Johnathon Morrison’s mother helped get tianeptine banned in Alabama. But she says it makes her “sick” it is still being sold in stores across the U.S.
Kristi Terry keeps replaying the last time she saw her son Johnathon Morrison alive.
The 19-year-old scholarship student came into her bedroom on the night of Feb. 20, 2019 and asked if it was OK if he cooked some pizza rolls; he didn’t want to hog them from his younger sister, who was a fussy eater.
Terry, 41, and her husband found it odd that he was asking permission.
“We were like ‘you don’t have to ask to cook something," she said. In hindsight, she wishes she’d gotten up to see if he was feeling alright. She wonders if he was feeling sick at that point and was trying to settle his stomach with food.
The next morning Terry and her 15-year-old daughter found Morrison unresponsive in his bedroom in Trafford, Alabama. Paramedics spent an hour trying to revive him, but they couldn’t. Next to his body was a half-eaten plate of pizza rolls and a nearly empty bottle of tianeptine pills, an unapproved drug known as “gas station heroin” because of its addictive effects on some users.
What even is the point of having separate categories of prescription and OTC drugs if there’s nothing stopping unapproved drugs from being sold over the counter?
Another part of the problem is that these unapproved ‘health supplements’ are often not even checked to see if they contain what they claim to contain. Unsurprisingly, some of them contain prescription pharmaceuticals. And even when it is discovered that those products do have them, they aren’t always taken off the market.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/many-food-supplements-unlawfully-contain-drugs
It’s nuts.
But God forbid we let the FDA have a look at these supplements, because if we did, the Pyramid Scheme Industrial Complex would collapse and with it the economy of Utah and the finances of the LDS Church.
They tried to pass a bill regulating them in the early 90s. All the supplements companies took out ads screaming that doctors were trying to take your vitamins away. Very unpopular, bill went down in flames.
Like no, doctors just don’t want people getting amphetamines in their creatine supplement. Or unexpectedly getting St John’s wart in some supplement that doesn’t list it as an ingredient, suddenly causing severe and dangerous interactions with multiple medications the person is taking. It says a lot about the supplement industry that they fight tooth and nail against any regulation that would require them to accurately report what’s in the bottle. They can basically just make it up out of thin air as it is. Tons of supplement makers with expensive “proprietary blends” where they don’t even attempt to show what’s inside, then market them toward incurable diseases like alzheimers, very carefully avoiding the name of the disease in advertising, and taking money out of their pockets in exchange for false hope. Looking at you neuriva. If your blend actually works, test it, patent it, become billionaires (they won’t because it doesn’t).
And some being sold are just straight up harmful. You can hop on Amazon right now and buy 250 mg /pill vitamin b6 supplements. If they’re reporting that accurately, that’s a toxic dose that could be harmful to your health and even cause neuropathy (ironically many who take it are hoping it will help with neuropathy, but that’s only true if you’re deficient, and you don’t need anywhere near that amount even if deficient).
where downsides
Only upside land ahead
I the FDA can’t even keep up with trying to approve legitimate pharmaceutical drugs, let’s not task them with looking at random s*** too.
Give them more resources then.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; strip the army and arm the FDA. Lead in your cinnamon pills? Sniped.
No quarter.
How about they just investigate and prosecute.
Take away profits, business licenses and import licenses.
This seems less snipy than my plan. Can they at least be armed?
My country made basically that in the 50’s, now we have one of the few Blue Zones in the world
Welcome to research chemicals. They invent new drugs and sell them wherever until the DEA puts them on the restricted or regulated schedule, then they just make a new drug that has just a little different chemical compound but still essentially does the same thing as the last one that got banned and start the process all over. It’s a legal loop hole for selling drugs.
The worst part is that each replacement generation is almost always worse than the predecessor. Just take the cannibinoids, JWH-018 was sketchy, but anything after that was Hella sketchy and had some terrible side effects.
I think the situation blurs with “natural” things
Yeah I always thought over the counter meant it was checked before being put behind the counter unlike stuff on the floor
Because the rules are made up as the ruling class goes along.
These aren’t being sold to treat anything. They are just sold with flashy labels but no claims.
Historically OTC drugs were just drugs that existed before the fda was formed, and therefore were exempted from the rules. OTC drugs are almost always less regulated, less tested, and have had less research done on them. Hence the whole thing with allergy meds last year.
Allergy meds last year?
WASHINGTON — The leading decongestant used by millions of Americans looking for relief from a stuffy nose is no better than a dummy pill, according to government experts who reviewed the latest research on the long-questioned drug ingredient.
In theory, the active ingredients in these nonprescription products are considered safe and effective when consumers follow the instructions on the label, without direction from a health care provider. In practice, however, many contain ingredients that the Food and Drug Administration has not yet evaluated. Still other OTC products that are known to be misused or abused remain on the market with no changes to the label to warn customers.3
oh shoot I forgot about that!
vape shops in the US sale it too sometimes
big issue here not just with tianeptine pills
most products in vape shops and gas stations are either fake and/or inferior quality and/or questionable
includes nicotine vape products, hemp selections, fake THC products, etcetera
unregulated and/or fake products are a huge problem in the US and are not being handled in the same way as other things in the marketplace
also some of these products are sold out of package individually with no food regulations (no handwashing with gloves or anything to do with food safety)
all this overshadows what could be a regulated market with lab tested and correctly dosed/portioned products sold at specifically licensed dispensaries with staff trained in these fields
at this point it is starting to look intentionally set up and kept like this to keep the population in a certain place
these products are also widely available in the US due to dealers catching on to the lower prices of these alternatives and due to the option of possibly getting this item or others mentioned online with overnight shipping sometimes being an option
Intentionally set up… well sort of in my opinion. All in all it is about money. Testing and what not cost a ton of money. And that would reduce what can be funneled to “other” places. It would also cost money to the people selling the crap. So that makes it politically unpopular. They don’t need a nefarious agenda to do the wrong thing, they do that naturally.
It’s a shit show either way. I remember when vaping started, it was pretty awesome that it was unregulated and a lot of experimentation, discussion and “consumer led” development.
The regulations and outright bans on vaping pushed by the WHO were and still are concessions to puritanical thinking (no harm reduction for smokers!) or support for nicotine replacement therapies (much less effective like patch). And of course they also lead to a few big companies being able to afford the regulations (big tobacco) now being able to compete against smaller companies (less competition).
But of course without any regulations, sooner or later you have other “big whatever” corporations pushing shitty unsafe products. And once money is flowing they will always lobby and capture the legislation to improve profit instead of competition or better quality or safer products.
Regulations are a major form of power that is very badly managed. The economic power / money behind this leads to major distortions and corruption. In many cases new ideology is being crafted by PR campaigns that have long term effects. We need to get some kind of democratic control into this, maybe like a fifth estate comprised of nerds that can act quickly and smartly and have no political or monetary incentive.
Can they just let me have my LSD and weed already?
It’s so fascinating to me that people can show make something concerning the death of a teenager strictly just about themselves.
I had another comment in here that was more directly related to the post, and that was my second thought after writing the first comment.
The reason why I said that is because we have a large market of unregulated research chemicals, supplements, and boner pills that are creating unpredictable side effects in people, and the highs are second hand knock offs of better drugs. Meanwhile, there are mind altering substances out there with 50+ years of use, that we know are essentially non-toxic, and are a waaaaay better ride with fewer side effects than the legal drugs we have available to us today.
If the kid had dropped a tab of acid or smoked a joint, he would probably be alive today.
This is Lemmy, not the local obituaries. Chill.
Okay but tianeptine is good it just shouldn’t be sold as a gas station drug like kratom. It has nothing to do with heroin this is insane. They use it as an antidepressant here in Vietnam.
