Blood-Sharing Drug Trend Fuels Global HIV Surge
34 comments
·October 11, 2025bgutierrez
EA-3167
That sounds far more realistic than some macabre attempt to transfuse. Just from a purely skeptical point of view, drug users want to get high, and it's more effective to split a dose in two separate shots than it is to recycle someone's blood. Never mind the issue of blood type aside, from a pure drug-seeking behavior angle it makes no sense.
Ylpertnodi
> Just from a purely skeptical point of view, drug users want to get high,
Many use drugs for pain relief, too.
parineum
Many use drugs for allergies as well.
khannn
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ChrisMarshallNY
That's terrifying. There are so many things (that make HIV look like a cakewalk) that can happen, when you inject blood.
I guess it is really about the same as "tranq" (xylazine), in the US. That stuff is pretty horrifying.
Back before I quit, PCP was the drug boogeyman. That's almost quaint, now.
tartoran
You did PCP? I still think it's a scary drug that I don't have the curiosity to try.
ChrisMarshallNY
It’s like giving yourself the flu.
Not a great head.
Loooong time ago, though. I quit at 18.
TimorousBestie
This has to be a joke on the order of “lipstick parties” and “d&d is satanic,” right? I’m not saying the behavior in question _never_ happens, but surely the prevalence has been blown out of proportion.
There’s no drug I can think of that is present in the blood in such great concentrations that a transfusion would communicate the high, certainly not without killing the donator or the donatee. Nor does receiving mismatched blood result in anything resembling a high. I concede that the placebo effect can do many remarkable things.
However, given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy, I’m more inclined to believe this is a rumor that got too big for its britches. Maybe a pharmacist out there can convince me otherwise?
WheatMillington
Agreed, I'm totally convinced this is a weird media hysteria. This just cannot be true, it makes zero sense from the most basic level.
onlyrealcuzzo
The facts seem to be:
1. HIV in Fiji is up 10-fold from 2014 (that's a lot, but if the starting point was small, then it's hard to say)
2. 50% of people who contracted HIV said they shared needles (common issue, unrelated to "Bluetoothing")
3. "Bluetoothing" is a meme, and it sounds insane, and in some small sample in South Africa, 18% of drug users claimed to have done it.
4. In Pakistan, street vendors are selling pre-used heroin syringes (also insane - but needle sharing, not "Bluetoothing")
I mean, sure, this is news in the sense that it's insane. But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.
parineum
> But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.
Journalists getting news from tik tok.
thomassmith65
When do we get the article about this article? That's more interesting, in a way.
myvoiceismypass
The article seems to mention that the only effect seems to be placebo.
Don’t forget, people were and still are taking horse dewormer for Covid, despite shitting out parasites not really fixing much other than a parasite problem.
thomassmith65
If you mainline a half gallon of junkie blood, you should get a decent buzz. Just remember to check their blood type first, and to bring a large rug so you can dispose of their desiccated body afterwards.
dotancohen
> given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy
sirreal14
It absolutely is, but the “joke” is manufacturing consent for considering drug cartels as terrorists, and for considering wars for regime change in Latin America as dealing with terrorism.
TimorousBestie
Oh, yeah. Now that you mention it, that makes sense. Gross.
labrador
Especially since one can boof a few ounces of vodka to get drunk (or so I've heard). Sharing blood with alcohol in it makes no sense. But kids are stupid, so who knows.
TimorousBestie
Right on, but even if you take a liter of blood at 0.4% BAC (potentially fatal) and give it to a sober person who nominally has five liters already, that dilutes it down to an equivalent BAC of 0.06%, right? They’d have to be a real lightweight to feel anything. And that’s a full liter, not the tiny hypos in the article photos.
I dunno. Another 300ml of vodka can’t be that much more expensive than the apparatus needed to perform a blood transfusion.
mrguyorama
It's just like how all that panic of "Powdered alcohol" was absurdly bullshit!
All the news and the company's marketing was implying it was more concentrated by being "dried", like you would concentrate all sorts of things.
Except alcohol is a liquid, and cannot be "concentrated". The powdered alcohol was alcohol soaked into maltodextrin (or similar). By definition, it is less potent. In fact, if you make some and actually try to do things like spike a drink, or even just try to make normal drinks from it, it was flat out useless and worse than just sneaking in a flask to somewhere.
The media that IMO kinda "debunked" the whole thing was WIRED
giantg2
It doesn't have to be effective to gain popularity. Just the rumor could be enough to cause a small percentage of people to try it. Even a small percentage of people doing it could lead to a wider spread of disease, especially when they share needles with people who don't do blood sharing.
dylan604
Why do you think the "d&d is satanic" thing was a joke? I remember growing up and that was going around, and it was very much not a joke. These people were serious about them thinking it was satanic. If you say it's a joke because it was laughably misguided, that's one thing I guess, but it was never a meme like joke. Just like the fear of backmasking in rock-n-roll music, these misguided people were very serious about it. I spent a lot of my teenage years with this crap, and it was only funny in how we made fun of the people with those beliefs.
margalabargala
The joke is the people. By believing so seriously like that or this, they place themselves in an outgroup and are made fun of as "those people" by the rest of society who aren't insane.
Another modern example would be people who genuinely believe that Portland is a fiery warzone.
dylan604
You say things like this in a way that makes me think you underestimate them. These are the same type of people that elected the current administration. While their beliefs maybe a joke to you, when they get in to power, it won't be funny to you any longer. These same groups talked about the slow boring of hard wood that the reversal of Roe was going to be. This was late 80s and early 90s.
Continuing to ignore or make fun of people with polar opposite viewpoints as your own to the point you become complacent will lead to exactly the situation we are in now. I promise you the people you are making fun or are not complacent and are vigilantly being active in having things changed to their liking.
Treating someone as a joke maybe cool at parties of like minded people, but now we are where we are because too many did not take things seriously.
nemo44x
Indeed this has to be ridiculous. Anyone who actually does this deserves whatever fate they receive. I don’t believe this is a thing. Shared needles? Sure. Transfusions? No.
greekrich92
They helped manufacture the Iraq war, sold a genocide the last 2 years, and helped push the fake shoplifting hysteria since Covid. No reason to believe NYT about anything.
_345
what
null
decremental
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CaptainOfCoit
Never heard about this before, and seems it's maybe related to "Flashblood" where Heroin users would pass on their blood right after injecting, mainly to avoid withdrawal? From 2010: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4407801/
> During 2005, a new blood-sharing practice, “flashblood,” emerged among female IDUs in Dar es Salaam. Flashblood is a syringe full of blood drawn back immediately after initial injection that is passed to a companion to inject. Those practicing flashblood believe that the syringe full of about 4cm3 of such blood contains enough heroin to avoid the pains of withdrawal.
martey
Both "flashblooding" and the 2010 paper you mention are explicitly mentioned in the article.
> One reason the practice hasn’t been more widespread is that it delivers a diminished dose of a drug. It isn’t clear how much of a high secondary users receive, and some medical experts say there is no more than a placebo effect.
Yes, this makes sense. People are not actually getting high from this, so I doubt that very many people are trying to get high from injecting other people's blood directly.
> Unusual injection practices in Pakistan include selling half-used, blood-infused heroin syringes. (link to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19558668/)
This is the headline, I think. Street vendors sell hits of a syringe that may have already been stuck in someone else. Every time the needle enters a blood vessel, some of the blood goes back into the needle. It's not that users are asking for "blood-infused" syringes, it's that the vendors are sticking multiple people with a single syringe and now 50% of intravenous drug users in Sargodha have HIV.