Johnathon Morrison’s mother helped get tianeptine banned in Alabama. But she says it makes her “sick” it is still being sold in stores across the U.S.
Kristi Terry keeps replaying the last time she saw her son Johnathon Morrison alive.
The 19-year-old scholarship student came into her bedroom on the night of Feb. 20, 2019 and asked if it was OK if he cooked some pizza rolls; he didn’t want to hog them from his younger sister, who was a fussy eater.
Terry, 41, and her husband found it odd that he was asking permission.
“We were like ‘you don’t have to ask to cook something," she said. In hindsight, she wishes she’d gotten up to see if he was feeling alright. She wonders if he was feeling sick at that point and was trying to settle his stomach with food.
The next morning Terry and her 15-year-old daughter found Morrison unresponsive in his bedroom in Trafford, Alabama. Paramedics spent an hour trying to revive him, but they couldn’t. Next to his body was a half-eaten plate of pizza rolls and a nearly empty bottle of tianeptine pills, an unapproved drug known as “gas station heroin” because of its addictive effects on some users.
He stumbled upon tianeptine by chance when he popped into a gas station in search of medication to relieve his migraine, according to his mom. The gas station didn’t have Excedrin, but an employee there offered Morrison a bottle of pills called Tianaa, a popular brand of tianeptine.
So Morrison took it like Tylenol, popping a couple at a time over the next few hours.
Just three of the 15 tianeptine pills in the bottle remained, Terry said.
Hmmm… seems a bit fishy. Who takes 12 Tylenol that quickly? I think the REAL story is this kid wanted to get ripped, had probably bought this crap before and took a megadose after feeling a buzz.
Popping 12 of anything you get from a gas station is probably a bad idea.
What even is the point of having separate categories of prescription and OTC drugs if there’s nothing stopping unapproved drugs from being sold over the counter?
Another part of the problem is that these unapproved ‘health supplements’ are often not even checked to see if they contain what they claim to contain. Unsurprisingly, some of them contain prescription pharmaceuticals. And even when it is discovered that those products do have them, they aren’t always taken off the market.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/many-food-supplements-unlawfully-contain-drugs
It’s nuts.
But God forbid we let the FDA have a look at these supplements, because if we did, the Pyramid Scheme Industrial Complex would collapse and with it the economy of Utah and the finances of the LDS Church.
They tried to pass a bill regulating them in the early 90s. All the supplements companies took out ads screaming that doctors were trying to take your vitamins away. Very unpopular, bill went down in flames.
Like no, doctors just don’t want people getting amphetamines in their creatine supplement. Or unexpectedly getting St John’s wart in some supplement that doesn’t list it as an ingredient, suddenly causing severe and dangerous interactions with multiple medications the person is taking. It says a lot about the supplement industry that they fight tooth and nail against any regulation that would require them to accurately report what’s in the bottle. They can basically just make it up out of thin air as it is. Tons of supplement makers with expensive “proprietary blends” where they don’t even attempt to show what’s inside, then market them toward incurable diseases like alzheimers, very carefully avoiding the name of the disease in advertising, and taking money out of their pockets in exchange for false hope. Looking at you neuriva. If your blend actually works, test it, patent it, become billionaires (they won’t because it doesn’t).
And some being sold are just straight up harmful. You can hop on Amazon right now and buy 250 mg /pill vitamin b6 supplements. If they’re reporting that accurately, that’s a toxic dose that could be harmful to your health and even cause neuropathy (ironically many who take it are hoping it will help with neuropathy, but that’s only true if you’re deficient, and you don’t need anywhere near that amount even if deficient).
I the FDA can’t even keep up with trying to approve legitimate pharmaceutical drugs, let’s not task them with looking at random s*** too.
Give them more resources then.
The answer is education, not prohibition.
Tianeptine is extremely dangerous, and the fact that it’s being sold as an entirely unregulated supplement is a bad thing.
Regulation & education, not prohibition.
Goalposts ---->
Heaven forbid someone change their mind based on new information because, as well know, people don’t change. They’re immutable stone with fixed beliefs from birth til death.
If all it took for you to change your mind was for me to say
Tianeptine is extremely dangerous, and the fact that it’s being sold as an entirely unregulated supplement is a bad thing.
Maybe your initial assertion that
The answer is education, not prohibition.
Shouldn’t have been stated so confidently.
are you saying prohibition works or are you just being a cunt?
You can’t effectively use an education if products overtly lie about their contents/effects or are contaminated.
That’s just a blatant lie, a 30 second search on the internet returned plenty of information about this substance… If you can’t establish enough confidence that some random drug that you buy at a gas station isn’t the really legit, don’t buy it? Ugh, we are doomed at this rate
Teenagers do stupid things. That’s why addictive drugs are marketed towards them.
vape shops in the US sale it too sometimes
big issue here not just with tianeptine pills
most products in vape shops and gas stations are either fake and/or inferior quality and/or questionable
includes nicotine vape products, hemp selections, fake THC products, etcetera
unregulated and/or fake products are a huge problem in the US and are not being handled in the same way as other things in the marketplace
also some of these products are sold out of package individually with no food regulations (no handwashing with gloves or anything to do with food safety)
all this overshadows what could be a regulated market with lab tested and correctly dosed/portioned products sold at specifically licensed dispensaries with staff trained in these fields
at this point it is starting to look intentionally set up and kept like this to keep the population in a certain place
these products are also widely available in the US due to dealers catching on to the lower prices of these alternatives and due to the option of possibly getting this item or others mentioned online with overnight shipping sometimes being an option
