There are the dogs of war and the dogs of home. Then there is the story of their remains.
The Secret of Love, Joy, and Magic Lake
Last month police were called to investigate a routine break-in in the town of Silver Spring Shores, not terribly far from the fantasy factories of Orlando and the horse farms of Ocala. The owners had discovered, trashed on the floor, the cremated remnants of the homeowner's father and two beloved Great Danes. Their ashes had been held in urns and something that looked rather like an attaché case. All three receptacles were gone.
The police soon arrested five young men. As they burglarized the house, the perpetrators had found envelopes of white dust. Their conclusion: cocaine, at the very least heroin. Quickly they pulled the chemicals from the envelopes and excitedly began to snort them.
They tried and tried. No one could get high.
Finally they recognized their error. This was no cocaine. Of course the police would come. How to hide their deed?
There was the lake just outside, beyond the house.
The distraught family asked for help and quickly received it. Police divers dove into the turbid waters of Love, Joy and Magic Lake (its real name.) They recovered the urn of the father and one of the Great Danes, yet the last urn had disappeared.
Snorting Doggie Xanax
In the sedate seaside town of Sarasota where I work, one of my patients felt equally distraught. Her teenage son had returned home from a recent hospitalization and had acted surprisingly well. His mood swings had petered to nearly nothing, his drug use appeared of the past.
One night, a high wind blew in from the Gulf.
The sudden storm's horrific clanging terrified their dog. She sputtered and moaned, jumping wildly about the house.
Quickly my patient rushed to her medicine cabinet, searching for the veterinary grade xanax. It had always worked in the past.
The bottle was still there. Most of its contents were gone.
Eventually her son revealed the truth. The dog's xanax had disappeared up his nose.
Yet people have been snorting far more than canine products these days.
Snorting Out Your Life
People have snorted drugs for a very, very long time. Snorting cocaine has become a particularly American public health disaster, destroying the lives of millions at home and the political, economic and social stability of countries abroad. More recently, snorting of "popped" oxycodone sustained release pills has killed hundreds of young Americans, provoking a more than $600 million fine to its maker, Purdue Pharma.
Yet few would recognize the recent craze for snorting any imaginable powder. Snorting veterinary drugs is bizarre. Snorting bath salts is crazy (okay, many of them are not really bath salts but chemical stimulants, which is even crazier.) But snorting the cremated remains of dogs?
Florida Leads the Nation
Some might ascribe the Silver Springs Shore story to the strange styles of life now current in Florida. Few recognized the tectonic shift in American popular history when, soon after the advent of the millennium, O.J. Simpson decamped from southern California to the Sunshine State. Within a short time California lost its status as Kook Central to America's southernmost coasts. Novelists like Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey continued to mine this regional trend, writing stories so inconceivable only Floridians recognize them as slightly re-arranged local news stories.
Yet in the ever increasing arms race of popular fiction, a new champion of impossibility has emerged. Karen Russell's recently published novel "Swamplandia!" heralded by Hiaasen himself, takes its 12 year old alligator wrestling heroine across the Ten Thousand Islands to recover her sister Osceola, fled with her lover, the ghost of a 1930's mosquito control worker, while her brother labors to recover the family fortune at the thoroughly hellish "World of Darkness" theme park.
Even if fiction can still compete successfully with unreal reality, why are kids snorting everything they can get their hands on? Perhaps because
1. Kids are trying every prescription drug they can find or steal (including "bowl parties" where everything is thrown together and sampled as if drugs were M&Ms.)
2. Snorting gets drugs into the bloodstream faster, leading to more intense effects.
3. Snorting's highly novelty value.
Privately Wrecking the Public Health
Snorting may occasionally leads to higher highs, but it also brings faster deaths. Most drugs are not devised to be inhaled through your nose.
Doses go in too fast. Frequent results include many cardiac arrhythmias and cerebral seizures. Both may provoke death in what minutes before were physically healthy young people.
Then there are the multiple and volatile changes in metabolism. Frequently drugs like crystal meth are combined with other drugs.
More drugs, more lethality. More drugs, more addiction. More rapid induction of drugs, more rapid addiction.
Which does not include the effects on your nose.
Snorting with the Stars
The American nose continues to take on and survive endless challenges. There are the fungi, bacteria and viruses that cause sinus infections; the innumerable allergies that provoke chronic sinusitis; the many thousands of new chemicals that human nose must sniff and help identify as friend or foe.
Otolaryngologists know that cocaine necroses the nasal septum, sometimes leading to a collapsed nose (though the mechanism was different, think of the tragedy of Michael Jackson and his fifty nasal prostheses.) Clinical studies with other drugs is sparse - most people don't want their doctors to know they're snorting crystal meth or whatever's in Mom's medicine cabinet. Yet infection rates go up and up.
What will stop this novel form of self-destruction? More public information may help.
Here is a chance for Reality TV to show its public spiritedness. Aerosmith's Steve Tyler, now judging American Idol, has publicly admitted snorting sleeping pill lunesta to treat his feet (for further information, see my article of January 27th in therestdoctor.com) Tyler fell off the concert stage that day, leading to more than that single concert's cancellation. Unquestionably the horrors of snorting drugs might be convincingly demonstrated by many other celebrities.
So perhaps one day we will wake up to a new Reality TV show - "Snorting with the Stars." Sadly, public health issues rarely excite TV programmers. We may have to settle for "Pole Dancing with the Stars" first, before the public health is served.
