Follow Up on Opioid Toxicity

As the California court system delves deeper into the death of Tyler Skaggs, the Los Angeles pitcher whose death several months ago stunned the team, organized professional baseball, his family and the country, certain things are now clear. Tyler Skaggs apparently had an antecedent problem with alcoholism a decade or more earlier but was seen as a recovered (or a recovering) alcoholic. Adjusted within a marriage with children, he was sustaining heroin and/or a cocaine habit. These drugs are recreationally sustainable when accompanied by good nutrition and avoidance of intravenous routes.

Enhancing these drugs and resorting to intravascular use boosts the thrill along with the lethality. A network of acquisition and distribution of narco substances seems to have infected the Angel's organization and organized baseball in general. It would be naive to believe that football, basketball, soccer, and other sports are uninfiltrated. The Roar of the Crowd and the Smell of the Greasepaint leads to a high in performers that many seek to attain, sustain and maintain through opioids and other narco substances. We hear of it when death and disaster follow. Vaping with nicotine content, marijuana content or no content is part of the body exploitation game.

There are regional differences in the relentless spread of addictive disorder. Melissa Healy in the October 26th issue of the Los Angeles Times tells us that in 2017 in the East and in the industrialized Midwest, fentanyl (a synthetic opioid) was the drug cited as the the usual cause of overdosage death in all five CDC regions east of the Mississippi as well as a neighboring region that includes Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. Methamphetamine overdosage was notably the leading cause of death west of the Mississippi but east of America's South West and North West (largely coastal) regions.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid developed in China reaching American shores in 2013. It is a crystalline product that is milligram for milligram 30 to 100 times more powerful than heroin and concentratable to a degree that could make it 1000 times more powerful. Initially, it was seen as an alternative for human prescriptive purposes, soon deemed too powerful and unpredictable for routine use it is largely a narco drug admirably suited for goofballing or speedballing (the mixing of narco drugs for enhanced effect). Heroin according to M. Healy is circulated in the west as a sticky goo not terribly amenable to mixing.

The opioid epidemic has gone through at least three identifiable phases. We may well be, according to M. Healy, in the middle to terminal part of a fourth phase. It is reasonably clear that money, a wish for elevation above mortal status, desperation and inability to invest in one another are fueling a lemming like, worsening, human crisis. The 2018 academy award nominated A Star is Born, retells the Judy Garland, James Mason, Janet Gaynor, Frederic March story with believable gender and role switching, and admirable performances by Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. The changes made produce a cinematic experience that reflects the modern drug scene in a manner that the originals (of the 30's and 50's) cannot.