Spirit Airlines Capt and wife found dead Thur AM

weilke said:
Well, Prince did have a legit reason to be on pain meds. Apparently he had a pretty ground up hip at the time of his death.
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Yet I've had a bad hip for years and they act like I'm an addict if I want any pain meds. Once the doctor gave me a 30 day supply, one pill a day. He lectured me saying if I came back before 30 days was up, he wouldn't give me a refill. I came back over 90 days later and he was hesitant to give me a refill! I snapped and told him I used 1/3 of what he recommended. I know you have to be smart to be a doctor, but a lot of them lack common sense. BTW, this was for Tramadol, which isn't even classified as a narcotic in most states.
 
I think it is reprehensible that there were people who knew what he did for a living and knew about his drug habit. If this pos pilot would have caused an accident, these people would be criminally culpable in my book.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I think it is reprehensible that there were people who knew what he did for a living and knew about his drug habit. If this pos pilot would have caused an accident, these people would be criminally culpable in my book.
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Agree 100% 'Dog. So sad for the children they left behind. We had a pilot get canned for drugs, nice fun guy, didn't have a clue he was a druggy. But, the Co finally canned him, I moved a number in seniority so that was nice . :D

We had the random drug screens all the time at the airline. I swear I'd get nab once a month for a screen. Never understood why they tested a pilot after completion of a 3 or 4 day trip though. Seems you'd want to check at the beginning before they flew but that never happened that way. When I was a controller in the USAF we had screening unannounced, and the monitor would be in the john keeping a close eye on you to prevent you submitting a sample of something else I guess. Ever try to pee in a cup w/ a dude staring at you? Fun fun.
 
mscard88 said:
Agree 100% 'Dog. So sad for the children they left behind. We had a pilot get canned for drugs, nice fun guy, didn't have a clue he was a druggy. But, the Co finally canned him, I moved a number in seniority so that was nice . :D

We had the random drug screens all the time at the airline. I swear I'd get nab once a month for a screen. Never understood why they tested a pilot after completion of a 3 or 4 day trip though. Seems you'd want to check at the beginning before they flew but that never happened that way. When I was a controller in the USAF we had screening unannounced, and the monitor would be in the john keeping a close eye on you to prevent you submitting a sample of something else I guess. Ever try to pee in a cup w/ a dude staring at you? Fun fun.
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Working offshore we tested at crew change so it was luck of the draw as to whether it was start or end of hitch. And yes, I know of folks coming off hitch who were caught. Considering the quality of the tests they had to be using while offshore to get caught.
 
Any possibility they pizzed off their dealer and he doubled up the dose on them..??

I never met a druggie that was not convinced that they were in control of their drug usage. And that includes the abuse of prescription drugs.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I think it is reprehensible that there were people who knew what he did for a living and knew about his drug habit. If this pos pilot would have caused an accident, these people would be criminally culpable in my book.
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I share the same contempt for the parents of Eric Harris (Columbine), but the law says different. The level of awareness on the part of Wayne harris of the shenanigans of Eric is mind blowing (as if the 911 call wasn't enough insult to injury). They settled lawsuits in the years after the carnage, but never admitted criminal or civil guilt in court of course.It is what it is though. Same deal for Nancy Lanza (Sandy Hook), though in that case at least some form of justice was served in self-correcting flavor.

As to this situation, not to absolve the male deceased of the shenanigans, but it sure looks he married a known train-wreck, based on the paternal's side objections in the first place. p**** does strange stuff to men's ADM. Friends don't let friends settle.
 
Zeldman said:
I never met a druggie that was not convinced that they were in control of their drug usage. And that includes the abuse of prescription drugs.
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And alcohol. Which we, as a society, don’t call a “drug”, or nobody would have to mention that.
 
Zeldman said:
Any possibility they pizzed off their dealer and he doubled up the dose on them..??

I never met a druggie that was not convinced that they were in control of their drug usage. And that includes the abuse of prescription drugs.
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Possible on the drug dealer, but more likely they just OD'd. If they liked to mix cocaine and heroin, then the stronger the heroin variant the more cocaine they can mix with it. Like you said, you never met a druggie that wasn't convinced that he/she was in control of the drug use. So I'm sure they felt they knew what they were doing. Taking enough cocaine that you have to take heroin to try to balance it out inherently seems like an easy way to die. But, just goes to show you addiction.

hindsight2020 said:
As to this situation, not to absolve the male deceased of the shenanigans, but it sure looks he married a known train-wreck, based on the paternal's side objections in the first place. p**** does strange stuff to men's ADM. Friends don't let friends settle.
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Seeing as a close friend of his from childhood posted on here and didn't believe that he would've been doing any drugs, he obviously hid it pretty well. Still, the known train wreck should not be overlooked. If he was willing to marry a drug addict then he must not have found it as entirely reprehensible as most of us seem to. Or he overlooked it and lied to himself.

denverpilot said:
And alcohol. Which we, as a society, don’t call a “drug”, or nobody would have to mention that.
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I think in society we tend to refer to "drugs" as " illegal drugs", whether drugs purchased on the street or use of prescription drugs. Sure, alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine are drugs (with alcohol and nicotine being very addictive). So are Tylenol and Advil. While a cousin of mine did manage to kill herself with Advil (suicide - she left a note), I don't think anyone would say that those drugs should be banned. So as a society it's more a question of where the line gets drawn between legal and illegal/abuse drugs. Thing is, plenty of people enjoy a glass of wine or a beer with dinner most nights for their entire adult lives and are perfectly functioning members of society. Same goes for people who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. While you may have hard drug users/abusers that are productive members of society, it seems to be a significantly lower percentage, which a higher percentage of deaths for the number of users, even though the raw numbers for tobacco and alcohol related deaths are higher.
 
denverpilot said:
And alcohol. Which we, as a society, don’t call a “drug”, or nobody would have to mention that.
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I'm not a druggie because I drink PBR. Y'all say it ain't beer, so it I ain't a druggie Nate. :goofy:
 
The carfentanyl mixed into heroin is usually not pharmaceutical grade elephant tranquilizer. This stuff comes from semi legal chemical manufacturers in china and has unknown potency. As it is 10,000 times as potent as morphine/heroin, you can't measure the mix-in dose with a regular scale. The dealer or manufacturer of the speedballs has to trust his source that X milliliters of solution contains Y micrograms of carfentanyl. If the end product is off by 50% (which is easy to do in the microgram range), you get a series of ODs further down the supply chain. Also, many drug dealers are not in that line of work because they chose it over a career in applied physics. They may get lost in the whole millions, micro, nano thing. At times, cops confiscate drugs with absurdly high opiate potency, 100 and 1000 times the strength required to kill a horse.

White collar druggies like this pilot get their dope often from a source hours away. It's not like our local rural cases where the deaths are linked by local contacts and there is at least some feedback mechanism for 'bad dope'. There may have been 10 others who died from this batch but they died in Cleveland or Gary, not in his town outside of Dayton.
 
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weilke said:
...White collar druggies like this pilot get their dope often from a source hours away....
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?
Again, I'm calling you on your "facts". They get it hours away??? Why would you go hours away, when it is sold right down the street. Junkies can't wait hours.
 
tawood said:
?
Again, I'm calling you on your "facts". They get it hours away??? Why would you go hours away, when it is sold right down the street. Junkies can't wait hours.
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Because respectable people don't have drug dealers coming to their house and can't be seen in the bad parts of their own towns. The opioid epidemic is one of the most amazing things I've seen in my life. I started realizing just how bad it was when I saw a commercial for a laxative meant to counter opioid-dependent constipation...

...being advertised during the Super Bowl. Big Pharma created it, and the cops have been trying to arrest it. Thankfully in the epicenter of the problem folks have woken up to the fact that you just can't arrest your way out of it, and are even starting to realize that addicts have a mental health problem and aren't just criminals to be locked up.

Still, business as usual in America. Privatize the profits and socialize the fallout.
 
steingar said:
Because respectable people don't have drug dealers coming to their house and can't be seen in the bad parts of their own towns...
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Believe it or not, you probably see drug deals every week, and don't even realize it. Saying that they can't come to their house, and can't be seen in the bad parts of towns, shows that you don't realize how drug deals are done these days (which on your part, is a good thing), or how prevalent it is...
There was case last week near me where the dealer was delivering in pizza boxes, for example. And the "bad parts of town" are in-part bad because (nearly) no one is watching them.
 
mscard88 said:
60 Minutes had a piece on last night about how big pharmaceutical manufacturers lobbyists "bought" Sen Moreno Pa to craft a law basically disabling DEA's crack down on Drs and pill dispensary companies providing pills to addicts. Ironically his district has a big problem with the epidemic and deaths.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cb...-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/
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I've had many cases (probably dozens if not hundreds) where white collar types had a chronic pain issue, then were "cut off" of narcotics from pills and so switched to heroin. I remember one in particular, where a guy was injecting hydrocodone, because he felt it did a better job than swallowing it. He then had his pill supply (or maybe money supply, I don't remember which now) cut off, so he switched to cheap / available heroin. Very common path...
 
Oh, and I forgot to mention that in the case I mentioned above the "junkie" was a nurse at my town's hospital.
 
Incredibly sad...leaving behind 4 kids? Jesus...drug use is something I will never understand.
 
A friend of mine became involved with a girl. She was a druggie. He started embezzling from the company he was working for and gave her the money for drugs.

He got caught and she left the state. He faced felony charges and was looking at prison time. But before the trial he killed himself.

A girl I knew wanted to become a big time drug dealer. She always said the cops are so stupid and don't know anything. Her and her boyfriend walked into a house to make their big drug buy that she has set up, totally unknowing that they were about to buy from federal agents. After they made bail, the folks that they were going to resale the drugs to stopped by their house and shot them several times.

The local postman in Texas was letting drug dealers use his race car shop to store stuff. He plea bargained to stay in county and become the jail cook. He spent 1.5 years there. He told me he never had any idea that the police knew what was going on. When he was arrested he was so surprised that he didn't even know why he was being arrested.

All this happened in the "nice" part of town.
 
tawood said:
Believe it or not, you probably see drug deals every week, and don't even realize it. Saying that they can't come to their house, and can't be seen in the bad parts of towns, shows that you don't realize how drug deals are done these days (which on your part, is a good thing), or how prevalent it is...
There was case last week near me where the dealer was delivering in pizza boxes, for example. And the "bad parts of town" are in-part bad because (nearly) no one is watching them.
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Quite sad, in my opinion, but can't say I'm surprised.

When I lived in Cincinnati I had some suspicions regarding some places that were drug fronts, including an auto repair shop across the street from my office, and one of the neighbor houses down the block. Plus some other stores. No way of knowing for sure and I could be completely wrong, just my hunch. The reports were that 1 in every 8 semis going down the road there was filled with drugs there.
 
tawood said:
?
Again, I'm calling you on your "facts". They get it hours away??? Why would you go hours away, when it is sold right down the street. Junkies can't wait hours.
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- because they have the resources to do so
- because they need trusted sources and can't afford to just walk into a crack house
- because just like the pilot at the center of this story they are not junkies terminally addicted to the drug who can't function without it. Just like there are pain patients who take an opiate for a painful procedure and stop once they don't need it, there are recreational users who 'binge drink' on cocaine or pharmaceutical fentanyl on their days off but are able to function in between.



You only know about the people you see as part of the criminal justice system. I look at this from the vantage point of licensing boards and employee assistance programs.
 
As a kid and really into my teens I always had this image of a person who did drugs... a dirty, uneducated disheveled shell of a human being who, if not homeless, is probably living in a filthy hovel. Then you note all the celebrities and politicians who OD on drugs or get into trouble for them. Often troubled people but not always... sometimes seemingly normal intelligent successful people get caught with them.

Then you realize you know all sorts of people who drink to excess then put it down Sunday evening and go into work Monday with no lasting repercussions... and maybe one or two who destroyed their life and maybe someone else's with it.

Then it clicks- there are lots of people out there. Poor to wealthy, educated to uneducated, successful to unsuccessful who are out there doing drugs. Most of them probably go out and party on occasion and never get hooked- never end up an ambulance or in any kind of trouble. They go out and have a great time then go home and we never hear about them. We only hear about the ones who get arrested over overdose. I think understanding that part is key to attacking the drug problem though- if it wasn't fun nobody would do it. If people were dropping like flies when they did it then it wouldn't be nearly as popular. I feel like we tend to ignore that when we talk to kids and the public about drugs and the lack of honesty about it might be part of why we're so terribly unsuccessful at keeping people away from them.

That, or, it's just something that some humans like to do enough that they just won't care about the consequences and there really isn't anything we can say or do.
 
weilke said:
- because they have the resources to do so
- because they need trusted sources and can't afford to just walk into a crack house
- because just like the pilot at the center of this story they are not junkies terminally addicted to the drug who can't function without it. Just like there are pain patients who take an opiate for a painful procedure and stop once they don't need it, there are recreational users who 'binge drink' on cocaine or pharmaceutical fentanyl on their days off but are able to function in between.



You only know about the people you see as part of the criminal justice system. I look at this from the vantage point of licensing boards and employee assistance programs.
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Dude, do you think the people I'm encountering, in the criminal justice system, are all "junkies" that can't function? Heck, I just mentioned that case with the nurse, who had been using heroin for at least 5 years while working full time as a nurse...I say "at least five years" because that was how long he would admit to...one thing I've learned about all heroin addicts (at least I will define "all" as only all of my experience, which would include dealing professionally with about 500 or so heroin addicts) is that they ALL LIE. It seems to almost be a part of the heroin culture, to lie...lie to the police, lie to their employer, lie to their spouse, lie to their friends, lie to themselves.
To say that this pilot wasn't a junkie, but just an experimenter that died...??? I can't think of a single heroin addict that I've ever dealt with that didn't go to great lengths tell me they weren't a junkie: they were different than everyone else, they weren't going to die (funny thing is, many of them had ALREADY died and been brought back with Narcan, yet they said they weren't going to stay dead), they weren't addicted, how they just were an occasional user (some of them would actually define "occasional" as just every couple of hours...no joke).
You sound as bad as the addicts. If you are going to use a drug that can easily kill you, do you really think you'll drive for hours to get it??? Why? To hide it from a stranger that might be watching your hand-to-hand? Heck, most people don't know what a hand-to-hand even is...let alone, would never identify a hand-to-hand when its actually done car-to-car (this is how they do it in Detroit where I worked, and most other cities in this region).
And you talk about resources? Nothing I have ever observed drains resources like drugs. We joke that a love of aviation drains resources...a heroin user conserves resources like no one I've ever seen. They can feed their kids on $2 a day. They can do math better than a math scholar when they have to compute how much gas it costs them in heroin to drive a city over for their drug vs buying down the street...
And funny (not really) choice of words when you say a pilot that overdosed and died wasn't "terminally addicted"....if he wasn't, who is?
 
tawood said:
Dude, do you think the people I'm encountering, in the criminal justice system, are all "junkies" that can't function? Heck, I just mentioned that case with the nurse, who had been using heroin for at least 5 years while working full time as a nurse...I say "at least five years" because that was how long he would admit to...one thing I've learned about all heroin addicts (at least I will define "all" as only all of my experience, which would include dealing professionally with about 500 or so heroin addicts) is that they ALL LIE. It seems to almost be a part of the heroin culture, to lie...lie to the police, lie to their employer, lie to their spouse, lie to their friends, lie to themselves.
To say that this pilot wasn't a junkie, but just an experimenter that died...??? I can't think of a single heroin addict that I've ever dealt with that didn't go to great lengths tell me they weren't a junkie: they were different than everyone else, they weren't going to die (funny thing is, many of them had ALREADY died and been brought back with Narcan, yet they said they weren't going to stay dead), they weren't addicted, how they just were an occasional user (some of them would actually define "occasional" as just every couple of hours...no joke).
You sound as bad as the addicts. If you are going to use a drug that can easily kill you, do you really think you'll drive for hours to get it??? Why? To hide it from a stranger that might be watching your hand-to-hand? Heck, most people don't know what a hand-to-hand even is...let alone, would never identify a hand-to-hand when its actually done car-to-car (this is how they do it in Detroit where I worked, and most other cities in this region).
And you talk about resources? Nothing I have ever observed drains resources like drugs. We joke that a love of aviation drains resources...a heroin user conserves resources like no one I've ever seen. They can feed their kids on $2 a day. They can do math better than a math scholar when they have to compute how much gas it costs them in heroin to drive a city over for their drug vs buying down the street...
And funny (not really) choice of words when you say a pilot that overdosed and died wasn't "terminally addicted"....if he wasn't, who is?
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Most of what you say is probably true........for the slice of the addiction pie that you see in your line of work.
 
weilke said:
Most of what you say is probably true........for the slice of the addiction pie that you see in your line of work.
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It’s a big slice of pie.

One of the more eye opening things about just boring old pot being legal in Colorado was the sheer number of people you knew who told you how happy they were they didn’t have to keep getting it from their dealer anymore.

Not a majority by any means, but most people know more than a handful. From all walks of life. Poor to super rich. And because of the Aviation background and extended friends, I probably know far less than most folks. If I had to guess, I’d say something just under half of the software developers I know are potheads on weekends here now. They want to go sit on their couch or in the woods camping and get high, I really don’t care. I’m just making the numerical observation.

My stepsister (who’s a bit of a loon in many ways) posted photos a few weeks ago that she’s proud of her entrepreneurial friend who bought a van and started a mobile pot glass cleaning company. Lol. No kidding. Drives around cleaning people’s bongs. Haha. Growth business around here, I suppose. Ha.

Not saying that legal heroin is a good idea though. That’s a bit much. But the underground of addicts of all kinds is massive, and the legalization of pot here made it really clear quickly how many pot smokers there were who were hiding it.
 
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