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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sam Quinones
Read between
January 3 - January 20, 2024
a continuum of care,”
As Procter showed his clients, benzodiazepines combined with opiates were especially potent and addictive.
But addicts grew to love the two together as benzos seemed to enhance the euphoria of the opiates.
Enormously potent dope could be sold at scarily low prices.
Usually it was seven balloons for a hundred dollars.
Purdue Pharma promotional campaign, opiate addiction was exploding due
Meanwhile, the pain revolution was in full swing in U.S. medicine.
convinced that when used this way they were all but nonaddictive.
Their transition from Oxy to heroin, he saw, was a natural and easy one. Oxy
As they reached their financial limits, many switched to heroin, since they were already shooting up Oxy and had lost any fear of the needle.
Years before, as black tar heroin accelerated the valley’s decay, each dead junkie had been viewed as one less problem.
It seemed the dead kid was some kind of black tar deliveryman, being sent regularly to supply the Chimayo dealers.
“At least I’m not going to die wanting to know what’s on the other side,” he told himself.
When you’re strung out on that shit, you just don’t think properly.
You compromise your moral compass.
The bust reflected the spread of Mexican immigration. Mexican immigrants were now coast-to-coast, too. They formed the working classes in North Carolina, Alaska, Idaho, Minnesota, and Nevada. Mexicans were the largest influx of foreign-born labor to the American South since slavery.
They succeeded because they were the Internet of dope: a network of cells with no one in charge of them all, with drivers rotating in and out, complementing each other as they competed for every junkie’s last twenty bucks, yet doing this without guns, shutting down their phones fast as a website at any hint of law enforcement’s approach.
As Tar Pit took place, out of the east was swelling a wave of opiate abuse creating vast numbers of new addicts as it swept west across America.
“My fellowship director even told me, ‘If you have pain, you can’t get addicted to opiates because the pain soaks up the euphoria.’
“There’s not a shred of research on the issue. All these so-called experts in pain are dedicated and have been training me that opioids aren’t as addictive as we thought. But what is that based on? It was based on nothing. I felt I’ve just uncovered the problem of our age, and of 500 B.C.: What are the risks of opioids? There was no answer to those questions, despite the fact that people have been asking them for twenty-five hundred years.”
“people in the United States consume more narcotic medication than any other nation worldwide.”
OxyContin very quickly had a street price: a dollar a milligram—so forty dollars or eighty dollars per pill.
Overdose deaths involving opiates rose from ten a day in 1999 to one every half hour by 2012.
In May 2001, Hale filed what is believed to be the first Oxy-related wrongful-death lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, on behalf of Jackie Burton.
Franklin and Mai’s paper was the first time anyone in the country had documented the deaths associated with the new prescribing of opiates for noncancer pain.
To a degree unlike any other town in America, a raging, full-blown OxyContin economy developed.
“That was one of the driving factors when pills exploded. We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”
make five thousand dollars from each patient she took to a doctor.
OxyContin, with so much dope in each pill, bought big stuff.
They were trained to sell the drug in a way that was simply not accurate.
By the fall of 2006, John Brownlee was prepared to file a case of criminal misbranding against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin.
The Xalisco Boys branded their system: the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency.
The one to start with and stay with.
They targeted new ones using come-ons, price breaks.
them, the less face time with addicts, the better.
The bosses didn’t seem to care how many got arrested. They always sent more.
“we’re sending a farm boy away for twenty years and have had no impact.”
than 120 mg a day with no reduction in pain, then they should stop and get a pain specialist’s opinion before prescribing higher doses.
“This is your specialty. At what dose do you say, ‘I need to step back and reevaluate this patient because this may not be working?’”
They objected to the idea of a ceiling on opiate doses.
They didn’t want us to know God forgives.”
“What we had here is a medical community that’s gone along with the idea that pain is the fifth vital sign,”
“It’s not this wild abuse. It’s that we have a whole medical community prescribing moderately too much.”
As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent.
Florida had no prescription-monitoring system
New opiate addicts spread information on where to find pills the way a cough spread germs.
Plus in 1999 the state put in its prescription-monitoring program.
When he pleaded guilty, Hall confessed to selling two hundred thousand OxyContin and methadone pills, though the real figure was likely far higher.
Florida had no prescription monitoring, so any pharmacist would fill a script.
Broward County had four pain clinics in 2007 and 115 two years later.
