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Vice Blog

HAMILTON'S PHARMACOPIA - ANTI-HIV MEDS SWEEP SOUTH AFRICA


A hot new drug trend is sweeping South Africa, and it's coming from the most unexpected of places. No it's not ginseng or hoodia, but rather prescription anti-retroviral medication essential to slow the onset of AIDS. Teens across SA are crushing the pills onto local schwag and smoking themselves into antiviral oblivion. Aside from giving the immune system a generous boost, the drug supposedly produces a long lasting dissociative and hallucinogenic high. Teens are able to buy the pills off health care workers diverting the medications from patients in need, or teen addicts rob the HIV sufferers directly, whatever works.

This story is all over the news, and I'll be the first to say there is nothing wrong with sensationalist drug reporting, but at the very least the BBC could have bothered mentioning what drug these crazed teens are smoking. I mean, is nobody curious? Well, I was. So I looked over all the commonly prescribed HIV meds and it would seem to be a drug called Efavirenz, which costs something in the neighborhood of 30 dollars a pill and counts hallucinations and psychosis among its many side effects. With such a high price tag, surely that makes Efavirenz the Rolls Royce of stolen South Africans anti-retrovirals. For those unlucky folks without HIV-infected friends, a similar high can be achieved by stealing a blind person's cane, grinding it into a powder and smoking it.

HAMILTON MORRIS