The Most Addictive Drugs Ranked

A man staggers down a garbage-laden street.  Men and women clothed in rags lie on the sidewalk as he pushes forward through a sea of  semi-conscious drug addicts standing stooped, arms down by their sides like zombies. The  man stops and talks to a friend.

His legs are covered in infected pustules. To his side,  a woman lies unconscious, looking all but dead, blood running down her bandaged left leg where a  flesh-eating condition has caused a gaping hole. This is addiction at its very  worst, and it is the epitome of 21st-century drug-related civil disorder.

The scene is just a regular day in the American heart of urban squalor, a sight unimaginable when  the US kicked off its war on drugs decades ago. Today, we’ll cover all the most addictive drugs,  including the terrifying ones that have led to the description you just heard. We’ll try  to get our heads around what has happened with drugs in the USA, the most addicted  country on the planet, which, as you’ll see, is home to some disturbing statistics along  with those ultra-dystopian city streets.

Coming in at number 5 is alcohol, also  known as booze, brew, juice, hooch, sauce, firewater, and liquid courage, which can get  you drunk, wasted, wrecked, smashed, trashed, hammered, plastered, battered, blasted,  sloshed, trollied, and our favorite of the British expressions, absolutely wankered. Booze is, of course, legal, but it’s still a drug, and an extremely addictive one at that. Alcohol addicts are everywhere you look.

According to studies, 50-60% of Americans aged  21 to 64 are regular consumers. 31. 5% of American people aged 18 to 21 are drinkers, as  are 14.

5% of people aged 16 and 17, 4. 7% of 14 and 15-year-olds and shockingly,  even 1. 6% of 12 and 13-year-olds.

29. 5 million, or 10. 5% of all Americans aged 12 and older  qualify for what’s called Alcohol Use Disorder, 17.

3 million of them males and 12. 3  million females. That’s a lot of addiction.

The National Institute on Alcohol  and Alcoholism wrote that each year, there are around 178,000 booze-related deaths  in the US, about 120,000 male deaths and 59,000 female deaths. Around the world, over 3 million  people a year die because of alcohol abuse, or about 5. 3% of all global deaths.

In people  aged 20–39 years, close to 13. 5% of total deaths in the world are attributable to alcohol. Alcohol is deadly, but in small amounts, it gives you a nice dopamine hit, causing relaxation and  reducing social inhibition, hence the term Dutch courage – relating to Dutch soldiers drinking  before going into battle.

The calming effect is down to something called Gamma-aminobutyric  acid, or GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that blocks specific signals in your central nervous  system. In layman's terms, it helps you chill out, lessening anxiety, stress, and fear. It’s always good to be calmed down, but booze does a lot more than that in the  brain, and the results aren’t always positive.

It literally makes you stupid, and stupid people  do stupid things, as can be seen in just about any city in the world on a Saturday night. Alcohol affects a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is vital for motor skills. Hence  why drinking makes walking or driving difficult, especially if you’ve had a lot.

That  rush of dopamine also affects the brain’s prefrontal cortex, our so-called executive suite  associated with self-control, decision-making, and restraint. Have you ever woken up after  a crazy night out and discovered you spent all your rent money? That’s a result of your  prefrontal cortex not working as it should.

But it also leads to a 40% to 360% increase in  dopamine activity, which also means that people use it to self medicate, making it especially  addictive to people with issues like PTSD, anxiety, or depression. In fact, 22% of people  who drink in the world will develop a dependence, and for many of them it’s as a way  to deal with psychological issues. Even so, the vast majority of people in the  world can control their drinking.

It’s an ongoing debate if there is a safe limit to how  much you drink, but people, for the most part, will drink with friends, have a glass of wine  at home, watch sports with a couple of beers, drink champagne at weddings, and it  won’t kill them or lead to an arrest. But for those who do become addicted and try  to quit, they quickly find the most insidious aspect of alcohol addition - the withdrawal  symptoms. And these can be severe, arguably the very worst of all drug withdrawal symptoms. 

Putting all that alcohol inside of you has affected how your central nervous system works and  because it has a depressant effect on your body, the body tries hard to keep you awake or alert  while on booze. When you suddenly quit drinking, the body is still in this ramped-up mode so  that you can feel very wired. You can start to shake and feel severe anxiety.

And these are the mild symptoms. Those in the grip of severe symptoms can start  to hallucinate, possibly talking to people who aren’t there or brushing spiders off their body.  This might happen within the first two days of stopping.

And the nightmare can get much worse. About 5% of people will have what are called delirium tremens, or DTs, after the initial  anxiety. The person will become extremely agitated.

In a medical setting, they may have  to be strapped down so as not to hurt themselves or someone else. Their hallucinations can be so  vivid that they barely see the people around them. Instead, they might be looking at snakes or some  other frightening apparition.

In the early 20th century, the condition would sometimes  be called seeing the “pink elephants. ” This can be very frightening, not to mention  dangerous. According to a 2022 research paper, the mortality rate for DTs is between 5  and 15% when the person gets treatment but around 37% when they don’t.

Coming off  an alcohol dependency is serious business. Ironically, one of the drugs that doctors  give people to counteract the dangerous symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is a drug  that can cause similar withdrawal symptoms after long-term use, resulting in what  sufferers have called a living nightmare. Welcome to Benzo hell.

Unlike alcohol, benzodiazepines, or benzos, are prescribed by doctors, although they’re also  sold on the streets, but as you’ll soon see, the street versions which are oftentimes  counterfeit can be dangerously contaminated. For decades, society and much of the medical  world seemed to ignore or underestimate just how dangerous and terrifying benzos could be  when they are stopped abruptly, and taking one of these so-called “chill pills,” with brand  names such as Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, or Ativan, is often talked about in a lighthearted way  in the movies or on TV. But chill pills, in fact, are not to be messed with.

Like alcohol, they work on the GABA system, so indeed, they chill you out. But, also like  alcohol, your body gets too used to being in chill mode, so when you stop, and you have  a dependence, your body keeps trying to make you switched on. You become tremendously  wired, maybe not sleeping for days on end, unable to do anything except be wired,  and panic.

You get rebound anxiety for the anxiety you’d been trying to prevent.  You can become so worked up that it leads to seizures that can kill you. We visited a Benzo  withdrawal forum online, and there are many, many reports of people having seizures, and  lots of people lose their minds to the point of a complete nervous breakdown.

Many lose their  partners, their jobs, their savings, everything. Benzos used to be handed out like candy by  doctors who underestimated just how serious withdrawal could be, what’s now referred to as  benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome. Thankfully today, doctors will usually not prescribe benzos  for weeks unless it’s absolutely necessary.

It’s hard to say how long it takes to form a dependency  though. Everyone is different. It could be months, or it could be just weeks of daily use.

The pills themselves can be lifesavers for panickers or insomniacs. They’re incredibly  effective at calming a person down, but this leads to people taking them when not absolutely  necessary. They might then become tolerant, so they increase the dose, or their doctor does.

We visited a lot of forums to research this video and reading what people say about benzo  withdrawal is enough to turn anyone off from ever taking them. People talked about “chemical  brain damage” that, even years after stopping, they said still made their lives difficult. Others discussed their paralyzing anxiety during withdrawal, or feeling like bugs crawling  on their skin, their night terrors, their tremors, their inability to barely speak, having  body spasms, hallucinations, psychosis, mania, paranoia, derealization, depression,  intractable insomnia, and for one person, what he described as an “incredible hulk  rage.

” Another person, a self-confessed life-long recreational drug taker, called Benzos  the “most dangerous drug I've ever taken. ” According to the US National Institutes of Health,  30. 6 million American adults or 12.

6% of the population, use benzodiazepines. 25. 3 million or  10.

4%, take them as prescribed by their physician, and 5. 3 million, or 2. 2%, misuse them.

And  the highest incidence of misuse falls into the 18 to 25 years of age category. In Scotland, according to the BBC, there was so much misuse that it was  dubbed a “Valium crisis”. In 2019, the BBC published a story with the headline,  “Street valium blamed for 'unprecedented' spike in drug deaths.

” The so-called “street blues”  were “selling…for pennies,” since traffickers were producing so many. Some of them were coming  from China, something we’ll get into later. In 2023, an Australian newspaper wrote the  headline, “Common anti-anxiety meds turning Australians into accidental addicts.

” Usage in  Australia over the last 20 years has shot up, with 1. 4 million Australians being prescribed  5. 1 million scripts of these chill pills from 2020 to 2021.

The same article said  since these are prescribed by a doctor, people don’t see themselves as becoming drug  addicts, and that, “the proportion of accidental overdose deaths due to benzodiazepines has doubled  in the past 20 years, up to 32. 5% in 2021. ” As with another kind of drug we’ll talk about,  some of the blame for the benzo crisis lies with doctors and pharmaceutical companies who might  endorse the use of benzos when it’s not always medically necessary.

The benzodiazepines  market was worth US$2. 35 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach US$3. 1 billion by  2032.

These pills can be a lifesaver, but they can also be a life ruiner, and behind both  are people profiting who don’t care either way. This puts benzos high on the most  addictive drugs in the world, and the next drug, while not as dangerous in terms  of withdrawal symptoms, is even harder to kick. Like alcohol, nicotine is legal, and smokers  consume about 5 trillion cigarettes a year, costing about $2 trillion in economic damage  but making a whole lot of people very, very wealthy.

In 2024, the global tobacco market  generated a revenue of almost a trillion dollars and is expected to increase by another $130. 2  billion by 2029. That’s why you won’t be seeing an end to the tobacco business anytime soon.

According to the WHO, there are around 1. 3 billion smokers in the world, with around  1. 1 billion using cigarettes as their fix and the rest using various other kinds of  tobacco products.

The legal age for which you can buy cigarettes or other tobacco products  differs depending on the country. In the U. S.

, you have to be 21 after being raised from 18  in 2019. In the UK, it was 16 for many years, but that changed in 2007 when it went up to 18. In most of the world, 18 is the magic number, although there are about 50 million smokers on  the planet who are 13 to 15.

The CDC in the US said in 2023, “Nearly 2 of every 100 high  school students (1. 9%) reported that they had smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days. ” 1 out of 100 Middle School students had given it a go at least once in the past month too. 

The CDC added, “15 of every 100 middle school students (14. 7%) and nearly 28 of every 100  high school students (27. 9%) said they had ever tried a tobacco product” in their lifetime. 

The same report said nine out of ten US adults had tried smoking at least once in their life. Considering the dangers, this isn’t good news. Still, things now are a lot different from how  they were in the past.

Some of you out there will remember a time when smoking was pervasive. You  went into a restaurant, bar, or pub, and the place was full of people smoking cigarettes. People  smoked at the office.

On planes, you went into the smoking part that was divided from the non-smoking  part by a curtain. Former cabin staff have said the smoke was sometimes so thick that they could  see enough to carry out in-flight service. And it was even worse in the decades before that.

In the 1930s, American Tobacco, the maker of Lucky Strikes, used doctors in their  ad campaigns to sell their cigarettes. “20,679 Physicians say ‘LUCKIES are  less irritating’” to the throat,” said a doctor in one ad. And believe it or not, that was an improvement over times past.

In  1890, an ad for Dr Batty's Asthma Cigarettes said their brand helped sufferers of asthma,  hay fever, head colds, diseases of the throat, and bronchial issues. That’s like saying lard  aids weight loss. The company did at least state that kids under 6 shouldn’t smoke.

After  all, they might stick a lit one in their eye. In the 1930s, 50-60% of American men and 5-10%  of women smoked. The number of male smokers was around the same in the 1940s, although around  20% of women smoked.

Smoking had been viewed as somewhat un-lady-like at the start of the 20th  century, but thanks in part to Edward Bernays, known as the father of public relations, and his  marketing campaign to show strong women smoking so-called “torches of freedom”, the number of  female smokers increased. Smoking had attached itself to the growing feminist movement. It was a similar story for men, who were subliminally informed that smoking was a tough  guys thing.

Eric Lawson, one of the Marlboro Men, died at the age of 72 from respiratory failure  due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In 1965, about 52% of American men smoked,  and 34% of American women were smokers, but at the end of the 60s, the Mad Men-style  marketing campaigns were less effective with all the studies on smoking and cancer, and the decade  ended with about 44% of men and 31% of women being smokers. Still, despite all the warnings, by  1987, around 29% of US adults smoked, 32% being men and 27% being women - so close to equality.

The numbers gradually decreased with bans on smoking and anti-smoking campaigns until  we arrived at the adult smoking rate in the U. S. of 14% of men and 11% of women at  the start of the 2020s.

People know it’s bad, but it’s highly addictive, so they keep doing it. It’s estimated that every year, around 8 million people die prematurely due to smoking.  Researchers say it will likely kill a billion people over the course of the 21st century.

While smokers don’t seem to be getting high, that doesn’t mean it’s not addictive. It actually  increases dopamine levels in your brain’s reward system by about 25% to 40%. If you’ve ever been  to an airport and seen a smoking room – the toxic coughing human zoos that can be depressing  enough to make smokers think twice about their so-called “dirty habit” – you’ll see that  people can’t seem to go very long without a smoke.

Prolonged nicotine use causes cravings. While you  might not think you get high from lighting up, you do, which is why it’s so hard to quit.  According to the CDC, in 2015, a massive 68% of American smokers said they wanted to quit. 

In 2018, 55% said they tried, but only 7. 5% said they were successful. Smoking is notoriously  easy to start but very hard to stop.

So, is it addictive? Of course, it is! People know there’s  a high chance of it ending their life early, not to mention causing a grocery list of possible  health problems including cancer, heart disease, lung disease, to name a few, yet they still do it.

Ok, now it’s time to talk about the hard hitters, the drugs that can take over your life, chew you  up, spit you out, and throw you into a street somewhere in the USA’s heart of urban darkness. In the number two spot are the stimulants. We’re going to focus more on cocaine than  on amphetamines and methamphetamines, although neurologically speaking, they both have  similar actions, which is to create a dopamine and noradrenaline tsunami in your brain. 

They both speed up messages in your brain, affecting the sympathetic and central nervous  systems, causing arousal, alertness and giving you energy. It could also result in you talking  for three hours non-stop about how much you loved your pet hamster when you were in Middle School. It’s thought there are around 22 million cocaine users around the world right now, with as  many as 1.

5 million regular users in the US, and experts say we are doing more coke than ever. In the UK, where groups of men and women are often seen bunched in toilet stalls together on a  night out, there’s coke in the sewage water. Scientists said in 2015 that London sewage had  the highest cocaine concentrations in the whole of Europe.

We kid you not, a marine biologist  in Britain in 2024 said there is so much contamination in the sea around Britain that the  crabs are on cocaine and the shrimps are on speed, which could affect their behavior and  upset the natural ecological system. Traces of coke were even found in the  Houses of Parliament bathrooms just as various politicians were talking about getting  tough on drugs. Coke is truly everywhere.

The Global Report on Cocaine 2023 said coca  cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021 Seizures of cocaine hit record levels at about 2,300 tons  and it’s believed only 20-25% of the coke that is shipped gets seized at some point. Most of it hits  the streets where it will be cut with something, and so grow in size but become weaker, sometimes  to the point of it containing hardly any cocaine at all. Some British coke that was tested  in a lab not long ago only had a 10% purity, but Channel 5 news in 2019 reported that “the  purity of cocaine in Britain has risen from an average of 20% to 80% in just ten years.

” Unlike methamphetamine, the drug that powered so many soldiers during WWII,  cocaine has not been demonized as much, making it seem more acceptable in society. Meth  is often viewed as kind of trashy, while coke has, throughout the decades, been linked to Wall Street  Traders, Hollywood movie stars, high-powered sales executives… and people who can’t wait to tell  you about their screenplay. In short, snorting rails is not too taboo, which doesn’t help  where growing consumption rates are concerned.

Date from the Organization for Economic  Co-operation and Development said about 2. 4% of Americans had done coke from 2022 to  2023. What may come as a surprise to many of you is the same report said 2.

5% of Spaniards had  done cocaine that year, as had 2. 5% of Austrians, 2. 7% of British people, and at the top  was Australia at 4.

2% of the population. The US used to be the king of coke, but  things are changing. As you'll soon see, there’s a perfectly rational explanation for this.

It’s believed about one-fifth of cocaine users will develop dependency at some point, which can  get very, very expensive. In terms of it killing you outright in one sitting, the chances are very  low, although a 2018 study of people having heart attacks under 50 showed that 6% had coke in their  system. Correlation is not causation, but it can still count for something.

A paper published  by the National Institutes of Health explained: “Cocaine users are at a 7-fold risk for myocardial  infarction compared to non-users. The…study found 6% of emergency room patients treated for chest  pain had a cocaine-induced myocardial infarction. ” Unlike powder coke, its freebase form,  crack, seems to have become a bit more taboo, even though essentially, users just want the  same thing: rushes of dopamine and adrenaline.

Both forms can be incredibly hard to quit.  Overdoses might be uncommon, but with crack and regular cocaine, the euphoria a person experiences  can start to produce profound cravings. If a user quits, he or she likely won’t suffer psychosis  or seizures as someone with an alcohol or benzo addiction might, but they will feel very  uncomfortable, and the cravings will be intense.

People sometimes do so much that they suffer  from septum perforation… their nose collapses. It’s also highly psychologically addictive.  Just ask rapper Flavor Flav, who said he used to spend $2,600 a day on crack and did so for  six years straight.

That comes to $5,694,000. And kicking that habit is hard. A paper in the  US National Library of Medicine written on the topic of cocaine withdrawal listed the  symptoms as: “depressed mood, psychomotor agitation, psychomotor retardation, craving for  cocaine, insomnia, and vivid, unpleasant dreams.

” And yet, cocaine use is increasing all  over the world. As demand remains high, farmers and traffickers from South America  will keep making and selling it. That means more cocaine-related violent deaths.

A recent  article in a Dutch media website said four out of five assassinations in the Netherlands  were linked to cocaine trafficking. In Europe, traffickers from Balkan countries now work with  Latin American cartels, which is one reason why Europe has seen much more cocaine use in recent  years. In the Belgian port of Antwerp, authorities seized 116 metric tons of cocaine in 2023, a new  record.

Dutch customs seized around 60 metric tons that year, up almost a fifth from 2022. The DEA says these often extremely violent Balkan gangs leave the USA alone only because  the Mexican cartels have pretty much sewn up the North American coke market. Because  of the mafias in Europe, coke has steadily been getting purer and cheaper.

According  to the EU’s Home Affairs Commissioner, it also means drug-related killings have started  to “rival terrorism. ” And all this is just so some guys in a toilet stall can get a dopamine  rush so they can brag about how great they are. In short, coke is extremely addictive, otherwise  the world wouldn’t be seeing mini-wars in the streets over it.

But this next drug has turned  streets in the USA into what looks like something not from a war, but from a horror movie. “It’s my wife, and it’s my life,” sang the band the Velvet Underground in their song Heroin. The singer Lou Reed, then a heroin addict, talked about heroin taking him to a place where he just  didn’t care about a thing in the world.

Heroin was his fix for all of life’s problems. That’s what  heroin does; it makes all your problems go away while you are in the throes of its high. Unlike  speed, coke, or LSD, which aren’t everyone’s cup of tea because they can be too intense, heroin’s  soft landing into a bed of feathers can be an easy fall, provided the amount consumed isn’t too much.

This is what makes it the most addictive drug of all. It seemingly cures everything…until it  destroys everything. Former users often say heroin usually takes back ten times what it  gives.

There are no free rides in life and heroin exemplifies this to the extreme. In 1898, the German company Bayer & Co. introduced heroin to the world’s drug market  as a pain reliever and cough suppressant.

They said it was a remedy for many of life’s common  conditions. This seems ridiculous to us now, but you’ll see in a few minutes how pharmaceutical  firms tried something similar in the 21st century. Since heroin was introduced, it’s been  the go-to fix for artists, rock bands, and poets.

. . and the often-traumatized hordes  on the world’s meanest streets.

For many years, it was perhaps the most demonized drug  of them all. Heroin, unlike cocaine, was often associated with being down and out. It  tore families apart and made people do anything for their fix even though the withdrawal symptoms  are not as bad or dangerous as benzos and alcohol.

One of the major problems with demonizing drugs  has always been the fact that not telling the truth about them can lead to younger people not  understanding the dangers or never believing adults because they were lied to about drugs.  Your brain on drugs is not a fried egg. Heroin is supposed to feel good.

After all, it  ups your dopamine levels by about 200%. You might now be wondering, if both heroin and  cocaine lead to the release of lots of dopamine, why are they so different? Most recreational drugs, in fact, release more dopamine than is usually made  in the brain, but they don’t all produce the same feelings.

Heroin converts to morphine in the  brain and binds very rapidly to opioid receptors. Opioid receptors play a big role in regulating  pain. Once activated, they inhibit pain signals in the brain and spinal cord.

That’s why opioids are  used in medical settings. The feeling is usually a surge of warmth, described as a “rush. ” This  usually comes with euphoria and drowsiness but can also make people quite upbeat and chatty,  especially in lower doses.

The pain it fixes for many people is also emotional pain. Heroin  often becomes not a social drug, but something people do in the privacy of their own home…or  cardboard box, or toilet cubicles at work. In higher doses, people can “gouge out” or “nod  off,” which looks like them falling asleep while sitting up, perhaps falling forward over their  keyboard at work and suddenly jolting back.

The high can also result in the release of histamines,  which is why heroin users tend to scratch a lot. To the advanced user, it’s pretty obvious who  is on heroin. Scratching is a giveaway, as are small pupils, nodding off at work, or sometimes  being overly and insincerely friendly or glib.

But use of opiates at lower levels might not seem  to have much of an outward effect on the user at all, which is why so many functional addicts hold  down jobs and go about their lives normally and remain on the drug for many years, with hardly  anyone knowing. You can look very normal on opiates, as is often the case for millions  of Americans on prescription opiates. It’s when you don’t have them or do too much of them  that makes people look like so-called junkies.

Tolerance can quickly develop with heroin,  which means the body gets used to it, and so a higher dose is needed. Addicts often talk  about chasing that first high, which they never attain again. Heroin slowly rewires the brain.

You  start to need the heroin because the brain adapts to all that unearned dopamine being produced. Once addicted, they often say they take their heroin just to avoid getting sick.  The withdrawal is physically very uncomfortable but not as dangerous as coming  off booze or benzos.

A woman told the Times, “It’s like a demon crawling out of you. You’d  rather just die and be done with it than go through that. ” And even if you do get through  the five or so days of physical withdrawal, two or three intense days, your brain that got  used to the heroin doesn’t make as much dopamine anymore so you can feel incredibly depressed.

Dependence like this doesn’t happen overnight. Users often have to do it daily for several  weeks to form a dependence, although for some people, it can take as little as two weeks. One of the biggest problems, evident in the fact that 1,106,900 US residents died from overdoses  from 1968 to 2020, is that it is not always easy to control how much of a dose you take.

As little  as five times over a safe dose can kill you, and street heroin can be maybe 10% or 90%  pure. You just don’t know what you’re getting. The vast majority of fatal drug overdoses in the  US involve an opiate.

In 2023, 295 Americans died every single day due to drugs, and most of  those deaths were from opioids. Opioids are central nervous system depressants, so high doses  can lead to respiratory depression. In short, you stop breathing and nod off for eternity.

Another major issue is the new synthetic opioid called Fentanyl. It’s about 50 times stronger than  heroin and much cheaper to make. Just 2 milligrams can be lethal.

Carfentanil, also a synthetic,  is 100 times stronger than Fentanyl. In the USA, 36,359 died from Fentanyl overdoses  in 2019. Over the next few years, it went up to 56,516, 70,601, and 73,838.

Even scarier is the fact that authorities have found cocaine that has been contaminated  with Fentanyl. Traces have also been discovered in methamphetamine, MDMA, and fake prescription  pills. The latter are often brand names such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Xanax, which were  previously sometimes over-prescribed to the American public by pharmaceutical giants and  physicians.

Such pills are in high demand, so criminals make counterfeit versions. Fentanyl has led to a new wave of overdose deaths in the US. A Dr explained to ABC News, “We  think of it like waves, and with the first wave being prescription opioids, the second wave being  heroin, the third wave being fentanyl and this fourth wave is fentanyl with stimulants.

” Over  650,000 Americans have died in the opioid crisis since it began in the 1990s, and it doesn’t look  like things are about to improve. The waves are a tsunami of death and misery washing over America. Not helping things is the way pharmaceutical companies cleverly and sometimes insidiously  marketed pain pills and put the heroin equivalents in nice boxes, which lead to use of opiates  taking off in the USA among regular folks who’d never dreamed they’d essentially  one day become junkies.

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, is the company that  springs to mind, but there are various kinds of so-called heroin pills made by multiple firms. Some of those companies wrongly said such pain pills were not very addictive, basing this on  no credible evidence whatsoever. Heroin and other opiates, it turns out, are highly addictive,  but they were being treated like essential oils.

It’s not surprising then that the US Department  of Health once famously said, “The United States makes up 4. 4% of the world’s population and  consumes over 80% of the world’s opioids. ” The US government cracked down after certain  companies were exposed for essentially pushing drugs like heroin on the public, but many of  the addicts this created were already hooked, so they went to the streets.

In 2018, a study  said that 75% of Americans who used opioids recreationally had started their drug-taking  careers with legitimate prescriptions. There are stories of elderly people getting hooked  on prescriptions, and when told the prescriptions were no longer available, they went out into the  mean streets and scored bags of dope from people they’d never dreamed of meeting. Grannies  of suburbia who’d never even smoked weed because they believed taking drugs was immoral  or dangerous were now mixing with drug-peddling street gangs.

It was eternally embarrassing  for them, but heroin was that addictive. As we said, everything heroin gives you, all  that warmth and courage and not giving a damn, will usually make you pay back tenfold. It’s so  addictive that it requires all your energy and time.

You can’t live without it. You can’t travel  without it. It becomes your ball and chain.

You can become utterly selfish in your devotion to  your high, someone you never imagined could exist. You might start to constantly lie. You might even  steal.

It can take everything you love away. And all the time, it becomes less and less effective  until you need it just to feel normal. Indeed, heroin is the epitome of the Faustian bargain  - the deal with the devil.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” should be embossed on the  back of every opiate pill and brick of brown tar smack or China white heroin in existence. Once addicted, most recreational users often can’t get enough of it. They do desperate things to get  it.

They don’t take care of their health. Many inject it, which at some point will likely cause  an injury. They often inject stuff mixed with impurities.

They shoot up evil combos designed  to be stronger and so are much more lethal. Welcome to the American nightmare we  mentioned at the beginning of this video. The so-called zombies in the streets are  people who’ve likely taken heroin or Fentanyl combined with a drug called Xylazine. 

Xylazine, known on the streets as Tranq, is actually for horses…seriously. And other  animals, too. It is a legitimate veterinary tranquilizer, often used as a sedative.

A paper in Science Direct explained, “Its primary goal is to calm down animals  undergoing medical procedures or testing while minimizing their suffering. ” There was  some testing on humans as a potential sedative, pain killer, or anesthetic, but the FDA put  up a red light because of its effects on the central nervous system. It’s good for pigs,  but not for people, was the FDA’s decision.

Because it’s never been approved for humans, this  means drugs to counteract its toxicity in humans have never been created, and neither have ones  to treat addiction to it. The zombie drug is, therefore, a fairly unknown entity in the world  of human drug-taking. We do know that injection sites can turn into ulcers, and if ulcers aren’t  treated, they can turn into holes, and holes can become infected, and so on and so on until the  limb is completely runied.

If you want a formal explanation, the study we just mentioned said: “The mechanism by which xylazine causes skin wounds is not well understood, and wounds  have been reported beyond the sites of local injection. It has been postulated  that the pathogenesis involves peripheral vasoconstriction from α2-receptor activation. ” That means the blood vessels become constricted, and so the affected areas don’t get enough  blood, which can lead to the tissue dying.

There has also been an increase in Xylazine  fatal overdoses. The CDC said they went up 30% from 2019 to 2020. In 2021, Xylazine was said to  have been a factor in 3,468 US deaths, 73% of them men.

It’s when it's mixed with Fentanyl,  though, that it becomes really dangerous. More bad news is traditional opioid antagonists  like Narcan, which can bring someone out of an opiate overdose, doesn’t work for Xylazine.  There couldn’t be a worse combo than Fentanyl and Xylazine, but Xylazine is strong by itself.

In a study in 2023, Xylazine was found in drug samples in 36 US states. First, Fentanyl kicked  heroin off the streets, and then sometime around 2020, Xylazine arrived on the scene and rendered  the already strong bag of Fentanyl even stronger. The Department of Justice has partly  blamed Chinese gangs, writing in 2023: “DEA has seized xylazine-fentanyl mixtures  in 48 of 50 states and in Washington, D.

C. We know where this xylazine comes from—it  comes as powder from China and as liquid diverted from veterinary supply chains. ” A DEA report said: “A kilogram of xylazine powder can be  purchased online from Chinese suppliers with common prices ranging from $6-$20 U.

S.  dollars per kilogram. At this low price, its use as an adulterant may increase the  profit for illicit drug traffickers, as its psychoactive effects allow them to reduce the  amount of fentanyl or heroin used in a mixture.

” The Chinese suppliers don’t sell directly  to the US. The finished drugs or precursors usually go to Mexico and then across the border. Even so, the demand for regular narcotics in the US is there and has been there for a long  time.

China didn’t create the prescription opioid crisis; American companies did.  Still, it’s not helping the US that Chinese Fentanyl and Xylazine have hit its shores. According to the National Center for Drg Abuse Statistics, around 10 million American  adults abuse opioids at least once a year, or about 3.

8% of the entire population.  And this number doesn’t include the people who use the opioids as prescribed. .

The Brookings Institute wrote in 2023, “An estimated 12. 6% of the U. S.

workforce  receives an opioid prescription each year, and 75% of employers surveyed by  the National Safety Council report that they have been directly affected by opioids. ” The global pharmaceutical market has seen  massive growth during the past 20 years, with revenues worldwide totaling around  1. 48 trillion U.

S. dollars in 2022. And now we have fake pain meds coming into the US  via China or Mexico, pretending to be the legal ones that so many addicts so dearly want.

Had  those glitzy marketing campaigns for opiates never been a thing, it’s hard to imagine the  counterfeit explosion would have happened.