the expressway with a van full of children because they smoked too many joints? Nope. That’s always got Vodka or Bourbon or some other liquor behind it. Well, I do enjoy your show on a regular basis. Thanks for the opportunity to post here.

I just caught this show on black tar heroin (I guess a repeat)I wanted to call in as I heard nothing as to how the Mexican and American drug cortels have taken over this market. Most of the references were to Xalisco farmers and the farmers becoming distributors. I have lived and visited in Nayarit not far from Xalisco and was quite surprised to hear this. Maybe I am naive. But for years it appeared that Nayarit was immune to the other drug cortel related crimes and murders, until the past 2 years and now even Nayarit is prey to such violence. That I postponed retiring there for that reason. Nayarit is an absolutely beautiful state and very dear to my heart. I love the place and the people. This may explain why Tepic and other towns of Nayarit are now experiencing the violence that eluded the state for a while. I would like to hear from the guest reporter what his take is on the increasing violence in Nayarit and if it is related to the black tar business. enjoy always try to take a break from work when I can listen for a few minutes.

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I HAVE A 35 YR OLD BLACK BOYFRIEND WHOM IS ADDICTED TO HERION,,WE HAVE BEEN 2GETHER FOR 6 MONTHS NOW AND THE PAST 5 HAVE BEEN HELL.HE KEPT IT HID FROM ME FOR A MONTH.I HAVE LIVED THE PAST 5 MONTHS WITH NOTHING BUT LIES,LIES,LIES..I LOVE HIM AND HAVE OFFERED HIM TO HELP IN ANY WAY I CAN AND HA SAID HE WANTS HELP,BUT STILL CONTINUES TO STAY OUT UNTIL 4 OR 5 IN THA MORN. USING AND THEN CALLS ME CRYING THAT HE WANTS HELP..CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME….

to anoynomous,
I have been an addict since I was 16 I am now 30 and have been clean for a year. As tough as it is to say this to you, it has to be said. You can not do anything to help him, it has to come from the addict himself. Most do not get better, I’m not even sure if I will be clean in a years time. Only the addict can determine the when, where and how long they will change. You need to move out and move on, maybe some day you to will meet again, but you can not help him. Sorry,

I love you/hate you Black Tar Heroin. You are the rise and downfall of me. May you and I find their place in this world.

Until next time, your friend/enemy,
Anonymous B