Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Fentanyl's rise is 100% attributable to smuggling in drugs due to the War on Drugs. It allows the smugglers to move the maximum potency with the minimum risk and minimum quantity. Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate.
Legalizing opiates, providing safe and clean areas for people to use, and using those safe and clean areas to get people help to quit, help finding a place to live, help getting food to eat, and help reintegrating into society will go much, much further than continued prohibition.
Many people, including myself, quit smoking normal cigarettes although it was highly addictive, because it was bad for health, not because of legality or cost. Of course opiates are a very different beast, but the point is that if someone wants to get drugs they will succeed, period. Expecting them to disappear just because they are made illegal is 100% fantasy. Legalizing drugs would move their production and sale in the open and more regulated markets, with less risks of them being made by improvised chemists in their basement, plus lower costs and much less involvement by organized crime which once prices drop would move to more lucrative businesses. remember what happened in the US when alcohol was banned: people searching for drinks would still find where to buy them, but it was organized crime that started making profits out of the ban.
And alcohol can be used in quite a benign way. Good reason to think opioids would see an even larger decline as they are high impact and unlikely to be openly consumed for group socialization the way alcohol is.
You can argue for legalization but it is a fallacy to believe that prohibiting something is bad if you can't eliminate it 100%.
Yes, not _everyone_ will stop using opiates if they’re made legal. THAT'S THE POINT - more users will quit when provided resources and the ones who don’t quit are better off than they were before while they work toward sobriety if they choose.
Are you suggesting there should be no controlled chemicals? No pharmacist?
>Expecting them to disappear just because they are made illegal is 100% fantasy.
What if the expectation is for fewer people to use less of them due to higher hurdles?
This is what I advocate for. Probably way more killed by regulation here than saved. I recall accompanying someone in Mexico who had to get their life saving asthma medication in one of those unregulated pharmacies that don't ask questions, because they can't afford to see a doctor to get a prescription.
No, that was not my point.
> What if the expectation is for fewer people to use less of them due to higher hurdles?
That's the very reason why "first dose is free". Many people are sucked into drugs consumption either for fun at parties or because they're lured into substances by "friends". Unfortunately, once they're dependent it's too late to put obstacles on their way.
It is hard enough to treat alcohol addiction, and that makes people feel awful. I am skeptical about broadly treating opiate addiction, which surely makes people feel much better than being high on alcohol.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
I don't think legality is the main thing incentivizing people to quit.
Today, virtually all of the ‘oxycontin’ that is used recreationally is actually fentanyl and binders that looks like an oxycontin. Unless it’s in a prescription bottle (and even then,) it’s almost certainly fentanyl.
> In 2023, DEA seized more than 80 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. The 2023 seizures are equivalent to more than 381 million lethal doses of fentanyl. [0]
If they seized 80 million, just imagine how many weren’t seized.
[0]https://www.dea.gov/onepill#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20DEA%20sei....
Why is that a problem exactly?
Also people quit smoking and drinking all the time, has nothing to do with it being legal.
So?
Then again, ideally the government would be hard at working making society nice enough to live in that people don't turn to opiates...
We've been doing the same shit for 50+ years, and the results are always the same: more drug use of ever harder drugs, more deaths, more destitution, more prison, more homelessness. We should try something else, but when all you have is a hammer ...
Oh it will take a generation. Most people who are currently heavily addicted to fentanyl, meth, crack or even alcohol are lost causes. I think 10% of current addicts getting into recovery is extremely optimistic. The objective is to reduce addiction in future generations. At our current trajectory, the next generation will be more addicted than the current. The last 10 years after the crackdown have been an utter disaster with drug deaths doubling in that time and opioid deaths quadrupling.
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
You can't solely decriminalize drugs, throw everybody to the wolves and expect a good outcome.
They are unwilling to run homeless people out of their cities. San Francisco has the same issues but drugs aren't legal there.
Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net and draining it ruins any city's ability to have a good social safety net. It punishes and ruins the cities that try to lead with compassion.
The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap.
> Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net
Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the Dust Bowl.
You keep misrepresenting the situation by dramatizing it. People sleep on the streets of San Francisco (one of the most expensive cities in the US) not because it's literally the only place in the country or even the state where they would not die in a cold snap. SF is brutally expensive, it's unreasonable to expect it to solve homelessness by housing people. It hasn't happened and it will never happen. Ever. We can spend $100B more on this next year, and we will just have more homeless people.
This is not a realistic goal, and it would still result in homeless people gathering in cities.
>The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap.
There is an entire southern half of the country where that won't happen.
Or, you know, actually house them.
It's sad.
That's not enough. You have to legalize everything with restrictions like cigarettes and alcohol.
The problem is that fentanyl is so powerful that it contaminates everything.
Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example).
You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. The only way to avoid that it to clean up the manufacturing. And the only way to do that is to force it to be made in actual medical manufacturing facilities.
> You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl.
Nobody is dying from fentanyl laced marijuana.
However, people are dying due to buying and eating pills that contain fentanyl when they think they’re buying xanax or oxycontin. None of the fentanyl is accidentally in these pills. The manufacturer knows about the fentanyl, but the customer might not be aware.
People have died from doing cocaine that had allegedly unknown fentanyl in it, as this news story details the deaths of three people who claimed to have done cocaine with unknown fentanyl in it: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-05/three-de...
> “The thing that makes this surge so different than others is most of these people weren’t trying to take opioids,” Stedman said. “They were trying to use multiple different substances — crack cocaine, methamphetamine, K2.”
They're not putting it in marijuana intentionally, as I understand it. It's simply so hard to keep from contaminating it that it is practically impossible to avoid the contamination.
I don't really have an opinion on opiates legalization, but I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. It could be legal, but smugglers could still sell cheaper drug with higher potency.
One may wonder why these people get addicted in the first place. It seems rather specific to the US.
I would rather people do Heroin than fentanyl which is 10X worse and a small dose can kill.
The problem is that regular pills from the street like oxycodone are being laced with fentanyl. Someone seeking a cheap high, but with the laced pill can end up on the deathbed.
At this point, I would rather legalize opiates than people killing themselves with these tainted pills.
Legal, regulated opiate availability implies a known quality, purity and therefore dosage. Any drug user who prefers heroin takes uncut heroin in the precise amount they choose. They would not choose to take cut fentanyl where they can be precise about nothing, including the knowledge that it is fentanyl not something else they might prefer.
The secondary argument is the reduction in crime committed to finance addiction. Burglary, mugging, prostitution all are said to expect to decline.
The tertiary argument is the reduction in corruption of law enforcement enabled by the sugar bags of cash in the illegal drug trade, a trade that just got undercut by the government to the point where it is out of business. In addition the additional police resource made available by the collapse of the illegal drug trade and reduction in "drug use financing" crime is very useful in reducing other crime and corruption.
Whether you believe it or not is up to you. If you have strong views either way it would pay to research results from countries where it has been tried while noting it's a hugely emotive issue so your bullshit detector has to be well tuned. Also keeping in mind any good idea can be ruined in implementation through incompetence, inexperience or malice. Also people do get very excited about ideas they think are fantastic but turn out not to be.
Good luck.
Or is your position that all drugs - including antibiotics should be freely available for recreational use without any physician advice ?
Mostly true but there's another factor: fentanyl is synthetic. There's no dealing with opium poppy crops, farmers, processing of crops (in places like Mexico and Afghanistan), transportation and as a result it's cheap.
> Legalizing opiates ...
I agree that the legalizing these drugs is better than prohibition but, by itself, is an insufficient solution.
As an aside, the US loves criminalizing things. Building prisons is jobs. Prisoners are slave labor. Felons count for the census but can't vote. Often you'll have private prisons thrown in there too. These are an abimination but still represent only a small minority of prisoners.
The Louisiana State Prison, known colloquially as "Angola", is basically a cotton plantation with slave labor.
People need access to their basic needs like housing, food and water. A lot of drug addiction comes out of homelessness as people self-medicate. A bunch of heroin addicts were originally on an opiate prescription. The American medical system compared to other countries hands out opiates like candy.
People need access to mental health care, have security and have hope and dignity in their lives. All of these things are substantially cheaper than our carceral state but there's no profit in it and nobody wants to live near "homeless" people.
At the core of this is the American belief in the myth of meritocracy because the other side of that coin is that homelessness, drug addiction and other awful circumstances are viewed as deserved or at least a personal moral failure. As such, such people almost deserve those outcomes.
So my point is that legalization just barely scratches the surface.
It was detected in Canada and in 48 states. It's beyond horrible, if was is written that article is true https://theconversation.com/what-is-xylazine-a-medical-toxic... .
Personally I kinda miss it but also it was such a waste of time. Esp not miss unproductive hippy conversations around bonfire.
Today i think differently about that. My close calls were with very clean drugs. Seeing all these crazy new drugs & what they're mixed with, i believe these close calls would have been final ones for me.
I think the experiences did a lot of damage to my young brain, but also, everyone is damaged one way or the other.
But man, i got fun memories. Alongside sad & scary ones.
The last 10 years i was so "focused" on creating something and spent most of time working on stuff (on the computer). Pulling 12-14 hour days or 1-2 days no sleep at all regularly... A lot of less real life memories. That is something i regret much more. Especially now that i am a father and turned 30. I still spend my working hours too focused on trying something big, now that i have already wasted my good years on the computer. This is actually something i regret. Because i feel now that i still didn't do much of significant work & always struggle financially, i am a loser. But i'd rather feel like a loser with less of a "wannabe change the world entrepreneur focused" past and more of a "man, was i really still such an idiot when i was 25" kind of past.