A too-deadly drug?
I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as a drug that is too deadly? In the past two years in Dallas, Texas, 21 teenagers have died from an overdose of cheese heroin. Cheese heroin is apparently a half-and-half blend of black tar Mexican heroin and crushed over-the-counter antihistamine drugs like Tylenol PM. The mix is apparently highly addictive and very deadly, because the two components are both highly effective depressants, and when combined, can simply shut the body down. So why does anyone take this drug? Is there such a thing as a drug that is too deadly?
There are some pretty deadly drugs out there. In addition to cheese heroin, people get high off of sniffing various chemicals and aerosols, a habit which simply destroys the brain through lack of oxygen (if not the addition of deadly chemicals) and leads to severe mental retardation. Heck, even regular heroin is very dangerous — just ask Janis Joplin. The dangerousness of a drug seems to be inversely proportional to how widely it is used (ignoring other factors, like cost). Marijuana, which isn’t known to have ever killed anyone, is very widely used, with more than half of all adults admitting they’ve tried it. Cheese heroin and huffing paint thinners, on the other hand, are much less widely used, and I think a lot of it has to do with a prospective user examining the danger and coming to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth it.
Which brings me back to my original question: is there a drug that is too deadly? If sniffing rat poison got you high, would people do it, central nervous system paralysis be damned? If some extreme version of crack cocaine (let’s call it abyss cocaine) was developed that had a 50% of killing you but produced the craziest high imaginable, would anyone take the plunge? I suspect at least a few people would try a given drug, no matter how dangerous it is. After all, a fair amount of people who wish to commit suicide do so by taking drugs, so why not go out on a killer high?
