Tom Petty died of a drug overdose

The article says...
The Hall of Fame musician had taken several pain medications, including Fentanyl, oxycodone and generic Xanax. Other medications included generic Restoril (a sleep aid) and generic Celexa (which treats depression).

Seems hardly accidental.

Sad. He was a great songwriter in a great band.

We have a drug epidemic and it doesn't appear to be slowing yet, even though the medical community is aware of their role and have taken steps to be more circumspect about writing pain prescriptions. Sadly, we recently had a doctor shot to death in my area after he refused to write a prescription for an opioid. It's going to take a lot of courage and effort to slow this epidemic down.

Anyone with some Bitcoin and TOR can order Fentanyl to their door within a couple of days, unfortunately.

They give it to women in labor. It’s used for lots of things, just in careful dosages.

I find it really odd that anyone thought it was a good idea to give a former heroin addict opioids though.

What a bummer.

Yes, it's prescribed in patch form. Still it's very tricky stuff, to be avoided if at all possible. It's also used during surgery.

It's one thing to prescribe it in patch form, very much another in a self-administered delivery system that could result in a fatality, like a pill or intravenous solution. In those instances it's really more acceptable to use it for people who are at least HOSPITALIZED, if not terminally ill. Just like propofol it was never intended to be something you can run down to CVS with a scrip from Dr. Sawbones and get filled while you leaf through the latest edition of "Guitar Player". The idea that the stuff should be regulated that way is as silly as marketing phenobarbital as "Sleeping Pills".

Jayson, these statements are incorrect. Feel free to edit your comments as necessary.

Which is incorrect.

You evidently have difficulty keeping many things straight. Propofol and fentanyl are nothing alike. They're not in the same class of drug and they don't have the same effects. Propofol is NOT of much use outside surgery - for the very good reason that it only has about a 10 minute period of activity. That makes it a pretty poor sleep aid. It is also NOT a pain medication. Totally different thing. In fact propofol CREATES pain on injection.


Again, incorrect. Fentanyl patches are designed for self administration, just like nicotine patches - which are also deadly if used incorrectly. You can't guard against stupid.


That's not always possible. It's also extremely condescending and insulting to the vast majority of chronic pain patients.

I, for one, do not need or want a "care giver". I can control my medication perfectly well by myself, thank you very much. And who's going to pay this "care giver"? What qualifications do they have? It seems like a totally gratuitous effort to drivce up already exhorbitant medfical costs.


No, it's not. It's part of a  well orchestrated war against chronic pain patients,  aimed a victimizing us and forcing us to ever more costly (and often dangerous) treatments for our very real conditions.

We are treated as political footballs for unscrupulous politicians and cash cows for a number of industries - not only the obvious medical and big pharma, but also the police industry, legal profession, the prison industry, and a way for shady intelligence organizations to fund "off the books" operations, a subject that I had a very real brush with in my younger days, I'm not talking paranoid conspiracy theories. It's not a theory when you know people involved.

And it seems you don't know much of anything about the drugs you're talking about - Percocet/percodan are oxycodone, aka oxycontin, the focus drug in the current hysteria campaign. Demerol is synthetic morphine. In the last years of her life my mom was on Demerol to control pain from severe arthritis and an intestinal problem that probably was Crohn's disease before they had a name for it. Vicodin is hydrocodone and acetominophen (Tylenol), a synthetic codeine analog midway between  codiene and oxycodone in efficacy.

And just to clarify matters, OPIODES are not products of the poppy, they are synthetic analogs, products of the laboratory. That's Demerol, Dilaudid, Fentanyl, hydrocodone,and oxycodone, for the most part. OPIATES are products of the poppy - codeine, thebaine, morphine, and heroin.

Right. I've seen automobiles do an absolutely amazing amount of damage. I've seen unnecessary, gratuitous wars create absolututely incredible amount of damage, which lingers and self-perpetuates. (And also create huge numbers of chronic pain patients.) Tom Edison, in his business war against Nikola Tesla used to publically electrocute elephants to show the "dangers" of alternating current and whip up hysteria to support his Direect Current schemes.

Opioid/opiate narcotics do far more good than damage. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people who are able to lead reletively normal, productive lives because of these drugs, who would otherwise be immobilized in excruciating pain. But nobody ever talks about that because it does not suit the political and business ends of the hysteria peddlers.


You are  talking about subjects on which you have no knowledge.

I am a chronic pain patient - not a severe one at this point, but at previous times  I've had much worse issues. Currently my main pain problem is arthritis in both hips. It comes and goes. Most days i don't need anything more than one or two 30 mg codeine sulfate (taken 12 hours apart), if that, but when it flares up I'm literally unable to walk or get out of bed without significantly more medication. As a degenerative disease it's only going to get worse. One of the major contributing factors in my arthritis is that I have two misshapen vertebrae, souveniers of a double compression fracture of my spine suffered in a truck wreck while on tour in 1979. One is wedge shaped back to front, the other is side to side. These days my back seldom causes direct problems (occasionally it does) but over the years the uneven load has been a factor in wearing out my hip joints. However following the accident I spent about six months on Percodan (oxycodone and aspirin) With the help of this medication and a back brace I was able to go back on tour about a month after the accident, tuning guitars and mixing the smaller shows, although I was obviously unable to do heavy labor. Without pain medication I would have been immobilized at home, going stir crazy from pain and nothing to do.

But others are not so lucky. I have a good friend in The City, a lady in her early '50s, who has some sort of severe spinal condition (I don't know the exact name) that has her in excrutiating pain much of the time. The pain is controlled by a combination of oxycodone and a TENS machine, which allow her to pursue a relatively active, productive life (she is an activist for a number of charitable organizations) although some days she is bedridden. Oxycodone is not a weak opiod - one half of one of her pills hits me like  maybe 4 or 5 of my codeines - it's right up there with morphine - and she takes several whole pills a day - and acts completely normal - you wouldn't think she's on anything at all.

Opiate class narcotics are like any other aspect of our lives that needs to be treated with respect and care - electricity, automobiles, lots of things are like that. And those who don't exercise intelligence and care sometimes pay the price. Like I said, there's nothing to be done about stupid, it's an often lethal condition. But we must not penalize those who actually need these things (automobiles, electricity, narcotic painkillers) just because some people are too dumb or careless for their own good.

It should also be noted that we KNOW ABOUT opiode/opiate class narcotics - the biochemistry is well understood, as are the dangers, whereas the various new "miracle" substitutes frequently turn out to have unexpected side effects that are much worse than what they're supposed to replace. Or course these new drugs are subject to patent and therefore are significantly more lucrative to the big pharm companies peddling them as substitutes for well known drugs available as generics.

The situation regarding oxycodone was the result of a deliberate and intensive campaign orchestrated by the pharma company that originally held the patent. They marketed it very aggressivcely to doctors as a safer alternate to morphine and Demerol with fewer side effects and a nearly nonexistant risk of addiction, which was a blatant lie, actually the opposite of the truth. It's not the first time. Heroin was originally marketed by Bayer (yes, Bayer, the aspirin people) as a safer, nonaddictive alterenate to morphine and as a cure for morphine addiction.

Of course the only reason it's an "epidemic" is that it quite visibly affects a significant number of middle class whites. If it was only other ethic groups there wouldn't be much heard about it.

I would be willing to bet money that I've had more people in my life die from overdoses than you - it's hard to count them all. But, like I said, you can't protect people from their own stupidity, and discriminating against those who are not so stupid on that basis is nothing less than pure evil.

The social cost of repression is far worse than making opiate class drugs available to those who need them.  These drugs often allow people to lead productive lives who would not be able to otherwise. For every high profile overdose there are thousands of people who are able to maintain regular employment and lead relatively normal lives.

The US government's emphasis on repression, demonization, and "abstinence" is responsible for far more drug related deaths than any other single factor. Forcing people toward street drugs (which is the real effect of any repression based program) forces people to use unreliable, impure, vastly overpriced drugs with no quality control. It spreads disease and exposes people to unknown and adulterated substances. It nmakes people unable to work, for both mewdical and legal reasons.

"Abstinence" does not work - the success rate is something like 5%. What it does do, however, is make a lot of money for various classes of people. When you couple that with the "Mexican Wall" the increase in profits is astronomical. (You didn't really believe that the Wall is about immigration, did you? No, it's about control of the drug trade. Only those with the right connections will be able to get through. Think Ollie North.)

And meanwhile those that suffer are the legitimate chronic pain patients.


That problem goes far beyond opiates. And it's the natural and inevitable outcome of our "free market" unregulated medical industry and a lack of regulation of pharmaceutical advertizing (both to doctors and hospitals and to the public) and regulation of pharmaceutical profits.

You could use the same non-argument if he'd been hit by a car.

Dig it, people are responsible for themselves. It is not your right to be hovering over their shoulder like a little cartoon regulatory angel.

This is just a case of hysteriacl manipulation of the media. I'm quite certain that Mr. Petty would not approve of being used in this manner.

Fentanyl is a synthetic Moriphine. The Street Fentanyl ( also in Tom's Tox report ) is a different chemical make up.
Morphine has a 1/2 life of 15min and a bell like effectiveness curve, Fentynal has a more gradual fall off but the same effective 1/2 life.
Fentynal is Available in the fairly quick acting Lollipop, fast acting nasal spray IV and the patch, the patch has the advantage of giving a constant dose for 3 days no fuss.
For many Fentynal unlike moriphine is nausea and constipation free.
I have used the Fentynal patch for most of 20 years with some Norco for breakthrough pain, in fact I am in the midst of stepping down my dose to be in line with new FDA/ DEA guidelines ( withdrawal is a fucking bitch). Fentynal is most commonly used inpatient or for cancer patients, but I have see it used for many other purposes lately just because the constant flow of the patch is just so easy.

It's kind of strange that you have nearly unrestricted access to Fentanyl but when I need to get my piddly 30 mg codeine refilled every month I have to email my doctor to have her deliver a paper script to the pharmacy (no auto refills, no phone prescriptions), then when I come down a couple days later my prescription is not ready - unlike everybody else's non-narcotic prescriptions - and I have to wait 30-45 minutes after showing patient and state ID, then have to show ID again when actually receiving the pills as well as sign a computertized screen for pickup.

My friend in SF has to jump through even more hoops to receive her oxycodone and they've been cutting her back as well.

And it's disgraceful that dosage limits are being set by politicians who have no medical or pharmacological training (let alone a degree) andf that their politicking overrules the judgement of licensed physicians. The inevitable result of that tomfoolery is that bona fide pain patients are forced to outside, illicit sources to meet their needs. Which, or course, is the whole point.