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Legalize heroin, and nobody would want to take the more-dangerous fentanyl?
But sure, legalize fentanyl and nobody would accidentally overdose.
Legalize and standardize all drugs and nobody would die from fentanyl contaminating their cocaine.
If by "regulation" you mean "restriction", then, sure, I buy that, stipulating that it's somehow possible to restrict access. But what the preceding commenter meant by "regulation" was labeling. No, that won't work.
I am not against drug legalisation, on libertarian grounds. If you want to kill yourself, kill yourself, it's your life not mine. But I don't buy that banning drugs results in more harm that making them freely available.
And it's very paradoxical for liberal societies to want to ban or heavily control the use of alcohol and cigarettes and to consider legalising hard drugs at the same time.
Your implied claim, as I read it, is that "opioid-ness" is "why fentanyl kills," and there's nothing special going on because we had a bunch of deaths from licit opioids in the early 2000s. But I think that there's actually something special about illicit fentanyl in particular, as opposed to regulated opioids, and dose inconsistency is one plausible difference.
Anyway, you could just share what your thoughts are more explicitly, and that would be interesting and maybe harder to misunderstand.
The original claim was having a controlled dose matters, so it not only matters, that's the whole conversation here.
The death stats on oxycodone are staggering
You make these claims about stats but don't give stats.
but given free access to oxycodone
People don't have free access oxycodone
you're just as likely to die
This is not verum. "16 million individuals worldwide have had or currently suffer from opioid use disorder (OUD)"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448203/
Remember as well that a great many street fentanyl deaths were pts started on regulated, labeled opioids
Primis, this is an unbacked claim. Secundo, why didn't they die from prescription opiods?
The truth is fentanyl has a low safety index which makes the dose more important.
"The calculated safety index (ORantinociception/ORrespiratory depression) for fentanyl of 1.20 suggests that fentanyl has a low safety margin, implicating that fentanyl needs to be titrated with caution."
Clear according to what? You gave no statistics and made nothing but unbacked claims. Most of what you did say is directly contradicted by the CDC.
Fentanyl is extremely potent and has a very narrow window between therapeutic dose and an overdose that kills you. Other opiate cause deaths overwhelmingly only when combined with other drugs.
Everything you have said about increased use or more deaths is an assumption not based on data. Why won't you source your claims?
Among synthetic opioid–involved overdose deaths in 2016, almost 80% involved another drug or alcohol, such as: another opioid, heroin, cocaine, prescription opioids, benzodiazepines, alcohol, psychostimulants, and antidepressants.
> In 2021, nearly 71,000 drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids (other than methadone) occurred in the United States, which is more deaths than from any other type of opioid. Synthetic opioid-involved death rates increased by over 22% from 2020 to 2021 and accounted for nearly 88% of all opioid-involved deaths in 2021. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2021 was nearly 23 times the number in 2013.
Same CDC page, "opioid" tab. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/opioid-overdose.html