An analysis of millions of Americans’ medical claims showed diagnoses of opioid addiction has surged nearly 500% over the past seven years, according to a review by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (1). Exacerbating the opioid and overdose crisis, cut batches of heroin containing...
Looking at the sale of illicit drugs on the internet. The dark net is a part of the Internet hidden by security and cryptography. It is partitioned off, so you can’t access it from a simple Google search. From a technology point of view, it is...
A look at over-prescription of opiates in the United States Last week's post seemed a bit implausible: we saw that while overdose deaths have plateaued or fallen in the West, they are rising east of the Mississippi. We wrote that this difference may be explained by drug trafficking, the price and availability of black tar versus powdered heroin. To shed some light on last week's data and understand the opiate...
The market for black tar and powdered heroin Opioids are cutting through the country, claiming an increasing number of deaths and, in some cities, taking more lives than traffic fatalities and murders combined.1 But the rapid increase in overdose deaths over the past ten years didn't...
Birthdays have never meant much to me. I grew up with a sister whose birthday was two days before mine. Ours was a childhood of shared birthday parties and identical cakes. Then when I got older they never seemed very special. Maybe that’s because I...
What does it mean to be an addict or alcoholic? I’m not talking about the medical definition but at the core who are these people? Here’s what I learned in my 10 years in and out of the rooms of a 12-step program. Addicts and Alcoholics are...
It’s about 7 p.m. on a Wednesday night. It’s still over a hundred degrees outside in the desert. The air conditioning is blasting. You can hear laughter in the air. In this nondescript building, in a nondescript neighborhood lives about 20 women. They come from all...
What do you think when someone says tell me a story? Does it conjure up images of beasts and princesses? Maybe it’s a little more personal. A time when you laughed so hard you cried, or cried so hard you laughed. Chances are it’s a...
It’s been called a weaponized form of marijuana by the police commissioner of New York City. On the street it’s known as Spice, K2, or Black Mamba depending on where you are in the country. The headlines say “synthetic marijuana”. No matter its name it’s...