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How the pandemic helped spread fentanyl across U.S. and drive opioid OD deaths to grim new high

11 Comments
By Andrew Kolodny

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It's the response to the pandemic that helped spread the fentanyl; it did not have to be this way...

-5 ( +4 / -9 )

It's the response to the pandemic that helped spread the fentanyl; it did not have to be this way...

To say this you would first need to prove not responding to the pandemic would not be worse, that is something you have not done. Pretending the situation would be all fine and the health services fully functional even with several times more patients (and health care providers) being hospitalized and dying is not logical.

0 ( +7 / -7 )

It's the response to the pandemic that helped spread the fentanyl; it did not have to be this way...

To say this you would first need to prove not responding to the pandemic would not be worse...

No, I am not saying there should not have been any response. I am saying the responses have been completely misguided.

-5 ( +5 / -10 )

Fentanyl overdoses exploded when Chinese suppliers of precursor chemicals joined with Mexican drug trafficking organizations, most significantly the Sinaloa and CJNG cartels, to smuggle it into the U.S. in unprecedented quantities. It's low-intensity warfare by the Chinese. American policymakers know this but are slow to respond to due political considerations that conflict with the national interest.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

No, I am not saying there should not have been any response. I am saying the responses have been completely misguided.

Since you propose nothing to replace the measures taken that is exactly what you are doing, specially without a well substantiated argument about how your replacement would be in any way better.

0 ( +6 / -6 )

So people are buying and injecting themselves with a substance they buy illegally and have no real idea what is in it?

Darwinism at work?

2 ( +3 / -1 )

As a distraction from psychopathic Big Pharma and its enormous profits from the pandemic of iatrogenic opioid addiction for which a single pathological family of greed driven drug dealers demonstrably was responsible, this article serves well. When increasing recognition of the Corporate fueled opioid 'crisis' emerged and limits were placed on prescription opiates, an enormous new market for such substances had already been created and fentanyl stepped into the void. But COVID, itself, just exacerbates the increasing existential terror which the average person is experiencing as Corporate Greed and the international sword rattling it causes creates more and more stress upon the average person and the desire to 'step out' for a time from their daily anxiety becomes stronger. Alcohol use, also, is showing a similar increase in anesthetizing stress addled minds.

But fentanyl's most dangerous feature is its unfamiliarity to both the supplier and the user and how to judge what one is taking. The most rational approach, and of course the least likely to be adopted, would be for the Federal Government to recognise an otherwise uncontrollable and fatal 'pandemic' and decriminalize fentanyl and {heavens!] supply it to users, freely or with a slight surcharge, in a regulated and dependable dosage. This would destroy the 'blackmarket' and give the otherwise at risk and highly unlikely to quit user the ability to judge what was 'safe'.

Sadly, there are many among us whose developmentally implanted perceptions and innate or conditioned inability to sympathize make 'rationality' appear as 'insanity', as giving in to 'sin' perhaps, and would sooner see people die than to do, try, ANYTHING necessary to ameliorate this scourge of these precocious deaths of our ever more alienated young people.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Easy to handle if really wanted. Two weeks warning , including TV spots, posters, newspaper ads , radio announcements etc, just to stop producing, dealing, buying and for destroying all illegal or legal depots of those deadly drugs. Then the next escalation step, next 100 big drug dealers caught get a lifelong prison, accompanied with respectively 100 last public warnings. And finally, for the still resisting potential killers follows execution right at the place when still caught and not giving in. Problem finally solved in just a few weeks and with quite humane procedure for the big majority involved and only really punishing the most extreme few ones. In relation to the next 100,000s of saved lives it’s a little bit violent during the last phase, but considering that the problem is quickly solved once and for all, quite an irrelevant side effect.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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