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Elephant Smack is 5000 times stronger than heroin | economixt.com
Some time ago, a friend was telling me a story of how we was administered “medical heroin” in an emergency room following a nasty motorcycle accident. I didn’t know that heroin was in the doctor’s toolbox, which led me to wonder what other disturbingly powerful drugs at their disposal? It turns out there are some mega-opiods out there.
I ripped and twisted some stats that here available here and was able to discern that heroin is about 30 times stronger than codeine – a commonly perscribed opiod for things like post operative pain. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than Heroin and a stunning 1500 times more potent as codeine. The graph at left uses a log scale base 10 so the fentanyl bar is not 50 times longer than the heroin bar and doesn’t completely eclipse the other narcotics. Essentially, it’s a way to adjust the representation of the data when differences vary by orders of magnitude between the units that are being compared.
The trade name for Fentanyl is “Sublamze” – is it just me or does that sound recreational and wrong?
That’s not all, an alternative formulation of Fentanyl called Sufenta is 5-10 times as potent at regular Fentanyl! Not surprisingly, Sufenta is used in heart surgery. Illicit and recreational use of Fentanyl has also been reported by the DEA.
If we step out of the human sphere of things, we can even talk about a drug called Carfentanil - a formulation only used to sedate large animals that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine – which makes it 100,000 times as strong as that Tylenol 3. I suppose that for elephants, heroin is just a gateway drug.
I was stunned by this. Popular thinking leads us to believe that heroin is as crazy as it gets, but it turns out that that is far from true. These opiods go to 11.
-Sean
Some time ago, a friend was telling me a story of how we was administered “medical heroin” in an emergency room following a nasty motorcycle accident. I didn’t know that heroin was in the doctor’s toolbox, which led me to wonder what other disturbingly powerful drugs at their disposal? It turns out there are some mega-opiods out there.
I ripped and twisted some stats that here available here and was able to discern that heroin is about 30 times stronger than codeine – a commonly perscribed opiod for things like post operative pain. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than Heroin and a stunning 1500 times more potent as codeine. The graph at left uses a log scale base 10 so the fentanyl bar is not 50 times longer than the heroin bar and doesn’t completely eclipse the other narcotics. Essentially, it’s a way to adjust the representation of the data when differences vary by orders of magnitude between the units that are being compared.
The trade name for Fentanyl is “Sublamze” – is it just me or does that sound recreational and wrong?
That’s not all, an alternative formulation of Fentanyl called Sufenta is 5-10 times as potent at regular Fentanyl! Not surprisingly, Sufenta is used in heart surgery. Illicit and recreational use of Fentanyl has also been reported by the DEA.
If we step out of the human sphere of things, we can even talk about a drug called Carfentanil - a formulation only used to sedate large animals that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine – which makes it 100,000 times as strong as that Tylenol 3. I suppose that for elephants, heroin is just a gateway drug.
I was stunned by this. Popular thinking leads us to believe that heroin is as crazy as it gets, but it turns out that that is far from true. These opiods go to 11.
-Sean