GEtting high on Tramadol

There is a bit of a kerfuffle on the BBC because a british lady was arrested for smuggling Tramadol to her young husband who claimed he needed them for his back pain.

She was carrying 300 tablets, so the number is borderline if personal use or for sale.

Tramadol in the US is a mild narcotic pain killer we give instead of the more addicting Percocet or Tylenol 3 to old folks in pain.

But in the Middle East, it is a major problem for abuse, including having the terrorists take it to get high before they go out to fight.

UKMirror article.

an interpol article says the source of the drug in the Middle East comes from "Asia". Well, duh.

this article in the Indian press suggests one of their companies was behind the huge amount seized in Italy.
DNAIndia also notes that they are the source of illegal Tramadol used by terrorists and others in the Mediterranean.



Conversation.com has a long article on the uses of this mild narcotic, but then goes on to discuss it's abuse in Africa and the Middle East.

 tramadol is popular in Egypt and is misused widely. Indeed, besides it being a recreational drug, many people – especially from the poor working class – take tramadol to give them more energy, to work for longer or to hold down two jobs.
It has been a particularly serious problem in places such as Gaza, where addiction has led to an illegal trade in tramadol, often smuggled in through underground tunnels. This has led the government to take a particularly hard line on it.

but use and abuse are two different things: The dosage differs.

The usual dosage of Tramadol for pain is one 50 mg tablet every six hours. The TamolX is a longer acting version of the drug, used for chronic pain, with 225 mg. Since the drug can be ground up and give an instant high, it is the drug of choice.

in contrast, abuse takes larger amounts. Again from the DNAINDIA article:

The Gulf and Middle East countries, where the armed conflicts fueled growth of an illegal drug economy, demand in trafficking of powerful amphetamines and opioid painkillers from source countries like India has increased. Pills like Captagon and Tramadol are favored by militants for their sedative effects as it makes them 'invincible' during fighting.

captagon is a variation of methamphetamine with theophylline, a variation of caffine... in other words, a stimulant.

Fenethylline, also known by its brand name Captagon, is a combination of amphetamine, a stimulant, and theophylline, a drug traditionally used to treat respiratory diseases such as asthma. The latter greatly enhances the former's psychoactive properties, making the codrug a powerful amphetamine, according to scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who published their findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“It boosts the overall stimulant activity,” Cody Wenthur, the study's co-author and a postdoctoral research associate at the Scripps Research Institute, said in a statement. “You get a faster onset than other amphetamine drugs and a stronger effect than just amphetamine alone.”

more here.

alcohol and marijuana and other drugs have a long history of being used by soldiers, and may be behind a lot of the worst atrocities in war.


I remember when my father's small company was bought by a larger one that had many medically related businesses. One day, back in the 1970's, he told me he had run across evidence that his company was shipping millions of amphetamine type pills to clinics in Tiajuana... all legal, of course.

Back then, it was being used for dieting, for students trying to study hard, and by truck drivers to stay awake in long hauls. What got it banned was after a couple of bad accidents by these truck drivers, but any student could tell you of the paranoia and violence by students who did too much drugs for all nighters, i.e. 24 hour study before tests.

so the illegal drug trade not only funds terrorism, but is used by terrorists to fight.

the use of stimulents in the US military is another dirty secret: because the alternative is being sleepy and making mistakes when you fly a plane, or being too tired to fight.

the use of amphetamines goes back to World War II...

but were mainly used by Japan and Germany... a recent book discusses the widepread use in Nazi Germany not just in the military but in civilians.

But now the use of "go/nogo" pills is an open secret.

oday, American and other nations’ armed forces use more modern stimulants and sleep aids to improve performance in combat.  The policy to use these medications, however, has not always won unanimous support from military leadership.  In 1992 Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill A. McPeak banned the distribution of amphetamines to aircrew, though he admitted that his decision was not based on science but only his own personal experiences as a pilot.  The practice was reinstated by the USAF in 1996 when Gen McPeak left his position as USAF Chief of Staff.2  In the aviation community, these meds are often better known as ‘Go’ and ‘No-Go’ pills.

NYTimes article on the problem (2012) wonders if the increased use of stimulents has increased the rate of PTSS.

Because norepinephrine enhances emotional memory, a soldier taking a stimulant medication, which releases norepinephrine in the brain, could be at higher risk of becoming fear-conditioned and getting PTSD in the setting of trauma. This possibility is supported by both animal and human studies.

Finally, the fact that China is looking the other way when their drugs kill people (both opioids in the US and stimulents throughout asia) is an open secret.

One commetator quipped that the opioid crisis in the US was China's payback for the Opium wars when Britain forced them to buy opium.

But here in the Philippines, it is the meth/stimulents/ "shabu" that is the problem.

The drug war gets all the press, but the murders by druggies do not.

For example, over the last few years, several older people were killed in home robberies, which in the past would have been non violent. Were drugs involved?

A young lady across the street died of a "heart attack". she had once bee in jail for drug pushing, and it was suspected the heart attack was a drug related overdose.

Or one of our cousins shot his brother and killed him. The Brother was angry at this first brother for something, and one night, he was "drunk" and attacked him while he was sleeping. The sleeping brother always kept a shotgun by his bed so grabbed it and shot.  Shotguns are not usually fatal, but in close range, it hit an artery in his leeg and he bled to death.

Alcohol might have been enough to fuel the anger of the dead man, of course, but with all the shabu locally, I wonder if he wasn't doing that also.

Sigh.

In other words, the "human rights" folks are up in arms about the drug war, but not about drug crime.

Ditto for the local Catholic church which worries about the "poor", the Pope's "green" agenda, and about dead drug dealers, but not about the poor becoming addicted.

 the bile quote is:

English Standard Versionnor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.

Sorcery in the good old days was often taking drugs to see visions: using "religion" as an excuse to get high.

Drugs were around back then.
of course they also used drugs as... medicines.

One of the passages in the Odyssey was when Helen mixed some Egyptian drugs into the wine so her husband and the other soldiers could forget their sad memories.

So the drug treatment of PTSS has a long history too.