The Rise of ‘Gas Station Heroin’

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—Kristin couldn’t stop fidgeting with her hands, clutching them together and wringing each finger one by one, as she shivered in her dark kitchen despite the 80-degree heat outside.     

It had been 14 hours since she’d taken seven tianeptine pills—half a bottle of a legal supplement known as “gas station heroin”—swallowing them in one gulp and washing them down with a Monster energy drink. By 7 a.m. the next morning, the 42-year-old mother of five, who along with her fiancé Jason is hooked on the pills, was in full-blown withdrawal.

“I’ve been up since about 4 o’clock,” Kristin said, her dark brown hair dyed rose gold and piled in a knot at the top of her head. “I was up sick, throwing up and shaking, cold and sweating, all over the place, bouncing around the bed.” 

At 5-foot-3, she was swimming in an oversized black hoodie paired with pajama pants featuring Jason, the hockey-masked killer from Friday the 13th; in the past couple of years, she’s lost 75 pounds, often skipping meals because the drugs hit stronger when she doesn’t have food in her system. 

“Sometimes you can’t even shower. You get chills so bad you can’t even get out of the bed,” Kristin said. 

Normally, Jason, 34, who works a landscaping job that pays him daily, buys Zaza Red, their preferred brand and variety of tianeptine, in the evening. Since they don’t have a car, he walks the six miles to and from a local smoke shop that sells them, which takes him more than two hours. He tries to make sure he and Kristin each have at least a bottle, and sometimes more, for the morning, when their cravings are at their worst. Besides the $10 to $15 a day they spend on smokes and $500 a month in rent, almost all of their money goes toward “Zazas.”

But Jason didn’t make enough cash to buy any yesterday, and Kristin was feeling it. To calm her nerves, she swallowed a handful of anti-seizure pills she got from a friend. “I’ll probably go have another cigarette now and wait for this to work,” she said. 

The pills, which sell under brand names like Zaza, Tianaa, and Pegasus, earned the nickname “gas station heroin” because they hit opioid receptors in the brain, causing extreme addiction for some people. The packaging and advertising usually don’t indicate that’s a possibility. Some offer a disclaimer that the vendors are not responsible for any misuse of the product and that only people 18 and older can buy it; some encourage repeated use. 

“Use it in the morning to get yourself going and use it in the afternoon to help finish your day. There is something special about ZAZA (Red, Silver, White) Capsules,” reads one online ad. “We have found that repeated use of the ingredients somehow continues to work, improving, and enhancing our daily experiences.” 

But the daily experience for many tianeptine users is indistinguishable from traditional opioid addiction, with withdrawal symptoms including nausea, chills, restless legs, agitation, insomnia, diarrhea, and an overwhelming sense of doom. One user said he became suicidal while self-detoxing and another said his addiction led him back to using illicit fentanyl. Those with previous opioid addictions, including Jason and Kristin, have said the withdrawal that sets in is worse than being dopesick from heroin or fentanyl.

As awareness about the drug’s effects, including links to fatal overdoses, has grown, Alabama, Tennessee, Minnesota, Georgia, Oklahoma, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio have banned tianeptine. Mississippi legislators have passed a bill to make tianeptine a Schedule I controlled substance, though it hasn’t yet taken effect. However, the drug remains legal in Florida.

“It’s crazy to think that we did all that really hard shit together and it was something legal and over the counter that took us,” Kristin said. She’s warned others looking at the pills in smoke shops not to ever try it. 

“Tianeptine is the devil,” she said, a refrain she repeated over the three days VICE News spent with her in March. “I want the whole world to know these things are evil.”

But Kristin is near the maximum methadone dose she can get, and while it’s eased her cravings, it hasn’t stopped them. Mainly, she said, it allows her to go longer between doses of tianeptine. She said their doctor at the clinic only heard about tianeptine through them. 

Tianeptine is a tricyclic antidepressant that boosts the production of serotonin and dopamine, which impact happiness, and norepinephrine, which impacts the body’s fight or flight response. It also hits opioid receptors in the brain, which can produce euphoria and pain relief. In theory, methadone could ease the desire for the drug by acting on those same receptors. Because many tianeptine products feature proprietary blends, though, no one knows just how to counter their effects, because no one but the manufacturers even knows for sure what’s in them. (VICE News reached out to several tianeptine manufacturers and distributors for comment but did not receive any responses.)

Kristin doesn’t work. Back home from the methadone clinic, she waited for the various medications to take the edge off as she chain-smoked on a worn-out grey couch in her backyard, which was littered with a mishmash of items, including a trampoline, surfboards, and a Confederate flag. 

Normally, her 11-year-old son wouldn’t be with her during the day. She would have gotten him ready for school. But because Kristin didn’t have any tianeptine, she didn’t feel up to it and let him stay home. 

She shook her legs as she colored in pictures on her phone to pass the time and keep her hands occupied. 

“My nerves are kind of bad because I know that I don’t have any of these for the day, and I'm scared of it,” she said, picking up an empty bottle of Zazas. “It’s just miserable.” 

Kristin’s other kids range in age from 14 to 21, but only the youngest lives with her. The others either live on their own or with her mother in Virginia; her daughters regularly video call her to catch up. 

She said having to function as a parent is in part what makes quitting tianeptine so hard. 

“The sickness is too much and when you’re trying to be a parent too, you can’t just ignore your children” she said. 

The one on the back of her right forearm says “DREAM,” which stands for “Drugs ruin everything around me.” Another says “FAITH,” which stands for, “Forsaking all, I trust Him.” She also has a stick-figure doodle her son made of himself, her, and Jason. 

Growing up in Jacksonville, Kristin started experimenting with ecstasy at 18 and began drinking and doing cocaine daily in her early 20s, after she lost custody of her first child. Sometimes her father, who she said sold coke, provided her with the drugs.

“He was a great friend, but he was never really a good role model,” she said. 

In February 2008, after her father died and she got pregnant with her fourth child, she took opioids recreationally for the first time, snorting the painkiller Lortab, a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocodone. 

“I felt so much guilt for doing that because I was pregnant. I know it was just the grief,” she said, lying in her bed, where she spends much of her days watching crime documentaries—most recently one about Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in jail after being arrested by a white cop for a traffic violation. The bedroom has a toaster oven and fridge so she doesn’t have to leave the room to get food. The windows, like most in her three-bedroom bungalow, are covered over with large posters or blinds. She prefers the dark. 

Kristin didn’t take any more opioids until her daughter was born, but almost immediately after, she became addicted. She said she used them to cope with her anxiety and depression. She also has epilepsy. 

“The more I did them with my friend, the easier it got on my stomach and then before I knew it I could take 10 at a time and it didn’t bother my stomach at all,” she said, describing the feeling they gave her as “really good, numbing, warm.” 

“Some people complain that they knock them out and they make them groggy, but they wake me right up. I never felt like I was a better mom than when I had those in me,” she said. 

A couple of accidents later—she broke her neck in a car crash and fell in a ditch and broke her arm—and Kristin was using even stronger prescribed opioids like Dilaudid, a brand of hydromorphone. She graduated to injecting pills for six months, before going back to only taking them orally. In the meantime, her drinking escalated to the point where she would be at a local bar from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. (Her kids were living with her mother and stepfather at the time.)  

That’s when Jason, who’d long been a friend, came into the picture. The two of them got together because he vowed not to abandon her. Slowly, she stopped drinking, although she said she still binge drinks on occasion, pointing to a magnum of Pinot Grigio on her bedroom floor.  

Around January 2019, Kristin, Jason, and her son moved to Alabama. They tried to live with a friend—all three of them slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor of her trailer—but moved in with a stranger after a shootout broke out outside. 

Being new to the state, they couldn’t find any pain pills. But one night, Jason came home with a paper bag containing Zazas, saying he had “new things for us to try out.” Kristin took seven that night and noticed she felt good, but a bit dizzy. The next day, she took a full bottle of 15 pills. 

“I was like, ‘Holy crap, I will be damned, it feels more like pain pills than pain pills do.’ I was so happy, thinking something from a gas station isn’t going to be addictive,” she said. “It was like a godsend. I almost heard heavenly bells.” 

Before long, she was downing a bottle and a half at a time. At first, the effects lasted all day. Now they last four hours at most. 

Kristin said the high she got from the Zazas was the same as the feeling she got from painkillers. But there was a big difference between the two, Kristin said, gesturing at her 11-year-old, who played with miniature skateboards nearby. She’s no longer worried about losing custody of her child, since she’s taking something legal.

“It was like, ‘Oh wow, we get to have that feeling back without our children being taken.’” 

The euphoria has mostly disappeared, she said. 

Florida has struggled with opioid addiction because of its history with “pill mills,” pain clinics that loosely prescribed prescription opioids. In Jacksonville, a city of just under 1 million, opioid-related overdoses soared 2,000 percent—from 15 to 336—between 2015 and 2021.

In Kentucky, another state battling high overdose death rates, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear signed an emergency order banning tianeptine in late March, using legislation that was created to ban fentanyl analogs. He told VICE News he acted quickly because of how hard the state was hit by pill mills. 

“Any time that people think they can find a legal way, sadly, there are some people who are willing to profit on the deaths of our people,” he said, adding that the state’s priority is on cracking down on sales, rather than users. 

After enacting the ban, Beshear said he was thanked by the mother of a man who died of a tianeptine overdose after years of struggling with opioids. 

Tianeptine overdoses, however, appear to be rare. The 2018 paper found nine fatal overdoses involving tianeptine, at least three of which didn’t include any other known drugs in the person’s system. These deaths were related to either respiratory depression, which is typical for opioid overdoses, or cardiac arrhythmias, which have been linked to tricyclic antidepressants. 

Beshear said that the FDA should be pushing for a nationwide ban on tianeptine. 

“Once you say there is no medical use and it's killing people, that should be enough,” he said.

The FDA told VICE News tianeptine “is not approved by the FDA for any medical use, and it has not been reviewed by the FDA for safety, effectiveness, or quality.” The paradox is that the very fact that it’s not approved means it can be sold as a supplement with no oversight whatsoever. 

But the FDA did issue a warning about tianeptine in February 2022, which noted that poison control center cases involving tianeptine skyrocketed from 11 total cases between 2000 and 2013 to 151 cases in 2020. A 2021 Consumer Reports investigation found even starker numbers: 883 poison control center calls since 2015, up from 27 the previous decade. 

One smoke shop owner in Jacksonville, who did not want to be named, told VICE News she also wants warnings included on the bottles she sells. She knows that some of her customers are intentionally replacing opioids with tianeptine, but she thinks that it’s still “the better option.” 

She doesn’t have many customers who buy tianeptine, but those who do, including Jason and Kristin, buy in bulk. One man buys 10 bottles at a time, she said. 

“Everyone who gets it is a repeat. They’re all regular faces that you see every day or every other day, tops,” she said. “It’s definitely addictive.” 

That’s because the half-life of tianeptine is short—within three hours, half of the drugs are out of a person’s system, depending on their metabolism. 

The couple stopped using when they first got back to Florida in November 2019, mostly because they couldn’t find any stores carrying them. But Kristin and Jason didn’t want to go back to using pain pills. They started ordering tianeptine online.

“Once you’ve been hooked on opioids,” Kristin said, “and you get clean, it’s almost a very depression-inducing feeling to know you’ll never feel that again.”

One day in 2020, about a year after they moved back, Jason called Kristin to tell her he was staring at six bottles of Zazas in a smoke shop. “The six bottles were gone that night,” Kristin said.  

At their worst, Kristin and Jason were taking four to five bottles a day each. Now, with the addition of methadone, they’re down to one or two. 

“We need a minimum of two bottles for the morning, or we kill each other,” Jason said, his dark brown brows permanently furrowed. Because he’s usually the one buying, he’s worked out deals with local vendors. If he and Kristin have more cash, they can get eight bottles for $200. But often, all they can afford is two at a time, for $35 each. 

It’s impacted their parenting, Kristin said. At Christmas, she had just $40 to buy gifts for four of her kids. One of them is a robot that Jason is hoping to build with her son—but Kristin said Jason hasn’t had enough time off work and tianeptine “to feel good enough to sit down with him and do the stuff.” 

“I have to make sure that I wake up about 30 minutes before everybody so I can take my Zazas and let them start working. I would be good for nothing without them,” Kristin said. 

Hearing her criticisms, her son chimed in, “She’s still a good parent. She’s still a nice mom.”  

As they lay on the bed, Kristin’s phone repeatedly went off every time she received a new text message. But instead of a standard alert sound, it was a recording of her son’s voice saying, “I love you a lot.” 

“Somebody said something about it binding to opioid receptors and the addictive part of my brain went off,” he said. After taking a handful of them, “I started to get fucked up. I was like, ‘Oh man, this is just like taking hydrocodone.’” 

Josh started taking a bottle and a half a day but only lasted a few weeks before he decided to quit, taking various prescription and over-the-counter medications to make himself sleepy when he was in the throes of withdrawal. While he said the physical symptoms were brutal, the mental ones were unbearable. He became suicidal. 

“It was like, ‘Oh my God, everything is terrible. My future is just going to be terrible.’ I wanted to die,” he said. 

There’s no standard detox protocol for tianeptine. But more rehabilitation facilities in places like Florida and Tennessee are offering services for people addicted to the legal drug. 

“When people come in and they’re using it, they go through what we see as opioid withdrawal,” said Lantie Jorandby, chief psychiatrist at Lakeview Health, a Jacksonville-based rehab facility. “They look like they have a bad case of aches and pains. They’ll have diarrhea. They’ll have chills and sweats.”

In October, Jorandby treated a man who had to leave his job to deal with his tianeptine addiction. She said he stayed for a total of three weeks, doing behavioural therapy and group support, but Jorandby didn’t think medications like methadone would be useful because tianeptine doesn’t function exactly like an opioid.

But not everyone would be able to afford the treatment, which Jorandby estimated would cost up to $900 a day for an uninsured person. 

She’s worried that simply banning tianeptine would leave people in withdrawal and potentially lead them to take more dangerous drugs. It’s a similar pattern to what happened in many states after the government began cracking down on pain clinics, when patients who had been provided prescription opioids and patients turned to heroin or fentanyl. 

“Any time you limit a supply of one drug, unfortunately people that are highly addicted end up going for a different drug and a lot of times it’s more dangerous,” Jorandby said. One tianeptine user told VICE News he relapsed on fentanyl after becoming addicted to tianeptine, in part because it was cheaper. 

That’s a fate Kristin and Jason have been trying to avoid. 

“I know somebody that’s got Dilaudids right now,” Kristin said, smoking on the couch in her yard. It’s the painkiller she’d probably go back to using if tianeptine got banned. 

“I want them to ban them and get them gone but I don’t because it could affect me deeply,” she added. “I don't know if I could even live through withdrawal from it.” 

While she’s scared to stop using Zazas, she also yearns for the time before her days revolved around how to score tianeptine. 

“I miss me. I miss the girl who used to wake up with copious amounts of energy and dance with my kids.” 

The cashier, familiar with Jason due to his near-daily trips to the store, smiled apologetically as she told him they didn’t have any. 

“You’re out?! Oh shit,” he said, rubbing his hand over his face, which was smudged with dirt from the landscaping job he’d worked all day. He tapped his fingers on the counter and paced back and forth as the reality of the situation set in; Kristin’s withdrawal would now get worse. “Oh my god, no.” 

Minutes after Jason confirmed with the clerk that the store didn’t have any other brands of tianeptine, Kristin called him. There was a long pause after he gave her the news, telling her his only other option was to walk another hour to a different shop that may or may not have any. 

“Fuck it, just come home,” Kristin instructed. 

“You sure?” he replied. 

“I ain’t got no fucking choice, do I?” she said.

Another hour-long walk later, Jason entered their home, where he found Kristin in their bed, shivering. She placed a pillow on her lap as she sat cross legged and hunched over. 

“I’m panicking. My anxiety is stupid high,” she said as she broke down in tears, covering her eyes with her hands.

“I’m pissed off at myself that I even let it get here,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I did this to me. Nobody else forced that shit in my mouth, I did it to myself.” 

The magnum of wine that had been sitting in the corner over the last couple of days was now on her bedside table and she poured herself a full glass and downed it in one gulp, tipping her head back at the end.  

“I’m drinking wine because I don’t have any Zazas and the store didn’t have any so I’m trying to warm up from the inside,” she said. “Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it makes it worse, but that’s a chance I have to take.”

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

If you’re struggling with addiction, you can visit the official website of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) or call the national helpline at 1-800-662-4357 for treatment information.

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