Oxycontin Blues

Bill Ford, "Dad on Fire" had this on his blog today. Looks like an intense film. It was based on the life of Heath Ledger.

Ban Oxy Rally a Success

Did you hear about this:

The first BAN OXYCONTIN rally was a HUGE SUCCESS. We urge all of you to have a rally in your towns and cities. We reached tens of thousands of people in the Tampa Bay Area and just think how many millions of people we could reach if everyone of you had a rally in your hometown. WE HAVE TO LET AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE KNOW THE DANGERS OF THIS DRUG!!!!

It was a beautiful April day and a group of around 40 people or more from all over the country gathered in front of a Tampa, Florida Pain Clinic for Florida's first "Ban OxyContin Rally." Most of the people that were protesting were relatives or friends of people who had either died from this drug or had been addicted. Many carried signs with pictures of their loved ones that had died. We were located on a very busy corner across the street from the University of South Florida and we had numerous motorists honking their horns in agreement with our "Ban OxyContin" signs. We also had pedestrians and motorists stop and ask questions concerning the dangers of OxyContin. Television news teams covered the rally bringing the message to tens of thousands of Bay Area viewers.

Article and video here.


Peace, Hope and Love, Barbara

Oxycontin Express

UPDATE:
The video I linked yesterday is long and most people don't have time to look at it, so may not understand the point I was trying to make.  Here is an excerpt from an artilce in the New York Times called "The Alchemy of Oxycontin" has the same message I was trying to get across:  That it is becoming common in certain areas for oxy to become available to virtually anyone who wants it.  This article is about a small town in West Virginia that has been taken over by addiction:

"A few years ago, Paula says, Man was like any small town in America: you could buy a variety of illegal drugs, as long as you knew the right person to talk to. Pot was big; there was occasionally some cocaine around and a few pills for recreational use. Fads would come and go. But these days, she says, the only drug for sale in Man is OxyContin, a narcotic painkiller that users crush -- to disable its patented time-release mechanism -- and then snort or inject for a powerful and immediate opiate high. Legally, it's sold only by prescription for the treatment of chronic pain. In practice it's available just about everywhere around here, immediately, for cash. The going rate is a dollar a milligram, or $40 for a 40-milligram pill."

''There's always been a certain degree of prescription drug abuse in this area,'' says Art Van Zee, a physician in Lee County, Va., ''but there's never been anything like this. This is something that is very different and very new, and we don't understand all the reasons why. This is not just people who have long-term substance-abuse problems. In our region this is young teenagers, 13- and 14-year-olds, experimenting with recreational drug use and rapidly becoming addicted. Tens of thousands of opioid addicts are being createdout there.''

 "When I returned to the Gateway rehabilitation Center outside Pittsburgh earlier this month, I got a clearer sense of the way in which OxyContin is taking hold in urban and suburban America. I also learned about an unexpected secondary effect of OxyContin abuse: in cities like Pittsburgh, the crackdown on OxyContin is resulting in a sharp rise in heroin abuse."

 Dad on Fire had a link to this video, Oxycontin Express.  Its hard to watch if you know someone addicted to it because it will make you SO VERY ANGRY about:

- how easy it is to get
- how addicting it is
- the "doctors" who have pain clinics just to sell this stuff to whoever wants it
- how little is being done to stop it
- the amount of people, mostly young, that are dying from it (11 per day in Florida)

One thing that really got to me was when someone on the film said (paraphrased)  "If Manatees were washing up on our shores and mysteriously dying we would have no problem getting plenty of funding and support to find out why and save them.  But when it comes to PEOPLE DYING from this DRUG we have very little help, its basically ignored".

Another warming because I know some of you are sensitive to this:  It does show a guy smoking oxy, so please be aware of that.  I haven't watched the entire thing yet but saw enough to know its excellent, but heartbreaking and anger making, info.




Peace, Hope and Love,
Barbara

Man Points Gun and Demands Painkillers

When I saw the above headline in my local paper I had no doubt that I would scroll down to discover the drug was Oxycontin. Hard to know if the guy was an addict or just a dealer looking to make an easy $4,000 - $8,000 on the street. Either way I hate this drug so much! Even though my son's first choice is heroin, he uses Oxy whenever he can't get H. UGH! Its everywhere.


I ran across this article written in 2005 (it won't link but its on NPR) and got infuriated - why can't more be done about this? But what? Sure, I partied in HS myself and used just about every drug you could think of. The difference back then was that we didn't have ADDICTIVE opiates, everyone KNEW heroin was for hard-core druggies not recreational drug users. There was nothing like Oxycontin or Vicodin back then.

But this generation has HARD CORE SERIOUSLY ADDICTIVE DRUGS readily available to them. I guess some of the executives of the company who make it have already been sued, back in 2007. But a lot of good its done - its still out there causing people to get unknowingly addicted.

It just makes me incensed! I can't link but here's a small part of the article:

Fast-Forming Addiction

Prescription drugs are the second-most used drugs among teens, behind marijuana. Teens are doing stimulants, barbiturates and painkillers. Many don't realize how highly addictive and dangerous some of these pills can be -- OxyContin in particular.
"I was sick as a dog and I was in bed and I couldn't believe it. I was actually scared," recalls 17-year-old Ryan, a high school senior from Tewksbury, Mass.
Ryan, who asked that NPR use only his first name, is enrolled at a drug-treatment clinic at Children's Hospital in Boston. He says he first tried OxyContin at a party when he was 16. Kids crush up the 12-hour time release pills and snort them, so they get hit with all the opiate at once. Ryan says pot made him feel "weirded out." OxyContin just made him feel good -- warm and relaxed. And it's easy to get.
"There's always someone who has it," he says. "There's kids selling it. I know alone, like, 10 kids selling it themselves."
But just a week after he started using OxyContin, Ryan realized that if he didn't get a pill every day or two, he'd start to feel sick. So he kept using it. He says he had no idea how bad he was hooked until the next time he tried to stop.
"It was like somebody was inside of your head with a hammer," Ryan recalls. "You feel like you're going to die. Just laying there in the bed, sweat pouring off of you... Then five minutes later, you're freezing… then you'd be throwing up."

THIS WAS FOUR YEARS AGO AND ITS GOTTEN SO MUCH WORSE!