South Carolina sued the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma LP, this month for fraud and deceptive marketing (1). This is the latest lawsuit Purdue faces amongst others from Ohio, Oklahoma, Missouri, Mississippi and New Hampshire as well as smaller counties and cities (2). News headlines...
The club drug Molly, which is a street name for a drug called MDMA, has been linked to an increasing number of deaths recently. This is very troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that many of the deaths...
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...
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...
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...
A guest post from Chris P. I had my first cigarette and drink at around aged 15. What I didn’t know at the time, was that I was a drug addict and alcoholic in the making. I would abuse anything I could get my hands on,...
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...
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...
One of the country’s top electronic music festivals, Electric Zoo, recently cancelled its third day of programming after two concert goers who attended the first two days of the concert died due to what appear to be drug related issues. Four other concert goers are...