HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — The Food and Drug Administration is sounding the alarm regarding the substance Tianeptine, sometimes referred to as “gas station heroin.”
The drug is approved for use as an antidepressant in some foreign countries. Still, it has never been FDA approved as a medication, food additive, beverage additive or dietary supplement in the United States. Selling such a product in the U.S. would be illegal.
Regardless, manufacturers find a loophole by adding the drug to beverages and dietary supplements sold in convenience stores, as the FDA does not preapprove ingredients for either. Officials consider this the “grey area”, as supplements are not as regulated as medications in the U.S..
Dr. Luke Engeriser, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer with AltaPointe Health System, frequently studies addiction and has looked at the effects of Tianeptine for some time. He said the lack of regulation in this area is troubling.
“There is no way of knowing whether what’s on the label is remotely accurate in terms of what you’re actually putting into your body,” Engeriser said. “And that’s when we’ve had problems with people overdosing, it’s often not that they’ve taken way too much of the product. It’s that the product itself was really problematic and had massive, massive overdoses in the actual capsule.”
Tianeptine products are usually sold in an energy drink or a capsule form, under several different brand names. Dr. Engeriser said the drug can be deadly since it behaves similarly to an opioid, even triggering the same brain receptors, giving it addictive qualities.
“You’re basically taking, it is an opioid,” Engeriser said. “If you take an overdose of an opioid, the most dangerous thing is it’ll slow down your breathing. And you can, you know, basically die of respiratory depression. But it also has other effects like seizures, agitation, confusion.”
Nearly a dozen states have regulations on the drug due to some of those effects. Alabama was the second state to ban Tianeptine entirely in 2021. The Yellowhammer State saw tianeptine-related emergency calls to poison control centers increase by more than 1,400% between 2018 and 2021.
Alabama State Sen. Arthur Orr introduced the bill to ban the drug to the Senate after it passed in the House.
“It’s a dangerous drug,” Orr said. “And again, what you have with chemically created drugs, when they’re put out there for consumers, there’s no law against them.”
The legislation in Alabama led to a larger question: if the FDA is not regulating these chemical products in convenience stores, who is?
“That’s another thing that’s really dangerous with these gas station drugs is there’s no way of knowing what substances are actually in the product that you’re buying,” Engeriser said. “And there may be all kinds of toxic things in there that maybe the manufacturer isn’t even aware of.”
Senator Orr said the process for federal agencies to ban a drug entirely can be lengthy, leaving state lawmakers playing defense against the substances on a local level.
“We’re just playing, like I said, cat and mouse with the manufacturers and the chemists, because they’ll come out with something else and we’ll try to react to it as quickly as we can,” Orr said.
The FDA’s warning does not regulate the drug in any way. It makes officials aware of the prominence of ‘gas station heroin’ and the dangers that come along with it.
A national perspective on the issue is available on our website.
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