Perhaps my understanding is wrong, but watching the documentary ‘ crime of the century’ and one of the experts on screen said oxycodone has effects indistinguishable from Heroin.
When i think of a heroin high i think of people spaced out, or manic before falling asleep.
Why did oxycontin not give users that sort of ‘high’ if its effects are indistinguishable from heroin?
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Oxycodone and heroin are different drugs. Just because they share a similar mechanism of action, it does not follow that they produce identical results.
Variations may depend on the rate at which a drug interacts with opiate receptors, the degree to which it saturates them, and the rate at which the body metabolizes the drug to free up opiate receptors.
This variability is the reason so many different opiate drugs exist.
There is a thing called the blood brain barrier and basically taking a drug orally waiting for it to metabolise into your blood stream before reaching your brain has a much smaller impact than injecting the drug intravenously directly into your blood stream. I’ve heard of heroin junkies crushing up oxycontin and cooking it up like heroin to get the desired effect. Similarly most people who transition from opioid pain killers to heroin start off by snorting it.
So it would produce the same highs if it was administered in the same way.
There is also the question of tolerance and higher functioning addiction. Through taking it orally over an extended period of time you tend to build up a tolerance to the negative side affects and in turn have to start taking more to feel the positive side affects. You get to a point where you become what is known as a higher functioning addict where your tolerance is so high that being high has become your base normal operating level and you can spin out if you don’t maintain that high. Unfortunately that’s how opioid pain killers lead to heroin addiction. Either the prescription ends or becomes too expensive to maintain, but the patient is a higher functioning user now and needs to find a cheap and easy alternative to maintain their higher functioning addiction.
Oxy was designed to be slow release, so it built up more slowly in the body. It was one of their main marketing tactics in selling the idea that it wasn’t addictive, because they said it you couldn’t get the same high feel so people wouldn’t get addicted. Obviously it was bullshit and they knew it.
Simple answer is beacuse heroin is injected straight into the blood stream, and oxy tabs are swallowed (generally). A high concentration of a drug in the bloodstream is what brings about it’s effect. Absorbing drugs from a tablet swallowed creates a situation with a much smaller peak concentration in the blood over a longer period of time, and as such the experienced effects are much less than IV heroin.
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