There’s a new drug that just arrived on the streets, in Syracuse of all places, called “Super Mario.” Unlike bath salts, it won’t make you want to chew somebodies face off in the middle of the street, but it would surely favor your odds in taking on an entire police force in a fist fight. The synthetic drug is a combination of fentanyl and Xylazine (a horse tranquilizer), laced with trace amounts of heroine and Carfentanil (an elephant tranquilizer), and meant to stop a stampeding bull in its tracks.
The authorities describe it as, “100 times more potent than fentanyl,” which ravaged the city after I left it. “And 10,000 times more potent than morphine,” they finished. According to last years number, there were 152 overdose deaths in Syracuse, 6,300 in New York State alone. The majority of those deaths were caused by fentanyl.
The drug overtook Massena, where my grandmother grew up, forcing her to move down to Syracuse to escape the forever zombies. Once she moved away, three hours from her closest friend, the drug has seemingly followed her. Not only that, it evolved into a whatever forever type drug, which now that I say it aloud, does sound indicative of the way Syracuse can make you feel.
Wait.
Is my grandmother secretly an overlord to a fentanyl empire?! The drugs do seem to be moving around with her. My birthday checks have been getting larger over the years, and she hasn’t worked in decades.
Hmmm. No, she’s perfect.
Those who were brave enough to try Super Mario admitted to the drug, “knocking them out,” paralyzing them just as a dart to the neck would. The baggie if touched, even through gloved hands would make a person feel funny, so shooting this stuff into a bloodstream seems reckless. I’ve been tired before, but never worn out enough to put myself into a coma on the streets of Syracuse, New York. The things that could, and probably would happen, are unthinkable.
Not just that, skin lesions eat at the user, sometimes to the bone, exposing an already frail body to airborne illnesses. It’s been rough in Syracuse ever since I can remember, and with the creation of new drugs, it’s only going to get worse.
I was exposed to Opium at a young age, 15 or so, and thankfully I only pretended to do the drug with friends, but never fully inhaled. When I coughed out the weak smoke, I described the taste as it smelled.
“Eww. I hate licorice!,” I said. “Like a Necco wafer.”
I smacked my lips together as if I were trying to slap the taste out of my mouth, which I was. The cool, 20-year-old dude my friends and I were trying to impress could’ve cared less about the kids in his apartment. He was even nice enough to offer us our first taste of drugs at a young age. I’ve forgotten his name, Matt or something, and I hope he’s grown up with the rest of us. Times were weird back then. How we got to his apartment? I don’t remember, but we all had our bikes with us, so I assumed it was after a day of riding on the trails.
Hours later, after pretending to get high, the dude said, “goodnight” and blared death metal music before tucking himself into bed. I realized then, that we had overstayed our welcome by hours.
There was no threat to us since we could’ve taken the dude, and had the young Syracuse spirit to do so at any moment, yet the air was menacing, as if the cops were about to break down the door at any moment.
I needed to get out.
In the pitch black, I stepped over bodies on the floor, all high on Chinese medicine with their jackets draped over their bodies like blankets. I tried to find the door to figure out the locks blindly, and placed my feet gently as I moved. When I reached the door, I clicked one of the locks open, and I heard an echo behind me.
Oh, fuck, I thought. It was my friend Jeremy.
I quietly found the other lock and waited to unlatch it, hoping someone would cough to disguise the click. Slowly, I twisted my wrist to unhitch the lock and it clinked against the metal on the other side. When I opened the door, the hallway bulbs spotlighted the entire apartment, everything besides the bathroom. I saw my friend Jeremy get up to follow me out as the heavy metal door shut behind me.
Staring at the numbers above the keyhole slot, I was memorizing them in case I needed it for the evidence later when identifying my dead friends. The number has since escaped me, but I’m sure if I were back home, I could find the apartment door fairly easily. And I bet, Matt, or whatever his name was is still living there.
When I slipped out of the house that night, Jeremy and I rode our bikes home as fast as the cars driving beside us. After that, I vowed to get better friends, even leaving Jeremy behind to join the military.
Jeremy was my childhood best friend, who overdosed a few years back, making himself a variable to the statistic that I mentioned earlier. He was sober for almost a year before relapsing, and dying from a heroin overdose. My mother saw him a month before he passed, and told me that he looked better than he ever had. “He still looks like a drug addict, but the best I’ve seen him in a while,” she said.
The last time I saw him, he was on the side of the road with his kid and addict wife, holding a sign and waving at drivers. I ducked down so he couldn’t see me, as if he could see anything behind those glazed marbles anyway.
He was covered in scars, skin as bruised and pale as a bowling pin. His eyes were dead, with nothing behind them, and I blamed his mother for everything that happened to him.
The fact that he was cleaning himself up at the time of his overdose isn’t the worst part though. He relapsed the day of his kid’s 7th birthday, now presumedly remembered as the worst day of his child’s life. His birth, and his father’s death, on the same day.
Drugs don’t discriminate and will infect anything they touch, sometimes having lingering effects on the abuser. Weeks after coming in contact with Super Mario, the user can develop respiratory issues due to the open wounds, along with and including the various side effects that come from regular fentanyl and heroin use.
Super Mario is indefensible. Narcan and Naloxine are no match for the drug used to take down 800-pound beasts, and not meant for stringy, drug users named Shifty, who haven’t eaten since the weekend.
I imagine it’d be easier to come off of the drug in the hospital rather than in a prison, but I don’t think either could hold someone who was coming down off of the drug. It’d be like pitting a grizzly bear against a group of prisoners, or defenceless nurses as they run for the exits.
It’s only appropriate for a drug invented in Syracuse to be named, “Super Mario” since it’ll have the user searching for coins in the sewer, or dead after using it. Although no deaths have been reported yet, one man was hospitalized from severe wounds and given a green mushroom to give him a second chance at life. Ahhhh, drugs.
Home sweet home.
LATER: I’m glad I never inhaled that opium when it was pressured to me. I’m pretty sure that my body couldn’t handle both a horse tranquilizer, and an elephant tranquilizer.
I bet if I touched the wax bag it came in, I’d be halfway down a building from the outside by now.
Upstate NY mah man.
Kill the dealers