But these fake pills do more than just cause addiction—they lead to fatal overdoses. Fake Percocet comes from a variety of sources. One recent example from shows that a pharmacist brought Mexican Percocet from across the border into the United States.
These prescription pills, branded with its now-famous name of M30, were laced with fentanyl. This deadly issue is not going away, either. The United States Drug Enforcement Administration reports that in one state, the amount of fake Percocet they found in just the first half of was almost four times greater than the entirety of fake oxycodone recovered in The DEA has released warning statements this past year to alert people to the dangers that they could be facing when purchasing what they think are real Percocet pills.
Knowing the difference between fake and real Percocet is not as easy as you might think. The M30 that is pressed into the pill looks similar to how it would for a prescribed dose from the pharmacy. Additionally, the color of real Percocet is usually lighter than the fake pills.
That being said, it is still incredibly challenging to spot the difference between real and fake pain pills, especially if you are in a state of addiction that could alter your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Truthfully, the only way that you can protect yourself from the dangers of fake Percocet is to receive treatment for prescription drug addiction.
Ultimately, drug addiction is a serious condition that affects countless veterans around the country. One guaranteed way that you can protect yourself from fake Percocet is to treat your addiction and any co-occurring mental health concerns so that you do not feel the need to turn to these dangerous substances just to get through your day.
As mentioned earlier, withdrawal symptoms from a dependency to prescription pills can be severe and even life-threatening. This is why it is important to start with drug and alcohol detox —especially if you have other mental or physical health concerns.
In detox, medical professionals will help you to be as safe and as comfortable as possible as you take the first steps toward recovery. Once you have safely completed detox, you will then be ready to tackle the work that goes into sobriety and emotional wellness.
Treatment looks different depending on your specific needs and recovery goals. However, some common treatment options for veterans who struggle with addiction and any co-occurring mental health disorders include:.
This is especially important if you are in danger of using fake Percocet. In addiction treatment, you will learn that turning to drugs and alcohol is not your only option. Our mission is to keep you safe during your time here with us as well as to provide you with the skills you need to keep yourself safe and healthy out there in the real world.
Give us a call at You can also complete the online confidential form to start sharing your story and work toward recovery today. Please note: For medical emergencies, please call For other urgent matters, please call our admissions line Submissions after-hours, weekends, or holidays may experience a longer response time.
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Mexican cartels and packages shipped direct from China, where it is produced in a huge and under-regulated chemical sector. A Senate investigation last year found massive quantities of fentanyl pouring in from China through the Postal Service. The report largely blamed dated technology that left customs inspectors sifting through packages manually looking for "the proverbial needle in a haystack. By the time a seized package heading from China to Utah led investigators to Shamo, he had already turned fentanyl into at least , potentially poisonous pills, the government said.
There are many more like him, officials say, upstart traffickers pressing pure Chinese-made fentanyl into pills in their basements and kitchens with unsophisticated equipment. In a single batch, one pill might have no fentanyl and another enough to kill a person instantly.
One agent at Shamo's trial compared it to making chocolate-chip cookies, only if too many chips ended up in a "cookie," whoever ate it dropped dead.
Aaron Shamo dreamed of entrepreneurial riches. He and a longtime friend, Drew Crandall, worked at eBay after failed stints in college.
But Crandall was fired and Shamo decided it was "unfair" that he still had to work, so he quit. They wanted easy money. Shamo grew up in Phoenix with three older sisters. As a teenager, he started smoking pot and refusing to attend services with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
His parents sent him to boarding school in Utah, where he earned his Eagle Scout badge. He later met Crandall through their shared love of longboarding and they moved in together. Crandall was awkward and shy; Shamo was charismatic, and prided himself on helping his friend talk to girls. The pair concocted a plan to sell their Adderall, prescribed for attention deficit disorder, on the dark web — a wild, unregulated layer of the internet reached through a special browser.
There are underground marketplaces there that mimic Amazon or eBay, where guns and drugs and pirated software are traded. Money is exchanged anonymously through cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. They learned what they needed on the web, searching with queries like "how to ship drugs. They expanded, ordering drugs in bulk, breaking them down and selling at a mark-up, all while barely having to leave the house. They used the postal system like a drug mule, peddling the club drug MDMA, magic mushrooms, date rape drugs — they once bought a kilogram of cocaine from Peru.
But the profit margins were slim and their ambitions were greater: They bought a pill press, ordered the sedative alprazolam online from India and watched YouTube videos to figure out how to turn it into fake Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication.
Crandall, math minded, created the recipe. They mixed it up by shaking it in mason jars. His new girlfriend grew suspicious when he would sneak away to package drugs.
When she confronted him at a party, he tearfully confessed. She forgave him, if he promised to leave the business. They bought one-way tickets to New Zealand.
Then a local drug dealer made a suggestion to Shamo that would change the course of his life: There was a fortune to be made in producing fake oxycodone. Shamo enlisted his gym buddy, Jonathan Luke Paz, to help him.
Shamo ordered fentanyl online from China, set up the pill press in the basement and bought dyes and stamps to match popular pharmaceuticals. Then they handed them over to the local dealer, who tested them on his own customers.
The first batches were weak or speckled in color, he told them, or didn't react like real oxycodone when users heated it on tinfoil to smoke it. On the first day of , Shamo wrote out his goals for the upcoming year: He would be rich.
All the girls would want him. He went online with his products a month later. Some were specified as fentanyl, but some weren't, purporting instead to contain 30 milligrams of oxycodone. Shamo named this new store Pharma-Master.
As winter turned to summer, sales skyrocketed. On June 6, a relatively small order came in: 10 pills, to be shipped to an apartment house in Daly City, a working-class suburb of San Francisco.
Like every order, it was sent in an encrypted email to two former eBay co-workers in charge of distribution. Alexandrya Tonge and Katherine Bustin counted out the pills in their suburban condo, packaged the shipments and dropped them in the mail.
Under different circumstances, Shamo might have been friends with the year-old man who lived there. Ruslan Klyuev, a Russian immigrant, was also an aspiring tech entrepreneur interested in the dark web.
He had a baby face: rosy cheeks and curly hair. Klyuev loved to cook and would make extravagant meals for the house. But his relationship ended, his web design business sputtered and he became estranged from his family, said Barry, a roommate who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published.
His emotions toggled between sorrow and elation, and he struggled with substance abuse. After drinking vodka, Klyuev crushed two of the pills with a battery and snorted the powder with a rolled-up sticky note, according to testimony.
He started drifting in and out of sleep. He couldn't stand up. He was found dead the next day, with fentanyl, alcohol and a substance associated with cocaine in his system. His was the only death with which Shamo would be charged. His defense attorney, Greg Skordas, argued that neither his death nor any others can be definitely linked with Shamo's operation. A year-old man in Seattle overdosed three weeks after he bought pills from Pharma-Master in March Later that spring, 40 pills were shipped to a year-old in Washington, D.
He died in his dorm room 11 days later. In Utah, a year-old software analyst named Devin Meldrum had been searching since he was a teenager for a cure for cluster headaches that felt like knives stabbing his skull, said his father, Rod. Doctors had prescribed opioids but limited the dosage, so he bought a backup supply from Pharma-Master. On Aug. As he got ready for bed, he texted his fiance and took a pill from his reserve for the first time, his father said. His father isn't sure Shamo even now understands the magnitude of what happened: "Does he even comprehend how many families have had their hearts torn out?
He was a dealer in Portland named Jared Gillespie. He bought 80, pills from Pharma-Master, according to documents filed against Gillespie in Oregon. He knew he was buying fentanyl pills, the Oregon prosecutors alleged, but the people buying from him had no way to know that. They are unknown and uncounted. Shamo offered steep discounts for bulk buyers. Tonge, one of his distributors, testified that she began to question Shamo's claim that he was helping patients who couldn't get medication: Why would one person need 5, pills?
Her vacuum cleaner would become a critical piece of evidence. Its dust bin was filled with pills. The operation had grown so frantic, pumping out tens of thousands of tablets a month, that when they spilled onto the floor, they weren't worth saving.
Tonge and her partner complained that the orders were coming too quickly, so Shamo hired a "runner" named Sean Gygi to pick up the packages and drop them in the mail, dozens of them a day. Drug manufacturing became routine: Shamo once wrote himself a to-do list, and included a reminder to "make blues," the street name for oxycodone, along with getting a haircut, washing his sheets, cleaning the kitchen.
And Shamo planned to expand. He bought another press so big agents would later need a tow truck to drag it out of his garage. Shamo hired a personal assistant; she did his shopping, had his car detailed.
He shopped for real estate in Puerto Rico; took photos sipping champagne on a cruise ship; bought designer jeans, an inch television, a boat and a BMW. Crandall and his girlfriend posted photos on Instagram of trips to Laos, Thailand, Singapore, kayaking and partying.
But he was running out of money and agreed to become a remote customer service representative. The list of people accepting packages from China ballooned to more than a dozen. Everyone was making easy money and getting text messages from Shamo dotted with "lol" and "awesome!
One customer reported an overdose death. Shamo scanned obituaries, then declared it was a fake, Crandall said. Then a message said pills were making people sick.
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