For years, this Canadian city has hosted safe consumption sites for addicts. They’ve saved lives, but with some painful tradeoffs.
Tara Stamos-Buesig walks down a row of tents offering to test drugs to determine if they contain fentanyl, heroin, ketamine and other compounds. Stamos-Buesig unfolded the foil and crumbled a bit of residue into an empty ice cube tray to check if it was meth. “We’ll know by the color change,” she told Amrani, eyeing the squirt of reagent in the tray. As Amrani waited, Stamos-Buesig sprinkled another sample into a container of water, which she checked for fentanyl using a test strip.
Drug mixing is nothing new, but experts warn that its dangers have accelerated as the drug supply has become littered with fentanyl and other synthetic compounds. “You’re talking about two very powerful drugs, going mano a mano,” Ciccarone said. “And it’s worrisome in terms of what it’s doing physiologically.”
If you combine meth with opioids that hinder breathing, “you can see why this would be a very, very lethal combination,” Volkow said.Friedman, the UCLA addiction researcher, said that as drugs have gone synthetic, “there are different kinds of opioids, benzodiazepines, stimulants and cannabinoids being synthesized and invented and mixed into the drug supply all over the place — and for the most part we don’t know about them.
Let’s make it safe for the junkies at the cost of hard working class…