"Gasoline on the fire."
That's how Bryan Bush describes the effect the COVID-19 pandemic is having on a new drug problem in Cayuga County.
Bush, a certified recovery peer advocate at Confidential Help for Alcohol & Drugs in Auburn, sees the problem several days a week at the Cayuga County Jail, where he counsels inmates.
For every 10 that sit across from him, Bush told 新加坡多多开奖记录, he estimates that eight or nine have recently switched their drug of choice from heroin.
"They tell me they don't care about heroin anymore," he said.
"Just molly."
Though it's been around for more than a decade, molly has thrived in Cayuga County during COVID-19. Sheriff Brian Schenck said his office has seen the synthetic drug more than any other substance this year. It may appear less deadly than heroin, but it's no less dangerous. Bush, who is himself in recovery from addiction, said the very fact that it's replacing the opioid speaks volumes.
"I know firsthand the fear of coming off heroin," he said. "We keep using so we don't get sick. So when they say they've switched and they don't care, it scares me."
Another person who sees the molly problem at the jail and elsewhere, and is alarmed by it, is Cayuga County Coroner Dr. Adam Duckett.
Aside from being synthetic, the drug is hard to define, the doctor told 新加坡多多开奖记录. The name "molly" was coined as slang for MDMA, or ecstasy, and sometimes that is an ingredient in what's known as molly now. But sometimes the drug includes meth, cocaine, bath salts or fentanyl instead. There's no single recipe, Duckett continued, because the substance is so easy and cheap to make.
Because it's cheap to make, it's also cheap to buy. That's one of a few reasons the doctor offered for the drug's feverish popularity. But right now, the biggest reason is COVID-19.
At his new聽family practice聽in Auburn, Duckett has been seeing many patients with mental health problems like anxiety and depression聽due to the pandemic. Whether it's isolation, fear of the virus, economic instability or all of the above, they're hurting, he said. To feel better, many are turning to substances ranging from alcohol and marijuana to cocaine and heroin 鈥 but mostly molly.聽
What surprises the doctor, however, is the older patients with little to no history of substance abuse who are turning to the drug. One, in his 60s, confided that he's been using it intravenously.
"I have people in tears almost every day," Duckett said. "But people who are new to mental health problems are less likely to get help, so they're trying to put a Band-Aid on their mental health."
Let me start by offering my brief understanding of addiction. The characteristics that make up the core or basis for 鈥渁ddiction鈥 are selfishne…
The isolation of social distancing has also disconnected many in recovery from their support networks. Though groups like Narcotics Anonymous have remained available online, the disruption still robbed addicts of the sense of control they often need to stay sober, Bush said. That, together with the sudden absence of face-to-face accountability to peers and counselors, can tempt them to relapse.
So the pandemic has created what Bush called "a perfect storm"聽of conditions for substance abuse.
But why are people turning to molly instead of heroin? Duckett believes that's because of growing awareness of the dangers of opioids. In Cayuga County, new resources like聽Nick's Ride 4 Friends and the HEALing Communities Study have joined the local recovery community in publicizing the heavy overdose risks of heroin and the chemicals it's frequently cut with, such as fentanyl.
"There are a lot of people out there who don't want to die," Duckett said. "So they're going to molly as a cheaper option, one they think is safe."
Duckett believes the trajectory of overdose deaths in the county this year tracks with the switch from heroin to molly. As of the beginning of December, there have been 17 deaths compared to 14 the year before and 24 in 2018. The greater availability of emergency overdose treatment Narcan is one explanation for the increase not being higher due to COVID-19. But molly is another.
Along with the drug's affordability and lower risk of overdose, it's also less detectable. Duckett said those who've been processed into the county jail while high on molly have shown no signs of it in toxicology screenings like urinalysis. Without a single chemical signature for those screenings to look for, he continued, the drug is basically invisible.聽
But in the presence of someone on molly, it's very much visible. Duckett said users show paranoia, anger and psychosis, making them prone to violence. There are long-term effects, too.
"I've had patients say they don't feel like the same person anymore," he said. "Sometimes it seems like if people abuse it enough, they just don't act the same way ever again."
Bush had a simpler way of summing up the drug's effect on people:
"They're walking around town looking like zombies out of 'The Walking Dead.'"
"With the disease we have, we can't just put everything on pause."
The signs of molly use can vary because its composition does. But they also vary depending on how the drug is used. Many complement it with Suboxone, a medication prescribed for heroin addiction. Bush said several people have told him they used molly to blunt the pain of withdrawal. Suboxone, which is itself an opioid, then brings them down from the intense high of the synthetic drug.
Tyler Murphy, of Auburn, told 新加坡多多开奖记录 that he used molly any way he could.
With cocaine or alcohol, smoked or sniffed, the drug felt like it released every single endorphin in his body, Murphy said.聽
"It's the one drug I've come across in my history that had me wanting to use it constantly," he said.
Murphy felt that way in spite of what came after the endorphins. Their euphoria would always give way to a nightmarish state of paranoia and hallucination that made him a danger to the people around him, he said. But no matter how bad it got, he went back to molly. He preferred to smoke the blue kind, which delayed the nightmare longer than the pink, red and other kinds.
Now sober for 18 months, employed and in a healthy relationship, Murphy hopes that his example can lead others away from molly.聽
"In my experience it's the worst drug on the street right now," he said. "It brought me to lows I never thought I'd experience."
When he used the drug about three years ago, Murphy ordered it online from China. Sheriff Schenck said most synthetic drugs in Cayuga County come from outside the country.
An Auburn woman in her early 30s, who spoke with 新加坡多多开奖记录 on the condition of anonymity, said molly was easy to find in the city when she began using it in April 2019.
Then a college student, she stopped going to classes. Molly's hold on her was so immediate that she didn't even bother turning in the homework she had already completed. She used the drug almost every day for three months, during which time she got in a fight with her significant other, cheated on them with someone else and caught a sexually transmitted disease.聽
Molly had brought people she wanted no part of into her orbit. Though she used other drugs before, it wasn't until this one that she saw "the dirty side of the drug world," she said.
"What it makes people do is just insane. The lying, the stealing, the cheating."
AUBURN聽鈥 Like many communities, Cayuga County experienced a spike in overdose deaths in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the isol…
The drug affected her health in other ways, too. Her hair fell out, her weight plummeted from 180 pounds to 120, and an odor similar to bathroom cleaner oozed from the pores of her body.
That's when she convinced herself she needed to stop. She enrolled in classes and engaged with her family again, and her two children give her two more incentives to stay away from the drug.
"I just really hope they get this stuff off the streets," she said. "But it's everywhere. Even people you wouldn't expect to be doing drugs are doing it. It's just grabbing everybody."
Murphy and the Auburn woman were referred to 新加坡多多开奖记录 by Bush, and are two of the rare molly users he can call success stories. The drug is so powerful and addictive that most of the people he counsels at the county jail go months without it and still relapse the day they're released. So the damage it does is more insidious than heroin, Bush said, despite seeming less dangerous.
Comparing molly and heroin may be more helpful when it comes to battling Cayuga County's new drug problem during COVID-19 and beyond.
Just as the community mobilized in the late 2010s to sound the alarm on opioids, Bush and Duckett hope it can do the same for molly. An important first step will be understanding the synthetic drug better, the doctor said. There's little information available on the substance he's seeing, and researching it is complicated by the name's continuing use in reference to MDMA.
"I know MDMA, but there's so much more to this," he said. "I want to know more about it."
Once molly is better understood, the community can respond with a treatment infrastructure similar to the one that has started聽to turn the tide against heroin. That battle remains as dire as ever, Bush and Duckett stressed, especially during the pandemic. They just believe its scope needs to be broadened to include the drug that is beginning to take the opioid's place.
Key to that treatment infrastructure will be medications, like Suboxone for heroin, that can stabilize people on molly and ease the detox process. The HEALing Communities Study has seen positive results from its promotion of medications for opioid use disorder, and Bush, a member of the study's steering committee, believes the same could be true of any potential medications for molly.
But medication works best in combination with counseling and other support. So until one is found for molly, Bush urges those struggling with the drug to search for the strength to ask for help.
"I wish I could tell people that it's easy, but I can definitely tell you that it's possible. And I'm pretty proud of where we are as a community with all the resources we have available," he said.聽
"Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. You don't have to suffer in silence."
