Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/03/coroner-says-two-rugby-players.html
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Could happen to anyone who takes their cream and sugar intravenously when having tea.
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did they shoot it or smoke it? if they simply ate it who the hell knows? I mean buying brown sugar in the middle of the night is pretty suspect tho.
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Am I naive, or could this have been a genuine mistake? It doesn’t say they injected anything, just that they died from opiate toxicity, which could have been from taking it orally, and the drug was called “brown sugar”. So if they bought a couple small baggies of it, thinking it was actually sugar and mixed it in a tea or coffee, could this actually be an accident?
Edit: I just know, when I’ve been travelling, confusion between languages, social conventions and currency can happen.
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“Brown sugar”… Guys never paid attention to Rolling Stones lyrics, I guess.
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No alarm bells rang for them when they paid way more than sugar was worth, or when it tasted as bitter as an opiate?
It really reads like the coroner is covering for them, like a military coroner deciding that a suicide was actually a case of cleaning it and it went off. The Gruniad has missed the important piece - how the heroin got into their system. If they ate the sugar, then it makes more sense.
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Yeah, who buys “brown sugar” after a nightclub in a foreign country?
Does anyone really believe they were planning on baking a cake?
I mean, I don’t really blame them (I support safe drug use), and I’m kind of happy the coroner is covering for them, but c’mon…
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I could be wrong, but i don’t think that’s what that means in that song.
ETA: Looks like it was intended to have multiple meanings, so you are of course correct.
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Or maybe it does!
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but still not very much sense
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Wait wait… brown sugar is cheap heroin? This changes the possible meaning of that Stones song.
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Oh man, I better be careful when I substitute “brown rice” at lunch.
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they didn’t know about heroin???
it would be totally f’ed up if they were actually legit asking for sugar…but who buys 7 little bags of sugar in a back alley deal from a guy your driver hooks you up with on the way back to the hotel from the nightclub, and then ingest it before they even got to the hotel? it wouldn’t have tasted at all like sugar. i’d like to know how much they paid, how they took it, and what exactly they were asking for.
seems doubtful this was a mixup for sugar, but either way sad.
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There’s not a lot of literature on the proper dosage range for the oral administration of heroin (which was always intended for IM and IV injection). I’m sure it’s still fairly potent, not nearly as much as fentanyl. And these were rugby players who tend to be larger dudes.
Also, opioids are nasty-ass bitter. You brew a cuppa and dump a small baggie of H in it, you will KNOW something is off, esp. when you can detect absolutely NO sweetness.
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It sounds to me like they’re saying “someone told them to take (the drug) brown sugar, i.e. that it might be fun or whatever, but they didn’t know it was literally heroin, and were not heroin users, and therefore weren’t prepared or tolerant of it and died”
Which seems reasonable? Like maybe they think it’s hash or something, who knows
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a kind of heroin nicknamed “brown sugar.”
Vague drug reporting is one of my biggest pet peeves. Not casting blame on BB here — the source is awful.
Near as I can tell from a few searches, in that area “brown sugar” heroin is a smokable form. One source cites 20% heroin, 80% additives.
ETA:
From an old DOJ Opium Poppy Cultivation and Heroin Processing in Southeast Asia report:
brown sugar heroin
A common name for heroin (any source) which has the appearance of light brown, granulated sugar. Used in contrast with the white, fluffy powder or crystals form of heroin, such as Southeast Asian “China White” heroin. Injected, snorted, or smoked.
But I’m also finding news reports that discuss heroin and brown sugar as if they’re wholly separate things: https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/five-held-with-20-kg-of-heroin-and-brown-sugar-in-jammu-116060701283_1.html
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maybe those dealers had both forms? more pure and the cut brown both making up 20kg total? that’s how i read it.
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Anything you take orally had to go thru the liver before you get into the blood stream and the liver does a job on it. When you inject it you skip the liver and thus the dose is multiple times stronger. Even snorting it can be multiple times stronger.
Now if those guys were heroin naive then any dose they took would have a stronger effect than it would on an addict. But a dose used by most addicts IV would hardly kill a naive user taken orally.
I think this conclusion is fishy.
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