Shit Life in the USA

[Kurt]

A guy in my hometown, who I used to play with as a kid, was arrested last month when he gave his 30 year old son fentanyl laced heroin that killed his son. Then it turned out that the dope he had given his wife killed her too. He had such a tolerance that he survived.

His first wife died of an OD that was not his fault since she bought her own dope.

So he is pretty much fucked.

The thing is with Dope-Sick people is everything is distorted towards dope. If a normal person would say "my God, I cannot let my family starve, I will bring them food" but since the addict knows the pain of withdrawal he sees his loved ones suffering the same thing and wants to help make them feel better, so he scores dope for them and kills them.

Since I lost track of him sometime after I graduated high school I did some research on him and his associates via social media, police records and what I knew of him before this.

His father worked in local factories making boxes. With this, his mother was able to stay at home and raise three kids. They owned a decent house, had two cars and when the father died in a car accident around 1990 his insurance and pension made sure his wife was able to lead the life she had when he was alive and working. Like alot of people I grew up with, and me as well, we pretty much saw our future as similar to our fathers. My dad went to college and did fairly well on a teacher's salary and his dad did factory work and did just as well as my dad did in manufacturing.

1990 to 2003 he was doing ok. Then all the paper mills started shutting down (they have not re-opened either in spite of boxes being big, though office supplies are not) and I assume he went through periods of unemployment. Around 2003 was the first time he was busted for forging prescriptions. Then 2008 was heroin possession and in 2018 he was busted for supplying dope that caused a non fatal OD and served probation time.

I began to track the people mentioned in the newpapers and police logs. Junkies tend to be friends with whomever. There is no age preference, just drugs. So he was friends with very young people. People younger than his son. His second wife was in her mid 60s, he is in his early 50s.

Housing tended to rotate between mother then miscellaneous relatives to trailer court flop houses. Employment was never lost because of drug use, employment was lost because a car broke down and they could not afford to fix it. Then it seemed they would become temporary dealers to their friends until they could get their car fixed and get a real job.

Apparently even a low paying job was all that one needs for narcotics, which is good (keeps crime down).

The most common way to "hustle" cash was not theft but GoFundMe. However, though the goal was set low ($200) I never saw a campaign that ever had more than $5 in it, and the donor was always a relative from Facebook. Apparently when all your friends are Junkies it's kind of hard to raise charitable contributions from them, especially bogus ones...but the legit ones did not raise more. Since they had a lot of friends and relatives who died of overdoses there were always please for Funeral expenses that were around $5k ...but again more than $5 was rare. Some people ran a different GoFundMe every month and there were all these unfilled campaigns. The pattern was a bit expected but still spooky.

Politics was not just skewed Trump Republicans, it was 100% Trump Republican. A bar where one of them worked and the rest would gather had carboard cut outs of Trump and they would un-ironically pose with them. This same bar had reviews that gave a junkie vibe like "bartender begged me for a bigger tip" and "don't leave your money out" (A Wisconsin thing is to leave your money out so the bartender can just take what they need, then the tip is what is left of the pile). Facebook posts were somewhat threatening to Liberals like "I hope nothing happens to the socialists in New York (during COVID-19 last year) and then with an /s to show that they were being sarcastic.

It's a majority white place but there are black people and south east asians and they were represented as the group of dope based friends as well so there was no racist overtures at all, just anti-Liberal and Democrat ones.

What is odd to me is when I left the midwest, Heroin was like sasquatch...people claimed to have seen it but, if true it was rare. In the mid 1980s a friend of mine worked at a hotel as a maid and she found a dead body all rigored up with a syringe in his arm. The OD was a guy traveling from Chicago to Tomahawk Wi. and decided to over-night in my hometown before proceeding.

We treated her like she was almost a celebrity who had come close to something strange and foreign, like a failed William S. Burroughs or something. Now the maids are Mexican or Hmong and they carry Narcan.

[ROB]

Well that was a depressing read.

[Lost Boy]

Kurt, you are hilarious. I patrol a city that is as far-left as they come. We come across dead OD junkies all the time, sometimes with the needle still sticking out of their arm. 200-300 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses every day in this country. The opioid pandemic does not discriminate against race, political affiliation, or social-economic status.

Many heroin addicts start by becoming hooked to the oxycodone that their doctors liberally prescribed to them, when Purdue Pharma was actively pushing it to doctors all over the country and downplaying the addiction risks. When the oxy ran out and they couldn't get a doctor to renew the prescription, they turned to buying it on the street. When they couldn't get it, they resorted to heroin. I've interviewed scores of transients and many of the origin stories of their life of addiction are nearly identical. Lots of them came from good families and jobs, then they got an injury, were prescribed oxy, and it went all downhill from there. Execs at Purdue have a lot of blood on their hands.

The 200-300 opioid deaths does not include the overdoses from central nervous system stimulants that are abused, such as methamphetamine, cocaine, ritalin, or adderall. This is not in any way a problem unique to the USA, as the title of your thread seems to imply. The Filipinos were so fed up with meth-heads committing crime in their country that they elected Rodrigo Duterte as their president, who promised to solve crime by killing "tens of thousands of criminals." He promised to kill "sons of bitches." He gave cops a free hand to doctor crime scenes to turn every shoot into a good shoot. Fleeing junkies shot in the back were photographed after a drop piece was put in their hand or next to their body. Afghanistan produces most of the world's heroin, and China produces the vast majority of the world's fentanyl. Even worse than fentanyl is carfentanil, which is five-thousand times more potent than morphine.

I predict the next major terrorist attack will be a dirty bomb exploded in a crowded place like a convention center. Instead of radioactive material, the terrorists need only to put the explosives inside a kilo of carfentanil. Nearly everyone in the building would be killed by OD. They've seized enough of the stuff on the Mexican border each year to kill every man, woman, and child in America many times over.

[Kurt]

Kurt, you are hilarious. I patrol a city that is as far-left as they come. We come across dead OD junkies all the time, sometimes with the needle still sticking out of their arm. 200-300 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses every day in this country. The opioid pandemic does not discriminate against race, political affiliation, or social-economic status.

Many heroin addicts start by becoming hooked to the oxycodone that their doctors liberally prescribed to them, when Purdue Pharma was actively pushing it to doctors all over the country and downplaying the addiction risks. When the oxy ran out and they couldn't get a doctor to renew the prescription, they turned to buying it on the street. When they couldn't get it, they resorted to heroin. I've interviewed scores of transients and many of the origin stories of their life of addiction are nearly identical. Lots of them came from good families and jobs, then they got an injury, were prescribed oxy, and it went all downhill from there. Execs at Purdue have a lot of blood on their hands.

The 200-300 opioid deaths does not include the overdoses from central nervous system stimulants that are abused, such as methamphetamine, cocaine, ritalin, or adderall. This is not in any way a problem unique to the USA, as the title of your thread seems to imply. The Filipinos were so fed up with meth-heads committing crime in their country that they elected Rodrigo Duterte as their president, who promised to solve crime by killing "tens of thousands of criminals." He promised to kill "sons of bitches." He gave cops a free hand to doctor crime scenes to turn every shoot into a good shoot. Fleeing junkies shot in the back were photographed after a drop piece was put in their hand or next to their body. Afghanistan produces most of the world's heroin, and China produces the vast majority of the world's fentanyl. Even worse than fentanyl is carfentanil, which is five-thousand times more potent than morphine.

I predict the next major terrorist attack will be a dirty bomb exploded in a crowded place like a convention center. Instead of radioactive material, the terrorists need only to put the explosives inside a kilo of carfentanil. Nearly everyone in the building would be killed by OD. They've seized enough of the stuff on the Mexican border each year to kill every man, woman, and child in America many times over.

Russians did it with Fentanyl. But did it to kill terries but killed more hostages than terrorists. I cannot remember the year.

My hometown is Liberal as well. But I made an observation: My childhood friend and all of his junky friends and associates were 100% Trumpian Liberal haters.

When the Right Wing started claiming Liberalism was an Mental illness or defect I kind of wondered if they were projecting a bit. Paranoid about "losing our way of life" from elected officials but not at all scared about "losing their life" from sketchy dope brought to them by friends and family.

[el3so]

I predict the next major terrorist attack will be a dirty bomb exploded in a crowded place like a convention center. Instead of radioactive material, the terrorists need only to put the explosives inside a kilo of carfentanil. Nearly everyone in the building would be killed by OD.

A billion micrograms of carfentanil and you'd want to blow it up? Guess that is part of the reason why you carry a badge and I don't ;-)
Local guy brewed it up first btw. This op-ed from some medical site uses the lethal dose as more of a rather dramatic appeal for a shift in handling the (then upcoming) opioids crisis in Canada. Dunno how that played out.

Think most of the law enforcement focus over here is on the cocaine trade and the designer drug manufacturing. Still tragic sure, but a bit less depressing. Both of those are rooted in modern medicine as well. Can't have the good without the bad.