Wednesday, June 09, 2010

The Oxycontin Express

I wish I could remember how I originally found this link, but unfortunately, I can not. If I got it through a fellow blogger's own entry, then please notify me so that I can update this post with all the proper and correct info et al.

The Oxycontin Express

Last night Jim and I watched an absolutely riveting documentary from Current TV's original documentary series Vanguard entitled The Oxycontin Express. From the web site:

"In this Peabody Award-winning edition of Vanguard, correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to South Florida--the "Colombia of prescription drugs"--to expose a bustling pill pipeline that stretches from the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale to the rolling hills of Appalachia. "The OxyContin Express" features intimate access with pill addicts, prisoners and law enforcement as each struggles with a lethal national epidemic."

If you've got an hour to spare, it is well worth investing this time watching this documentary. Frightening stuff indeed!

Vanguard airs every Wednesday at 10pm on Current TV.  

1 comment:

Gledwood said...

I would like to see that.
It's weird and I'm not entirely sure why, but we have nothing at all like the problem with prescription drug abuse over here.
Perhaps it has something to do with a National Health Service where the patient is not a paying customer, so doctors don't feel quite so obliged to dish out whatever is asked for.
Britain is hardly less "liberal" than America. I mean, this is a country where most of the terminally ill die on huge doses of pharmaceutical heroin!
British doctors don't need to mess around with hydromorphone, oxycodone and the like because when pain really does get so terrible morphine and/or fentanyl aren't enough, they are free to prescribe the real deal.
Reading between the lines I also get the impression that the heroin here is more reliable than in America. Here "opiate addict" pretty much means "heroin addict". It's pretty unusual to encounter anyone at NA, or the methadone who isn't basically on heroin, crack or both. (No crystal meth either! ~ well, hardly any...)

The only exception re pills were tablets called diconal/"dykes" which I hear old-timers talk about with relish. They were a mixture of an opioid called something like dipanipone with an anti-nausea agent, cyclizine. Somehow these two interact so spectacularly the rush is like "opiate crack" ~ in a league of its own. Far as I know diconal was long ago withdrawn from the market!

PS from what I heard, those oxy pills are so expensive! Where does anybody find the money for them.?!