It’s always terrifying to read about the latest crazy drug and alcohol trends, especially when someone on the bandwagon ends up dead. But at least falling prey to an idiotic drinking fad feels somewhat controllable—like a person could dodge that bullet if they had been privy to a little common sense and some decent parenting. Of far greater concern is the fact that the risks involved with using baseline drugs like cocaine and heroin have skyrocketed in recent years as more and more toxic chemicals are mixed with them.
Drug Mixology
The Albuquerque Journal recently reported on “Mexican Oxy,” a blend of heroin, morphine and Fentanyl that is being distributed as a pressed pill and marketed as Oxycontin. If you know a thing or two about opiates, you might wonder what the problem is—sure, people are buying something that is being falsely advertised and that’s not cool but at least consumers are getting a potpourri of solid opiates rather than being ripped off $30 for a hit of cattle dewormer and kava kava, right?
But the problem with mystery pills is beyond cost. When you’re not aware of all the ingredients in the drugs you’re taking, it can lead to lethal drug interactions and an inadvertent overdose. Sadly, drug addiction is a powerful thing so I am sure most regular users aren’t too concerned with the purity of their product as much as they welcome the intense high brought on by Fentanyl, a potent painkiller reportedly 100 times stronger than heroin. In fact, the only people that are probably concerned with the dirty contents of Mexican Oxy are the loved ones of drug addicts.
The Price of Being Poor
Much like affordable healthcare, Mexican Oxy may be an unfortunate plague of the financially less fortunate. Although I assume the idea is to sell MO at the same price as the real stuff in order to boost profits, since the cost is actually less, the street price isn’t stabilized by upfront costs. Dealers close to the source are afforded the option of selling MO at a lower price to their customers—if they so choose—to help move more product at a quicker pace.
So what do you do? If you’re a heroin addict who’s out of money and your friend knows a guy who just got back from Tijuana with a supply of Oxy for half the price of what you normally buy it for, I can tell you what you do: you get your hands on as much of it as possible and you don’t ask any questions, especially the ones you don’t want answered.
What Do the Cartels Know That We Don’t?
What I find the most interesting is how the drug cartels always seem to be one step ahead of the DEA. How is it that I can’t find one decent guy I can trust to make a dinner reservation yet Mexican drug lords have an abundance of loyal foot soldiers who deliver them valuable intel about the drug habits of Americans? It doesn’t appear that a PhD in Criminology holds a candle to the knowledge gained in the school of golpes duros (hard knocks).
Photo courtesy of 51fifty at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons (resized and cropped)
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