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.
What even is the point of having separate categories of prescription and OTC drugs if there's nothing stopping unapproved drugs from being sold over the counter?
Another part of the problem is that these unapproved 'health supplements' are often not even checked to see if they contain what they claim to contain. Unsurprisingly, some of them contain prescription pharmaceuticals. And even when it is discovered that those products do have them, they aren't always taken off the market.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/many-food-supplements-unlawfully-contain-drugs
It's nuts.
But God forbid we let the FDA have a look at these supplements, because if we did, the Pyramid Scheme Industrial Complex would collapse and with it the economy of Utah and the finances of the LDS Church.
They tried to pass a bill regulating them in the early 90s. All the supplements companies took out ads screaming that doctors were trying to take your vitamins away. Very unpopular, bill went down in flames.
Like no, doctors just don't want people getting amphetamines in their creatine supplement. Or unexpectedly getting St John's wart in some supplement that doesn't list it as an ingredient, suddenly causing severe and dangerous interactions with multiple medications the person is taking. It says a lot about the supplement industry that they fight tooth and nail against any regulation that would require them to accurately report what's in the bottle. They can basically just make it up out of thin air as it is. Tons of supplement makers with expensive "proprietary blends" where they don't even attempt to show what's inside, then market them toward incurable diseases like alzheimers, very carefully avoiding the name of the disease in advertising, and taking money out of their pockets in exchange for false hope. Looking at you neuriva. If your blend actually works, test it, patent it, become billionaires (they won't because it doesn't).
And some being sold are just straight up harmful. You can hop on Amazon right now and buy 250 mg /pill vitamin b6 supplements. If they're reporting that accurately, that's a toxic dose that could be harmful to your health and even cause neuropathy (ironically many who take it are hoping it will help with neuropathy, but that's only true if you're deficient, and you don't need anywhere near that amount even if deficient).
where downsides
Only upside land ahead
I the FDA can't even keep up with trying to approve legitimate pharmaceutical drugs, let's not task them with looking at random s*** too.
Give them more resources then.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; strip the army and arm the FDA. Lead in your cinnamon pills? Sniped.
No quarter.
How about they just investigate and prosecute.
Take away profits, business licenses and import licenses.
This seems less snipy than my plan. Can they at least be armed?
No.
Why do Americans think you can shoot all your problems away?
Welcome to research chemicals. They invent new drugs and sell them wherever until the DEA puts them on the restricted or regulated schedule, then they just make a new drug that has just a little different chemical compound but still essentially does the same thing as the last one that got banned and start the process all over. It's a legal loop hole for selling drugs.
The worst part is that each replacement generation is almost always worse than the predecessor. Just take the cannibinoids, JWH-018 was sketchy, but anything after that was Hella sketchy and had some terrible side effects.
I think the situation blurs with "natural" things
Yeah I always thought over the counter meant it was checked before being put behind the counter unlike stuff on the floor
Because the rules are made up as the ruling class goes along.
These aren’t being sold to treat anything. They are just sold with flashy labels but no claims.
Historically OTC drugs were just drugs that existed before the fda was formed, and therefore were exempted from the rules. OTC drugs are almost always less regulated, less tested, and have had less research done on them. Hence the whole thing with allergy meds last year.
Allergy meds last year?
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1199159009/a-popular-nasal-decongestant-doesnt-actually-relieve-congestion-fda-advisers-say
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2017/03/regulation-of-over-the-counter-drug-products-should-be-streamlined
oh shoot I forgot about that!
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.
vape shops in the US sale it too sometimes
big issue here not just with tianeptine pills
most products in vape shops and gas stations are either fake and/or inferior quality and/or questionable
includes nicotine vape products, hemp selections, fake THC products, etcetera
unregulated and/or fake products are a huge problem in the US and are not being handled in the same way as other things in the marketplace
also some of these products are sold out of package individually with no food regulations (no handwashing with gloves or anything to do with food safety)
all this overshadows what could be a regulated market with lab tested and correctly dosed/portioned products sold at specifically licensed dispensaries with staff trained in these fields
at this point it is starting to look intentionally set up and kept like this to keep the population in a certain place
these products are also widely available in the US due to dealers catching on to the lower prices of these alternatives and due to the option of possibly getting this item or others mentioned online with overnight shipping sometimes being an option
Intentionally set up... well sort of in my opinion. All in all it is about money. Testing and what not cost a ton of money. And that would reduce what can be funneled to "other" places. It would also cost money to the people selling the crap. So that makes it politically unpopular. They don't need a nefarious agenda to do the wrong thing, they do that naturally.
It's a shit show either way. I remember when vaping started, it was pretty awesome that it was unregulated and a lot of experimentation, discussion and "consumer led" development.
The regulations and outright bans on vaping pushed by the WHO were and still are concessions to puritanical thinking (no harm reduction for smokers!) or support for nicotine replacement therapies (much less effective like patch). And of course they also lead to a few big companies being able to afford the regulations (big tobacco) now being able to compete against smaller companies (less competition).
But of course without any regulations, sooner or later you have other "big whatever" corporations pushing shitty unsafe products. And once money is flowing they will always lobby and capture the legislation to improve profit instead of competition or better quality or safer products.
Regulations are a major form of power that is very badly managed. The economic power / money behind this leads to major distortions and corruption. In many cases new ideology is being crafted by PR campaigns that have long term effects. We need to get some kind of democratic control into this, maybe like a fifth estate comprised of nerds that can act quickly and smartly and have no political or monetary incentive.
Can they just let me have my LSD and weed already?
It's so fascinating to me that people can show make something concerning the death of a teenager strictly just about themselves.
I had another comment in here that was more directly related to the post, and that was my second thought after writing the first comment.
The reason why I said that is because we have a large market of unregulated research chemicals, supplements, and boner pills that are creating unpredictable side effects in people, and the highs are second hand knock offs of better drugs. Meanwhile, there are mind altering substances out there with 50+ years of use, that we know are essentially non-toxic, and are a waaaaay better ride with fewer side effects than the legal drugs we have available to us today.
If the kid had dropped a tab of acid or smoked a joint, he would probably be alive today.
This is Lemmy, not the local obituaries. Chill.
The answer is education, not prohibition.
You can't effectively use an education if products overtly lie about their contents/effects or are contaminated.
education includes learning to distrust marketing. as well as to be suspicious of new too-good-to-be-true products.
Learn not to seek out random mind altering drugs from unreliable sources
NO
How do you know they lie? Is that something were taught?
That's just a blatant lie, a 30 second search on the internet returned plenty of information about this substance... If you can't establish enough confidence that some random drug that you buy at a gas station isn't the really legit, don't buy it? Ugh, we are doomed at this rate
Teenagers do stupid things. That's why addictive drugs are marketed towards them.
The answer is regulation not prohibition. There's a big difference between "this is illegal, you're under arrest if we catch you with it" and "this is being sold illegally, we'll pull your business license if you keep selling it" or "this product is mislabeled and contaminated, we're banning it from being imported".
Tianeptine is extremely dangerous, and the fact that it's being sold as an entirely unregulated supplement is a bad thing.
Regulation & education, not prohibition.
Goalposts ---->
And we wonder why people stick to their guns even when wrong. Thanks for helping with that.
Heaven forbid someone change their mind based on new information because, as well know, people don't change. They're immutable stone with fixed beliefs from birth til death.
If all it took for you to change your mind was for me to say
Maybe your initial assertion that
Shouldn't have been stated so confidently.
are you saying prohibition works or are you just being a cunt?
Sorry I wasn't aware my comment was going to be assessed by a politics A level examiner. In future I'll bear that in mind when I make a comment.
How dare anyone ever question your assertions, indeed.
You educated them about it. Maybe the answer is education after all.
Education+regulations
I agree. 👍
Absolutist statements like this generally confuse political discourse, not simplify it. America prohibits the sale of lots of things and people don't mind.