From "How Frighteningly Strong Meth Has Supercharged Homelessness" (NY Magazine).
"Fentanyl was really mostly in the Midwest, and it was only by 2018, 2019
that it had really spread to both coasts and every place in between.
Meth has been marching across the country in these staggering supplies
since about 2012 or 2013, I would say, but it’s also a drug that really
doesn’t create the headlines fentanyl does.... It doesn’t kill people.
It’s also like the pure raw face of addiction — people out of their
minds wandering in the streets, screaming naked like some Allen Ginsberg
poem. It’s something that people would prefer not to have to face, I
think. It’s easier to send condolences to someone who’s dead than to
deal with someone who is out in the streets, out of his mind."
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55 comments:
There is an immensely effective, shockingly simple, and foolproof course of action that would solve this problem within just a few years. Get rid of narcan.
For bonus points you could go long morgue futures. This is the "imperial Chinese heroin" solution. Quite literally a self-solving problem.
'Fentanyl was really mostly in the Midwest, and it was only by 2018, 2019 that it had really spread to both coasts and every place in between.'
Decoded meaning:
Well now it's killing coastal folks, not just the flyover hillbillies, so I guess we should write a story now.
Simple solution.
Government places where you go in, sit down, a press a button.
A dose of fentanyl is shot into you.
For free.
When you come to, you could (COULD) walk out..
OR, you could (WOULD) press the button again (and again (and again))
After a while, they flush your body into the vat ( Of soylent green, dyh)
Who can we thank for this miraculous chemical? China?
Brave New World
Fentanyl leading cause of death 18-49.
Oh no! Anyway...
So Fentanyl is a self curing problem?
Let's just keep it cheap enough so that the junkies don't have to steal to get more
Fentanyl is pills, not shots.
So this means we're going to get a lot of used needles off the street?
This crisis - and this is a real crisis - is mostly the fault of China, the Mexican drug cartels and the Democrat party that enables all this death and destruction.
The Dems are the party of death. Change my mind.
Next up for Opposite Day: Democrats bring back Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign and fight against Fentanyl because it comes from Purdue Pharma in the US rather than China or south of the border.
Here's what puzzles me. If Fentanyl is so deadly and so ubiquitous, why aren't there MORE deaths from it?
As for the blanket cold-turkey therapy imposed from above, the imperial Chinese couldn't stop endemic drug abuse; the Tai-peng rebels couldn't stop it; the Republic couldn't stop it; Mao may have stopped it temporarily by the most extreme application of the principle. ("It" being the addictive substance considered most dangerous at the time.)
Escape From New York might actually be a workable plan. Manhattan is already on its way back to being the shithole the movie was prophesying it to be. All the junkies, crazies and violent criminals in one place. Have a few supply ships dock on various locations on the island to drop off food and drugs and a few other supplies at scheduled times and give the inmates one handgun with 100 rounds each and they will solve their problems peacefully.
"Who can we thank for this miraculous chemical? China?"
No. Paul Janssen.
@Narr
I recently attended a business luncheon where the director of our ambulance district revealed they have tens if not hundreds of 'frequent flyers' who have received upwards of 20, 30, and in one case 50+ narcan rescues by the district. It's not just mine. It's yours too. It's everyones.
These are people that are dead already. They exist to be resurrected so they can use drugs again. Take away their resurrection machine. Compost the remains.
If you are taking illicit drugs these day, you're a damn fool. Might as well just get a pistol and play Russian roulette.
If you are taking illicit drugs these days, you're a damn fool. Might as well just get a pistol and play Russian roulette.
"Escape From New York might actually be a workable plan. Manhattan is already on its way back to being the shithole the movie was prophesying it to be. All the junkies, crazies and violent criminals in one place."
No. It was more like that in the 70s and 80s. Though crime rates in NYC are rising, they remain far below what they were back then. And yet, even then, it was mostly safe to live in the city. NYC is not even among the 100 most dangerous US cities per capita for 2022.
100,000 thousand people die each year from opioids and that's now mostly from fentanyl. 600,000 people die each year from tobacco but it takes a long time to die from it. Odd how we can get used to that.
Dave Chapelle:
“This opioid crisis is a crisis. I see it every day. It’s ruining lives, it’s destroying families. Sadly, you know what it reminds me of seeing it? It reminds me of us. These white folks look exactly like us during the crack epidemic.
"It’s wild because I have insight into how the white community must have felt watching the black community go through the scourge of crack. Because I don’t care either!
“Hang in there whites! Just say no! What’s so hard about that?”
That last part was spoken in Nancy Reagan’s voice.
This morning I read an article in today's NYT about how fentanyl is rolling through Milwaukee - where I was just two weeks ago. I thought you could tell something was different there.
Surprisingly, ethnicity found it's way into the story.
Pretty sure the CIA must be working against this aggressive terrorism coming from foreign nationals. Don'tcha think?
Is the Sackler family making any money on this thing?
George "Fentanyl" Floyd syndrome is a progressive condition facilitated through [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform, labor and environmental arbitrage, "burdens" aborted and their carbon sequestered in darkness, nationwide insurrections, trillions in Green deals to flatline, and Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter.
The Washington Post just ran a big article on fentanyl too. There's clearly been some sort of coordinated effort to push this particular story at this particular moment. One has to wonder why.
I have written it before- fentanyl is an easy molecule to synthesize from an organic chemistry point of view, and very, very tough to regulate via restrictions on chemical inputs since there are several different ways to make the drug itself, or the inputs themselves. Were fentanyl a drug target when I was a medicinal chemist (structurally speaking), I would have assigned to task to an associate rather than tackle it myself since it is so straight-forward.
The only hard part about synthesizing it is not killing yourself in the process.
As of the meth derivatives- they are even easier to synthesize than fentanyl except for one thing, all of them require methylamine as an input, which isn't so easy to get ones hands on in quantity, no are there really any substitutes as inputs or routes. I can design ways to do it without methylamine, but the DEA has probably thought of those, too, and restricted those inputs, too.
as i said, make it FREE to take As Much fent as you want, get RID of free Narcan..
Put up BIG SIGNS, saying:
Fent will KILL YOU... Want Some?
If they'd just let the mopes have their oxycodone Rx they wouldn't need street drugs.
But ohhh no, we had to have another big moral panic with the guilty parties painting fingers at everyone else.
Ten years ago it was "you want it, you got it."
The point of open borders is to cement the Democrats' relationship with the cartels. Obama/Holder provided weapons. Biden is making them richer with muling fees, sex trafficking an dope smuggling.
Much better dark money than FTX. High risk for the country. Low risk for Dem grifters who control federal law enforcement.
Robert Cook said..."NYC is not even among the 100 most dangerous US cities per capita for 2022."
I wonder about the reliability of that statistic. I've noticed a strong sense of resignation in Manhattan lately, to the degree that I suspect a lot of crimes aren't getting reported, including violent crimes. The crime rate may not be quite as bad as I remember it being in the 80s, but the lack of faith in the justice system, even when an arrest is made, is much worse than I have encountered before.
Interesting that CVS and Walgreens are paying the government billions because they did not supervise the prescriptions of doctors enough for opiates. There may be some bad stuff they did behind the scenes, but if I were CVS I would consider stopping the sale of all narcotic painkillers due to exposure to legal action. Supervising all the doctors is a tough thing to be responsible for.
600,000 die from tobbaco. LOL. How many die from Red meat and too much dessert.
Yes, tobbaco might lead to lung disease. It killed Rush limbaugh at 71. After he smoked cigars and cigarettes off and on for 50 years.
Comparing the deadliness of tobbaco and meth is like comparing a bb gun to a machine gun.
I thought we were on the Legalized narcotics toboggan to a happy future of FREEDOM. With Oregon leading the way. If people can't handle FREEDOM and die, well they were the weak ones who deserved it.
At least that's what all the bighearted leftists seem to believe.
If you buy fentanyl or oxycodone from a pharmacy, you know exactly what strength you are getting. But street dealers of (say) cocaine or heroin or meth might mix in some fentanyl in a more random or less carefully controlled way, so the buyer has no way of knowing how to avoid an overdose. All of the recommendations of other commenters about getting fentanyl to users through government programs and facilities would solve the problem of people who are only seeking fentanyl, but it won't solve the problem of users of coke, heroin, meth, etc. who are dying of fentanyl overdoses, through unintentional exposure.
There’s a morning radio show HQ’d in Sacramento (Armstrong & Getty) that covered a series written by a NorCal reporter about the meth/homelessness connection. This reporter contends that there’s been a change in the formula used to make it… one particular ingredient that has made the stuff more potent and has increased the paranoia users usually feel and also is so destructive that it is quickly leaving these users with even more severe mental issues and brain damage. I just looked it up… it’s “P2P” and it has been a game-changer. If we thought this meth crap was horrible - it is - it sounds like we ain’t see nothing yet.
I skimmed the article, and didn't see any reference to the legal gateway drug Oxycontin. I have read so many stories of people who got hooked on oxycontin, or some other pain relief drug, and then started using heroin when they couldn't get oxycontin legally from their doctor anymore. I have a great fear of that drug. When I had an impacted wisdom tooth, I was very leery of actually using the drug.
"If people can't handle FREEDOM and die, well they were the weak ones who deserved it. At least that's what all the bighearted leftists seem to believe."
Paging RideSpaceMountain and gilbar.
RSM, thanks, that would explain a lot and it's plausible.
I tend to Chappelle's sentiment, myself.
"It’s wild because I have insight into how the white community must have felt watching the black community go through the scourge of crack. Because I don’t care either!
Chappelle is a racist asshole. Whites across the country voted for their justice systems to go to great expense, personal risk, and trouble to try to stop crack and the violence and self-destruction it let loose. It was black people who didn't seem to care that their poor communities were drug stores and war zones. Post-Floyd, we're repeating the process.
China, Mexican cartels, Joe's puppet masters.
"How Frighteningly Strong Meth Has Supercharged Homelessness"
The strong meth has supercharged the insanity of addicts which supercharges further drug use which leads to "homelessness," i.e., living in public places close to drugs.
Re: Biff:
I wonder about the reliability of that statistic. I've noticed a strong sense of resignation in Manhattan lately, to the degree that I suspect a lot of crimes aren't getting reported, including violent crimes.
I think you're probably underestimating how bad other American cities, particularly second and third rank cities like Detroit, Baltimore, and St. Louis, are. And also how successful two decades of centre-right authoritarian governance (Giuliani and Bloomberg) was in driving the crime rate in New York way, way below the rate in most other American cities. New York's pretty crappy compared to, say, Seoul or Tokyo, but it would have to get a lot worse before it would be back in the running for murder capital of America.
Now, if things don't turn around -- if the fatalism or resignation you note dissuades the government from cracking down harshly on crime -- then I suppose New York could catch up. But it would have a lot of catching up to do. Even as things get worse there, I think they're getting worse faster in places that started off much worse to begin with.
Chapelle has said a lot of smart things, but if Fentanyl is replacing heroin, most of those deaths will be happening to African-Americans. Indeed, African-Americans are the group with the largest number of Fentanyl deaths, having overtaken Whites 5 years ago. The per capita numbers are higher.
It's possible that America didn't care enough about crack in the Black community. We didn't care much about cocaine use in the White or Hispanic community back then. And apparently, our politicians don't care that much about Fentanyl or opiate deaths now. But jokes, if that's what what he said was, aren't meant to be taken seriously.
People are pretty arrogant in their comments about the fentanyl addicts but at least half of these people became addicts due to overwhelming pain, rather than due to a desire to flee from life and be a bum on the street. Maybe one day some of you will experience the kind of physical pain that a life of hard work can bring.
Last year between December 20 and December 31 - 11 days - 16 white Milwaukeeans died of drug overdoses. 2 were using cocaine, 1 was using meth, the others were using fentanyl alone or combined with meth or heroin or cocaine or all three. Some were young, in their twenties and thirties, but quite a few were in their fifties, sixties and seventies. These aren't junkies or the homeless. These older people are in pain and got hooked on oxycodone as a pain killer and when that became inaccessible, they moved on to fentanyl, and then to the grave. Far fewer black Milwaukeans died of drug overdoses in that period and the deaths were mostly from cocaine and heroin.
It seems to me that the problem of excruciating pain in older people should be considered when the fentanyl crisis is considered. Solve that problem and you cut the fentanyl death rate in half.
wildswan said...
but at least half of these people became addicts due to overwhelming pain,
i mean no disrespect, but it feels like you're making up numbers to match what you WANT to be true.
Do you have ANY citations for this assertion?
Narr said...
"If people can't handle FREEDOM and die, well they were the weak ones who deserved it.
it's NOT that people can't handle freedom.. it's that they'd rather shoot up than eat
they'd rather shoot up than breathe
Normally, an addict would stay mainlined until they ran out of skag..
Then they'd come down, and "get" some money... For More Skag..
IF they didn't "get" enough for skag, they'd come down MORE, and Then get hungry.
But, since ALL THEY WANT, is More Skag... Why NOT give it to them? Why are YOU so mean?
And Biden is letting all that Fentanyl Southern Border.
Biden is the biggest drug runner ever.
And Biden is letting all that Fentanyl Southern Border.
Biden is the biggest drug runner ever.
News you can use
Doctors say reversing effects of fentanyl overdose becoming more challenging
“Fentanyl, over the past year, they’ve come up with different strands of it to where it’s almost 100 times stronger than what the fentanyl was a year ago,” explained Chris Chodkowski, a trauma therapist.
Now, there’s a newer overdose reversal medication that’s said to be stronger. It’s called Zimhi, and some medical professionals who treat overdose victims say it’s doing a better job of reversing the effects of stronger fentanyl.
Several weeks ago, Drug Enforcement Administration lab results revealed that four out of every 10 fake pills are laced with fentanyl. Recently, that number jumped to six out of 10.
Those fake pills, which are smuggled into Florida along with cocaine, meth and heroin, have been known to be laced with deadly fentanyl to producer a greater high.
“Even the regular people that just smoke marijuana, if they’re getting it off the street, we’re seeing it laced with fentanyl here in Palm Beach County,” Chodkowski said.
He treats drug overdose victims who have suffered internal trauma to their bodies. He said that recently, stronger forms of fentanyl smuggled into Florida have caused overdoses that are hard to reverse with just one dose of Narcan.
a Jacksonville woman, who spoke on a condition of anonymity, said her daughter accidentally ingested fentanyl two weeks ago. “She was administered Narcan twice in the ambulance. And then twice again in the ambulance,” she said.
That’s a total of four doses of Narcan
If it’s so bad why not lock the country down for a couple weeks… to flatten the curb.
Give the addicts as much free fentanyl as they want and the problem solves itself. That's what is happening already, with the extra step of for-profit illegal sale of the drug.
You can thank Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for all the deaths.
Robert Cook: your claim about NYC neglects two facts: the radical DAs do not even prosecute many crimes now and have reduced others, including serious muggings and burglaries to misdemeanors. Much property crime isn't even criminal anymore in cities from NYC to Chicago to San Francisco. So of course stats are down.
The chart you link to is useless. Note that it is mostly places with tiny populations near big cities. Take Newnan, for example. It has some 40K people and is an exurb of Atlanta. I can tell you the Atlanta region is more dangerous than it has been since around 1990. Any real analysis of crime would be regional. The few big cities that make that list must be lunatic asylums.
The most cogent fact? They are all run by Democrats.
Chappelle is a racist asshole.
Chappelle is a comedian. A good one.
Howard says we can thank the man who discovered fentanyl, not the people who manufacture many millions of doses and then smuggle them into America. My question for Howard is, "How hard do you have to work at being as stupid as you are?" One wouldn't think it would be that easy.
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