How does fentanyl get into the US?
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is a completely artificial problem, created by the war on drugs. Just like the waves of PMMA deaths in europe caused by safrole seizures. Western nations have no one to blame for this but themselves.
Addicts literally carry around fent testing kits so they can _avoid_ this synthetic opioid.
Its my understanding that heroin and street pharmaceuticals aren't really around anymore. Its ALL fentanyl now and everyone knows it.
Choosy addicts choose...is something I never thought I'd read. I'd suggest they weren't addicting right if they are choosy. When you can find your fix of choice, you just fix with what's available.
If your comment were accurate, fent sales would plummet and the problem would fix itself. This is clearly not the case.
None of what you've described is how any of this works in the real world.
There's an entire world of behaviour from a seller's perspective for every drug and an entire set of behaviour from a user's perspective. They match closely to how 'legal' alcohol production and consumption works. Biggest profits are from the biggest addicts of alcohol and their suppliers are all on the stock exchange for everyone to see. Beer almost never kills anyone, same with the production from large reputable companies. but if you find a great deal of homemade hard liqour make sure you test for ethanol and methanol. Thats simply how addicts die no matter the product they are using.
'some white powder' could literally be anything and everything. Idiots could cut it up wrong and what previously got you high just fine might potentially be a lethal dose right in front of you in the form of a powdery white line with no way to tell. Theres the mostly harmless chemicals used to reduce dose to cut the dealer more profit but could still not be mixed properly so new users wouldn't be able to notice. Then theres the nitazenes and other stuff that most tests only detect 'presence of' but not the dose so you would still have to throw everything out even though it might be mixed and dosed properly. And then theres the less addicted group who doesn't even bother with anything ever and only wants the pure stuff in large single batches in order to test fully and properly. Those people never get screwed over because thats what they pay for.
Possibly it's just too potent for legalization to be viable.
https://www.gloshospitals.nhs.uk/healthcare-professionals/tr...
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I know that by the 80s heroin had a bad stigma attached to it even by other drug users, and it was rarely seen in the circles I knew. Coke, pot and meth did not have that at the time.
Why is the solution always either "let them take drugs" or "don't let them take drugs"?
To fix the problem, shouldn't people be asking why they feel the need to take drugs to start with?
The same goes for alcohol abuse.
Seriously, it feels like society has drifted too far away from the idea of small, local communities. So much of modern life separates people either physically or technologically. Though I would like to blame modern marketing and consumerism, I think these problems have been brewing for centuries.
From a sociological perspective, I do see the benefits of small conservative communities that effectively serve as a guarding or protective mechanism, shielding the more vulnerable from potentially destructive influences.
There is already some compelling anecdata that warrants studying.
Rat park is one, and the doctor who prescribed heroin in the 60s is another.
The jist of it was that addicts stopped abusing when there was something better to live for. In the absence of community, opportunity, and hope, abuse abounded.
The reality of some people's experiences though is that while euphoric in the beginning, long term use leads to an unpleasurable mental haze. The lack of clarity becomes its own hell.
----
The potential solution is likely unpopular and likely difficult to implement. Investing into communities that promote community along with incentives for economically depressed areas to be rebuilt, IMO would likely reduce opioid abuse.
But that's not nearly as popular as the moral displacement schadenfreude the people get by being able to point the finger at the drug abusers.
The legal side of it is just that; one side. It's important, yes, but just legalising opium won't automagically solve the opioid crisis on its own. We also need to address societal causes of opioid addiction. At least in the US, overprescription from doctors corrupted by big pharma(especially purdue), is one major contributing factor that's been thoroughly exposed in recent years. Obviously the role of money in medicine needs to be changed.
The deeper issue though is that more people are becoming vulnerable to developing addiction. Speaking as an addict myself, one of the root causes of addiction at an individual level can be untreated mentall illness. Drugs can often provide a temporary reprieve from mental illness, and unfortunately is often more easily available than good treatment options. In many western countries, funding for mental health treatment programs has been reduced. This is contributing to a rise in unmanaged mental health issues.
I think spending a ton more on mental health, especially in youth, is essential to reducing the prevalence of addiction.
Other issues include poverty, unemployment, housing. The thread through all of this is that more people lead miserable lives, and that makes drugs more tempting.
But let me circle back to the legalisation issue and why it's so important. The main health risks with opioids are overdose in the short term, infections(hepatitis, HIV, endocarditis) from dirty needles and organ damage from dirty drugs in the longer term. Legalisation can address all of these things. Any addict will tell you the main reason overdoses are so common is there's no consistency to the potency of their drugs. Even when it was still heroin, the constant battle with LE meant the purity would fluctuate wildly. Add to that synergistic adulterants, and now these hyperpotent drugs, and you get addicts dying like flies. Legalising the drugs would allow regulating them and providing consistent dosages, eliminating harmful adulterants, and mandating that doses be sold alongside clean user equipment. This would greatly limit the health impact of these drugs on its users. It's obvious that recovering from addiction would be a lot easier if your body hadn't been destroyed by it before you even enter a treatment programme.
In addition, remember what I said about funding for mental health declining? How much money is spent futilely fighting the war on drugs? I haven't done the tedious task of adding up federal, state and police budgets for the US, but the budget for the DEA alone is in the billions, so it's safe to assume once you do the math it'll be in the tens of billions for LE alone. And that's without accounting for the courts, prisons, and all the money being funneled away from the legitimate economy by criminal gangs. This is money that should be spent elsewhere. On mental health and addiction treatment, housing, social programmes. But instead it's essentially being piled up and lit on fire.
So at least for me, that's why I keep saying "let them take drugs".
Here's an exercise for you to do just that. Alcohol is legal and extremely available in the west. It has an even stronger addiction potential than opioids do. And the majority of people in the west drink at varying rates. But the rate of addiction is generally under 5%(in the west). Why do you think that is?
I conclude that... alcohol doesn't actually have an even stronger addiction potential than opioids do?
The justice system concentrates only on putting small vendors behind bars (usually black people), but they're not the ones making real profits. I guarantee you don't know any big drug traffickers operating inside the US that were sent to jail. When you hear about big bosses it is always some guy outside the US, but the ones operating inside the country are all protected in one way or another. They're all laughing and buying mansions all over the country. This corruption is what the US should be concentrating on if they want to stop drug trafficking.
Adjusted for population size and it’s roughly half the length of the US/Mexico land border and it’s designed for military incursion via tanks not just people in a pickup truck.
Similarly the amount of money spent on inspecting imports is well under 1% of the total value of said imports. It’s possible to inspect literally every package crossing the border, we just don’t want to.
For anyone else that was curious, the Korean DMZ is 150 miles long. US Mexico border is 1950.
On the other hand suggesting there’s suddenly massive issues with coordination because a country is 7x the size just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
PS: 160 mi, but that should be obvious from my comment and the relevant population sizes.
Manpower can only travel so far in a rapid response to incidents, which quickly makes distant sections 100% independent. That’s linear scaling.
For something like fentanyl where a single success is enough for a single trafficker over a long time, the fact that sections are 100% independent is exactly why scaling is exponential - only one section has to fail for the goal to be achieved.
Driving 1 truck through a brick wall isn’t easier than driving 10, you need to deal with the wall either way.
Same deal with a tunnel, it’s detecting that’s hard. Shipping thousands of tons through a small gap is easy.
If anything length of border gives you economies of scale in terms of specialization equipment.
If you assume that drug traffickers can't estimate the likelihood of success or that every part of the border is consistently just as secure at every point in time as any other then you'd be right, but those aren't reasonable assumptions in my opinion.
People are unwilling to accept infinite risk and the question of if a segment of broader is secure depends on the risk of crossing that segment.
They might have better targets, but if a given segment isn’t secure that’s an inherent issue even if people happen to choose somewhere else.
In the other direction, if some segment is effectively impossible to cross that’s irrelevant. You don’t need other segments to reach an arbitrarily high standard just high enough to either get people to give up on the idea or fail often enough you’re dealing with the issue. IE one guy with a backpack per decade isn’t failure.
People are, in practice, given a commensurate reward, willing to accept arbitrarily high risk, and market dynamics are willing to provide the rewards in this case.
https://www.voanews.com/a/korean-industrial-zone-reopens-as-...
Edit: also, landmines
But that stuff is independent of length which is why I mentioned trade separately.
Here is one such study: https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/llic...
The war on drugs has shown that focussing on the supply side has done little to solve the problem. There will be new ways to smuggle or new drugs to catch in the drag net while the demand remains.
The question then is, why is the demand for drugs so high?
Because they (at least opioids) make people feel great. Better than sex, better than achieving a lifelong goal, better than a lot of things. The second half of the story is after 5 or so years, the effect isn't nearly as strong. After 10 years you don't get the high, you just don't feel like shit. That along with a likely police record, takes people completely out of society.
I remember the crack epidemic in the 80s, and it was pretty much over by the late 1990s. I've heard it's because people saw what crack did to other people and didn't want that to happen to them. That's honest marketing.
Nothing wrong with some honest marketing about what drugs really are. Nothing like DARE, just make some good, honest commercials and play them. Drugs are great to start with, but this is what will happen. You think it won't happen to you, but it probably will.
They aren't doing it to feel good, they are doing it to escape what they feel all the time.
There's lots of reasons, boredom, a friend talks you into it, a doctor prescribes pain meds, getting drunk at a party and trying it, take a little mental vacation from the stress of life, and as you mentioned, despair. Lots of people with good lives get hooked on them as well.
Feel like putting forward a source for that claim, or did you simply decide it's true because you think it sounds true?
Just to name a few examples: The Flores brothers, Frank Lucas, the five families of NYC, George Jung. All of these were heavily prosecuted and if they weren't major drug traffickers in the U.S, then no one is.
Tariffs are just taxes that will destroy the economy.
They reversed course and recently passed a law to recriminalize possession. I think its the right move. Downtown turned into a very unpleasant place.
Then in April of 2024 House Bill 4002 made possession once again a misdemeanor but kept most of the other provisions of Measure 110 and still focuses on "deflecting" people who possess out of the criminal justice system and into treatment programs.
So Measure 110 is still mostly in effect. They just made it so you do in fact have something on your record if you're caught with possession.
Unless you're forced to do something to deal with the addiction then there's probably not much point for this kind of thing:
> Starting September 1, 2024, possession of hard drugs became classified as a criminal misdemeanor outside of the regular A-E categorization system, carrying a sentence of up to 6 months of jail, which may be waived if the convictee enters into mandatory drug treatment.[8][9]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_Ballot_Measure_110
Of course one needs to keep at it, otherwise things fall apart:
> Funding ebbed still more recently due to new national budget pressures, which undercut efforts encouraging addicts into rehabilitation programs. The results of “disinvestment” and “a freezing in [their] response” led Goulão to state that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.”
> Speaking more quantitatively, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352 (from 2015 to 2021) as funding dropped in 2012 from $82.7 million to $17.4 million. Budget pressures and the apparent desire to cut immediate program costs of drug addiction (distinct from the total societal cost of drug addiction) led to program decentralization and the use of NGOs. Anecdotal evidence of a fragmenting, even breaking, system abounds: Demoralized police no longer cite addicts to get them into treatment and at least some NGOs view the effort as less about treatment and more about framing lifetime drug use as a right.
* https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-dru...
The other question is does the US have the resources (that people can afford) to have folks go to treatment.
In terms of GDP per capita, the USA is the 6th richest on the planet. So the question is not do we have the resources (we do!), but are we willing to make the political and social choices that would be required to deploy the resources to such ends.
Most incarceration is about helping those who aren't the ones suffering (evidenced by "... a very unpleasant place"). Not attacking you for your comment, just pointing out the paradigm we as a society have.
The deterioration of our public spaces is not caused by our drug epidemic, it's the logical outcome when the state fails to provide services to the most vulnerable. People literally have nowhere else to go.
How would you sell this in a way that could get you re-elected?
How would you persuade voters to NOT vote for that other guy, now that the problem is solved? How would you "secure more funding" for x,y, or z now that z doesn't exist? If you eradicate suffering, you can't blame the other side for it anymore. It's political suicide.
Not likely you'll run out of problems to fix.
It's still a good idea, but term limits only really work as part of a much broader program of oversight and control over the incentives of politicians.
You need access to safe and clean drugs. Support systems need to be in place. The look of downtown isn't the only way to measure success. How many people aren't dying because there isn't a stigma around drug use, where clean and predictable drug doses (like alcohol) can be had, drug testing kits, safe pieces to use with, safe places to be etc
The support and treatment structures have remained essentially unchanged since Measure 110 passed, with holdups to funding and logistics at almost every level of the state's government. Oregon was already ranked almost dead last in addiction treatment, and that hasn't budged. I can't see how it would work without this other critical piece.
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has some good coverage about this failure from the first couple years (which was never really rectified): https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/24/oregons-measure-110-i...
Also worth noting is that research has found no association with with Measure 110 and crime, and crime has been steadily falling since the measure was passed. (along with most other metro areas in the USA) https://www.opb.org/article/2024/01/24/portland-crime-violen...
I wonder to what degree Portland is a product of its local policy (like this decriminalization/recriminalization) vs the national trends that are seen across the USA.
You could go the way of East Asia. That would be very difficult, but easy access to narcotics could lead to disastrous results.
Tariffs are taxes and subsidies. See "Tariffs Give U.S. Steelmakers a Green Light to Lift Prices":
> Executives from U.S. steel companies were enthusiastic backers of the 2018 tariffs and have urged Trump to deploy them again in his second term. They have called for the elimination of tariff exemptions and duty-free import quotas, saying those carve-outs allow unfairly low-price steel to enter the U.S. and undermine the steel market.
[…]
> Higher prices for imported steel are often followed by domestic suppliers raising their own prices, which then get passed through supply chains, manufacturing executives said. For consumers already reeling from rising retail prices and inflation, pricier steel and aluminum could further lift costs for durable goods like appliances and automobiles, as well as consumer products with aluminum packaging, such as canned beverages.
> “The issue with tariffs is everybody raises their prices, even the domestics,” said Ralph Hardt, owner of Belleville International, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of valves and components used in the energy and defense industries. Steel and aluminum are Belleville’s largest expenses.
* https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-tariffs-mexico-canad...
So tariffs are taxes in the sense that consumers are paying higher prices. But they are subsidies in that domestic companies don't have as much pressure on prices and can get more money.
So if you want to help a particular industry might as well just go with subsidies directly instead of the taxation add-on as well.
They just get hysterical information about the extreme cases and extrapolate to everyone.
People just need to be supported through hard times and experimentation phases so they come out the other side.
So many people eventually get clean, stop using and get back to having productive lives.
I saw so many unnecessary deaths, friends with potential, die, because we don't want to help and support them. Overdoses are not needed.These aren't street people that make up so much of the hysteria, just middle class normal people that had their life go a certain way.
People don't want fentanyl or fake drugs in general. Access to drugs that can be measured are safe. Opiods are safe, doctors give fentanyl to patients constantly, and you don't come out of surgeries a opioid addict because you got a dose one times.
The hysterical people need to learn there place in the discussion on drugs and get to the side.
Just wait until you see who's making decisions about women's health.
> [...] the trade in other chemicals involved in the manufacturing of fentanyl - some of which can have legitimate purposes - remain uncontrolled, as those involved in the trade find new ways to evade the law.
One has to imagine there's local manufacturing of fentanyl too, and one has to wonder the magnitude of it.
It’s the classic “put more armor on the areas with holes for planes that make it back from bombing raids”.
Inspections at the respective borders is absolutely not equal as anyone who has travelled by land through both borders. A lot more contraband comes through the South border and much more enforcement is there as well.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki...
Most seizures happen at checkpoints or vehicle searches.
https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-c...
From a purely economic perspective, it just sounds like local production will replace foreign imports if the US does manage to stop fentanyl from entering from abroad.
> In the first 10 months of 2024, the Canadian border service reported seizing 10.8lb (4.9kg) of fentanyl entering from the US, while US Border Patrol intercepted 32.1lb (14.6kg) of fentanyl coming from Canada.
So the US is exporting 242 doses per 1000 Canadians to Canada. Canada is exporting 84 does per 1000 Americans to the US.
Funnily enough the Republicans seemed content to sit on their hands and play politics with this so called crisis until the media broke the story.[also 0]
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/border-fe...
What are these chemicals, and what are their other uses? Which of them don't have any other uses?
By now it it's well known that globalization is for a fantasy world that doesn't exist, and people should stop listening so much to economics professors. Trade barriers need to go up to re-orient things. Unfortunately, Trump is unlikely to do it competently.
Look for American made kitchen knives. You will be lucky to spend less than $2k on a block of Made in USA knives. Meanwhile you can get a pretty good set made in China for under $200.
If you wanted American companies to compete, you would need a 10x tariff to make that $200 knife set cost $2000.
Well, at least we got some cheap knives or whatever.
certain political figures and their supporters just need a story to tell, it doesn't have to be particularly accurate or even coherent for their purposes
Feels like the main reasons you institute tariffs, historically, is to 1- control the production/flow of goods and 2- to raise money for other endeavors. As tariffs are a much more difficult form of taxation for a payer to track (they're not getting a bill the way they do on income/real estate taxes, it's being hidden in the cost of the good) they're also a great way to obfuscate "raising taxes" if you're running on a platform of, say "I'm going to institute the largest tax break in American history".
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-discuss-tariffs-canadi...
Oh no, it's very easy. When I sell my product, I will be including the exact amount the buyer is paying above what is normal due to tariffs. The tariffs are very well expressed on the purchase price of the parts that go into the product, so it's very easy for me to add up the tariffs and tell the buyer how much more trump is demanding they pay for the product.
For one we could stop subsidizing suspect products (e.g. HFCS) and create other incentives.
And we also know there's a ton more that could be done to lessen how common heart disease is
Yes lifespans were extremely short on average in Medieval Europe which faced constant famine and disease from peasants living in such close conditions with animals.
But medieval europe isn't the whole world. Hunter-gather lifespans varied greatly depending on environment but the modal lifespan is usually around 70 years old. Modern archeological evidence shows us that people living past 100 was far from uncommon even 1,000 years ago:
We care about CVD because of mortality, and if mortality rate is terrible then it's a moot point.
> people living past 100 was far from uncommon
"uncommon" is not a number. The most we can infer from the data is that life was exceedingly harsh and short on average. Even if we believe it was 70 years old, that's still worse.
In fact, this is an age old debate in anthropology. A major discussion was sparked by a talk called "The Original Affluent Society" during a now-famous symposium which highlighted then-recent evidence that non-industrial societies generally had much more leisure time and less stress. We also know that they had much more stable food sources than agricultural counterparts and much less diseases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_the_Hunter
The debate has of course evolved since then and I won't recount the 50 years of research and debate that's happened but modern anthropologists are pretty much in agreement that the "nasty, brutish, and short" narrative is completely baseless.
Vehicle deaths are also avoidable.
I think Ozempic doesn't have crazy side effects other than the face? Could be wrong
Edit: Regarding the topic at hand, I either don't drink or binge drink so I'm no saint same with driving fast.
This argument applies similarly to the fentanyl crisis, since people could simply have the self control to not take fentanyl recreationally. Do you have a similar belief that the government shouldn't be trying to stop the mass import of fentanyl and other harmful drugs?
If the government manages to stop fentanyl imports, people will simply either manufacture fentanyl locally or opt for other drugs. I agree that it's not a matter of self-control— a fentanyl addict can't simply will its way out of it— but there is a reason they chose to consume fentanyl in the first place, and despite knowing its effects, willingly chose to "escape reality".
There is no example of a country that has reduced obesity through public policy, food policy (even in the EU with strong GMO regulations), or messaging.
From a government level a different approach is necessary. So far GLP-1 inhibitors are the only things that have worked at scale. Let's see if that holds up.
https://data.worldobesity.org/region/european-union-uk-1/#da...
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221265701...
If these don’t have adverse effects then it is not bad. What “bad” we are left with is character-moralizing.
We could go further. “It is bad to fix your obesity by removing yourself from bad food.” Because this does not involve self-control either. If you isolate yourself from grocery stores and only have access to certain foods you can lose weight without self-control.
if it's working for people great, I'm on the boat that does not like it when obesity is supported eg. in victoria secret but I'll just sound like an ahole to say that
edit: I'm also on the side of being somewhat against physical/genetic modification as it lies to your partner/future child what you actually look like but when it gets to that stage (eg. crispr) then I guess it doesn't matter.
I'm not religious so it's not from that perspective I'm also not white
Last thing I'll add, why not too, I mean humans don't have wings yet we engineered airplanes to surpass birds, is that wrong?
I am a nihilist to some extent so yeah really nothing matters except what is truly real pain/suffering and death.
Being predisposed to obesity and yet overcoming it by working 300% harder than average (compared to someone who exercises at all) on your diet and fitness is another way to lie.
But this is self-control so then it is irrationally different I guess.
> I am a nihilist to some extent so yeah really nothing matters except what is truly real pain/suffering and death.
Random existential observations but okay.
I don't think it's only about self control. but it would probably be easier if the industry wasn't pushing junk food and sugary food on Americans. Look, other countries don't have this problem. Does it mean that self control vanishes within US borders?
I also think regarding fentanyl it's a legit drug in hospitals so there will be a source
I think smoking cigarettes went way down in the US and other parts of the world. Sure, people still use them but the overall downward trend is good and that is because something was done about it.
In fact the tariffs will help fund the farm bills.
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/are-fentanyl-overdose-deaths-r...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overdose-deaths-a...
It turns out there are a lot of concerns beyond than the number of bodies.
Fentanyl takes people young. And it's new. Those characteristics make it a serious concern.
Some data (not exactly the same I found last time, but seems to still be accurate as I recalled it):
>About 82% of people who die of coronary heart disease are 65 or older[0]
See also the CDC's list of deaths by cause by age group:
For 65 years and over, Diseases of heart is ranked 1st (531,583 deaths in 2019). For 45–64 years, it is 1st in 1980 and second in 2019 (111,975). For 25–44 years it is 4th (13,994) and 15–24 years it is 5th (1,223 and 872 total deaths for 1980 and 2019 respectively).[1]
I'm also pretty sure many (most?) drug overdoses manifest as cardiac arrest and are probably included in "Diseases of the heart:"
>Drug overdose is a leading cause of cardiac arrest and is currently the second leading cause of overall injury-related fatality in the United States.[2]
[0] https://memorialhermann.org/services/specialties/heart-and-v...
I remember reading that elimination of heart disease would increase life expectancy by some 5,5 years. Not nothing, but it indicates that most people die of heart disease at a relatively old age, when something else would kill them quite soon.
OTOH if a Fentanyl victim loses 40 or 50 years of potential life, that is a major loss for society as a whole. Kids may not be born etc.
It can be even without that if you are looking at quality-adjusted life years and not just raw life years.
Huge hint for all you search challenged: Sackler family on wikipedia.
I've got a bit of karma to spend, and I think I'll double down and spend it to zero for the next year, dribbling a bit of facts out, to the consternation of the conspiracy bots now obvs infesting this now hell-site by a large majority.
Paul Graham, is this what you meant to create, 25 years ago?
(PG counts money.... YES!)
(Main takeaway: big money protects big money first)
Edit: fuck no, I'm not going to provide a courtesy link to Wikipedia. If you can't be bothered to use the ah user interface, you're too lazy to respond to.
Maybeee reconsider your motivations and/or your social tact my dude. Cause right now you just look like someone trying to feel smarter than others.
it's a security issue and municipalities and public health exploit it to "manage" for increased bureaucracy and funding. whenever they want more federal or state money, they turn the crisis tap on or off. public agencies all benefit from rising poverty, and where they can't create it with lax enforcement, they import it.
stopping the flow of drugs cuts off a huge source of bureaucratic crisis leverage, and local political corruption funding, that both poison the entire system of institutions. it's difficult to find a coherent moral case against a radical crackdown on fentanyl for those reasons.