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Opiates, Opioids, Crack!

This week Ann wasn't able to make it to the podcast so we scratched the legal talk.

Joined by Paul Smith of TruTalk on Tru Radio Networkin our makeshift studio, Dan and Becky discuss Dan's favorite topic, drugs! We will be back in our studio to talk about the law next week!

With all of the media coverage on the opioid epidemic we wanted to discuss why it was considered an epidemic and how it's being treated differently than the crack epidemic in the 80s. We also talk about safe drug use, drug interactions, and overdosing.

Prior to heroin, morphine was the drug of choice for treating pain but it was later discovered that morphine was addictive. Bayer invented heroin as a safer, non-addictive alternative which was prescribed up until about the 1920s. Once it was realized that heroin was more addictive than morphine, history repeated itself. We finally ended up with Percocet, Vicodin, and Codeine which were billed as safer alternatives to heroin and morphine. It turns out they got it wrong again. Opiates are very addictive as proven throughout history, but they're also very effective at controlling pain.

SOME of the problems contributing to opiate-related deaths are:

• Drug interactions. Mixing opiates with other drugs such as alcohol and benzos (Xanax, Valium, etc...)
• Acetaminophen (Tylenol). Vicodin and Percocet both contain Tylenol as an ingredient. You should only take up to 1,000mg of Tylenol per one dose, and 4,000mg per day. Both of these can be easily exceeded by opiate users, leading to liver damage/failure.
• Fentanyl. With the Darknet Markets being a popular place to mail order drugs there a lot of look-a-like prescription pills that are actually pressed with Fentanyl which is 50-100 times stronger than morphine. Fentanyl is being passed off as Xanax, Percocet, Vicodin, Molly, and other popular drugs. Dealers are also stretching heroine by mixing in Fentanyl leading to overdoses of all of these drugs.
• Respiratory Arrest. You essentially become too relaxed to breathe.

Paul discusses Narcan (Naloxone) from his time as an EMT. Narcan stops an opiate overdose in it's tracks. Paul has administered Narcan 40-50 times and has experienced patients becoming hostile afterward because they didn't know they overdosed. To the patient, they wake up immediately and think the medics ruined their high.