Mental Health conversation centered around 12 step recovery and related topics. We talk about spiritual living, living with addiction and growing in the 12 steps. Find us on our home at https://recoverysortof.com/. If you want to join the conversation, email us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RecoverySortOf, Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recovery_sort_of/, or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Recovery-Sort-Of-112376247161866/?view_public_for=112376247161866.
TranqDope, aka xylanzine and fentanyl, is becoming more and more prevalent in the Baltimore/Philadelphia area. Xylazine in a tranquilizer, hence the tranqdope term. This is a dangerous mixture to anyone who does not know what they are getting, because narcan does not work on a tranquilizer overdose. Further making this terrible for anyone struggling with using, is the wounds that sometimes appear after using xylazine. We talk with Nurse Jason about this scary new mix of drugs that are on the street in place of heroin, how to recognize it, what to do with it once you know, and safest methods of taking care of the wound. Listen in and share your thoughts with us.
How to find us and join the conversation:
Email: RecoverySortOf@gmail.com
Episodes mentioned:
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TranqDope, aka xylanzine and fentanyl, is becoming more and more prevalent in the Baltimore/Philadelphia area. Xylazine in a tranquilizer, hence the tranqdope term. This is a dangerous mixture to anyone who does not know what they are getting, because narcan does not work on a tranquilizer overdose. Further making this terrible for anyone struggling with using, is the wounds that sometimes appear after using xylazine. We talk with Nurse Jason about this scary new mix of drugs that are on the street in place of heroin, how to recognize it, what to do with it once you know, and safest methods of taking care of the wound. Listen in and share your thoughts with us.
How to find us and join the conversation:
Email: RecoverySortOf@gmail.com
Episodes mentioned:
Transcript:
recovery sort of is a podcast where we discuss recovery topics from the perspective of people living in long-term recovery this podcast does not intend to represent the views of any particular group organization or Fellowship the attitudes expressed are solely the opinion of its contributors be advised there may be strong language or topics of an adult nature [Music]
welcome back it’s recovery sort of I am Jason a guy that does not mess around with silosy and I’m Billy I’m a person that long term recover or the xylophone I’m Jenny I’m also a person in long-term recording and my name is Jason I’m a wound care nurse yeah we got Jason back on some of you guys might remember him we had him on for an episode we we talked about wound care we talked about what he and his work through voices is is doing in the community and then we apparently there’s some some new stuff we got to talk about with Jason so I’m not going to do a whole lot of introduction I’m going to let you take the show away for now okay so um I was asked to uh kind of talk about xylazine and tranq dope quote-unquote recently the news uh and the News being like Vice and kind of that more the underground news agencies have started talking about this new um drug that’s becoming an epidemic it’s actually been around since 2 2000 2002 um Puerto Rico it was super popular for whatever reason you could buy bundles of drugs uh your heroin cocaine and tranquilizer in like a a three bag and you could mix what you wanted so you could pick you know if you want more coke or you want more heroin are you a little bit more of the sedation from the tranquilizer for whatever reason it picked up it’s kind of cool though it’s like a little like a little mini pack like a sale right like it’s like it’s like like the um I mean there’s something intriguing about it for a guy like me I’m like man I could have got it all in one shot like it’s a three for one yeah like if you want to sleep no mix and match right 100 I love it um so when the borders locked up and heroin became much harder to find and Fentanyl became the Mainstay in the states for whatever reason the drug cartels started mixing the fentanyl with xylazine which is a um a legally obtained it’s not an illegal drug um tranquilizer for animals they use it’s like a lot of the misconceptions is only for large animals my wife worked with animals and she used it on rabbits yeah right I heard cats yeah they use it on little animals too um did you just say safe for bunnies and kittens it’s safer bunnies and kittens yeah right okay well no that’s actually one of the talking points I always say because everybody’s like it’s for large animals like elephants and it’s not it’s it’s safe for bunnies and kittens so that became like the Mainstay um so you’re saying they’ve done animal testing with this it’s actually safe for Animals yeah unfortunately it’s not safe for humans in 19 I think 63 um or maybe 67. it’s it’s mid 60s somewhere they the drug came out I think bear Pharmaceuticals made it for a new blood pressure med and it was wildly unpredictable um some people got it some people at the same dose that someone took they actually lowered their blood pressure and it was successful killed somebody so the first death by the FDA leaned it unnecessary unstable for human consumption and then it just went to veterinary medicine and people had like played with it before on the drug trade but it wasn’t a thing now that it’s a thing um yeah it’s a real thing so ninety percent of the samples of drugs taken from Philadelphia test positive for xylazine we have the same numbers in the county we’re in here um because most of this County’s drug Supply comes from Philadelphia so yeah and apparently um some from some of the the contacts we have there’s a couple main cartels that feed Philadelphia and they may be the ones responsible for shifting it up the the coast also I heard they’re starting to find it in like Michigan and points you know it’s starting to spread out it’s farther away from Philly there’s 13 or 14 States now that have confirmed issues with it um it’s everywhere yeah Massachusetts up through the Northeast the East Coast has been hit hard the west coast is starting to see it but um just by seeing it all the time here I’ve been in contact with now people from Oregon uh Michigan St Louis Florida Alabama New Mexico and these are all like nurses Nurse Practitioners or people running certain service programs and all of them are starting to say there are participants are telling us that I’m I feel different when I get high I’m not I don’t want to get us too far off in la la land while we’re still describing the problem but I’m just curious what everybody thinks of like how do you think this works somewhere along the line wherever these shots are being called in these cartels right is this like is this like the main guy uh or or the main guy scientists coming to him and be like hey there’s this other drug we can mix these precise amounts in it’ll work really well or do you think the main guy is just like let’s throw some other drugs in there and see what happens I honestly I think I think it’s a little bit more precise but I think it’s way after the facts so the fentanyl they know the fentanyl’s coming into the uh States just in fentanyl I mean you saw the colored fennel and skiddles bags and stuff like that um that’s just pure fentanyl when it gets to the the distribution level and the bagging level um or you know putting in capsules or the little bags is where this is Allah zinc is added oh okay and I and actually it’s in the book fentanyl ink that guy talks about the process of how these drug cartels and people found out about these drugs with the Advent of the internet and all this information being available online then they could research certain chemical compounds and be like oh these compounds do something similar so we can make this with these backyard drugs we got to you know that was a big part of it was all the information being available on the internet so it is pretty uh uh organized like it is I mean it’s billions and billions of dollars to these cartels so the fact that they have a couple chemists on staff is really not a surprise the crazy part is when you you can trace it all the way back but in Puerto Rico they don’t know why it started they can’t find why it started and apparently there’s an island in Puerto Rico off the Puerto Rican main uh Island and it’s it’s very rural they have uh a ton of horses and they think it may have started there for the abuse of like veterinary medicine because they didn’t have any other drugs but they’re not 100 sure um and that’s the one place you can treat it all the way back there an epidemiologist said hey guys in 2000 like 2008 I think he published the paper saying this is a problem it’s coming and nobody listened it was a white paper that he wrote nobody cared and I could tell you some drug addicts started it because living around this area in Cecil County when I was in my 20s a friend of ours had a horse farm and we went and still tranquilizer out of there they can cook it up and snorted it and we had no I don’t couldn’t tell you what it was called we had no idea what was going to happen we’re like I don’t know it’s an animal tranquilizer it’s got to [ ] you up in some way and I think and that’s honestly why it’s added to the drug Supply fentanyl is a great drug but it lasts for 15 to 20 minutes and it’s over um they use it all the time in medicine and it’s a safe drug relatively when used properly right um pharmaceutical grade stuff that you know what you’re getting you know what you’re taking but it only lasts for 20 minutes and so what I heard with the xylazine was I guess since it’s readily available to Pharmacists and it’s pretty cheap a lot of even like pharmacist assistants have access to it so you don’t need like a medical license or a pharmacy to get it you sort of just need to know a friend that works at a vet and you can get it my in basket I literally have a 50 kilogram drum that I got a price for from India a pure powdered xylazine nice so I get for like do you still want this email it’s like hey you’re still interested because I did I did this probably a year ago for a talk I was giving to Harford County um politicians and I wanted to show them how easy it was to get right and like I just pulled it up showed him the email like hey I can buy a 50 kilogram drum it’s like 100 bucks a kilo but right like that’s crazy right right you can trace that like wouldn’t like that’s my thought like isn’t that super easy for the FBI whoever to follow it’s not a scheduled drug yeah so that’s why it’s a pharmacy I mean it’s for animals so they don’t track it yeah it’s not anybody’s still they’re still buying it for animals like that’s still you said because it’s an old drug that’s and that’s the interesting part so it is still used for animals um there was a lot of and this is I’ve been part of a bunch of talks lately with brand new information because when I guess people that do what we do that treat people on the street and like we’re front line but we’re the actually gathering information so there’s a big group of us that come together now and readily share information the newest information came out of Philadelphia with a recent drug bust where they actually had the bottles of animal xylazine up to a point they hadn’t found bottles at a drug bust and this was a huge bus like multiple houses were brought down um but it took less than a day for the the drug Supply to pick right back up um but inside those houses they were packaging houses and they found Veterinary six like six packs that are shrink wrapped together and they found them open and they just just like you said you cook it up you double boiler evaporate the liquid and you get the salt and that’s the thylazine I’m still messed up about the 20-minute high from fentanyl I’m like that don’t seem worth it no I can I can tell you now when we found we’re part of a drug testing program uh voice of Hope is um through the state of Maryland and when people bring in empty bags paraphernalia anything I can swab it and send it into National like a National Lab to test someone had given had called and we picked up a weird druggist fold envelope and um it was full and when we tested it um it came back as pure heroin the reason why somebody gave it is because they thought it was cut with a hallucinogen and they didn’t know what they were doing because there is a completely heroin naive population of drug addicts right now right that don’t know what real like opiates or not real opiates but um anything other than fentanyl they know no feelings other than Fentanyl that’s to me that’s nuts yeah yeah it was it was crazy so maybe we could solve the drug problem by just making all the drugs uh no no well yeah make them all pure but then make them all like Veterinary oh thanks like oh yeah heroin we use that for the dog you know the the methamphetamines and the crack we give that to the mice and I don’t know yeah so they do know now to answer that question that is coming from like offset of purchasing Veterinary stuff because this stuff was bought it wasn’t stolen because they’re one of the hypotheses was that it was just kind of disappearing from animal shipments like trucks and stuff like that but it wasn’t like people were actually ordering it and being having it shipped yeah I heard in some places it’s pretty easy to get a Veterinary license too like it’s not like a medical license to get and like if you have say a farm where you have a bunch of horses you can get some sort of like lower level Veterinary license so you’d be able to get it with something like that so it’s not near as tracked or regulated between um pharmaceutical meds and large animal care it’s not like it is for like regular you know you went in for something for your dog or cat it’s harder to get drugs if you own a farm or have someone that runs a farm or owns one it’s far easier get antibiotics and stuff like that yeah so it’s not on chewy but it is actually on chewy I think but you need a prescription yes you need a prescription for it which is crazy yeah so the only obstacle is you just don’t know how to spell it right yeah I mean that’s tricky we’ve actually I’ve actually found someone in this County that actually purchase it and Jacks it and adds it to what he uses and he’s wondering why he has wounds okay so so far if I’m a person listening to this show uh or this episode at least I’m thinking [ ] yeah score they’re putting more drugs in my truck so why don’t why don’t we go towards like why is this bad why is this dangerous what’s the harm it’s twofold there’s there’s actually a bunch of bad things along with it um I’ll see the one I love the most for the end um but the the first and foremost is naloxone doesn’t work on it so when you overdose a lot of overdoses are misconceived as an opiate overdose right and then people are pounding in six seven doses of nasal Narcan which is overkill right um yeah and this is a tranquilizer right so it’s not an opiate so it’s a totally different it doesn’t work any of those it doesn’t work on any of the brain receptors that the opioids do naloxone is great at shoving all the opiates off the brain receptors but it does nothing for xylazine and um what’s happening is people are giving all this Narcan saying oh you know it took eight doses to wake them up it really didn’t like the first two doses of Narcan are pretty much putting you into withdrawal like when you give eight you go into rapid withdrawal so what’s happening is that person’s in Rapid withdrawal all the all the fun stuff that comes along with withdrawals there the nausea the shakes the chills the pain everything um but you can’t move so you’re kind of locked in so when they come to from the xylazine it’s pretty crazy like that’s when people run that’s when people fight that’s and all that other stuff um or they don’t make it because no one’s protecting their Airway and that’s the big take home um we went to a big harm reduction conference in Puerto Rico and the big take home nobody was talking about xylazine except for uh kudos to the state of Maryland Maryland and Hopkins were the really the only ones talking about it which was crazy and the big takeaway from the harm reduction this is like Airway protection and um rescue breaths because those are the two things that that will save people so I knew Maryland would be first to something I just didn’t know what it was it’s a horrible thing to be first yeah so Philly wasn’t represented there no so the people that were actually talking about it that had they had multiple um presentations through it like like some of they were smaller small room presentations and large room presentations was Maryland with a cohort through Hopkins huh and uh well I have you tell me more what’s Airway protection so it sounds like jargon no I’m sorry yeah I always forget this stuff so Airway protection a lot of people when they overdose you find them you know you’re in a car slumped over you shoot two doses of Narcan in them and they are dosing they usually wake up or they should start to you know look around talk to you that kind of thing um what happens is uh xylazine can actually cause your Airway to not work so well like your breathing hole gets a little loose and won’t work um Airway protection means laying the person on the side on the left side in the recovery position it’s in all the dark hand trainings but it’s kind of it’s not like glossed over but it’s kind of forgotten about so what you’re doing is protecting the airway from vomit because nine times out of ten you’re giving them too much naloxone and vomiting is probably going to happen and a lot of these folks end up aspirating or they choking their own vomit into their lungs and vomit and lung tissue don’t go well together so the the protection for that would be similar to the CPR like lay them on their side yep left side arm underneath head tilted away and down um making sure their Airway their neck isn’t like kind of crunked over and then um the rescue breath so one of the mantras people were saying there typically you give naloxone to get a conversation you’re talking to someone they wake up you’re like oh what happened you’re trying to fill them in and it’s it’s respirations not conversations so now they’re they’re telling people watch for breathing and if you’re at like 10 breaths a minute that’s enough to sustain life and you might have to sit there longer now with when someone overdoses and we’ve seen evidence here of that I feel like I could use this to my advantage somehow like damn girl I think you’re rosalizing well we can’t talk right now we got to give you some rest sorry uh tell me how it works yeah yeah I’ll let you know um I mean that’s that’s pretty scary I will say when you said Airway protection uh the rational part of my brain was like yeah he’s got to be talking about like CPR keeping popping out of their mouth the other part was like do I have to like stick my finger down there to make sure it’s clear or something no no that’s the old way they used to say like this the like sweep the mouth and stuff yeah you end up getting bit yeah yeah bad um it’s really just making sure they’re laying on their side and not vomiting I I know this wasn’t the important part of what you were saying but I’m kind of hung up on it like the airway hole gets too loose to work so the muscles the the kind of the muscle the Epic the thing in the back of your throat that flips back and forth really just stops working okay okay it’s overly sedated or it’s a muscle relaxer that’s it’s almost like the uh sorry Plumbing background the uh the check valve yeah if the check valve stops okay yeah that makes it back low either way or right your whole thing stops working yep okay 100 so um so you got that you got that naloxone doesn’t work on it xylazine addiction is a real thing now and that’s kind of out there um you can’t test it on people so this is all anecdotally from Case by case studies of people coming into the emergency room or the hospital that are now um withdrawing or detoxing and three to four days in they get so much bent up anxiety that they just can’t handle it but they’re being they’re being met with their opioid demand you know they’re they’re they’re getting their medicine they’re up on their um methadone or Suboxone and they don’t know what’s going on and typical drugs that work the clonidines and the benzos and stuff really aren’t touching it and they so these cases are now becoming more prevalent or at least people more aware of it and um that’s another bad side of it is the xylazine addiction because it causes the withdrawal from it causes extreme extreme anxiety well and I would imagine that the difficulty like it was it sucked for for me when I was using because it was like man I don’t have money I got to get that I got to go purchase it I gotta hope it I don’t get burnt but geez the added part of like oh [ ] I didn’t realize there was a second or third you know substance in here that are now I’m also addicted to and and who knows if Jerry across town also has that in his [ ] and right and that and that’s actually a big part of it so when we do our drug testing we don’t check for percentages right like the way that we do it is it’s supposed to be quick and fast just to tell you what’s in it um there is a toxicologist that’s an addiction medicine specialist in Philly now doing quantity he’s like a forensic toxicologist and they’re showing percentages of some of the xylazine how it’s you know the bag hits the streets more Fentanyl and xylazine than after you know like a couple days as he starts creeping out the fennel starts creeping down we’ve tested bags are just silencing no fentanyl no opiates um but we haven’t tested anything that’s just fentanyl nose Islands you know so it’s they’re just adding more it’s saving pennies but it’s still it’s a market they know they got oh yeah this is uh capitalism and we’re talking capitalism like pharmaceutical capitalism on like the microgram level but it’s still they’re saving money on it if they found out you could put human turds in there and make some money there would be a lot of people’s hands and toilets I’m just saying 100 guaranteed 100 any way to make a game [Music] this episode has been brought to you in part by Voices of Hope Inc a non-profit recovery organization made up of people in recovery family members and allies together members strive to protect the Dignity of those that use drugs and those in recovery by advocating for treatment harm reduction and support resources and mentoring please visit us at
www.voicesofhopemaryland.org and consider donating to our calls
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thank you so you have the addiction the withdrawal the uh overdoses and then also and this is a major one and this is what usually gets the most attention is wound care and they don’t know why it causes wounds and you know if if all of us were injecting drugs we may not get one or you might get one and never get it again or you can inject in your arm and on your leg you get a wound so this is a really weird drug inside the body and they’re not 100 sure why it happens there’s a couple schools of thought and all of them seem right some of the other schools of thought within the past six months have kind of faded a bit like one of them is that it it increases the attic picking like everybody in medicine wants to blame something and everything’s everything’s good on the table like everything’s fair game on the table but unfortunately because of the stigma attached to addicts picking was always one of the things and I’m like I have I have very pristine folks that come in here that are like like profoundly clean great hygiene that don’t pick anything and the wounds still appear and they’re still problematic um and that was like my big flag waving like not everybody does drugs it’s dirty right and most people that do drugs want to know there’s xylazine in it like that was the other thing that other people were kind of shocked about like when we started testing I have a board and you can go over and see like the fentanyl xylazine heroin none of that or what’s in it and um through just general education I started telling people like when you go to the hospital tell them you know you’re taking Fentanyl and xylazine let the every doctor know what this is and they can call me because sometimes I mean this is still very very new even though it hit the news um like we were focused in the newspaper the sun like in in June and even then it was recognized back in June that was a problem but like the Baltimore Sun was ahead of head of some of the news agencies and picking it up there’s a joke yeah yeah it’s crazy um so the wounds are they can be debilitating a lot of providers look at these wounds and provided me a doctor especially in the emergency room and they’re so gnarly looking that amputation is an option right away and what we’re finding is with the right client or participant amputation is not necessary at all but it it takes that client wanting to get better wanting their wounds to heal and actually like adhering to a plan but we have a we have a participant now that went to the hospital and they they told them that they would lose a finger and that the wounds almost closed now and it takes it does take time but it takes that person being diligent enough to want to heal themselves now I’m not recommending this for anybody but just I’m sorry I keep going to try um smoking turrets
if you had this on like the tip of your finger could you just cut your own finger off would that get rid of it or is it like through your body and that’s just where it’s showing up it’s through the body and where it’s showing up okay so some people we we have some participants that will inject in their arms I have one that was this is a slide that’s got some traction now a girl injected in her feet and you could see the injection sites and day one we saw the wound start and day five I was able to take the same photo and to show where the wounds have progressed and there’s one site that was an injection site and a lot of people were like oh it’s Downstream for one but it wasn’t like a lot of people think because when you inject it’ll you know it travels um it’s just in the bloodstream causing these wounds and it’s not yeah and people that snort it get the wounds inside their nose too wow but not everybody gets it right so what works for you and this is where I think some of the street level information gets crossed what works for you may not work for you but it works for me too so we’re around telling everybody oh just snort it right but you do it and like you’re blowing out like an aborted Mouse feet is out of your nose like this big blood clot and chunks of meat come out um so it doesn’t work for you there’s no right answer to like like how to how to do this safely right and that’s why I you talked about it in the 60s it was being tested for humans it was unpredictable then and it’s still unpredictable wildly unpredictable yep the FDA did something right by saying you can’t use it on humans but now we’re we’re kind of locked into place now because teaching institutions can’t test on people even willing people to see what it does or how we can like fix it like is there a cream you can put on the site to decrease like the trauma to the wound area after injection like it starts with a like a kind of a purpley spot and a blister could you put a lotion or cream on that because there are some medicines that do work but you can’t test on it and there’s no there’s no like like exceptions to these rules now could you find someone to test on probably I think some of the institutions are looking into this now dealing with participants like some of the teaching institutions testing their drugs on site and then treating the person and documenting what they did to that person so at least there’s some sort of documentation behind it right because right now there’s none it’s like me sharing with other people right so so I’m curious when you’re treating people who have gotten these wounds are you finding that like you said it takes the the specific person who really has the ability in that moment to show up and and the things that you’re asking them to do on a regular basis is that proving effective every time or is the treatment also kind of sporadic just like the drug where sometimes this works sometimes it doesn’t I I knock knock on wood I haven’t met that yet okay I’ve been really successful with things um I’m treating them very delicately like I’m treating it like it’s your butt there’s certain types of wounds the immune system causes like your body’s fighting itself I’m treating the wound like that this is right where I was going thank you so I’m of that school of thought too I think there’s an immune immune system type wound I think the body’s reacting to it and there might be some other factors to it but I think the immune system this looks it looks like it smells like and tastes like a wound the immune system causes but fortunately enough I had a lot of exposure to in Baltimore working with um like a certain it’s a certain rare and exotic room kind of thing um so I’m treating it kind of the same way and it’s working okay and other folks are trying different things you know other like some work some don’t but this has proved to be successful like when I first started here like my like the formula like the things that I wanted here probably 15 20 things I’ve actually kind of summed it up in the four okay and one of which is super easy to use and that’s like the the go-to for me it’s a burn dressing so I’m treating it delicately almost like you would treat a burn right we’ve had good success with this kind of dressing in a clinical setting too you know a lot of times in clinical setting you have access to all this expensive stuff like really expensive drugs and really expensive topical things you can put on um this has been working and it’s easy it’s nursing easy so it’s not like a strain on the staff um financially a lot of folks you know for whatever reason a lot of our participants are like the fight or flight they just Bounce from the hospital this is easy to dress it’s not expensive so it’s not like a stressfulness system either I know the local wound center is actually starting to pick up on it because some of our participants that do have insurance that have been following up because I want to teach everybody I can about how to do it right and share with everybody because it’s a lot less work for me if institutions are driving bigger more people are actually treating it I don’t need to and the ones that the people I’ve convinced that actually keep their appointments at the women’s center the wound center is actually sending them out with this stuff now so that’s a win in my book well I’m just gonna say people have been injecting drugs for decades what is different I mean we’ve always heard of you know track marks and abscess and things like that what is different about these wounds that we’re seeing now with the xylazine that’s traditional so take all of the the issues you have with injection drugs that everyone knows already the track marks like the um like the hardened veins and are like losing the ability to inject and stuff like that and then add on um these wounds start like a little purple splotch and kind of looks like they’re on fire the edges are not um you know like a wounds round when this first starts it kind of looks like it’s like if you ever lit a leaf on fire and blew it out how the edges kind of Cinder in and kind of like erratically burn that’s what the edge of the wound look like um but it’s only like a purple discoloration like a weird bruise and then a blister forms the blister comes off and that bruise is actually dead it’s dead skin underneath but it really doesn’t go deep and over time a lot of people um and this is one of the the street medicine things that I hate is everybody they’re all it needs to get a scab the minute it gets hard what happens is that tissue starts to almost like a cork it sits in it holds the bottle open like it clogs up the bottle when this stuff gets hard it’s probably you know like a centimeter maybe a little bit more deep but it will make the wound not heal and it stays there like three four or five months if you don’t do anything with it and it’s this word weird hard black spot and unfortunately over time your body doesn’t like it um they usually don’t get infected that which is pretty that’s a unique part of this and it might hurt around the edges people start injecting and that’s one thing that I I’d love to know more of why they do a lot of these wounds people make worse by injecting around the edge of the wound part of me wants to say maybe it’s pain relief you know because they’re not getting a vein like the tissue around it they’re pulling up like like pinkish red fluid but it’s not blood people are aware it’s not blood when I ask they always tell me oh I don’t have any veins I can get I’m like I I can see three on your arms right now I got you but you keep going back over here that you literally keep going to the wound edges um we have participants that like their whole back of their hands eaten away and they continue to use the edge of the wound why I mean you got friends you get high with friends let them like let them try to hit somewhere yeah this is harm reduction 101 I know this isn’t yeah I’m I’m not a nurse I’m not a doctor please I hope you’re not offended but I like to try to solve problems so give me give me a moment here just the way you describe that just now it reminded me of like when you get a new tattoo and you can’t let it get dried out and hard right have you tried putting any like tattoo cream on it so I you know what the the dressing I use is um it’s old as the hills it’s a sheet of linen almost oh my God it’s the tattoo covering Vaseline and um this stuff called bismuth and it’s it the the dressing is like it’s so old that like anyone can make the dressing themselves because it hasn’t been if there’s no copyright on it I mean as old as the hills yeah um I just got a tattoo Thursday and I left with one of these and you can probably remember it’s like from 1970 this black pad with a piece of tape around it yeah it’s like oh you’re good
Saran Wrap exactly um and like a piece of uh paper on it yeah but that’s what this is It’s a burn dressing that they use a lot in the burn units and stuff and it causes no trauma it’s soft on the wound um it keeps so there’s some things in wound healing that need to be there like moist moisture not wet but moist um temperature is really important on wounds every time a wound is exposed to air like when everybody says just let the air hit it you lose degrees of temperature and wounds need to be kept at a certain degree for that new skin to start right um all of this stuff does it keeps the moisture and locks moisture and it softens that hard rock hard cork that holds the wound open and um keeps the temperature like my dressings are super simple and they seem to be working that’s all it’s crazy and there’s some um I was on a zoom with a bunch of folks from across the country and they were well what if they can’t afford our uh zero form is addressing the name of it and we have I’m I’m getting back onto a call this week to see they were taking t-shirts and cutting strips and just putting Vaseline on it to see if it worked whether or not the Bismuth is the important part or or just the the Vaseline right so there’s and these are all street level tests that we’re doing and these are people willing to go out and say hey look you know like can we see if this works on your wound right right and participants our participants are willing to do just about anything like from like for me just helping them um there’s a young young fella that’s got he’s his wounds on his hands are so bad and uh We’ve healed him six times but he keeps going back to injecting him and uh he came in the other day just you know just saying hi and he’s like if there’s anything I can do for you if we can try out anything to heal these again like anything you want to try something different on what I’m willing to do it like that willingness is crazy to be like a scapegoat you know well there you go people out there if you’re running into these uh wounds on yourself and you’ve ever had a tattoo treat them like a tattoo so Jason I I wanted to go back a little bit when I had asked you like what you were doing in the treatment that was helping I was curious if that gave any clues to what was going wrong right and you you went right to the kind of sort of autoimmune uh possibility uh the book I’m reading right now the myth of normal by by Gabor mate is you know giving a lot of our medical research and trying to make the jump to say that we already have the information that kind of proves quite a few of our physical ailments aren’t as totally physical as we seem to think they are at least that’s his belief right um and it’s a really interesting book I I’m loving it so far but just this idea of the the suppression of feelings can create a toxic environment in our body where our cells can’t produce right and lose telomeres and shortened telomeres and all this stuff is causing the chaos like I’m curious since this doesn’t have a quote unquote predictable effect at least by what we can measure in humans is it possible that the predictive ability would come from knowing which individuals were more like people Pleasers who might be more likely to suppress emotions like is that something you could kind of sort of start to do as you talk to people it’s well it’s part of what I and it’s funny you bring that up because one thing I stress all the time it’s part of this kind of wound care and when I say this I just meet with xylazine wounds really um it’s teaching the person how to take pride in themselves and their wounds that’s why I touched on before with a person that would lose their finger teaching them and getting them on board and having them do something positive for themselves is worth a lot of weight when it comes to Healing wow um so that’s something that I always bring to the table like it’s just not me doing things to people in medicine I just said this two days ago medicine medicine we do things to people you come to a place and we do something to you and hopefully it makes it better like an intervention of some sort you know your heart’s blocked we open it and you go home with some medicine and now you’re alive again right um wound care is more of a holistic like you have to the person needs to be needs to be in on this because I can’t do all the work but what I’m finding is when when someone’s in on it and they’re like really proud like hey look I’m healing like I’m healing and they’re starting to speak in the eye terms of a positive and like the the participant I was talking about with the really bad hands seeing him smile was like a tremendous amount of stuff and it seemed like it hurt him to smile because he hasn’t been a smiley kid or guy I mean he’s not a kid but he’s been inject he’s been using drugs since he was 12 though um up in Cecil County and having given him a positive thing like he stopped by to say Happy Thanksgiving like that’s crazy that he wanted to get out of his basement and come and do something positive and I think that’s a big part of it is everybody lives in this like Eeyore moment of life like the world sucks they get up every morning they gotta hustle or go steal or trick or whatever to get money to go buy drugs then the hunt for drugs happens and then they spend part of the day running looking for it and then then they sleep all day or for the rest of the night because the tranquilizer and the the fennel hits them then they lather wrench repeat they get up and do it again the next day giving somebody something else to focus on and my mind has been helping people and encouraging them to be like this might be the first thing positive they’ve done for themselves in a while and some of these wounds are like hey look you’re telling the hospital they’re wrong like the person with the finger like has some mental issues like they come with a huge bag of tricks let’s put it that way like a whole bunch of stuff with them but basically they’re able to stick up that finger and say like [ ] you Hospital like I still have my finger and you had a surgical consult to have it removed and that person’s so proud of it like look what I did look what I did and they still come over and it’s almost closed I’m like you don’t need to come back and show me I trust you’re going to finish this out right and they still want to show me every day that it’s almost closed and that’s proud like that’s an internal Pride that they I don’t know I think there’s something to that I think your psyche has a lot to do with like drugs aren’t fun like the world that I see every day people are like you know you’re around all this stuff you never did heroin or fan all and stuff like that doesn’t this make you want to do it I’m like zero chance this is the saddest world I have I don’t see people smile I don’t see people happy like this isn’t like like opium dens look like more fun than this I’ve never seen more sadness in a human than I do with this level of drug addiction which I think is a huge point to make right now we have this moralized system of judgment versus you know people who are caught up in drug addiction or substance use you know disorders and I mean the reality of it is like it’s not this life of debauchery and partying and like yachts and [ ] chicks and bikinis it’s miserable every [ ] day it’s miserable and I think if more people knew that point maybe we would stop moralizing would everybody think about whenever I think about people here at least the people the participants I’m seeing in in the two counties that cover I only see it in black and white like if someone asks me about a person I don’t see that in a color like I literally every thought I have about them is in black and white because it’s so miserable looking so what you said about the the wound care and the treatment that you think is impacting it just there what I heard was you’ve got people who grew up who probably had some struggles with the authority figures in their life right there was probably not a happy caregiver background going on for them so they’ve already got this issue with authority they probably ran into it everywhere else they went in their life now they’ve become you know addicted to drugs because of the miserable way they felt dealing with authority and now you’re showing up as a compassionate voice something they don’t get barely ever right and you’re giving them a way to stick it to another authority figure with your compassion and they’re like [ ] yeah I’m bought in right we’re going to stick around and that’s actually what I realized as soon as someone tells them no like I the the person with the finger came and it looked it was a bad wound I’m like well I started debating with him I’m like look so you got the doctor said cut it off now it’s not infected but it could be in the tendon and Bone it was on a knuckle um really bad place for one so we always know so that that’s one Avenue we know the path already give me a week give me one week it’s not going to change in a week for the worst if it does you can always go down that path you know you can always go back to the hospital they already have consults set up they can look for your notes boom you’re right back in that pathway give me a week to see if what I’m doing works and for me that week is about training that person to help take care of themselves the signs and symptoms of infection um what really is a thing to make you go to the hospital because not everything means you need medical care and then whether or not the treatment plan works and within that week that interaction that I see that person more frequently like I might see them every day if I have the opportunity to and this person was locked in so I did have the opportunity that’s when I started building up self-esteem and you’re talking about a person who you’re now seeing every day that might have been getting zero moments of compassionate connection previously on any days and this person was complicated because of the psychiatric issues they’re pretty profound um and like I it’s not like it’s fake but in the beginning like I’m like I believe in you you probably haven’t heard that in a long [ __ ] time and they looked at me and like no I’m like I actually believe in you or I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you like this isn’t a waste of time until it is and I don’t think this is I believe in you and I want to spend time with you every day to teach you how to do this and they they were like no one’s ever believed in me [Music]
foreign [Music] so I I don’t know if this will happen because I I would imagine the Grassroots individuals that you’re talking to in this community of people treating these are probably all in it because they care and have empathy and compassion but if you run into people who are telling you like oh that treatment you said isn’t working don’t forget to tell them about the compassion piece of the treatment because in my mind that’s what you’re doing you’re healing them with your [ ] heart bro and well I and that’s the part that keeps me back to wound care like I’ve always wanted to do wound care for a reason and um like I’m not a religious person at all working at a Catholic Hospital or formerly Catholic Hospital you see a lot of like um like one of the big universities bought it and used we still had the patient population like the elderly sisters like the other like the old like ratchet over like fingers and gnarly and like um like the sisters and nuns and stuff uh but the one asked me she was quizzing me I went to Catholic school for 12 years she quizzed me with my like the Ten Commandments what’s the type of Commandments and I told her she’s like do you go to church I was like no sister I don’t like I’m in the church in a long time like I think I did my 12 years of time I got Uncle Behavior I didn’t go to college like a like a Catholic college or anything and at that time she’s like you’re to church every day she’s like you’re you’re like sitting below me on your knees cleaning my feet I’m in a wheelchair and I can’t look up and you get below me so you can see my face I was like I didn’t realize I was doing that she’s like you’re at church every day like stop like stop you know like this shouldn’t even be a question it was that statement that made me start thinking about like there is a holistic side to Healing that isn’t just medicine it is that those couple seconds you take with somebody to talk to them about them because medicine is always about doing to somebody not with them and I think wound care is like you can walk with somebody through that and that’s what keeps keeps me coming back I’d actually like to argue that medicine should probably be more doing it with people too and it might be more effective but at least we got it with the wound care yeah I think that is I think I think Society itself is kind of moving that way with a lot of stuff um I know Psychiatry is changing a little bit that way also and compassionate care you’re starting to hear a little bit more about Compassionate Care Medical you’re hearing it a little bit more um doctors the I know the new doctors the baby docs are coming out of medical school and the fellowships and stuff they’re actually learning differently about addiction then because you always have this um spectrum of medical knowledge at a hospital level like a big teaching institution you have like the the old grandfather doctors that are the gray-haired men or like the elderly guy they’re just old like Wizards or wise beyond their days but they don’t have the new information right so to them at this moment addiction is a choice because they weren’t really learning that it’s a disease so now you have the fellows and stuff that are actually learning about like hey early treatment is someone in the emergency room might keep them here like hey maybe we’ll start slipping on some sitting in a chair behind the desk and we’ll keep them from running you know keep them it’ll Stave off withdrawals it still may not feel good they’ll still feel like [ ] they’re a little crummy because we can’t meet what they’re doing but we can at least keep them here with a little bit of you know medicine that they’re teaching them and that that now so addiction is a disease with treatable parameters um and it’s about treating the the underlying issues of addiction instead of just the the drug part like I mean if I had a dollar for everybody that still to this day says well just can’t they stop just stop like why are they getting wounds just stop like just stop injecting that attitude was in medicine 10 years ago 15 years ago when I became an artist but now it’s different like we understand like people would be like I understand you you still inject that’s okay and that that’s crazy to me to hear that in the emergency room because I never heard that before well I love that you’re on this side of it and I don’t doubt that you’re you’re accurate with it starting to shift but it’s done it’s not enough for me either no we ain’t there so I can tell you this the um after going to Puerto Rico and meeting some of the underground network of like nurse practitioners doctors addiction Medicine Specialists um psychiatrists from all branches like from the VA like the like the psychiatrist the head psychiatrist with the VA research was in in Puerto Rico at the harm reduction conference meeting and speaking with these people and then getting kind of into the underground stream of communication there are tons of people out there that believe the same stuff like the same [ ] I was just spouting off that or this is the core of them there there’s a lady from Pittsburgh that’s I she’s like she introduced herself as an activist and she’s a social worker um but it’s not any social work that you’ve ever you would ever think about and she’s it’s not like a rogue social worker but it’s she’s on the ground doing the same stuff and seeing someone that’s leading that charge and she’s doing this for like 20 some years seeing her leave the charge or at least be like a in the Forefront pulling people together it’s it’s crazy so I think there is an underground movement of Compassionate Care I think there’s an underground move I thought I was the only one doing wound care until I started realizing that hey look there’s there’s a a nurse practitioner in a tiny little town in Washington state that works for a harm reduction group that does serene services that has been doing this too hey wait there’s a place in Philly Savage sisters they got a nurse doing the exact same thing that I’m doing but we don’t know how to get in touch with each other right right so it’s neat to to network through and see this because I stepped into the network it was already well established so it’s like stepping into a stream and it’s really like the Susquehanna River you know like you’re like oh wow get my foot wet next thing you know you’re surrounded with people wanting to do the same thing it’s pretty cool has it hit the hospitals though yeah yeah that’s what I’m doing fee for service like we’re not getting paid like Hospital people get paid I’m curious I would be I’d be interested to see if there could be a way to study the offset costs that I’m giving this Hospital up here for providing care that doesn’t require emergency room practice so if you can talk and if you can talk and let in in dollars and cents to organizations they’d love it right right like I think this is about I think doing what I do is viable enough where hospitals could employ people to do this but it gets lost in that red tape yeah and you’re speaking to me because like look we got to work within the framework we got to make people listen I get that and yeah money talks and saving money talks and all that good stuff but at the same time like when are we going to get to the societal point where it’s like we do things because they’re good for people not because they’re cheaper like you know we don’t like socialize hospitals yet and that’s so it’s interesting and you said something about the early in the very beginning about the safe drug Supply um you know like making animals animals smoking crack or heroin whatever like um I I got the opportunity to speak with a nurse who had been doing a safe injection site since the early 2000s that is mind-numbing to me but it’s in Canada yeah like it’s like yeah yeah and the nurse said she’s like I don’t know anything about drugs she’s like you just happened to be there and like do you want to do this and she’s like I enjoy working with like people in addiction so I was like sure so they started doing safe injection sites and now that site is actually doing safe safe Supply so you can go in and be like hey like here’s your fentanyl pill mix it up with water and we’ll like let you get higher in front of us make sure you don’t overdose and go about your day go back to work right or like like pure heroin that people can go do pure heroin and it’s not about eventually she said eventually people were coming and they look at themselves they’re like what the [ ] am I doing because when you take the chase out of it and you take like the everybody likes to be unsafe that that Adrenaline Rush are like oh this is this is bad that would lead some people to use drugs in general um it’s a thrill when you remove all that it becomes just like taking an aspirin and then you’re like what the hell am I doing it’s it’s interesting you say that uh the same guy I referenced earlier gab or mate whose book I was reading now I’ve read a couple of his previous books and he he lists it out now he’s he’s a medical doctor he’s not just some Joe Schmo off the street he’s worked with addiction he’s he’s headed up the Vancouver area of you know drug addiction treatment so he’s like a well-known figure he’s not some you know nobody but uh he presents this idea that there is a thing inside of people called counterwill and that for some of us it’s you know who are damaged it’s a little worse than others and it really is it’s not even external like I could be thinking I would like to have my dishes done but then you know if I tell myself to do the dishes instantly it’s like nope and and I feel like that is a big part of the fight for people struggling with substance use disorders is everybody’s telling them it’s wrong and it’s almost like if we could just give them the space they could figure out it’s wrong themselves but we don’t give them the space to do that so they’re constantly just pushing back against it and it’s that counter will and it’s like and you almost instantly tuitionalize the treatment programs like mat is like almost institutional like watching people go to like like methadone programs it’s it’s so like you come up to a window there’s no human contact there’s no like handshake even a touch a hug like I realize early on touching someone when you go meet somebody put your hand on the shoulder or shaking hands with them is the first step in opening up that vulnerability oh yeah like we were saying earlier about talking to people like I realize I when I give if I’m working a full day like actually seeing you know a bunch of people that day I am emotionally and energetically drained because you give a lot of yourself every time you see somebody just by just general like I’m you always have to be on point and thinking like okay how can I make this person feel more comfortable how can I make this lady that’s obviously uncomfortable feel more comfortable oh no now she’s crying how do I make her you know like that kind of stuff like it’s it’s a mental mind game constantly yeah you almost said it too how do I make her stop crying don’t yeah and that’s it and that’s it like and you have to go through those things like I like mentally you’re like do I or don’t I would I or won’t I like what’s the next step in making her in a better place well and it’s it’s like you said it’s we have to retrain our brains because we can’t do the normal societal thing we’ve been programmed to do right normally we’re like we gotta fix the crying we gotta stop it and like that’s not really the answer maybe no normally I reach over and grab tissues right like normally I’m like here like it’s okay and people are like I’m sorry I have more stories that can like fill a book of crazy stuff I’ve seen up here but um someone came in with a wound and next you know pants underwear down around their ankles wound was like in the crease of their their groin um extremely nervous awkward moments oh yeah like they started crying I’m like stop crying like cover up like I literally turn around the chair and I had two people with me um in the room that one was a nurse and and one was like my wound care appear and it shocked everybody and the person stopped crying and like we were joking and by the end of the whole thing she’s like thank you so much for being like understanding and caring and making this less awkward and treating them with dignity yeah like and that was it like literally it and they came back they actually came back again to thank us after she said I got my stuff together now like I’m not gonna cry I’m not gonna cry it’s like thank you for because we talked to her about children and stuff like that like there was some stuff going on in life and just that dignity part like that’s worth more than healing a wound because the body heals itself I mean someone once told me and this is an old quote it goes back to like a Greek philosopher I think but it’s it’s medicine is the act you put on while the body heals itself so that means a lot to me in wound care because you’re as long as things are optimal they’re going to heal even sub-opt them in the heel they you know like with children or children get wounds you could tape them to the wall and they’re going to heal yeah I mean as long as they get food in them they’re going to heal it’s it’s what you do in the process and ease like the tension the anxiety um a lot of folks are scared to go to the hospital so teaching them that like hey look you don’t necessarily need to go to the hospital let’s see what you got and that usually breaks the tension right away um and then we have other folks that like I need to go to the hospital I’m like you don’t need to go to the hospital and this just happened they said I didn’t need to be here I just need to follow up with my wound care like yeah and like okay you might know what you’re talking about literally that was said to me two nights ago in a text which is crazy right like I might know I might not either I don’t claim to know everything but I don’t think you need to be in the hospital your theory of you know the medicine and the body healing itself that’s very much the kind of the therapy world you know theory of like we need to we just kind of need to get the stuff out of the way that’s been holding you up right whether that’s suppressed emotions whether that’s something you dealt with in childhood and they’re still carrying whatever it is like once we can clear out all the mess every anything else figures itself out by itself and and I think historically that’s been viewed more of in a like oh if you don’t know whether to be in your marriage or not after you heal you’ll know right right but I think we are starting to think more and more that’s also with physical [ ] like there’s a lot of what we call phantom pain or autoimmune disorders that we don’t really understand why they’re not grip on them at all right and if we have this toxic environment in our in our mind body all one right that is what’s going to create more chaos and not let the body to heal and so yeah man just I don’t know I’m really liking the way this conversation no and um it’s funny there was a there was a conference that was part of for wound care and there was a doctor I believe he was from Amsterdam and he was talking about like do you need to wash wounds and he was like you don’t like the body like unless they’re like grossly infected right like once a week evens enough like all depends on the wound itself the audience ate him alive I literally ate him alive and with the like his his broken English and everything like the the nurses were just chewing him up like chewing him up for like you need them everything needs to be clean you need to wash the wound daily blah blah blah and he’s like no no no you don’t um I felt bad for him but it was it’s that same mindset like the body will do what it needs to do like sometimes you need to nudge it a little bit you need to keep it on path but what you just said like sometimes you just gotta Kick the Box out from in front of someone so they don’t trip on it yeah that box can stay there but just make sure they don’t trip yeah and that’s picturing that I’m picturing like instead of the box I was picturing like uh almost like the concrete shoes that the Mobsters would put on somebody right and we’re just kind of like chipping it away to make each step a little lighter and you don’t need them they don’t don’t need to be gone right and like just like one thing I’ve realized from coming up here and not being an addiction not understanding the full process of everybody in recovery you’re going to take your [ ] with you for the rest of your life like nobody’s ever healed addiction is one of those things that can always double back on itself through like weak armor and stuff like that or just just general human nature but nobody’s ever this job has made me realize there there is no level of perfection there’s just good right now yeah and I think that’s fine I think and good right now is is a to me a great great thing to strive for like I enjoy good right now because you can’t tell you what it’s gonna be tomorrow and you know you can kind of look back on what you did right and wrong in the past but still you don’t know what’s going to come up next right right yeah good for now is one of those things I’m I’m pretty happy with I I gotta ask because I’m gonna have to title this trank dope just for the clips uh I know I know but uh but since I’m gonna have to title it that why is it that you hate track dope so I think the media loves to and I say the media like it’s it’s a person but yes the media loves to grab these like catchphrases and I’d hate for this to be a catchphrase it’s not trank dope because there’s a lot of tranquilizers out there and what is dope like if you talk to an old dude dope still weed right they don’t like I smoke some dope like did you like what do you mean it’s a drug that gives you dopamine yeah right so when I I’m one of the purest like and this is what I teach people um participant-wise no I’m injecting I don’t tell them I’m objecting tranq though if I tell him I’m injecting like you are injecting fentanyl with xylazine if we get the words out people will understand it better um and I think it’s just like the food you put into yourself when you know what it is you have a choice you have more Choice when you’re using these broad terms that that people feel comfortable like tranq dope I’ve yet to meet anybody from Pennsylvania that calls it track dope some of the older participants that we see were like it’s tranq it’s tranq and I was like do you use that term she’s like no like we just go buy bags you know I was like why are you using it like well we heard it on the news I’m like oh When Things fall to that like tranquilizers can be a lot of things you know there’s other tranquilizers out there benzos could be mixed in but this is literally a xylazine issue with with fentanyl so I I think the first person who picked up the story and decided to write about it probably just couldn’t spell xylazine or fentanyl because they’re both weird uh and so I was trying to Frank dope was born um yes I mean I understand that I think getting the I think words matter I do think what we call something and what we name something affects our ability to interact with it inside ourselves right even in the therapy world we say that all the time like if if you’re you or I mislabel a feeling we might not be able to heal it as well because we’re not spot on with what exactly we’re dealing with um so that makes a lot of sense to me sorry I gotta call it trying to no that’s okay for the title that’s my that’s my uh thing to bear like burden to bear we like clicks yeah um so is there uh uh I hate to say it but like a safe way to use xylazine or is there should people be checking for it and trying to avoid it I mean so this and this goes to the so from my background of Harvard auction and you know Do no harm from medicine that whole concept of both of those they’re they’re coming up with xylazine test kits but it’s in everything it’s just like fennel test kits they’re kind of to me at this point fentanyl test kits are are not telling you anything you already know because if everything you buy is fentanyl like we’ve only found at like 200 250 I think now even close at 300 samples we sent in heroin has been an additive not an active ingredient so it’s like a trace amount or like one or two samples that are actually heroin the rest is all fentanyl so you almost see like a heroin test kit to see if you got real heroin I don’t understand and like marijuana like that doesn’t have fentanyl in it like so there are test kits coming in the pipeline there are developing test kits for it I’m unsure of the at least in our community other communities maybe I’m unsure of the value of it because it’s in everything here right right you know I think in a community that still has black tar heroin it might be beneficial to see if that that’s a thing because that still exists in some places um and knowing that it’s coming but just paying to I think for me paying attention to your participants is more important when they say oh that made me feel weird or when you hear keywords like I slept for a couple hours like those are really keying in um or the you pay attention to the overdose stories like feel like motivational like when you dig into people when they’re like oh I someone overdosed and he said oh tell me about it like what happened like how many doses you have to give did you have it I am or nasal that kind of stuff you start talking to them more you you realize it’s hey look this is a different kind of Overdose that’s where areas that don’t have it or are recognizing it but as far as a safe way no so what about like with the wounds like is there something people should be doing like early on right away obviously don’t inject in the same spot but no you laugh about it but that’s a big thing oh yeah everybody like and that goes back to there’s I think I think mechanism with this and it’s people are like oh yeah people like that process of injecting yeah it’s like the sentence setting and it’s part of the ritual but I think there’s something the self-harm portion um there’s a participant I’ve been working with that I’ve been trying to dig in deeper and I’m not a therapist or like have a psych background at all but just listening that they know that the hands are visible and they do it to get back at their parent because their parent hates the fact that they use drugs and when it’s good we can get it healed but when it’s bad I know that the participants having issues with their parent um and I’m just through conversation trying to dig through that that’s different yeah I didn’t I never put self-harm as part of drug addiction you know it’s all self-harm I know that’s where we’re going but it’s I never put like the psychiatric component on top of like the Cutters very similar to Cutters but what if it’s not what if if it’s what do you mean what if it’s not self-harm what if what you’re seeing is when they’re not doing well with their parents their emotional mind-body environment is worse and that’s why the wounds worse well they’re injecting their hands when they’re not doing well like I got that out okay like that much I’ve got out of them is that when they do it on purpose to get back at their their parents okay but even even that I would say even though that sounds like an active choice of theirs so it’s definitely not this is something this person does not want this to happen no I get that but in that moment of reactive nervous system to their parents right that fight or flight response I’m gonna injure myself a fight response to hurt you and that’s the part like the self-harm part that gets that mental thing yeah it’s it’s disassociation like and it’s I that’s something I was not expecting um the the person that was that the Baltimore Sun covered like they lost a hand they can they knew they were going to and just kept injecting and were like they we saved one hand but the other hand they just kept injecting knowing that they were going to lose it or potential to lose it and then it just snowballed and there was a point where they didn’t care anymore but there was a point where they still cared but they would still use the hand right it’s a ritual part that would never break so you you’ve given us kind of the description of what a wound dressing would look like for this wound that is seemed to be effective so far and and you know my take that I’m throwing there’s throw a whole [ ] ton of compassion at it too um is there any other really good practices that people could do if they know they have this or maybe even preemptive practices to avoid having it um so what we tell people and this has been kind of like across the board now we’re still trying to come up with like handouts for folks that actually are concise like through different harm reduction organizations um we don’t know if this is true or not a lot of the organizations use insulin syringes insulin syringes have a coating on the outside of the syringe that’s a silicone base we don’t know if it adheres to that when you draw up from like a cooker or wherever you’ve drawn the fluid into so we’re telling people just to touch the the needle itself the metal part onto an alcohol swab just touch it not to drag it and don’t bend it or anything like that just literally tap it um just to absorb any of the excess outside the not to use the same limb we always let the limb cool off if you get a wound on that limb don’t use on that limb if you don’t have to okay and then if you are prone to these wounds go somewhere else so the person with the the hands I was talking about they came in and said I this made me feel really weird the wound got weird even when I cooked it up it looked weird I think there’s a lot of xylazine in it so I went somewhere else and bought bags from other people I thought so when you said go somewhere else I thought that was still in line with the uh a different idea go to a different supplier yeah and I don’t mean no offense by that but I feel like that’s useless like that was my last ten dollars I don’t got ten more dollars to go somewhere else I’m shooting this [ ] it’s either lose your limb I got you and in that moment I’m probably well that was my question I was like did you finish off your bundle and they’re like yeah yeah of course but they didn’t go back for more of that that makes sense that makes sense okay so maybe yeah okay not not like the next thing oh that’s reasonable he’s throwing it away yeah the sour and they throw it away
we’re going yeah I didn’t tell you we snorted to animal tranquilizer out of a bar right now sadly enough I was telling somebody the other day there used to be and maybe there still is it was chorus in HBP it was like a heart of course it was like for blood pressure but it was cold medicine or something but if you took a whole box you tripped yeah and so we were like oh yeah yeah we were like stealing boxes and I took like 44 of these [ __ ] pills one night and tripped really hard all night and then woke up the next day like shaking like I was having a seizure I was like crazy overdose right right I’m like this is
wasn’t able to walk for graduation in high school because they fell off the stage into the band pit on like doing the same stuff eating them doesn’t remember any of it just knows that they pumped his stomach they told him he was taking PCP because that’s where the drug thing came back but the one the cough suppressant will sometimes test positive at high enough quantities in your body is PCP that’s crazy well Jason uh just looking at time here we really do appreciate having you on if you enjoyed listening to Jason there’s another episode he is on about nursing and wound care that we have yeah all right Jenny’s awesome she looked into that it’s number 76 you can look that back up uh did want to acknowledge we got a large donation from Chelsea one of our listeners this morning so thank you Chelsea that was very kind of you and and if you feel so inclined to donate or to give back to the community obviously that money does not stay with us we use it to keep the podcast running but anything that’s a profit goes back to the community to help people get with they need to have a successful chance at early recovery so please if you feel that go to our website recovery sort of.com go to click the PayPal link and donate or donation free ways to assist us which you can tell your friends about us you can post us on your social medias you can let people know you can like rate and subscribe our podcast wherever you listen and uh look go out there and be compassionate to people and you know that is going to maybe help them have a better day and a better physical life as well thank you again Jason for coming out anytime guys thank you for having me foreign
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