Former buyer reveals the “too dangerous reality” of the drug overdose epidemic among young people.

“At the time I was selling drugs, my phone was ringing all day long. To me it sounded like ‘chirping, chirping’ money. All the messages were asking me to ‘please sell them. There was not the slightest sense of guilt. In fact, the more I sold, the more people thanked me, so I even thought I was helping people.

Mr. A, who used to illegally trade in prescription drugs, says this. Currently, the young generation is exploding with the dangerous practice of overdosing on medicines, commonly known as “overdose (OD).

In fact, the sight of young people who have combined Bron, an over-the-counter cough medicine, with strong alcohol and become intoxicated on the streets of Tor Yoko has occasionally been uploaded on social networking sites and has become a hot topic of conversation. But even more prevalent is ODing with prescription drugs such as Cylace, as one ODer described its effects: “If you take too much Cylace, you can get intoxicated.

A person who has OD’d on prescription drugs such as Cyrase said, “If you overdose on Cyrase, you get intoxicated and lose your memory anyway. When I used it, I was told that I was sending unspeakable text messages to acquaintances and making phone calls to friends without being able to speak. Of course, I have no recollection of what I did at that time.

Cyrace is said to have the highest effect of getting high (upper) among sleeping pills in terms of its ingredients. On the other hand, this drug has been misused as a date drug that is mixed into drinks. Originally, it is colored blue so that one can tell when it has been mixed in, but ironically, this coloring has become popular among young children. Ironically, this coloring has become popular among young children, who show their blue-tinted tongues to their peers as a medal for ingesting the drug, and it has been used as a game to reinforce a sense of solidarity.

Even in the medical community, the effects of sialace are so intense that many clinics have stated that they do not prescribe it for initial consultations, and it is not easy to obtain an overdose amount. This is where illegal buyers of prescription drugs, such as Mr. A, come into the picture.

The term “OD prescription drug enthusiasts” is taken from Internet slang and is known as the “drug mugging community. The sellers are collectively called “pushers,” “pushers,” and “pushers-san,” and the buyers are collectively called “pullers” and “pullers.

I started working as a buyer in this area several years ago. At the time, I was addicted to prescription drug ODs myself, and I set my sights on the illegal prescription drug business to make some money for fun. I knew more about drugs than most people, and I thought it would be a lucrative business,” said Mr. A.

Mr. A said that the sales technique was no different from the illegal drug trade that is rampant on social networking sites.

First, they open an account on X for selling and buying, and post a list of prescription drugs with slang such as “#Oyaku Mogugu” (#Mugugugu for medicine). I also put the Telegram account on my X profile. Payment is made by pay-pay or direct deposit. Once payment was confirmed, the drugs were sent in a letterpack to the specified address, and the transaction was complete.

Naturally, unauthorized prescription drug sales are illegal. Therefore, transactions are conducted on social networking sites using a variety of cloak-and-dagger terms.

Drugs are described using specialized pictograms and specific words. For example, in the mark (fox) is Concerta, (rhino) is Cyrace, and (tiger) is flunitrazepa. (Tiger) is flunitrazepam. In letters, Mai is Myslee and Halcion is Haru. Lirika is Ririka, etc. It’s mostly wordplay and simple conversions.”

Mr. A’s account, which made full use of such cryptic words, quickly increased the number of customers, and at its peak, he received orders from more than 900 people, with revenues reaching 5 million yen a month.

The thing that customers hate the most is fraud,” he says. They hate it when they transfer the money and don’t receive the product, so I asked them to send me a photo of the product when they received it, along with a note saying that they had purchased it safely, and I shared this information with other people to gain their trust. I also sent out information about the availability of medicines every morning without fail. At our high volume, we were sending out more than 100 letterpacks a day.

However, as the number of customers continued to grow, the availability of prescription drugs became a problem.

The more orders we received, the more difficult it became to keep them in stock. Until then, I had to go to several clinics a day as a patient to get supplies, but I just couldn’t keep up. So I started a buy-back program, announcing on social networking sites that I would buy medicines, and bought surplus or discontinued medicines at about half the selling price. Since people who are addicted to drugs tend to accumulate them, there were a lot of people who wanted to buy them.

Some of them were even approached by medical professionals who wanted us to buy them by the boxful. Since the cases are usually not allowed to be taken out by patients or even nurses, I think it was a doctor or a person in the head nurse class. We were buying more than 2 million yen worth of prescription drugs from this person every month.

Mr. A’s purchasing business had resulted in an abundance of inventory, and he was attracting more customers than ever before.

The ratio of male to female users is about 60% female and 40% male. About half of them are in their 20s or younger, and the rest are in their 30s or older. Some repeat customers purchased more than 300,000 yen every month. Rural areas stood out as shipping destinations. In rural areas where there are few clinics, there are a limited number of bad doctors who will give out prescriptions as easily as in urban areas, so these are the people who get them online.

The most common purpose of purchase was OD, but there were also a few who wanted to use it as a prescription drug properly. To my horror, some customers explained that they could not sleep without begetamine. Begetamine is a prescription drug that is so powerful that it is considered a “drinking restraint” (now discontinued), and it takes years for the body to get used to it. Of course, there were also people who wanted to buy large quantities of the drug to commit suicide, but I kept the number of drugs I sold to a minimum.

Then, suddenly, something happened to Mr. A. He decided to stop being a buyer. He attempted suicide himself.

‘After a series of misfortunes in my personal life, I took Labona, a sleeping pill I had in my inventory, to commit suicide. On the way, someone I knew found out and stopped me, so I only ingested about 30 pills. Still, it was enough to kill me, and I was already unconscious. I was rushed to the emergency room and when I woke up I was in a hospital bed.

Although Mr. A narrowly escaped death, what he witnessed at the hospital was a reality in the “drug-mogging community” that could never be seen on social networking sites.

There happened to be a woman in the same hospital who had OD’d on a prescription drug. One day, perhaps as a side effect of an overdose, she began to suffer in bed, holding her chest, and her heart stopped. The doctor who rushed to the hospital immediately gave her a heart massage, which saved her life, but the moment she came up for air, she mouthed the words, ‘I feel so good! I was really speechless. At the same time, I realized that this is what I do as a buyer.”

This triggered Mr. A’s decision to graduate from being a buyer of prescription drugs. After leaving the hospital, he deleted all accounts and got out of the business.

He says, “Like the incident at the hospital, it was only after I attempted suicide that I finally realized that I was selling a terrible drug. It’s shameful that I didn’t realize it until I almost died, but the things being illegally sold and bought on social networking sites are poison drugs in the name of prescription drugs themselves. I was interviewed this time because I wanted to make a difference in this situation.

In closing, Mr. A again sounds a warning about the reality of the “drug-mogging world.

In the future, prescription drug ODs will spread as rapidly as illegal drugs. That is why we must stop this trend now. Currently in Japan, drugs that can easily kill people are easily bought and sold on social networking sites. And this poison medicine can be obtained by anyone with a smartphone. I want as many people as possible to know that this reality exists.”

We must be aware once again of the dangers of ODs with prescription drugs, which are becoming an epidemic, especially among young people.