Please be advised:Ĭomments are moderated and will not appear on site until they have been reviewed.Ĭomments are not open on some news articles Bell Media reserves the right to choose commenting availability. Bell Media reviews every comment submitted, and reserves the right to approve comments and edit for brevity and clarity. “…And I think public health officials really need to start warning the public.” “It seems at this point to be quite a dangerous drug to use inappropriately,” he said. Long agrees that doctors need to be screening for patients who might be abusing bupropion. “Physicians and pharmacists should be aware of the potential for recreational use of bupropion via inhalation or injection when considering prescribing and/or dispensing this medication, and when treating patients presenting with complications of use via these atypical routes.” He stated that “a public safety risk appears to be emerging” and urged physicians and pharmacists to be vigilant for abuse. Dan Cass, sent out an alert noting that his office has identified at least six deaths in the province in the past two and a half years that were at least partly caused by bupropion abuse. This past spring, Ontario’s interim chief coroner, Dr. And there are a whole bunch of places that will sell it to you over the Web," Long said. In the form of Zyban, it can be dispensed over the counter by a pharmacist.
"It is extraordinarily easy to get a hold of. Pharmacists in Ontario are even allowed to sell Zyban without a prescription. The problem, Long says, is that bupropion is seen as non-addictive, so drug users have no problem acquiring it. “There seems to have been a problem in the States for quite some time here, we’ve been hearing about it for about a year now in terms of street use and particularly in prison settings,” he said. Long says Wellbutrin abuse is becoming a growing problem in Canada, in part because it’s significantly cheaper than cocaine yet gives a similar effect. His brain stem slowly necrotized and the man was eventually taken off life support and died. He missed the site and likely hit his vertebral artery, causing the drug to enter his spinal column. In another case, a chronic drug user came into his hospital after trying to inject the drug into his jugular vein. It refused to heal because she had been injecting Wellbutrin into her sternum. He described one drug user who had developed a massive infection on her chest. He acknowledges there isn’t much research yet on the effect of injecting the drug, but it appears that when bupropion enters the bloodstream, it leads to a necrotizing, or tissue-destroying effect.
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He says drug users are increasingly injecting the pills on their own, or in combination with crack or meth. recently made a presentation about the Wellbutrin-injecting drug users he’s seeing at his hospital. James Truong, an emergency medicine physician in North Bay, Ont. It can cause embolisms (blood clots) or abscesses in the veins or at the site of injection,” he says.ĭr. “When you crush it and inject it, all that stuff goes into your bloodstream, which is definitely not a good thing. “Then what you end up with is a high very similar to any other stimulant such as crack cocaine and amphetamines,” he says.īut injecting the pills is very dangerous, Long warned, in part because they contain fillers and other ingredients that are meant to be processed by the digestive systems. Crushing the pills destroys their slow-release mechanism, he says, and allows a “rush” of the drug that brings on a high. Long explains that Wellbutrin and other bupropion medications typically come in controlled-release pills, which allows the medication to enter the bloodstream slowly.
“It’s in the same family as amphetamines and methamphetamines.” “It is a stimulant drug,” he told CTV News Channel about bupropion. According to the executive director of Breakaway Addiction Services, Dennis Long, all three drugs share similarities. It’s an antidepressant that has been used at different strengths for years to helped thousands of Canadians battle mood disorders, depression, seasonal affective disorder and to quit smoking.īupropion doesn’t produce many of the side effects of other antidepressants and is considered non-habit-forming.īut drug abusers have recently discovered that if the pills – particularly Wellbutrin - are crushed and then snorted or injected, they produce a high similar to that from amphetamines or crack cocaine. The drug is a medication called bupropion that has long been hailed as a wonder drug. Doctors are warning that an antidepressant sold under such names as Wellbutrin, as well as a smoking cessation drug called Zyban, is increasingly being abused by drug users – with often fatal results.
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