From: peter@petermc.demon.co.uk (Peter McDermott) Subject: I slugged methadone tonight -- was Re: I SHOT HEROIN TONIGHT Date: 1995/08/02 newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.drugs.hard >>Apparaently, pure pharmacutical grade Heroin has no bad side effectand it >>is absolutley not addictive, it is the street grade Heroin that causes >>addiction and all kind of health problems. >> >>Like almost every other substance it is the damn third grade street >>chemist who put all this shit in to the material we read about. > >Just because it was on tv doesn't mean it is correct. That's for sure. Check out the fried egg commercial you guys have. "This is my breakfast. This is my breakfast on drugs" Drug addicts don't eat fried eggs for breakfast. No way, no how. >Make no >mistake...Heroin is extremely addictive (even more so if it's pure). True fact. The tolerance with pharmaceutical or a good Thai Number 4 is ludicrous. You begin the week doing 10 or 20 mg, by the end of the week, you can be shooting quarter grams or more at a time. >Although it was invented by a german chemist who claimed that this new >'heroic' drug would rid the opium addiction that was plaguing america >during the aftermath of the civil war, he didn't realize that it was a >thousand times more addictive that opium. In fact, heroin is just >diacetyl opium which can be made fairly easily from opium with acetic >anhydride. When doctors began admistering heroin to opium addicts, their >patients were definitely cured of their opium addiction by replacing it >with a stronger heroin addiction. Needless to say, this practice was >quickly abandoned. And replaced with the use of methadone, a totally synthetic opiate, that currently administered to opium addicts. Many people argue that a methadone addiction is "stronger" than a heroin addiction because the drug has a much longer half-life and as a consequence, withdrawal is much more protracted than with heroin. The US government prohibited physicians from maintaining addicts at all until the 1960's, which was why the US suffered the creation of an enormous black market in heroin, with a corresponding growth in addicts to service the market. The UK, on the other hand, had a policy of allowing General Practitioners to prescribe heroin to addicted patients -- a policy that sought to 'quarantine' addicts and undermine any possible black market. Which is why the UK had no more than a couple of hundred addicts in the whole country, most of whom were medical personnel or therapeutic addicts who had been addicted through using opiates for medical reasons, and these numbers continued to decline until the end of the 50's and early 60's, when a large influx of American and Canadian addicts began to move to the UK to take advantage of the system. This saw the birth of today's British drug subculture, and the number of addicts started to increase for the first time since prohibition. The system remained intact until the mid sixties, when the increase in new young recreational addicts, which was attributed to overprescribing by a handful of GP's, led the Home Office to change the system and set up a system of Drug Dependency Clinics, based loosely on the US model of methadone clinics, and staffed by psychiatrists. Over time, these clinics came under pressure to stop prescribing heroin and shift over to oral methadone. There was a direct correlation between the shift to methadone and the growth in imported heroin in the UK. By the mid eighties, there was a black market in heroin that was too large to respond to attempts to wipe it out by competitive prescribing, even if they wished to try. When heroin was prescribed, it was believed that almost all of Britain's heroin addicts were in contact with health services and were known to the Home Office. As this policy was phased out, a very small proportion was in contact with drug services. Thus, when HIV came about, the drug treatment establishment ran around without a clue as to what to do. Now, only a tiny proportion of injectors were in contact with services. British drug treatment services began to experiment with different strategies to bring clients into contact with treatment services, and one of those strategies was a return to prescribing heroin. Unfortunatley, the person who led the return to prescribing heroin was British drug policy's equivalent of Dr. G. Not only did he prescribe heroin, he prescribed it in vast quantities, and often with a wide array of other substances, that included methadone, cocaine, methadrine, and even THC. He did things like, the very week the British Government began an international conference on the control of the cocaine trade, he announced through the tabloids that he was prescribing crack on the NHS. Now when you have kids who are dying for want of dialysis machines in an underfunded NHS, this is _not_ a good plan. While there were good arguments for what he was doing, it was never researched in a systematic way, he was given to making outrageous statements about his data, and this year, he was shut down, ostensibly on the grounds of cost. This isn't because it costs more to prescribe heroin than methadone, but because he wasn't _just_ prescribing heroin -- and the costs of his exotic drug cocktails were all going in charges to the pharmacist who was dispensing the drugs. Thus, while it was important to stand up and argue that heroin maintenance is a useful and viable strategy in drug treatment, it became difficult to defend this particular doctor's practice. Ultimately, the argument boiled down to being one of would you rather treat ten people on heroin at 10,000 pounds a year, or 100 people on methadone for the same price? Given that the research hasn't been done to show any real efficacy for heroin over methadone, the game is up. There are still a handful of doctors who prescribe heroin to a small number of patients in the UK, but the small resurgence that the policy enjoyed in the late eighties has probably come to a close. =============================================================== From: peter@petermc.demon.co.uk (Peter McDermott) Subject: Re: METHADONE Date: 1995/10/14 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard In article <45mqoa$3jb@pipe5.nyc.pipeline.com>, bippy@nyc.pipeline.com (Joseph Devito) wrote: > >On Oct 13, 1995 12:45:13 in , 'peter@petermc.demon.co.uk >(Peter McDermott)' wrote: > >The problem is the usual one. You can nod out, or you can make >it last all week. You can't do both (at least, not for long.) >However, the purity is 100% pharamaceutical heroin. Fingerlicking >good! ;-) > >Peter, > The herion that they give you is it herion or is it demerol or >dilaudid? Of the herion they give you how much do you get for 1 week? Does >it depend on your habit or is there a standard amount or maximum amount. Or Hmmm.. I could tell you stories that would make a grown man weep, Joe. The heroin that they give you is real heroin. Diamorphine hydrochloride. It comes in what are called 'freeze-dried ampoules'. They are made of glass and the powder is about a fifth of the size of the amp. With them, you also get amps of sterile water. The idea is that you draw the water into your works and transfer it to the heroin amp. As the water hits the powder, it dissolves instantly, like the best coke. Then, you just draw up the heroin solution and .. bingo! The amoules come in several sizes. The one's that I've seen have been 10mg. 30mg, 50mg and 100mg. I believe that there is also a 1000mg ampoule as well, that is generally used in those pumps that they give you when you are dying of pain. I've never seen one of these. However, until very recently I could buy 100mg amps on the black market for fifteen quid (around twenty, twenty two dollars maybe?). Theoretically, the amount that you get depends on your habit. In actual fact, it depends more on what area you live in and which doctor you happen to get. I was fortunate enough to be living in the area of "Mad" Johnny Marks, a rabit anti-prohibitionist. Mad John gave out some serious dosages. I know people who were getting 1 gram of heroin and 1 gram of cocaine each, a day! Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Dr. Marks is no longer working in the drug treatment area -- he was a comet who burned brightly and then burned out. But that's a whole other post on that topic. Hallelulia brother! I feel a whole new post coming on: "The good, the bad and the ugly: writing croakers I have known" Let me get back to that one... >does it work like the meth programs. Also do people in your clinics sell >there doses. I can tell you here in Long Island which is a suburb of New Indeed. A 20mg ampoule sells for five pounds apiece. The mixture sells for less than half of that. You could pick up 100mg bottle for ten quid, perhaps less. People tend to use it only as a last resort on the days when they can't raise the money to cop heroin - which is pretty cheap and of high purity here. [...] ==================================================================== From: peter@petermc.demon.co.uk (Peter McDermott) Subject: Re: Smoking Heroin Date: 1997/02/10 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard >By the way, when did they stop H maintenance in the U.K.? I >always thought it was still legal. It is still legal. In fact, it wasn't so long ago that I was on a heroin script myself. It's not the easiest thing in the world to come by though. You need to be either: a.) have been on it for ever (or since the 60's) or b.) be extremely chaotic, preferably HIV+ and not respond to methadone, even in injectable form, and c.) be one with one of a very small number of understanding and flexible doctors. In short, your chances of getting it are pretty negligible. ==================================================================== From: Nick Subject: Re: Smoking Heroin Date: 1997/02/12 Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard [...] >In short, your chances of getting it are pretty negligible. Even if you do get it - like when I could buy 5-gram sealed-from-the- factory pots of it in the early 1980's, I think Peter & I agree that your tolerance to pharmacuitical heroin grows enourmous very rapidly (like within 10 days). What happens is that the first couple of days are great - euphoria, nods etc. on maybe 100mgs/day (this with a 750mg/day "street" heroin habit). Then over the next week or so, you can work quickly up to taking well over a gram/day and only feeling "well" - it didn't last as long, no more euphoria - except for the 15 secs it takes to penetrate the brain... All in all, a very strange phenomenon which nobody has ever managed to explain to me. Basically, I believe that pharmacuitical heroin is *too* pure, and that it's the odd mix of different morphine-like compounds in "street" heroin which seems to make the difference. Has anybody else experienced this &/or know why it should be so?