Did fentanyl overdose become top cause of death for adults aged 18-45 in the US? | Hacker News Reader

Did fentanyl overdose become top cause of death for adults aged 18-45 in the US?

snopes.com

37 pointssteelstraw9 comments

I wonder how many deaths have been caused by attempting to prevent prescription drug abuse without providing treatment or alternatives.

There’s no question opioid addiction is a problem, but taking controlled doses away from addicts and their turning to street drugs was inevitable and always a recipe for disaster.

Overdoses are something like 10x higher than 20 years ago. I know there may be some cause for this that isn’t related to medical profession or BigPharma, but we are clearly doing something wrong today that we weren’t doing 20 years ago.

With good intentions the DEA made it much harder for people to get prescriptions for opioids and greatly reduced diversion.

20 years ago it was much easier for people to get a prescription for painkillers and it’s also likely it wasn’t as prevalent an issue at that time. There were also plenty of stories of employees at medical facilities and pharmacies diverting large amount of pills undetected. There were bad doctors, pharmacies and completely fake facilities as well. The DEA cracked down on this greatly using a variety of tools and it’s arguably been extremely effective.

There are good reasons to think that the combination of cheap street drugs and expensive and harder to get prescription drugs is responsible for the rise in overdoses.

It seems most addicts go from something like Vicodin to Heroin is price and access.

Medicine and Big Pharma aren’t blameless, but bad policy is a major factor as far as I can tell.

Also the war on drugs and heroin especially pushed production into labs for fentanyl which is 100x (No idea) more potent and most Street heroin is laced with it so people not used to it shoot to much and die..

Unfortunately Snopes has a checkered track record and fluidity with the truth.

An example of their bias:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-democrats-police-ta...

Their co-founder got himself into trouble for plagiarism as well:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snope...

yes, and he got the boot for plagiarising and failed to attribute his conclusions. if he attributed them properly the snopes fake/true would be unaffected. And the Pelosi stuff they said it was gray - a tossup. The fentanyl is validly attributed. Death of people who took overdoses of properly prescribed drugs are in fact far higher. people who intentionally died by powdered bootleg fentanyl are the focus of this conclusion. Many fentanyl doses are now dispensed as patches which do not bootleg well (bulky to import and too expensive for bootleggers). The lion's share of fentanyl overdoses are due to incorrect dilution of powdered bootleg fentanyl where the mixing and granulation is badly done a few pure granules get into the does. 2 milligrams of fentanyl kills the average person and some fentanyl derivatives are 15 times as toxic. This is 0.13 milligrams. 1 Sugar cube = 2.3 grams = 2300 milligrams = 17,692 fatal doses. Can you imagine cutting a sugar cube into over 17,000 equal powdered parts = why these deaths are so common, as the criminals have zero chemical training and screw it up. For those who may be curious, mixing powdered drugs means you need to powder them to the same size and mix them with a neutral powder of the same density and electrostatic nature or you get density settling = fatal doses, or electro static separation = fatal doses. Difficult materials are often made into a paste with a liquid non solvent(so they do not dissolve) at perhaps 500 times as much neutral powder. This paste is then well mixed by repeated subdivision and combination (like when you mix powdered green into white to get a very light green, the more you fold and divide the more even the light green gets). It is then vacuum dried and powdered as a 500:1 dilution, and can safely be pressed into small tablets of the right dose with precision. Usually a small added amount of a binder (gluing agent) is added to make hard pills that do not break in shipping

What bias do you see in that link? That seems even-handed to me.

I think Snopes is playing fast and loose with the facts here. "Unintentional Poisoning" - vital statistics jargon for drug overdoses - have been the leading cause of death for American's 18-45 for many years. The data they link to is not specific enough to say that Fentanyl alone is now the leading cause. If it is, it's simply displaced some other drug.

Overdoses are at record highs, and opium/opioids are the largest contributor.

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