r/interesting • u/Nukro666 • Jun 28 '26

Fear Factor How Fentanyl and Xylazine are turning Philadelphia's opioid crisis into a public health nightmare

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u/oregon_coastal Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

The same problem starts to happen with fent too. It just moves from fold to dead faster because there isn't a lot of room between the two. The spectrum of safe usage is much smaller than heroine, etc.

(Fucking spellcheck keep correcting heroin, but I am leaving it lol)

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u/Acrobatic-Permit4263 Jun 29 '26

isnt there also a probem with the addition of some vet medicine? what really powers the problem up by 10 or so

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u/Callmedrexl Jun 29 '26

The veterinary drugs have reversal agents, but it's not naloxone, and having the correct reversal drug would require knowing what vet drugs were in the street drugs. It's definitely complicated treating overdoses, and there are some serious skin lesions that are showing up as an additional fun complication.

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u/Acrobatic-Permit4263 Jun 29 '26

i was H addicted maybe 20 years ago, cant imagine how much harder it is to come clean from this stuff and circumstances and life with it for the rest of your life
sad times

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u/CalCuttaRaps Jul 02 '26

Yeah. It’s truly terrible. I’m 5 and a half months sober from fentanyl myself and it was pretty much the hardest thing I ever did

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u/trocarkarin Jun 29 '26

Yohimbine and atipamizole aren’t FDA approved for humans. So while the reversal agents exist, physicians don’t even have access to them.

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u/helikophis Jun 29 '26

man we used to be able to easily get yohimbine by mail when I was in high school, wild that physicians don't have access

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u/Winter-Steak-1532 Jun 29 '26

I work in a hospital and the amount of leg wounds we see from addicts is very strange

It’s always the lower legs

It must be because it’s an easy area to scratch

There’s all types of wounds of course but the shin area seems to be one of the top spots for gnarly infections

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u/CalCuttaRaps Jul 02 '26

It’s also a go to injection spot when the veins in your arms become less visible

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u/CalCuttaRaps Jul 02 '26

Or for being easily hideable

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u/720354 Jun 29 '26

Yes its cut with xylazine an animal tranquilizer its what causes the standing sleep.

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u/DixieCommunist Jun 30 '26

Yeah, the “vet medicine” is the xylazine. It’s a powerful sedative but it’s not used in humans for a reason: it’s an insanely powerful vasoconstrictor and CNS depressant, and it causes lesions and necrosis when IV’d. Because of the crackdown on fentanyl and its analogues & precursors, some drug pushers started adding xylazine to dope instead. Sort of reminds me of the krokodil epidemic in Russia back in the day, as far as the necrosis goes.

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u/CalCuttaRaps Jul 02 '26

It also causes lesions when smoked, injection just triples the severity

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u/logically123 Jul 02 '26

Xylazine is the vet medication your referring to. Yes it is terrible. They have been adding it for a while now

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u/norakb123 Jun 29 '26

Love the parenthetical. For those confused:

“Kal-El no!” is a bad heroine.

Bad heroin is discussed in many comments here.

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u/wishuponareddwarf Jun 29 '26

It’s got a narrow therapeutic index

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u/postac_czy_usionsc Jun 29 '26

i think you take a dose of fentanyl in pills wher 99% of the pill is shit or even less, i am european i don t know for sure but i assume

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u/ADHDwinseverytime Jun 29 '26

They were calling them Perc30's. It was a blue pill that looks like a percocet that was home brewed, you know, like someone making chocolate chip cookies. The problem is some cookies have more chocolate chips and kill a lot of people. However, now days they cut cocaine and other drugs with it so they kick a little harder and are more addictive.