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.

    • charles@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      You can’t effectively use an education if products overtly lie about their contents/effects or are contaminated.

      • enbee@compuverse.uk
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        10 months ago

        education includes learning to distrust marketing. as well as to be suspicious of new too-good-to-be-true products.

      • sphericth0r@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        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

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Teenagers do stupid things. That’s why addictive drugs are marketed towards them.

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The answer is regulation not prohibition. There’s a big difference between “this is illegal, you’re under arrest if we catch you with it” and “this is being sold illegally, we’ll pull your business license if you keep selling it” or “this product is mislabeled and contaminated, we’re banning it from being imported”.

    • Nougat@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      Tianeptine is extremely dangerous, and the fact that it’s being sold as an entirely unregulated supplement is a bad thing.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Absolutist statements like this generally confuse political discourse, not simplify it. America prohibits the sale of lots of things and people don’t mind.