I always assumed this was an america-only drug that no one actually does or at least not to the excess that it's claimed by the publications using it for the normal fear journalism purposes.
it’s an issue in that not everyone using it even knows they are using it. maybe you think your plug is a great hookup for grey market pharmaceuticals. or are they?
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out.
customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
Generally, when someone is addicted to painkillers, they "take what they can get." (After all, they are addicted.)
The black market is very inconsistent with what it provides, (because it is unregulated,) thus "heroin" may have fentanyl in it; or may not even be available. (Because it's easier to smuggle fentanyl.)
2/3 of all ODs in US. More deaths per year than gun violence and car collisions combined, which are both quite high in US. Seventh most common cause of death overall. Over a quarter million people dead since 2018.
Its gaining popularity in the UK and is starting to show up sporadically, but the opiod epidemic provided pretty extreme fuel to start the fire in America. No idea if itll ever take off here to the extent heroin did, depends on the economy I guess.
Unpredictable market forces the black market is subjected to. Europe doesn't have as much fentanyl for the same sorts of reasons America doesn't have as much ketamine.
Yes and no? Certainly America has a bigger opioid market and Europe has a bigger ketamine market, for different reasons; America had a prescription opioid epidemic create its market, and Europe's much larger EDM party scene gravitated towards ketamine. Europeans also get much more treatment for opioid addiction (half of them!). But you never know what's going to change; America certainly didn't expect to be flooded with cheap prescription pills, and we can't predict if the drug lords of Europe will decide to start cutting their heroin with fentanyl.
based on documentary style interviews I've seen of drug addicts in Lithuania, there's supposedly no more old school heroin left on the streets, it's been pushed out by fent.
Simple supply and demand. Why risk smuggling heroin when fentanyl is 100s of times more potent, meaning its way better bang for their buck all other things being equal.
Does lithuania not have methadone or prescribable diamorphine? They should reconsider if not, not everyone is going to make it sober, much cheaper and better outcomes to being pragmatic about it.
No one "does" fentanyl, it's a highly addictive additive that is secretly added to other things. Even so, 50,000 - 70,000 Americans per year die to it (more than suicide and gun violence many other things).
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
- While drugs laced with fentanyl are also a problem, lots of people _do_ knowingly consume fentanyl. In fact, it has replaced Heroin in the US 'market', for example. It is also a contaminant in other drugs (cocaine, meth), due to how easy it is for fentanyl to stay in crevices, etc. It is also 'snuck in' to counterfeit pills, which is the only aspect you mention.
- The traffickers physically moving fentanyl into the country are overwhelmingly Americans. Pre 2019 traffickers used to get this straight from China, but stricter controls in China have shifted things to be staged in Mexico instead.
- The demand and traffickers are still largely American, and it is a "symbiotic" problem. US drug demand is empowering Mexican cartels and making everyday Mexicans less safe (the cartels also get most of their guns from the US). At the same time, powerful Mexican cartels mean it is much easier to "stage" fentanyl in Mexico then import it into the US than the older model of importing it directly from China.
While I agree that "murder" is the wrong word, there is an angle that you are missing.
Drug dealers will lace "normal" drugs with fentanyl. It gives a "different buzz". The customer knows they are buying "normal" drugs, and there is no quality control, so lacing happens. If the dealer messes up how much they lace, it is easy to add too much (because a small amount t of fentanyl goes a long way), and your customer ODs.
I’ve heard from an HSI friend that a lot more of the fentanyl deaths happen from accidental exposure in their drugs from shared surfaces. For example, somebody buying cocaine that was cut up on a table that was previously used to cut up fent and not properly sanitized.
So if you bought a bottle of water, and inside of that water was a poison that kills you, intentionally added by a criminal because it makes them more profit, that's not murder?
Those people were doing a line of coke, they had no idea they were about to overdose on an opioid.
Well, that depends on the legal definition of murder where you live.
In lots of places, intent matters. You said the pill was added with the intent to make more money. If there was no intent to kill, then in lots of places that isn't murder but might be some other kind of criminal homicide.
For example, people at Ford made the decision to sell the Pinto with a dangerous defect to make more money and people died as a direct consequence of that product decision. The people who made that decision were not charged with murder (or anything as far as I recall).
I've known homeless people and desperate addicts. Many of them would deal in whatever, to feed themselves. That is wildly different from "They would enjoy kill a stranger."
No. But I find it strange that people categorically say that a drug dealer never would intentionally kill a buyer. They are violent criminals dealing in poison. They are not perfectly rational businessmen who would never do a thing which could hurt future profits.
That I would see as extreme recklessness leading to somebody dying, might be called murder in the US. I wasn't aware this is happening on a larger scale. The solution could be to vote for politicians that legalize drugs so users can get them safely
I would argue that fent became an issue only after the oxycontin et al. peddling was slowly curtailed; together with fent precursors becoming absurdly cheap to procure and process, compared to other opiates. Users originally hooked on the pills needed a replacement, and as suddenly the chemistry got much cheaper, everyone switched to fent. The physical volume of illicit substance you need to smuggle is also lower with fentanyl, so I'm sure that would have played into this trend as well.
If you want to find where to point the finger to, the systems that let prescription opiates be prescribed with such reckless abandon is a good superficial target. Getting political here - if you want to find the very root cause of all this, I would present the institutions that prevent the implementation or otherwise erode preexisting social safety-nets as the culpable party.
It is typically laced into other drugs. A small amount of fentanyl is highly powerful, so if you mix it into heroine, you get a different buzz. But if you (a drug dealer, not a chemist) mess up and drop too much, then your customer will accidentally OD.
Tiny bits of fentanyl are added to a variety of recreational drugs used extensively by all kinds of people, rich and poor. They add it to cocaine, heroin, meth and even marijuana. They imitate oxy, percocet, vicodin, xanax and adderal using fent laced pills as well.
As much as 20% of Americans use these recreational drugs. Europeans on average use recreational drugs like half as much as Americans, maybe 10% use them.
They’re not coming here and forcibly injecting people. Maybe we should be asking ourselves why so many are choosing the oblivion offered by drugs similar to and including fentanyl.
The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.
> Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.
The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.
Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.
But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.
When doing the right thing regarding things like addiction are tried in the US, there seems to be a habit of learning the wrong lesson. Attempts to apply the successful Portuguese model have failed because decriminalisation by itself is just an enabler of what _really_ helps, which is all the follow-up support.
And don't get me started on how public health interventions in general seem to end up treated as moral hazards or wasteful in the US, even when they're _saving_ money...
Decriminalization isn't necessarily the optimal solution.
For hard drugs, something closer to Sweden's Systemboaget [0] where the drug is carefully controlled (and taxed!) by a state monopoly, with the proceeds of this monopoly being used to fund rehabilitation efforts or other support/public-health efforts might be better.
