However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
No one is intentionally mixing fentanyl and MDMA or cocaine but with poor lab work it's easy to get a bit of the wrong whitish powder and the people selling it down stream have no more idea than their buyers what's really in it.
Affluent recreational drug connoisseurs can use basic chemistry and test kits to be highly confident what they're taking but even they get bit sometimes if reckless and using a new source.
Anecdotal: I have had many exposures to the illicit drug markets in my areas throughout the years. The symptom of many underlying unresolved issues I am sure, but that is not relevant. What I wish to say is that I have seen many pressed counterfeit tablets in my lifetime and have had the luxury and wherewithal to test a majority of them before usage. I have personally never identified fentanyl in a product that was not marketed as an opioid. With illicitly manufactured oxycontin and its ilk you will come across it a majority of the time. But with other things such as MDMA, ketamine and such it's incredibly rare to see. That is not to say it doesn't happen however, there have been instances of things containing fentanyl which had no business doing so. Despite this I echo GP's claim that it's largely due to inadvertant cross contamination than it is some intentional reason. The supply chains for these drugs are very long and windy once they are finalized for consumer use inside the US as well, with many middlemen making a few dollars to facilitate a transaction. Each of those hand-offs is one more opportunity for the new seller to say "I bought X, but could sell much more if I said it was Y", and that ends up killing people occasionally too.
Hypothesis: There is a number of factors at play here that add to the death toll. There is the occasional unintended cross contamination during production. It's also worth noting that individuals who import bulk drugs from overseas for their own sales often order multiple different substances and craft them for sale, further increasing the chance for that contamination during production. There is the fact that fentanyl and a majority of it's analogues are active at shockingly low doses relative to more classical opioids, which makes improper distribution of active ingredients into the final pill mixture highly likely when you consider they are usually not created with the best quality control procedures or equipment. There is the fact that younger users (I would argue they are more experimenters than users per se) of opioid drugs have less physical tolerance to these chemicals. We should also consider that youths also have less practical experience, and not knowing the "lay of the land" with these substances can kill you very easily. And then of course the obvious increase in the average American's listlissness, hopelessness, economic uncertainty, fear of the future and so on. The ground under our feet is shifting and drugs are a temporary respite from that, if harmful long term.
Add to this the fact that we have a very drugs-illiberal society on the whole, whose governments oftentimes think the best way to address this problem is simply banning substances or once in a while executing operations to damage the supply chain, while completely avoiding the idea that perhaps most usage of these substances is symptomatic of a problem and not the problem itself? And you end up with an firehose of drug analogues that can escape easy regulation and restriction juuuuust long enough to gain a foothold in the market and shift the consumer culture of a particular drug. It's not a problem you can legislate your way out of, and it never will be.
All of this is to say I expect US overdoses per capita, the "never-before-seenness" (and by extension lack of medical knowledge surrounding it) of the drug analogues on the market, and the overall appetite for drugs of dependency, all to continue increasing for the forseeable future. I wish it wasn't this way. But like most of the US' modern cultural issues we enjoy arguing about what could offer relief far more than we do finding a bipartisan way to address them.
To anyone reading: Please don't take this at face value. The article itself has a story of someone who OD'ed on fentanyl that was present in their "xanax".
From reading the results from the harm reduction tent at a nearby music festival it's in all the drugs, not just opiates
And yeah, don't take what I say at face value. I'm a nobody on the internet with one story out of billions. Test everything. Every single time.
I graduated high school in the mid 00's. When I last ran the numbers in 2018, my graduating class of ~250 had lost roughly 4% of its people over the years due to OD.
I deeply want this set of problems to get better, but I cannot convince myself that it will during my lifetime.
Puzzling over how we reach bipartisan without ever getting to the agreement part.
I didn't see this in the article. I read that Barnett didn't realize the trend until after a few events - but I didn't see anything indicating a lack of empathy. It's possible to both be emphatic and think an unfortunate event is a one-off caused by external factors, for which a policy change is not necessary.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-...
The chemicals are still making it to Mexico from China, that is still easy to track:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipelin...
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-chi...
Etc...
TLDR; China is still the source for the vast majority of fentanyl in the states (a lot of it is seized in Mexico in containers that come from china, though they get around this by just shipping a lot of it), and no one (including China) is really claiming otherwise since it is just too obvious ATM.
> However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
I don't get that either. Maybe the dealers actually want their clients dead. Or maybe they're incompetent.
An analog to the tech industry would be the universal frustration with end user data collection vs its continuing proliferation.
Most of us don't like the lack of privacy online and how much data companies capture, and many if not most of us work at companies that aren't capturing end user data. But many if not most of us, do make tools that are sold to companies who do capture an insane amount of user data. Ultimately, we still are often paid, at least indirectly, through privacy-violating user data collection because it's an extremely common web monetization model.
I'd be willing to bet that there more than a few Facebook engineers on this forum who unironically complain about the lack of privacy on the web. But what pays their salaries?
I always assumed the dealers knew they had terrible cocaine and would lace it with fentanyl to give it more of an effect. The problem is that such a small amount is lethal so it doesn’t get mixed well enough or they just put too much in.
No idea if that’s why.