My story last week The Plot To Bury the Opioid Vaccine was this newsletter’s most read ever. It announced my new documentary. Here’s the trailer.
In other news, I’m going to start pay-walling posts, but if you contribute at least $50 to the film you’ll receive a free year-long subscription.
Whenever you hear about drugs on the news, it usually goes like this:
“ACK! There’s a new drug. It’s killing people. It’s in your kids’ schools, lockers, and lunchboxes. Run for the hills!”
These segments are designed to raise public alarm, but they rarely contain context about where these drugs are coming from, or how they fit into our larger public health crisis.
The latest example is xylazine, which is not only causing overdoses, but flesh wounds. (Do NOT click this.) As explained in a recent DEA public safety alert: “Xylazine is making the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, fentanyl, even deadlier.”
This awkward wording reminds me of an old Kumail Nanjiani joke about a drug called “Cheese.”
I read four or five news reports: “There’s this new drug called Cheese! It’s sweeping the nation, kids in the midwest are doing it, it’s an epidemic, it’s a new drug, it’s an epidemic!”
Then I looked up what Cheese is: Tylenol PM and heroin. So really…it’s heroin. It’s mostly heroin. Heroin is doing the heavy lifting in this drug cocktail. It’s not a new drug, it’s mostly heroin.
*Nanjiani is right: Cheese is not really a drug cocktail. Tylenol PM contains diphenhydramine, an antihistamine that is a common cutting agent for heroin. It makes you sleepy — hence the “PM” — which dealers hope will fools users, who associate “the nod” with quality heroin.
I’m not trying to downplay the dangers of xylazine, a depressant also known as “Tranq.” Employed by veterinarians as a tranquilizer, it can kill people when used recreationally, particularly when combined with fentanyl.
But xylazine is just the latest drug panic, which in recent years has also included isotonitazene (an opioid known as “iso”) and clonazolam, a novel benzo similar to Xanax.
Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be cautious of these drugs. You should be. But what gets lost in all of the news reports is that…