Jake’s long-held theory—that his illness wasn’t accidental—takes a jarring turn when a Facebook message arrives from someone he’s never met. Content warning: Drug use/abuse, addiction, medical trauma, death and dying, mental health crises, emotional distress & mature content. Resources can be found on our website, blinkthepodcast.com . . . . . Hosted and produced by Corinne Vien Co-created by Jake Haendel Original composition by Michael Marguet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What unexpected message changed Jake's perspective?
Chapter 2: What theory did Jake struggle with for years?
The fact that jakes came on very quickly and progressed very quickly without going through the typical stages that you might see is a little bit unique. And a lot of times it's thought to be through a contaminant in the heroin.
Ann tells me about levosomal, originally created as an anti-parasitic drug for animals and humans, and now commonly used to cut into drugs like cocaine and sometimes heroin to increase the weight or volume of the drug.
This is an agent that has been associated with heroin-induced, chasing the dragon-induced TL. I mean, first of all, a lot of drugs are bad anyway, and you don't know what you're getting. But we've all heard of rat poison. Rat poison has been used to cut different drugs. We also have xylazine, Trank, that enhances like sedation effects. but it can cause a lot of wounds and tissue damage when used.
Even baking soda, starches, and sugars, those can be used, not usually having a lot of adverse effects with those. But again, anytime you change a particular route of exposure, you've got an issue. So, for example, if you are inhaling baking soda, people think, oh, well, baking soda's safe. Well... It's safe when you ingest it in certain quantities.
It's safe when you make a cake with it or put it in the back of your fridge to absorb odors. But it isn't necessarily safe when you ingest part of it as a result of it being contaminated into your heroin. I think the point is that when you get a drug like heroin and you inhale it, you don't know what you're getting. So the fact that you are inhaling something
right through the lungs, into the bloodstream, going straight to the brain. It is a very, I guess, effective delivery method because you avoid the stomach breaking things down. Because when you ingest something, you ingest it, it goes into your stomach. The acid in your stomach tends to break things down.
And then as it's absorbed, it goes through the liver, which the purpose of the liver is to detoxify drugs and get them ready to be eliminated. So by inhaling these drugs, you're able to bypass some of those other processes. And again, it's a very effective way to deliver substances, especially something that has been cut into the heroin that you're taking right to the brain.
And if it already has a possibility to cross the blood-brain barrier, or is known to cause problems, neurotoxic-type problems, it can promote those.
And here's where there's a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Did Jake's inhalation of heroin and potential toxic contaminants over time lead to this diagnosis? Or was this specific cut of this specific batch laced with something that brought on this disease?
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