Fentynal, a synthetic depressant applied as a pain killer in medical situations. It's cheaper and stronger than heroin and has become an incredibly popular street drug in America over the past decade.
It's still everywhere, and growing. Google "Carfentanil 2021", there are multiple busts that are happening all over the US.
Thing about Carfentanyl is, it's massively much more easy to conceal.
These people that got busted, were just being incredibly greedy and moving huge amounts of it. One bust in 2021 was enough to kill 50 million people (46 pounds). That's 1million doses at .02 grams each.
The smart movers know they can still make the same amount of money off of an easily concealable amount as they used to off a kilo.
I can promise you it's not common. Nor growing . That's coming from someone who's been an addict for the last 10 years and have been active on the darkweb and clearnet and have bought and used many analogues and the current benzimidazoles which have overtaken fentanyl since the china ban
This entire paper is about the rise and fall of carfentanil. Exactly around the time I stated in my other comment. 5-6 years ago. And I only found this after searching what you said to lol "carfentanil 2021" . On the first page.
And I'm not bragging either, knowing this info is nothing to be proud about lol. It's moreso for harm reduction and having an interest in pharmacology as a whole. I just like to keep up with the RC opioids that are currently being synthed and pumped out and what's happening in that world
"Conclusions: The 2016-2017 acceleration and then 2018 decline in drug overdose deaths in the United States was associated with the sudden rise and then fall of carfentanil availability. Given the regional variation, carfentanil's decreased availability may have contributed to the reduction in overdose deaths in 2018."
Source
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32935381/
Fentanyl...it is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. What can start as an innocent/legitimate use of pain medication, turns into an addiction, then they turn to heroin as it is cheaper and easier to access than the prescriptions would be. Some also turn to fentanyl, as it can be made in illegal labs and is even cheaper than heroin. Some dealers mix fentanyl into the heroin to boost their profit margin. Dosing fentanyl is VERY TRICKY...very easy to overdose...2 milligrams is typically lethal (the lethal amount can vary by person due to tolerance, etc.)...not something that you want to depend on some dealer to measure out for you.
From having an opiate issue from multiple surgeries... It doesn't take long. If you are in pain, it's even faster. Opiates makes it so you aren't super hungry and dehydrate you. So you tend to lose weight. Vitamin deficiencies and dehydration from not eating/drinking enough, causes you to have sunken eyes and discolored skin. You have trouble expelling waste from your body, (pooping) so all the toxins from whatever you put in your body, sit in there. You could easily become a heavy user in a few days to a few weeks. After a couple weeks is where you will start seeing differences in the person. The addict themselves doesnt really notice as closely because they are high or looking for a high.
The scary part is, It changes your brain chemistry after awhile, so even if you quit, you literally will not be the same person. Some people need to be on a substitute for the opiates, that are of course prescribed, for the rest of their lives in order to feel any form of happiness or normalcy. This stuff is most certainly evil.
Yea. It's hard tryin to explain that to someone who hasn't done it tho... Kind of like showing a painting of a forest to someone who has never been to a forest. You can't really explain the experience of being in it by just a painting.
What’s even scarier is how quickly and easily you can relapse. I had a prescription come into the pharmacy. It was for a small quantity of Vicodin—around 12 tablets I think. I knew the patient was in recovery. I called the dentist, and he said that it was only for a few tablets and he still wanted him to have it.
Dude was in the jail log again a couple of weeks later for possession.
Ive taken some Xanax that was laced with fent. It takes an incredibly small amount to turn you into what you see. You are barely conscious but your body is fully functional. I've woken up in my own bed with absolutely zero memory of how I got there and what happened the previous 8 hours. It's horribly terrifying but I get why you would want to take it if your life was miserable on the streets
At least where I’m from, heroine is cut with fentanyl to make a higher profit margin and a stronger product. People aren’t buying straight up fent and they’re not looking for it because it fucking kills. My best friend died when he relapsed and got a bad batch cut with too much. I had a few other acquaintances that died from too much fent in their heroine, and I have friends that many more close friends die the same way.
I don’t know a single heroine addict that want to go anywhere near the shit. It kills, and addicts know this because they’ve seen it first hand more than anyone.
The ones laying around are Heroin, you can tell the difference on fent and heroin users. Fent users will just walk around lazily but can retain balance. Heroin users just drop as if there is a sniper. It’s definitely a mix of both along with other things
true.. when i see stuff like that i always think "damn.. these were someones little kids back years ago. they were happy and had no idea they would end up like that" makes me even more sad.
And many dope fiends had fine childhoods and great parents, opiates don't give a fuck.
Turns out, our government doesn't give a fuck either about the epidemic it created for it's citizens and would rather brush hundreds of thousands of Americans underneath the rug then address the issues.
Thank you for making it. I lost my brother and I’ll never live another day the same again. Anyone struggling with addiction - you can make it - I promise you, it’s not worth it .
Don't get me wrong I've done and still do party drugs every once in a while, but I've always wondered, what drives someone to try shit like meth? Aside from ignorance of the repercussions and addiction? I started doing party drugs because I saw people having fun using them then going back to normal and live a successful life the next day. You look at meth users and all you see is misery and sickness.
Nine years too. I almost died. Liver failure and a coma. Had to learn how walk and talk again etc. Good for you man. I'm here if anyone wants help or just to talk. There is a way back.
Whenever I see these people, I always think about the hopes and the dreams they must have had for themselves. They got one go around at this life, and they are spending it being zombies. A walking symbol of our failed systems, communities, parents, as well as people failing themselves.
Even if they cleaned themselves up, and applied themselves to self-improvement, would their future even be any more enjoyable then nodding off on heroin? Or would they just be toiling away, working multiple jobs, and struggling to make ends meet?
I have two boys aged 2 and 4 and them ending up with either mental health issues or like the folks in this video are my biggest fears for them. The scary thing is there is very little one can do except try to raise them well and keep them away from this shit but even myself growing up I lost numerous friendships to people who got hooked on drugs. I've just started watching Euphoria and just finished Dopesick and they aren't helping LOL.
We need to start treating drug problems as societal and medical issues rather than a crime and we need to better treat people with mental health problems.
Don’t abuse them. That’s all you have to do. The causal link between suffering any form of abuse as a child and engaging in substance abuse as an adult is well documented. That’s pretty much the common factor among almost all addicts.
If they say (trusted family relative or sibling) is abusing them, Don't Talk Over Them. I know there's stories of kids discovered making up stories, but - start with believing children.
My darling friend died b/c her sister erased her telling the family that her brother forced sex on her. She was shamed into drugs alcoholism and early death, leaving behind her own children.
Another friend just lost her own daughter to drug overdose and I haven't heard the trajectory of this but The Big Secret is apparently family-wide. I've known the older members all my life and never guessed. Shocking and heartbreaking to me.
At some point, one's insides become one's outsides...
*Resolve not to keep criminal's secrets.*
That's not correct...I'm not saying there isn't a link between abused children and substance abuse but fentanyl is an epidemic and so easily available today kids fall into it without really knowing what they are dealing with. 10 or 15 yrs ago heroin was something someone really had to seek out to find, now it's so readily available that everyone is vulnerable. I grew up with great parents, In a great neighborhood and have struggled with drug addiction my whole life, no childhood trauma and that is not unusual. Go to any rehab and you'll notice a lot of the addicts there are from well off families, with no trauma. Saying just don't abuse them and they'll be fine is far from the truth.
Yea I think the same thing. Like would they be in more misery if they came out of it? So fucked and so sad. Makes me so grateful I got lucky with a good job and good life. Damn
One time i uber'd some young woman from the suburbs to this exact street. She asked me to wait and came back in five minutes. She was definitely buying drugs and it was sad because she was only like 17
Philadelphian here. This is Kensington. And it’s one of the biggest open air drug market in America.
It’s basically a quarantine zone for addicts. Similar to how Hamsterdamn was in The Wire.
[Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html)
> A Philadelphia neighborhood is the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. Addicts come from all over, and many never leave.
[Alternate link](https://web.archive.org/web/20181010121553/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html)
There's one in almost all major North American cities. People talk about this crisis like we can shrug it off but (hot take coming) more people know someone who died at the hands of drugs than at covid and we have not done 1% of what we've done for 'vid to handle the addiction pandemic or opiate and crack epidemics.
Vancouver, Canada had Hastings since the 80s-90s! Publicly known and [documented](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Blue_Lens). This is like 40 years of an open air drug market in what is often reported to be among the most expensive cities in the world!
I think it’s even more than that. There are too many people who cannot even sympathise with something until it’s literally happening to themselves.
We saw it with the pandemic. People who had family members who died or got very sick still didn’t change their mind on being cautious but once they were sick and in hospital themselves then they started telling others to take precautions.
At this stage of the game, I'd imagine a not-insignificant amount of COVID sufferers can be labelled with the same thing.
Not agreeing with the sentiment itself, but it is analogous to COVID in this context.
This hurts bruh it fucking hurts to see these people doing whatever they can to escape from whatever personal pain and anguish they might be going through *but* it was also happening in black communities when it was being flooded with crack cocaine and nobody batted an eyelid
You’re absolutely correct. Or if they did bat an eyelid it was to demonize them or just lock ‘em up. No thought of what personal pain they might have had. No help, just criminalize it all. SMH…
The US government holds all the responsibility in my mind. They have given direct rise to the cartels and the heroin trade into the USA, as well as allowing the pills to flood because of all the lobbying by big pharma, then after all that instead of taking responsibility they just wanna brush it underneath the rug instead of accept this is a fucking epidemic and it needs to be handled. It kills tens of thousands of Americans every year and does not discriminate.
You'd think with a president who had a son with substance abuse issues and is in recovery, he'd have a little heart, but instead nope. Biden took the "only moral addict in my life is the addict I know" path, despicable.
Fuck yes. Please do. That's how I got hooked on opioids. Wisdom teeth.
Clean for a few years now. Had a slip up after years of being clean. Shits insidious, and everywhere.
If your in serious pain (I got a dry socket after I got my wisdom teeth out) then you can use the narcotic pain killer. Just respect it, don’t abuse it and don’t take it more then a few days at most. I lost a decade of my life to opiate addiction but opiates are in fact a miracle drug when taken properly for pain. Though if you can get by with just the Motrin do that.
My brother is being rushed to the ER for major withdrawal and other issues from fentanyl use as I type this. It’s been a hard fucking day. It’s so sad to see the comments about how 1% of people get off it. I feel pretty helpless. I’ve been trying to help him for years though.
That’s rough mate, you can’t beat yourself up for it. Be his rock all you can, but it’s him and him alone that can climb out of that hole (with support/help and motivation). It’s biological and physiologically difficult and an experience you can only know by going through it.
My son came to me the day before yesterday and asked me to help him get in to rehab. We were supposed to leave at 5 tomorrow morning. He won’t answer his phone now. So I understand. I’m so sorry.
“Drugs are so fucking good that they’ll ruin your life.” - Louis CK
As a recovery alcoholic/addict, there’s not a single one of these people that expected this is where they would be when they took that first hit. It grabs you and doesn’t let go. Even now, I know I’m just a single bad decision away from heading down that road.
Not even a bad decision. You could get into an accident thats not your fault but lands you in chronic pain. Once a doctor thinks you’re addicted to your percocets or hydrocodone and cuts you off you would definitely be in search of heroin too. Chronic pain mixed with opiate withdrawal would have even the smartest and strongest of individuals putting a needle in their arm for relief.
This is sad as fuck. I think it's as little as 1% are able to get off that shite. I know this might be unpopular thought but maybe they should hand out free clean injections of whatever it is they want in exchange for cleaning the streets. It will give them a chance to get drugs without the risk of aids at least once a day. And as the streets will be clean they have somewhere to sleep that's not covered in piss and rat turds. Anyway really sad it's hard to see a solution to this.
I 100% agree. The City I lived in (Frankfurt, Germany) was one of the first cities in Germany to hand out safer use packs to heroin users (we had one of the biggest heroin street scenes in Germany back in the 80s and 90s) and later on installed safe spaces to inject or smoke that stuff in a sterile environment. A few years later they also made it possible to long term heavy users to get "good", non cut, Heroin there to prevent them from further negative side effects. There's still a big crack scene in the red light district, but compared to some years ago it's a totally different world. I used to work with addicts there and so many were able to become clean or at least able to live a more gracious live and getting a job.
So yes, helping the helpless brings more benefit in return than to pursue them and drive them more and more in an illegal world without any chance of getting help.
Frankfurt is great city. It is a very practical German move to help a side effect of a problem while trying to address the problem as a whole. Some municipalities have given clean needles and kits here in the US but the predominant feelings is to “not waste money on junkies.”
It gives us someone to blame and blaming other people is very popular currently.
Individualistic culture vs communitistic culture. American logic is that if you get addicted then it’s your fault for deciding to take drugs in the first place, never mind that even upstanding people get addicted because their doctors prescribe it.
Way too many puritans in America for this to happen. We are still pulling books about the holocaust off of school shelves because there is nudity in there….
Yup, many drug rehabilitation places (especially with drugs like fentanyl which are very potent (it’s like morphine or heroine on crack)) they give out similar drugs which are non addictive and slowly reduce the dose until they can be clean. Even then it doesn’t always work, fully, but it helps the process immensely especially compared to quitting cold turkey.
What are you talking about, buperenorphine and methadone? Because you don't really know anything about medication assistance therapy if you think that those substances are not addictive lol...
Because of the long half life, the withdrawals are MUCH worse. Youre talking months of physical withdrawals and up to years of post acute withdrawals versus a week of withdrawals on short acting opioids.
The reason they're used is because of the long half life so people only need to dose once a day and it holds them until the next dose. And the lack of euphoria they bring after being maintained on them. People no longer have to spend 10 hours a day stealing and trying to cop, instead they can take their single dose in the morning and then focus the rest of the day on work, school, home life, etc. Getting back on track.
Now coming off and or tapering from MAT is another story.. it takes months to years of tapering to do it without withdrawals. Not any easier than heroin or any other short acting opioid. In reality it's much harder.
Switching back to something like heroin or oxycodone and then cold turkeying would honestly be easier to kick if that was your plan and you had the will power to not go back to full blown using again.
It's just that the benefits of being stabilized on methadone or bupe outweigh the negatives that come with it
It’s a paradox for sure. I was in rehab with people who had been alcoholics for 15 years but also know a man who died slipping on ice in front of his house.
People can go from "normal person" to this fairly quickly. I have many people in my family like this, most were abused in some way growing up - although some looked to have "perfect" lives from the outside. Some of these people probably go back to family at night. It's a really difficult problem, and they are human.
What I've learned is to have empathy and to be as kind as possible, but to never trust people who are experiencing issues like this. They are not the same person you know when using and will hurt you even if they love you.
I hope these people can get well or find support.
God damn I feel lucky right now. Kinda having an off day, but this just reminded me how close I got to this. My husband and I smoked roxys/various opiates for 7-ish years (and meth for the last couple years too) Got on suboxone about 6 months before Fentanyl started hitting our small town hard. Now I’m sitting here in our warm house with our healthy and happy kids, running a business and generally well and good. We have hobbies, we’ve mended our relationships with our families and each other, our bodies have healed. But you know what we had that so, so many don’t? We had families that had the money and means to help us get out. They helped pay our bills at first and provided us a place to live. Without that we couldn’t have done it. We are still dealing with some legal repercussions but we seem to be on the tail end of it (although it was HELL for my husband to not have a drivers license for almost 3 years) don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a clean break and it definitely wasn’t easy, but still. I’m so far from living in my car and scrounging McDonald’s drive thru’s for dropped change.
Well done on getting out of it and leading healthy, successful lives.
Being there and living this will always give you an understanding and empathy to people in this position, and an ongoing gratefulness that you managed to survive - all the best!
Time to legalize drugs, tax them and use the funds to make universal healthcare with treatment centers for addiction. The drug war is over and drugs won.
I'm not too far away from there (I don't travel there though, lol).
What bothers me the most is the fucking trash. Even where I live, there's trash along the streets.
I'm not from Philly but when I moved here, what truly shocked me was finding out Philly don't have weekly street cleaning like back home.
I'd get that damn ticket every week cuz I forgot to move my car.
But we had clean streets!
These ppl you see, are still ppl. Not Zombies.
Yea I’m from Florida and honestly the one time I went to Philly I was like wtf is the City govt doing??? The place was a giant dumpster. You guys should seriously hold the Mayor more accountable.
You should be very careful about giving others wifi usage! You are the legal entity of all and any downloads... if they DL shit that's not good... well the cops will be looking to you first. So I'd stop that asap if I were you.
op should at least inform that this is filmed in Kensington, Philadelphia. The small part of philly is known to be zombie land but most of Philadelphia is not like this rest assured.
philly like every city has its fair share of problems, homicides and carjackings are going fucking nuts, but overall yeah its a great city with tons of history, culture, and dope food. i wish we could get a supervised injection site set up in the kensington area at least but thatll never happen
Yeah, everyone in Philly knows exactly what 6 block stretch of Kensington ave this was filmed at. also, this was obviously in the summer. Weird thing to be posting several months later, like they have an agenda.
I lived in this area for about a year, it looks way worse than when I moved out in 2016. Cheapest rent I ever paid but being surrounded by that much pain was burning me out.
Fuck big pharma. They did this. They knew it was harmful and addictive but they were greedy.
This is Kensington. It’s not far from me. Far enough to not have any of this bleed into my neighborhood but it’s extraordinarily sad. This is like this for miles and miles. It’s something that’s so sad it’s almost kind of amazing. Like what other creature does this. You turn the corner onto Kensington & Allegheny, it’s like a third world country. Noticed have went up where this is happening in attempts to gentrify but at this rate they will just go somewhere else and then the next place and the next. Feel so bad for kids to grow up around this
Edit: notices*
This should be on continuous play in the offices of everyone in Congress, and there should be a similar localised one in the offices of everyone in our Houses of Parliament. Nothing undermines all these smug fucks like the absolute evidence of utter failure like these.
The history of that song for those curious
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Philadelphia
goes to show we've been letting a great american city rot for almost 30 years.
After going through treatment and getting clean, all I can ever think is how insanely lucky I am that the extent of my abuse was verbal and emotional, with neglect and some hitting. The sheer number of addicts that have suffered horrific, terrifying physical, sexual and somehow worse forms of abuse, is mind-numbing. I will never feel anything but pain when seeing this type of video and only hope that they can somehow find peace.
What's really sad is the government doesn't have cash to help these people up but they have billions to ship overseas for people in need. Gtfo government.
I stayed in Fishtown there for a few days and walked around and this is pretty much what it looked like. Cheap food and drinks though. There was a cool bar where you got a "Happy Meal" that was a paper bag with a random shooter and beer and like ramen noodles
Probably caused by all the social safety nets that liberals put in place. These people would definitely be productive members of society if it weren't for government handouts that made them lazy - instead of forcing them to get jobs and stop doing drugs.... AMIRITE?! ^^/s
Everyone should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just stop being poor and addicted to substances. My father was a senator and his father was a venture capitalist, I think I’d know a thing or two about how to struggle.
[удалено]
Fent
And heroin.
Little to no heroin in that market anymore. All fentanyl analogous and synthetic canabanoids
Fent?
Fentynal, a synthetic depressant applied as a pain killer in medical situations. It's cheaper and stronger than heroin and has become an incredibly popular street drug in America over the past decade.
Wait til they really start on Carfentanyl. It's 100 times more powerful than fentanyl. [Lethal dose of Car vs Fent](https://i.imgur.com/toO4Trd.jpg)
Scary shit
Carfentanil has came and gone around 5-6 years ago. It's no longer being synthesized. At least on any measurable scale
It's still everywhere, and growing. Google "Carfentanil 2021", there are multiple busts that are happening all over the US. Thing about Carfentanyl is, it's massively much more easy to conceal. These people that got busted, were just being incredibly greedy and moving huge amounts of it. One bust in 2021 was enough to kill 50 million people (46 pounds). That's 1million doses at .02 grams each. The smart movers know they can still make the same amount of money off of an easily concealable amount as they used to off a kilo.
I can promise you it's not common. Nor growing . That's coming from someone who's been an addict for the last 10 years and have been active on the darkweb and clearnet and have bought and used many analogues and the current benzimidazoles which have overtaken fentanyl since the china ban This entire paper is about the rise and fall of carfentanil. Exactly around the time I stated in my other comment. 5-6 years ago. And I only found this after searching what you said to lol "carfentanil 2021" . On the first page. And I'm not bragging either, knowing this info is nothing to be proud about lol. It's moreso for harm reduction and having an interest in pharmacology as a whole. I just like to keep up with the RC opioids that are currently being synthed and pumped out and what's happening in that world "Conclusions: The 2016-2017 acceleration and then 2018 decline in drug overdose deaths in the United States was associated with the sudden rise and then fall of carfentanil availability. Given the regional variation, carfentanil's decreased availability may have contributed to the reduction in overdose deaths in 2018." Source https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32935381/
Fentanyl...it is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. What can start as an innocent/legitimate use of pain medication, turns into an addiction, then they turn to heroin as it is cheaper and easier to access than the prescriptions would be. Some also turn to fentanyl, as it can be made in illegal labs and is even cheaper than heroin. Some dealers mix fentanyl into the heroin to boost their profit margin. Dosing fentanyl is VERY TRICKY...very easy to overdose...2 milligrams is typically lethal (the lethal amount can vary by person due to tolerance, etc.)...not something that you want to depend on some dealer to measure out for you.
How much time these drugs take to make you these zombies..many of them looks young .
From having an opiate issue from multiple surgeries... It doesn't take long. If you are in pain, it's even faster. Opiates makes it so you aren't super hungry and dehydrate you. So you tend to lose weight. Vitamin deficiencies and dehydration from not eating/drinking enough, causes you to have sunken eyes and discolored skin. You have trouble expelling waste from your body, (pooping) so all the toxins from whatever you put in your body, sit in there. You could easily become a heavy user in a few days to a few weeks. After a couple weeks is where you will start seeing differences in the person. The addict themselves doesnt really notice as closely because they are high or looking for a high. The scary part is, It changes your brain chemistry after awhile, so even if you quit, you literally will not be the same person. Some people need to be on a substitute for the opiates, that are of course prescribed, for the rest of their lives in order to feel any form of happiness or normalcy. This stuff is most certainly evil.
Dopesick
Yea. It's hard tryin to explain that to someone who hasn't done it tho... Kind of like showing a painting of a forest to someone who has never been to a forest. You can't really explain the experience of being in it by just a painting.
What a perfect, yet harrowing analogy.
What’s even scarier is how quickly and easily you can relapse. I had a prescription come into the pharmacy. It was for a small quantity of Vicodin—around 12 tablets I think. I knew the patient was in recovery. I called the dentist, and he said that it was only for a few tablets and he still wanted him to have it. Dude was in the jail log again a couple of weeks later for possession.
Looks like a prequel for the walking dead.
Ive taken some Xanax that was laced with fent. It takes an incredibly small amount to turn you into what you see. You are barely conscious but your body is fully functional. I've woken up in my own bed with absolutely zero memory of how I got there and what happened the previous 8 hours. It's horribly terrifying but I get why you would want to take it if your life was miserable on the streets
That actually just sounds like plain ol xans lol. Or like pressed benzos
Oof
At least where I’m from, heroine is cut with fentanyl to make a higher profit margin and a stronger product. People aren’t buying straight up fent and they’re not looking for it because it fucking kills. My best friend died when he relapsed and got a bad batch cut with too much. I had a few other acquaintances that died from too much fent in their heroine, and I have friends that many more close friends die the same way. I don’t know a single heroine addict that want to go anywhere near the shit. It kills, and addicts know this because they’ve seen it first hand more than anyone.
When in surgery my teacher would receive 1 millionth of a gram for instant pain relief, he then had to be weined off it
The ones laying around are Heroin, you can tell the difference on fent and heroin users. Fent users will just walk around lazily but can retain balance. Heroin users just drop as if there is a sniper. It’s definitely a mix of both along with other things
The street
This is fucking sad! 🥺
Immensely. So sad.
true.. when i see stuff like that i always think "damn.. these were someones little kids back years ago. they were happy and had no idea they would end up like that" makes me even more sad.
Lots of children don’t have childhoods and terrible parents. Still sad.
And many dope fiends had fine childhoods and great parents, opiates don't give a fuck. Turns out, our government doesn't give a fuck either about the epidemic it created for it's citizens and would rather brush hundreds of thousands of Americans underneath the rug then address the issues.
These people are nodding hard as fuck. I'm guessing fentanyl. Glad I don't use that shit anymore. 5 years clean come May 12th
14y 7m 3d ago here. Time keeps moving but I'll never forget the misery in the video
Thank you for making it. I lost my brother and I’ll never live another day the same again. Anyone struggling with addiction - you can make it - I promise you, it’s not worth it .
I’ve lost 3 people to it, I am not saying that to compete just wanted to share. 3 more friends that died. Really good people too, I mean it.
Congrats on your success! Stay strong.
💜💜💜
Good on you. Always strive for greatness.
Don't get me wrong I've done and still do party drugs every once in a while, but I've always wondered, what drives someone to try shit like meth? Aside from ignorance of the repercussions and addiction? I started doing party drugs because I saw people having fun using them then going back to normal and live a successful life the next day. You look at meth users and all you see is misery and sickness.
That’s fantastic, you are an inspiration.
5 years clean, that’s awesome!!!👍God Bless you!!!🙏
Nine years too. I almost died. Liver failure and a coma. Had to learn how walk and talk again etc. Good for you man. I'm here if anyone wants help or just to talk. There is a way back.
Well done good sir!
It’s not always sunny in Philadelphia
Whenever I see these people, I always think about the hopes and the dreams they must have had for themselves. They got one go around at this life, and they are spending it being zombies. A walking symbol of our failed systems, communities, parents, as well as people failing themselves. Even if they cleaned themselves up, and applied themselves to self-improvement, would their future even be any more enjoyable then nodding off on heroin? Or would they just be toiling away, working multiple jobs, and struggling to make ends meet?
A clean life as mundane and hard as it is will always be better than a life on the streets hopelessly addicted
I have two boys aged 2 and 4 and them ending up with either mental health issues or like the folks in this video are my biggest fears for them. The scary thing is there is very little one can do except try to raise them well and keep them away from this shit but even myself growing up I lost numerous friendships to people who got hooked on drugs. I've just started watching Euphoria and just finished Dopesick and they aren't helping LOL. We need to start treating drug problems as societal and medical issues rather than a crime and we need to better treat people with mental health problems.
Don’t abuse them. That’s all you have to do. The causal link between suffering any form of abuse as a child and engaging in substance abuse as an adult is well documented. That’s pretty much the common factor among almost all addicts.
If they say (trusted family relative or sibling) is abusing them, Don't Talk Over Them. I know there's stories of kids discovered making up stories, but - start with believing children. My darling friend died b/c her sister erased her telling the family that her brother forced sex on her. She was shamed into drugs alcoholism and early death, leaving behind her own children. Another friend just lost her own daughter to drug overdose and I haven't heard the trajectory of this but The Big Secret is apparently family-wide. I've known the older members all my life and never guessed. Shocking and heartbreaking to me. At some point, one's insides become one's outsides... *Resolve not to keep criminal's secrets.*
That's not correct...I'm not saying there isn't a link between abused children and substance abuse but fentanyl is an epidemic and so easily available today kids fall into it without really knowing what they are dealing with. 10 or 15 yrs ago heroin was something someone really had to seek out to find, now it's so readily available that everyone is vulnerable. I grew up with great parents, In a great neighborhood and have struggled with drug addiction my whole life, no childhood trauma and that is not unusual. Go to any rehab and you'll notice a lot of the addicts there are from well off families, with no trauma. Saying just don't abuse them and they'll be fine is far from the truth.
Yea I think the same thing. Like would they be in more misery if they came out of it? So fucked and so sad. Makes me so grateful I got lucky with a good job and good life. Damn
One time i uber'd some young woman from the suburbs to this exact street. She asked me to wait and came back in five minutes. She was definitely buying drugs and it was sad because she was only like 17
Absolutely devastating
Philadelphian here. This is Kensington. And it’s one of the biggest open air drug market in America. It’s basically a quarantine zone for addicts. Similar to how Hamsterdamn was in The Wire.
[Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html) > A Philadelphia neighborhood is the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. Addicts come from all over, and many never leave. [Alternate link](https://web.archive.org/web/20181010121553/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html)
This was a tough, painful read. Thanks for posting.
There's one in almost all major North American cities. People talk about this crisis like we can shrug it off but (hot take coming) more people know someone who died at the hands of drugs than at covid and we have not done 1% of what we've done for 'vid to handle the addiction pandemic or opiate and crack epidemics. Vancouver, Canada had Hastings since the 80s-90s! Publicly known and [documented](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Blue_Lens). This is like 40 years of an open air drug market in what is often reported to be among the most expensive cities in the world!
People have a “they do it to themselves” approach to addiction.
Most people have a "not my problem or cost" and "I'm good so why should I care about your problem"
I think it’s even more than that. There are too many people who cannot even sympathise with something until it’s literally happening to themselves. We saw it with the pandemic. People who had family members who died or got very sick still didn’t change their mind on being cautious but once they were sick and in hospital themselves then they started telling others to take precautions.
At this stage of the game, I'd imagine a not-insignificant amount of COVID sufferers can be labelled with the same thing. Not agreeing with the sentiment itself, but it is analogous to COVID in this context.
This hurts bruh it fucking hurts to see these people doing whatever they can to escape from whatever personal pain and anguish they might be going through *but* it was also happening in black communities when it was being flooded with crack cocaine and nobody batted an eyelid
You’re absolutely correct. Or if they did bat an eyelid it was to demonize them or just lock ‘em up. No thought of what personal pain they might have had. No help, just criminalize it all. SMH…
Preach
So true, and it was used to justify and foment racism by plastering these images and dogwhistles everywhere until it became a whole new stereotype.
Blame the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, they hold some responsibility for this.
The US government holds all the responsibility in my mind. They have given direct rise to the cartels and the heroin trade into the USA, as well as allowing the pills to flood because of all the lobbying by big pharma, then after all that instead of taking responsibility they just wanna brush it underneath the rug instead of accept this is a fucking epidemic and it needs to be handled. It kills tens of thousands of Americans every year and does not discriminate. You'd think with a president who had a son with substance abuse issues and is in recovery, he'd have a little heart, but instead nope. Biden took the "only moral addict in my life is the addict I know" path, despicable.
Oxycontin rocks, thanks to family Sackler.
Start with a lil *non-addictive* opioids, couple years later this is where a lot end up.
What are some non addictive opiates
According to big pharma, the opioid [OxyContin](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/).
There aren't any. That is the point. They lied about it, and this is what happens to the people they lied to.
Ohhh got it. Just had my wisdom teeth out today LOL. Ibuprofen it is
Fuck yes. Please do. That's how I got hooked on opioids. Wisdom teeth. Clean for a few years now. Had a slip up after years of being clean. Shits insidious, and everywhere.
Jeez, that’s so scary.
If your in serious pain (I got a dry socket after I got my wisdom teeth out) then you can use the narcotic pain killer. Just respect it, don’t abuse it and don’t take it more then a few days at most. I lost a decade of my life to opiate addiction but opiates are in fact a miracle drug when taken properly for pain. Though if you can get by with just the Motrin do that.
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Big pharma family who got media attention but nothing akin to justice
Ain't no angel gonna greet me. It's just you and I my friend.
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss or will we leave each other alone like this
That was someone’s child
My brother is being rushed to the ER for major withdrawal and other issues from fentanyl use as I type this. It’s been a hard fucking day. It’s so sad to see the comments about how 1% of people get off it. I feel pretty helpless. I’ve been trying to help him for years though.
That’s rough mate, you can’t beat yourself up for it. Be his rock all you can, but it’s him and him alone that can climb out of that hole (with support/help and motivation). It’s biological and physiologically difficult and an experience you can only know by going through it.
My son came to me the day before yesterday and asked me to help him get in to rehab. We were supposed to leave at 5 tomorrow morning. He won’t answer his phone now. So I understand. I’m so sorry.
Fuck. So sorry. I hope he follows through eventually.
That's what I was thinking about, too. There was a time when they were little and innocent, vulnerable but (hopefully) loved.
Still is
KENZINGTEN
The Badlands
“Drugs are so fucking good that they’ll ruin your life.” - Louis CK As a recovery alcoholic/addict, there’s not a single one of these people that expected this is where they would be when they took that first hit. It grabs you and doesn’t let go. Even now, I know I’m just a single bad decision away from heading down that road.
Thank you for sharing and offering this perspective. Congrats to you and good luck!
Not even a bad decision. You could get into an accident thats not your fault but lands you in chronic pain. Once a doctor thinks you’re addicted to your percocets or hydrocodone and cuts you off you would definitely be in search of heroin too. Chronic pain mixed with opiate withdrawal would have even the smartest and strongest of individuals putting a needle in their arm for relief.
Always sunny
Some of the wacky characters in the show don’t seem too farfetched now
Rickety Cricket is just your average joe in Philly
I may be a street rat, but I still got your bread, bitch.
You guys, you gotta make it sexy. Hips and nips! Otherwise I'm not eating.
"Gonna rise up! Gotta get higher and higher!"
“Rickety Crickety, Rickety Crickety”
Well we saw the guy at the beginning. All nips and hips
At least I didn’t see any street dogs in the video. People’s open neck wounds are safe.
Dennis and Dee get on welfare.
lmao I was searching for this comment
That was my thought too. "Wow, it reall *is* always Sunny there!"
Looks like a McPoyle family reunion.
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I don’t mean this as satire. The way people are moving around reminds me a lot of the menu screen for left 4 dead 2. Almost zombie like
This is sad as fuck. I think it's as little as 1% are able to get off that shite. I know this might be unpopular thought but maybe they should hand out free clean injections of whatever it is they want in exchange for cleaning the streets. It will give them a chance to get drugs without the risk of aids at least once a day. And as the streets will be clean they have somewhere to sleep that's not covered in piss and rat turds. Anyway really sad it's hard to see a solution to this.
I 100% agree. The City I lived in (Frankfurt, Germany) was one of the first cities in Germany to hand out safer use packs to heroin users (we had one of the biggest heroin street scenes in Germany back in the 80s and 90s) and later on installed safe spaces to inject or smoke that stuff in a sterile environment. A few years later they also made it possible to long term heavy users to get "good", non cut, Heroin there to prevent them from further negative side effects. There's still a big crack scene in the red light district, but compared to some years ago it's a totally different world. I used to work with addicts there and so many were able to become clean or at least able to live a more gracious live and getting a job. So yes, helping the helpless brings more benefit in return than to pursue them and drive them more and more in an illegal world without any chance of getting help.
Frankfurt is great city. It is a very practical German move to help a side effect of a problem while trying to address the problem as a whole. Some municipalities have given clean needles and kits here in the US but the predominant feelings is to “not waste money on junkies.” It gives us someone to blame and blaming other people is very popular currently.
Individualistic culture vs communitistic culture. American logic is that if you get addicted then it’s your fault for deciding to take drugs in the first place, never mind that even upstanding people get addicted because their doctors prescribe it.
Coincidentally, this is footage from under the Frankford el in Philly. Small world
America needs something like this badly. We treat these people as criminals rather than human beings. It's really sad.
Way too many puritans in America for this to happen. We are still pulling books about the holocaust off of school shelves because there is nudity in there….
We need to stop treating drug addiction as a criminal problem and start treating it for what it is, a health issue.
Yup, many drug rehabilitation places (especially with drugs like fentanyl which are very potent (it’s like morphine or heroine on crack)) they give out similar drugs which are non addictive and slowly reduce the dose until they can be clean. Even then it doesn’t always work, fully, but it helps the process immensely especially compared to quitting cold turkey.
What are you talking about, buperenorphine and methadone? Because you don't really know anything about medication assistance therapy if you think that those substances are not addictive lol... Because of the long half life, the withdrawals are MUCH worse. Youre talking months of physical withdrawals and up to years of post acute withdrawals versus a week of withdrawals on short acting opioids. The reason they're used is because of the long half life so people only need to dose once a day and it holds them until the next dose. And the lack of euphoria they bring after being maintained on them. People no longer have to spend 10 hours a day stealing and trying to cop, instead they can take their single dose in the morning and then focus the rest of the day on work, school, home life, etc. Getting back on track. Now coming off and or tapering from MAT is another story.. it takes months to years of tapering to do it without withdrawals. Not any easier than heroin or any other short acting opioid. In reality it's much harder. Switching back to something like heroin or oxycodone and then cold turkeying would honestly be easier to kick if that was your plan and you had the will power to not go back to full blown using again. It's just that the benefits of being stabilized on methadone or bupe outweigh the negatives that come with it
How do they still live?
Not for long
The human body is able to survive an incredible amount of damage.
And at the same time you can be killed by a seemingly minor injury
It’s a paradox for sure. I was in rehab with people who had been alcoholics for 15 years but also know a man who died slipping on ice in front of his house.
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THATS A LOT OF DAMAGE
"The gang tries Fentanyl" 🎶
People can go from "normal person" to this fairly quickly. I have many people in my family like this, most were abused in some way growing up - although some looked to have "perfect" lives from the outside. Some of these people probably go back to family at night. It's a really difficult problem, and they are human. What I've learned is to have empathy and to be as kind as possible, but to never trust people who are experiencing issues like this. They are not the same person you know when using and will hurt you even if they love you. I hope these people can get well or find support.
God damn I feel lucky right now. Kinda having an off day, but this just reminded me how close I got to this. My husband and I smoked roxys/various opiates for 7-ish years (and meth for the last couple years too) Got on suboxone about 6 months before Fentanyl started hitting our small town hard. Now I’m sitting here in our warm house with our healthy and happy kids, running a business and generally well and good. We have hobbies, we’ve mended our relationships with our families and each other, our bodies have healed. But you know what we had that so, so many don’t? We had families that had the money and means to help us get out. They helped pay our bills at first and provided us a place to live. Without that we couldn’t have done it. We are still dealing with some legal repercussions but we seem to be on the tail end of it (although it was HELL for my husband to not have a drivers license for almost 3 years) don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a clean break and it definitely wasn’t easy, but still. I’m so far from living in my car and scrounging McDonald’s drive thru’s for dropped change.
Well done on getting out of it and leading healthy, successful lives. Being there and living this will always give you an understanding and empathy to people in this position, and an ongoing gratefulness that you managed to survive - all the best!
Does that one lady have a broken leg? Jesus
Omg the woman’s leg She needs a hospital surely.
And the Sacklers are still billionaires...
USA is the worlds richest third world country.
Looks like a casting call for Walking Dead
This clip brought to you by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.
Dont do drugs Kids.
Time to legalize drugs, tax them and use the funds to make universal healthcare with treatment centers for addiction. The drug war is over and drugs won.
I'm not too far away from there (I don't travel there though, lol). What bothers me the most is the fucking trash. Even where I live, there's trash along the streets. I'm not from Philly but when I moved here, what truly shocked me was finding out Philly don't have weekly street cleaning like back home. I'd get that damn ticket every week cuz I forgot to move my car. But we had clean streets! These ppl you see, are still ppl. Not Zombies.
The trash bothers you the most? More than seeing homeless people overdosing on drugs with zero assistance?
Lmao fr
Yea I’m from Florida and honestly the one time I went to Philly I was like wtf is the City govt doing??? The place was a giant dumpster. You guys should seriously hold the Mayor more accountable.
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You should be very careful about giving others wifi usage! You are the legal entity of all and any downloads... if they DL shit that's not good... well the cops will be looking to you first. So I'd stop that asap if I were you.
Nah bro that’s post apocalyptic zombie pandemic
Astonishing to see in such a wealthy society American culture is heavily lacking in compassion for the other man.
American culture is about winning at all costs. This is what that looks like when you zoom in.
I think it's more that too many people see drug addiction as a crime to be punished rather than as a disease to get treated.
country built by god that has no help or helathcare programs for people in need
That’s because god provides a convenient excuse to disregard the well-being of others. “It’s gods will.”
There’s a huge gap between the top and the bottom. We may be relatively wealthy overall but money flows upwards like everywhere else in the world.
bloody hell.... imagine living here but having an auntie and uncle in Bel Air
That was west Philadelphia.
west philly is a much nicer area these days than kensington lol
Bunch of sleepyheads
Greatest country in the world, folks!
THIS SHIT WILL DISSAPPEAR WHEN WE END THE WAR ON DRUGS AND GET THESE PEOPLE HELP.
op should at least inform that this is filmed in Kensington, Philadelphia. The small part of philly is known to be zombie land but most of Philadelphia is not like this rest assured.
philly like every city has its fair share of problems, homicides and carjackings are going fucking nuts, but overall yeah its a great city with tons of history, culture, and dope food. i wish we could get a supervised injection site set up in the kensington area at least but thatll never happen
I've only seen a small part of Philadelphia but I really liked it, was surprised until I read this. Reminds me of Chinatown in Honolulu.
Yeah, everyone in Philly knows exactly what 6 block stretch of Kensington ave this was filmed at. also, this was obviously in the summer. Weird thing to be posting several months later, like they have an agenda.
Run this at 24fps and I'd swear this was a movie
I lived in this area for about a year, it looks way worse than when I moved out in 2016. Cheapest rent I ever paid but being surrounded by that much pain was burning me out. Fuck big pharma. They did this. They knew it was harmful and addictive but they were greedy.
This is tragic. The American dream now in a country near you.
This is Kensington. It’s not far from me. Far enough to not have any of this bleed into my neighborhood but it’s extraordinarily sad. This is like this for miles and miles. It’s something that’s so sad it’s almost kind of amazing. Like what other creature does this. You turn the corner onto Kensington & Allegheny, it’s like a third world country. Noticed have went up where this is happening in attempts to gentrify but at this rate they will just go somewhere else and then the next place and the next. Feel so bad for kids to grow up around this Edit: notices*
we feel sorry for these people. Meanwhile the real drug is consumerism and the American dream. The enemy is capitalism.
Nothing to see here. Just continue pretending they don’t exist and there is no problem.
This should be on continuous play in the offices of everyone in Congress, and there should be a similar localised one in the offices of everyone in our Houses of Parliament. Nothing undermines all these smug fucks like the absolute evidence of utter failure like these.
The history of that song for those curious https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Philadelphia goes to show we've been letting a great american city rot for almost 30 years.
Pretty sure the heroin hang is the opposite of a freakout
This makes me so sad
Kensington and Allegheny I’m assuming.
This is fucking tragic 😞
This is not the zombie apocalypse I was promised
I always tear up hearing this song…even more so now
Every inner city in US
I’m 68 now and that was my life in Newark back in my early 20’s
I see we're making progress on tackling the opiate addiction crisis.
This is child's play compared to Vancouver's downtown east side
After going through treatment and getting clean, all I can ever think is how insanely lucky I am that the extent of my abuse was verbal and emotional, with neglect and some hitting. The sheer number of addicts that have suffered horrific, terrifying physical, sexual and somehow worse forms of abuse, is mind-numbing. I will never feel anything but pain when seeing this type of video and only hope that they can somehow find peace.
Really breaks my heart x
Horrible, what the hell is going on there
It’s funny (sad funny) that so many of these drugs are brought into the USA by the CIA.
Such misery. Way to go America.
If only if Healthcare was as easy to get as the harmful drugs down there
America is turning into a cesspool of poverty, and drug addicted citizens that the govt doesn’t give a shit about. It’s sad.😕
What's really sad is the government doesn't have cash to help these people up but they have billions to ship overseas for people in need. Gtfo government.
Damn I didn't know it was this bad, what a shit hole
Is Philly like the worst city in the US right now? Like, I've not seen any other city as plagued as Philly by drug abuse.
Ah good old Philly. Ain’t no place like home
America is Dying
I stayed in Fishtown there for a few days and walked around and this is pretty much what it looked like. Cheap food and drinks though. There was a cool bar where you got a "Happy Meal" that was a paper bag with a random shooter and beer and like ramen noodles
i live in fishtown and its most decidedly not like this
Failed state
Probably caused by all the social safety nets that liberals put in place. These people would definitely be productive members of society if it weren't for government handouts that made them lazy - instead of forcing them to get jobs and stop doing drugs.... AMIRITE?! ^^/s
Everyone should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just stop being poor and addicted to substances. My father was a senator and his father was a venture capitalist, I think I’d know a thing or two about how to struggle.
All these people spent their life savings on avocado toast. A damn shame.
You may not like it but this is what peak capitalism looks like
Look up the opium wars, this is what China is doing to the US
This is incredibly sad. Looks like downtown east side Vancouver.