A 19-Year-Old Died After Taking ‘Gas Station Heroin’. His Mom Wonders Why It’s Still Being Sold Legally.
Johnathon Morrison's mother helped get tianeptine banned in Alabama. But she says it makes her “sick” it is still being sold in stores across the U.S.
Kristi Terry keeps replaying the last time she saw her son Johnathon Morrison alive.
The 19-year-old scholarship student came into her bedroom on the night of Feb. 20, 2019 and asked if it was OK if he cooked some pizza rolls; he didn't want to hog them from his younger sister, who was a fussy eater.
Terry, 41, and her husband found it odd that he was asking permission.
“We were like ‘you don’t have to ask to cook something," she said. In hindsight, she wishes she’d gotten up to see if he was feeling alright. She wonders if he was feeling sick at that point and was trying to settle his stomach with food.
The next morning Terry and her 15-year-old daughter found Morrison unresponsive in his bedroom in Trafford, Alabama. Paramedics spent an hour trying to revive him, but they couldn't. Next to his body was a half-eaten plate of pizza rolls and a nearly empty bottle of tianeptine pills, an unapproved drug known as “gas station heroin” because of its addictive effects on some users.
Hmmm... seems a bit fishy. Who takes 12 Tylenol that quickly? I think the REAL story is this kid wanted to get ripped, had probably bought this crap before and took a megadose after feeling a buzz.
Popping 12 of anything you get from a gas station is probably a bad idea.
Taking 12 ibuprofen probably isn't good for you.
I was always paranoid about overdosing on literally anything as when I was at university one girl managed to overdose on prescription medication and nearly died. She was fine in the end and 2 hours after being released from hospital was doing shots (because at 18 you are indestructible), but it was quite a shock you could die from prescription medicine.
Apparently paracetamol (or whatever the non name brand is) has one of the closest effective and lethal doses out of most household and social drugs. Lethal (Ld50 anyway) is something like 3x the recommended dose??
Paracetamol and ibuprofen are not the same drug, and ibuprofen is not the name brand as far as I'm aware
You'd have to eat a lot of paracetamol to kill yourself in one go, and it's a slow, horrible death of liver failure. I'm lazy N not looking up numbers at the moment, afaik the you're going to die zone is something like 8-10 grams, max FDA safe dose is 3.5 or 4. You shouldn't take more than 800-1200mg at adult male size though, it's extremely hard on the liver at high doses.
paracetamol is a horrible, horrible way to go. You'll spend days in a hospital bed, needing but intelligible for a transplant.
That was my impression too. Plus, he didn’t really die of an overdose per se, he choked on his own vomit from the pizza rolls. The same thing could happen with alcohol, Ambien, or even heavy sleeping.
It’s a tragedy for sure, but I’m not sure that this particular case is rock solid evidence that the product needs to be taken off the shelves. It would be a good idea to get this stuff regulated for quality though.