I guess it comes down to your own personal view of the value of human life, of whether or not every human life* is worth saving. What I know is local politicians, and one extreme is our OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who notoriously discouraged the Board of Supervisors from distributing Narcan, opining that addicts “should be figuring out how not to use heroin. Not…how to use heroin, and then have somebody come rescue them.”
At the other end of the spectrum is former Anaheim Councilman Jose Moreno who observed to Recovery Road founder Robin Rush on a riverbed stroll, “You can’t get clean if you’re dead.”
I assume you probably know and agree, MANY valuable and productive and brilliant people, and even just nice and worthwhile people, have abused drugs. And it’s a really good feeling, to save their lives. And now you can and it’s easier than ever.
You know about FENTANYL.
If you watched the news in the last few years, you’ve heard all about the synthetic opiate fentanyl. Used to be, you’d see or hear about somebody overdosing on heroin every once in a while. Now, with fentanyl in the picture, overdoses are epidemic, increasing geometrically every year. It’s now the LEADING cause of death for kids under 17 (in California, and OC; it’s guns in some other places.) 150 accidental overdoses in OC in 2021, and last year was probably double that.
Some people take fentanyl on purpose, and OD because there’s like zero quality control, the stuff is so sticky and awkward to work with. The comparison is made with chocolate chip cookies – it’s really hard for manufacturers to control whether you’re gonna get four or twenty of the little bastards in your cookie.
And most people don’t MEAN to take fentanyl. Their heroin or speed or coke or even pot is spiked with it – sometimes on purpose by unscrupulous dealers who want to make their product more addictive, or sometimes accidentally because the stuff seeps through packaging.
At this point, it’s safest to assume that any drug you don’t get from a pharmacy is liable to have some fentanyl in it. So, just like the media says, we got a plague going on.
Let’s Flood the Streets With Narcan!
Narcan is the brand name for the nasal spray version of naloxone, a very easy and convenient way to combat overdoses for a period of 20 to 90 minutes while waiting for 911 help to arrive. During the overdose, too many of the receptors in the victim’s brain are crowded with opioids. (Whether heroin, fentanyl or other.) Naloxone is stronger, and it pulls that opioid off those receptors and takes its place (for 20 to 90 minutes.)
Like so many BOUNCERS supplanting so many MENACING DOUCHEBAGS. Hence, workshop presenter Greg Felix likes to say, “I want to flood the streets with Narcan the way the dealers are flooding the streets with Fentanyl.”
There is a law, AB 635, that allows you to administer Narcan to someone you have reason to believe is overdosing. There is a Good Samaritan Law that protects you and the victim from any prosecution for anything either of you might have on you. There is a law, AB 635, that allows Recovery Road to give out Narcan and conduct training in its use – and they’re just about the only ones doing it in the OC. I went to two of those trainings, because after the first one I was fascinated and decided to take notes and write about it.
I was both relieved and disappointed that it wasn’t anything like slamming adrenaline into Uma Thurman’s heart.
THAT was actually a figment of Tarantino’s fevered cinematic imagination. Nobody slams adrenaline into somebody’s heart. The handy vials of Narcan are squirted up a person’s nostril, very easily. Like I said, that’ll wake em back up for 20 to 90 minutes, while you immediately call 911 and wait for help (and try to get the newly alert victim to stay put.) After the 20 to 90 minutes the opiates could start to take back over and you can administer a second dose in the other nostril.
But I’m not going to tell you everything here, you need to go to a Recovery Road training, and they are actually short, riveting, and not at all boring. As I write in the middle of June, here’s the schedule going forward thru June and July:
At Recovery Road, 2370 E. Orangethorpe Road, Anaheim (near Placentia Blvd)
- Every Monday at 5
- Every Thursday at 6
and at the 202, 202 Broadway at Lemon (Jo Ann Burdick’s old dance studio)
- Friday June 16 & 30, at 2pm
- Friday July 7 & 21, at 2pm
*Every human life, that is, except, perhaps, Donald Trump.
Simple rule: no pricks (needles), no pills, no powder. My first date with my wife was dinner and a movie. The movie was Pulp Fiction. We’ve been together for 28+ years. The opium wars reprise. They don’t need to use bullets. Drugs are cheaper and equally as effective.
Two questions, Eric:
(1) Without looking it up, who do you think was doing what to whom during the Opium Wars?
(2) Who, in your comment, are you referring to as “They”?
Both questions have benign answers, though I don’t necessary expect them from you.
Simple rule no. 2: no playa yayo while in vacay in Mexico.
https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/story/2023-06-15/orange-county-couple-found-dead-in-baja-california-hotel-room
1. China, China, China and the West. Two wars not one re squabble of right to distribute
opium. Notice I didn’t say opium war. China didn’t want Westerners selling their merde.
2. China.
Nothing benign about war or opium or “opium wars”.
Let’s ask Encyclopedia Britannica about this:
The Opium Wars arose from China’s attempts to suppress the opium trade. Foreign traders (primarily British) had been illegally exporting opium mainly from India to China since the 18th century, but that trade grew dramatically from about 1820. The resulting widespread addiction in China was causing serious social and economic disruption there.
FIRST OPIUM WAR: In spring 1839 the Chinese government confiscated and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium—some 1,400 tons of the drug—that were warehoused at Canton (Guangzhou) by British merchants. The antagonism between the two sides increased in July when some drunken British sailors killed a Chinese villager. The British government, which did not wish its subjects to be tried in the Chinese legal system, refused to turn the accused men over to the Chinese courts.
There was a second OPIUM WAR, but while it had to do with Britain wanting Chinese territory, control of Chinese internal trade, and obeisance from China’s leadership, it didn’t seem to have much of anything to do with opium. (Therefore “THE Opium War” refers to the first one.) It did have a lot to do with why China still resents and mistrusts the West.
China was the overpowered victim in the Opium War. It was not a fight over who got to sell opium; it was the British wanting to introduce opium from India into China and thereby develop a “hooked” customer base. So your using the “Opium War” analogy to make China the villain here is weird.
During this period there used to be opium dens in the United States.
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinatown%27s_Opium_Dens
Because the Chinese weren’t selling opium in the 19th century. The Indian opium was cutting into the Chinese profit from their distribution of their opium. Hello?!?!
Those two sentences contradict one another. Find a good source that indicates definitively whether some entity in China was selling opium domestically before the British brought in opium from India. My recollection is that China simply did not have an opium problem before the British. I may be wrong, but I’m not going to trust you with providing facts.
No they don’t. You assume because you were alive during the Opium Wars. They were selling Chinese opium in dens in Chinatown in Northern California during the same time period as the Opium Wars. See link above. […] It was a simple observation to call the Fentanyl problem a reprise of the Opium Wars. China is a major source of it. Indian opium was illegal in China because it was screwing with the Chinese supply. Ask yourself this, what made Imperial China responsible for suppressing worldwide opium traffic? Why would Imperial China want to control this trade occurring outside of its borders in India, Turkey and Burma? Why was Chinese opium in the US at same time of Opium Wars. The drug smugglers won.
It was DECADES after the main opium war. The timeline is:
1839: Qing Dynasty destroys 2.8 million pounds of that opium, leading to the First (and if we’re being literal, only) Opium War
1861: First shipment of opium sent from China into the U.S. (San Francisco)
(Nothing on the record, besides your blithe assertion, suggests that China had developed *their own* domestic opium industry to compete with the British/Indian imports. It’s more likely than the Qing Dynasty was trying to fend off the accompanying social decay. So far as I can tell, there was limited production from the 11th century, but it did not become a major industry in China until shortly before the Opium War.)
But meanwhile, millions (more?) of Chinese were hooked on opium, or at least considered it a good drug, their equivalent of Valium.
1906: Opium dens destroyed in the earthquake.
The sale of opium was not in “the same time period” as the opium wars (a fortiori the first one.) It was 20 years later, and while it came “from China” — Britain had control over much of China during that time. It makes more sense to call it “British opium” than Chinese. If you want to say that our fentanyl problem is a repeat of the Opium War, it would be with Britain in the role of China and China in the role of us.
As for my having been alive almost 200 years ago, during the Opium War — “You assume because you were alive during the Opium Wars” — I don’t like to discuss that publicly.
Vern,
You need an editor. You are obviously not the best speller in Orange County, troubadour.
Thanks, I fixed my bio which I haven’t looked at in a decade. I’m still the best speller in the OC blogosphere, hands down.
I find I don’t like that word “troubadour” so much now, with its redundant-looking final vowel. Pinche French.
I grew up within walking distance of The Troubadour.