"I'll take the messiness of modern Western society" until you get pushed into train tracks or become a victim of fentanyl overdose, you are actually not taking it, sitting somewhere in Colorado typing these thing is not part of the messiness.
Current approval rating of the Kishida cabinet is about 25%. The disapproval rating is 50%.
To be fair, people are never happy with the government here, and come election time they’re always happy enough to not bother voting at all.
Plus, much of the population is elderly, and their preferences are quite different than the younger people you hear more from.
Fentanyl poisoning is >99.9% a result of the war on drugs. If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.
I had a big post here comparing the black market for marijuana here in Oregon (spoiler: it’s larger than ever, half the cost of retail, and now largely run by cartels) but ultimately the larger issue society seems blind to is that addicts don’t think rationally about their addictions.
So yes, opioid addicts absolutely will risk their lives to get a hit that costs half as much.
Also I have absolutely no clue, and I doubt there is really even data on it, but there are a lot of people who are dying from fentanyl who aren't opiate addicts at all. One person I knew who died last year couldn't afford healthcare, bought their anxiety meds online, and died in their room from fentanyl. Another person I knew died from ectasy, and having talked around it's a common story.
Only when you are sane. Did you know addicts are willing to walk on street @20F to get some money for drug instead of going shelters?
This is quite common and not hard to observe once you are willing to explore a bit beyond your regular happy life.
If an addict can be high all day for a quarter the cost of a meal, say $1, and can purchase said from a safe, reputable drug store in their chosen location, rather than trekking across town to a shady area to buy illegal drugs from a outlaw dealer, they’ll do that. If only because they can spend more time begging and less time walking.
You have a very skewed view of addicts if you think they are that deranged. A good illustration of that is clean needle programs that provide orange safety tips for used needles. If these addicts were so completely deranged, those tips would end up in the trash not on the ends of needles in the streets.
I feel like this rings the same as ‘unrestricted gun availability is good for people’.