Fentanyl
On Nov. 4th Fort Worth Police were able to recover a kilo of Fentanyl. Crazy!
The risk is real and it’s here on our home turf. Many people who die of Fentanyl overdose don’t even know they are taking an opioid. We need drug testing services around FW, especially on party weekends in the downtown and surrounding areas with lots of bars. It is apparent bar owners and employees are well aware of the amounts of cocaine use going in their establishments on any given night. Talking with bartenders you’ll hear them talk about a type of customer who drinks 10 shots, but still jabbers at 90 miles a minute. The thing is, cocaine seems pretty harmless, especially in small doses, and to top it off, people who use cocaine while drinking tend to drink way more. During the height of my cocaine use, 2017-2018, I would spend double the amount of money on booze that I had spent on coke. It seems simple but, trust me, it’s accurate.
If I were to play a show and make $150 pay plus another $100 in tips, I’d be on pace to make a grand in that week, or maybe more. However, I was going out to the bar and buying a $20 bag of coke and around $40 dollars of liquor to take the edge off all the while sputtering around town in a foggy-clear-headed-haze, bar hopping until way past closing time. By 2018, when I started to back away from the party scene, I was buying a half-gram of coke ($40-$60) and spending around $100 dollars on alcohol almost every night. I’d get home with the sun and sleep all day. Waking up it would seem like I needed a bump and a shot just to get going. There’s nothing more hypocritical than using cocaine.
For me it was hypocritical because of all the violence that comes with each $20 bag and all my desire to be a productive member of society and take care of myself, which is impossible when using excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol. The amount of death and destruction behind creating a few kilos of cocaine is incredible. The number of people who are treated as cannon fodder and arrested and sentenced to long periods in prison so I can get some of the coke making it through the boarders is another reason I can’t continue to use coke. Also, coke only brings in about 100 dollars a kilo to the farmers who actually produce it but $150,000 at the street level. Even though the war on drugs has tried to stop the cultivation of the coca plant, it is still more profitable for a farmer in Columbia or Peru to grow coca than it is to grow any other crop. Cocao for peace is an initiative to substitute the chocolate tree for the cocaine bush. The violence, death and destruction of regular people was enough for me to take a step back from cocaine in 2018.
Over the years, I have found cocaine in every single bar I go to. Sometimes the employees are selling it, sometimes it’s the shoe shiner, other times the owner of the bar enjoys and other times there is dealer ‘assigned’ to that bar. People drink way more on coke. When someone is blacked out, or too drunk to drive themselves home, a bump can set them straight again and they make it to their house ok. There are so many reasons why a bar owner would turn a blind eye to cocaine use, and so they do. Also who wants to live in a world where a bar owner is minding your business. It’s just not their responsibility, even if they are indirectly benefiting. Plus, cocaine infused benders can be a lot of fun when music is involved.
Cocaine is a fast drug by nature, only lasting around 30 minutes per use. Of course the time varies depending on dose size and method of use, but the point I’m making is that it must be taken repeatedly over the course of a night out. So if you go out for a ‘normal night’ from 9pm until closing time at 2a, that’s five hours, so 10 doses, or 10 trips to the bathroom or car, or where ever you’re hiding out to get the bump done. Something common back then for me or others to do was to take a Xanax along with the cocaine and alcohol. Man o man, that’s some fucked up shit. Cocaine makes it’s impossible for your brain to recognize the expressions on other peoples’ faces. That is why a coke head can be such a dick sometimes, they just can’t process the social, verbal and bodily cues going on around them. This is also why the cocaine user is so happy. A great book to check out about the effects of alcohol and drugs on the user is Malcom Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers. The audio book is really badass as he reads it and during the quotations you hear the voice of the person being quoted.
In my 20s cocaine would show up at a party every once in a while and wasn’t a thing people did regularly. It was still frowned upon by most anyone. So my experience with it was minimal and actually pretty fun. In my first times using it, there were normally a group of us of at least four, and maybe 6 or 8 and we’d share a 20 bag or a half gram. While drinking and partying, it heightened everything and conversation seemed to flow. I’d babble on for hours seemingly making very close connections with those around me. Back then, I had no idea where to get cocaine. It just sort of appeared every now and then and we did it without really questioning it too much.
Knowing what I know now, I assume that during my 20s (2004-2014) people were using just as much coke as any other time, but a coke user is pretty secretive about it all. The people who use it are usually quiet and sneaky about it. That changed in my 30s when I really became part of the bar scene through music. At my height of use in 2018, it seemed to me everyone I saw was either asking me for a bump or offering one. There were great all night parties around the city and in some bars that I still remember as some of the best nights of my life. Point is, back then no one was worried about fentanyl. When we were doing coke, everyone was pretty sure it was not an opioid, and at worst it contained baby powder, laxative, caffeine powder, or aspirin. All of these are pretty harmless, although the coke that was laced with caffeine powder was a pain in the ass. That stuff made me stay up all night and sometimes well into the next day.
So to clarify, cocaine was no good to me. The small amount of social benefits that came with the first uses and the beginning of regular use, quickly disappeared within a year or two as the self destruction as too much alcohol and partying took its toll. I wouldn’t say I got so far gone that I was addicted and needed treatment, although a treatment program wouldn’t have hurt at all, but I was definitely ruining my life and any chances of ‘success’ I saw coming at me in music were quickly disappearing. Still, I wasn’t worried about accidently dying of a fentanyl overdose.
I moved down to Brazoria, TX area in August 2018 after a fight with a Marine at a bar. I was 34 still drinking in a honky-tonk. I had just finished my gig, lived across the street from the bar, did a few bumps of coke, ordered back to back rumple and jaeger shots and proceeded to have a third shot and few more bumps within 15 minutes and then suddenly I was fighting on the patio. I was doing 10 shots a night with ease and then driving home or all around, for that matter, and this was after my DWI in 2016. I still didn’t get it. Socializing and hanging out with friends was still the most important thing to me.
I got a job in Angleton at this big honky-tonk where I got to see Rick Travino and Doug Stone perform, and it wasn’t more than a month until I was offered cocaine down there as well. It’s hard to say no. Even now in Fort Worth, I’m still occasionally offered a bump, and 9 times out of 10 I take it. These days, I really don’t know where to get it, so I figure I’m not at risk of relapsing or trying to run off and buy my own supply, so the risk of one bump seems pretty small. But that’s where this fentanyl stuff comes in. A single bump could kill you if it has fentanyl in it.
The nature of fentanyl and dumb asses is that the wrong amount is often used. With a substance so potent, if a dumb ass makes a batch of their own, trying to cut the cost and up the profit, and they do it wrong, then you have a bad batch. If we are talking a kilo of cocaine laced with fentanyl, that would amount to a ‘bad batch’ of 1000 half gram baggies. That’s what I used to buy. It would amount to over 2000 $20 baggies. Each 20 has probable 5-10 doses in it. Groups of people are dying. 6 people who all work together in a bar or restaurant all take the same bad batch and all die. This is super serious.
The news stories I’ve linked are from just the last few months. This bad batch scenario is happening and could happen here in Fort Worth. We are lucky the police like to brag and so have told us they have found a kilo of pure fentanyl. They’ve reported the kilo has the potential to kill 500,000 people. Imagine a fucking dumb ass pouring this shit down the toilet during a drug bust. Jesus help us. I’m blown away at the number of news stories involving fatal batches of cocaine and the ensuing deaths. You must suspect with the amount of cocaine found by the police that statistically there is much more of the stuff still out there. I assume most of the fentanyl is being used in press pills. I have never used this stuff, but have seen people snort it as an alternative to heroin. I assume that is what most of the fentanyl in Fort Worth is being used as, that or fake Oxys. This is well known and part of the opioid crisis across America.
I’m grateful that in my short lived cocaine period, we weren’t worried about accidently over dosing on an opioid. I damn sure felt like I was going to die of a heart attack at times, but luckily, I never did and no one I know did either. It might be age, or the fear of destitution, but cocaine isn’t a drug suitable for me and my lifestyle at this time. I have some hidden aspirations of one day cultivating a coca tree for myself and chewing the leaves while working on my farm, but don’t let me bore you with my idealism.
You might be wondering what you can do to help this situation. I mean nobody likes a snitch, and after all, if you rat out a dealer or a bar or a party where cocaine and other drugs are being consumed, you’re not helping. Being a snitch, when it comes to drugs, is the worst thing, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of other times when snitching is the exact and right thing to do, you just have to figure all that our for yourself. If you snitch on your friends, you’re likely to ruin their lives. Being caught with cocaine is a felony in Texas. If you tattle on the bar, then you risk something bad happening to that place and all its employees and all the musicians who benefit from it. You also run the risk of having more cops patrol the bar during leaving hours and pulling you and your friends over and sticking you with a lifetime of charges. And if you are the type to call the cops on a party, well may you burn in hell.
So, maybe talking to your friends is the answer? I’d say yes, but it doesn’t really work. People are going to do what they are going to do and the only way to change their mind is to provide them with the information they need to make better informed decisions. I wish the FWPD would have provided the name of the neighborhood where they found the fentanyl. In 2019, FW was reportedly responding to 3 opioid over doses a day. I don’t know if that number is going up or down, but what I feel is coming is a wave of local musicians dying from cocaine laced with fentanyl, or even myself dying from it, taking a quick bump from someone in the bathroom at a show. The reality is I don’t know these people, and people who drink don’t care about the future and they could easily use some unsuspecting bystander to test their coke for them. I’ve resolved to stopping the use of cocaine completely. There are thousands of reasons for this anyway, but the fear of death by one bump is the kicker.
One thing you can do is carry NARCAN. Anyone can buy it with a downloadable prescription, and it’s usually free of charge. In the circles of people who use Fentanyl to get high, as a substitute for heroin, they have long been carrying doses of NARCAN with them. They have terms like ‘death rattle’ which refers to the change in breathing patterns as someone who is overdosing grasps for their last breaths of life. NARCAN can immediately reverse the effects of Fentanyl and bring the user back to life. There are some gnarly videos on YouTube of people coming back after being hit with the NARCAN. There is even a video of a lady being instructed to give mouth to mouth to an overdosing junky. DO NOT do this. Chest compressions are all that is needed, do not endanger yourself by touching your lips to some junky. It won’t really help and there are diseases you can catch from lip to lip contact. Be careful. With NARCAN you can simply put it in their nose.
Whatever we do out here, with the rise of synthetic drugs, there will always be some crazy shit going down. We have a responsibility to be honest with each other and with ourselves and our cities have a responsibility to create safer ways to consume drugs. If we can police the bars with the absolute authority of the TBAC, then we could do the same with all drugs. That is my opinion. A legal drug is a safe drug for all. If it is regulated, then we don’t need the cartels to peddle it into our country and we won’t be responsible for the death and destruction that comes with the drug’s production. If the drug is regulated we can assure it’s pure and the product can come with labels so that the consumer can be certain of the dose size and make-up. We can already see these benefits in marijuana industry in states where it is regulated. Don’t want to smoke butane in your dabs? Ask the clerk for some ice water bubble hash. It’s that simple.
No one should have to die from trying cocaine. I’m sure glad I haven’t.