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.
Thinking about this - an effective IV dose of heroin is apparently about 15-20 mg. Stuff is usually less effective orally, so let’s say 40 mg oral. A sugar cube is about 4 grams. If they take two sugars in their tea, that’s 8 grams, 200 doses.
It seems like it would be possible to overdose on a single decent sized sip of tea that had 200 doses in the cup, even if you did pour out the rest because it was so awfully bitter.
I have no idea what heroin costs in Sri Lanka, but I imagine it has to be at least expensive enough that you’d be thrown when you bought hundreds of doses of heroin instead of a little bit of sugar.
I can believe this more easily than that they were literally seeking sucrose. I don’t care how drunk and brain-damaged you are, you’re not going to accidentally make a heroin transaction believing you were purchasing a GROCERY PRODUCT. The price, the means of exchange and the general circumstances make that profoundly unlikely to happen.
The only thing I can imagine is that they were offered a drug, accepted knowing it was a drug, but didn’t realize what drug it was. Totally would have taken hashish, would not have taken heroin.
These poor guys. I joked about it upthread, but it’s tragic. They’re just trying to have a good time, get handed an unfamiliar substance with no instructions, and make their best guess. Hopefully it was an easy death.
It seems like what was actually being said is that the players didn’t know they were ingesting heroin, not that they didn’t know it was drugs. I.e. they knew they were taking something, but since they weren’t habitual, savvy drug users, they just didn’t know how serious a drug it was.
I think the outcome would be the same were the cream and sugar added to the tea, with the additional consequence of regularly drinking ruined tea. Better the intravenous option.
A doughnut van at the Victoria market in Melbourne used to sell drugs to you if you asked for “extra sugar”. A friend of mine found that out when he followed the example of the guy ahead of him in the queue, but was charged $70 AUD.
What makes sense to me is that they thought they were buying some local drugs (in an already compromised state, e.g. Drunk) but did not know it was Heroin.
On the one hand, I could see an unfortunate misunderstanding between inebriated travelers wandering home and buying not what they thought. On the other hand, I’d imagine merchants selling to travelers would be aware of the risk and take measures. On the gripping hand, who expects traveling rugby players to go out late at night and pick up some black-market brown sugar off the street in a country with bodegas? I’m leaning toward inexperienced users ingesting it (as I understand it uptake is slower so rush is delayed) and consuming way too much, which would explain an absence of track marks. Anyway, heroin is one of those not-even-once drugs for me.
So nobody ever heard of, say, members of a sporting team who go overseas and spend their nights out on a tear, indulging and overindulging in ways they wouldn’t normally do or get a chance to do at home? Because that has never happened, right?
Hmmm…clearly the Coroner was whitewashing these guy’s escapades, so that back in their home towns they look like victims, while leaving their otherwise upright reputations intact in the process. Perhaps it may even have something to do with insurance payouts that might be affected by indulging in illegal acts? My read is that these players were already pretty smashed and just overdosed - while fully aware that they were playing with fire. It’s the Coroners job to determine cause of death - not what motivated them to use the means of death. It’s hardly suicide - guess that makes it death by misadventure?
Exactly - this is how I understand the article and the excerpt from the coroner’s report, too.
The way the article presents the available information is misleading, though, and has caused the speculation that they may have mistook the drug for sugar - but actually there is not even one statement in this direction. It is just that they may not have thought of heroin, but they were likely aware that they took a drug.
Having said this, obviously we all know that sugar is a drug (at least if you listen to your nutritionist)…
