The search for answers points in many directions — to city and county officials who allowed tents on the streets because the government had little to offer in the way of housing, to Oregon voters who backed decriminalizing hard drugs and to the unrest that rocked Portland in 2020 and left raw scars. But what has turbocharged the city’s troubles in recent years is fentanyl, the deadly synthetic drug, which has transformed long standing problems into a profound test of the Portland ethos....
July 30, 2023
"Fifty times as powerful as heroin, fentanyl sets off a high that 'human brains have never seen before.'"
From "Fighting for Anthony: The Struggle to Save Portland, Oregon/The city has long grappled with street homelessness and a shortage of housing. Now fentanyl has turned a perennial problem into a deadly crisis and a challenge to the city’s progressive identity" (NYT).
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The incentives are all wrong…
Joe Biden has allowed our country to be flooded by fentanyl.
Joe Biden is the father of a drug addict and he has personally destroyed thousands of families. And for what? A few million from the Chinese. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we find out later he’s been bribed by the Mexican cartels.
And never forget that Mark Zuckerberg installed Biden as POTUS. Never forget.
Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, LA. People thought they were being kind in allowing homeless people to find a life on the street, and people thought they were being cool decriminalizing drugs, and people thought they were being big-hearted in not enforcing the southern border.
Try that in a small town.
And why is any of this a surprise.
Opium wars revisited
"Now fentanyl has turned a perennial problem into a deadly crisis and a challenge to the city’s progressive identity"
Fentanyl is the progressive identity. Who's policies allow that shit to flow over the southern border?
Try that in a small town.
7/30/23, 6:36 AM
Meth.
It might be a problem that will solve itself if no one interferes. Right now the government and the so-called activists and do-gooders are just enabling and even encouraging people to make poor life choices. Maybe they should just get out of the way and let things take their course.
Are you really homeless if you're living in a tent or an RV?
It sounds like the feds and city parents are letting the homeless addict problem take care of itself.
Stop. Using. Narcan. Heartless though it may seem, it is actually the most logical way to solve this problem.
Every single policy put out by the former Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, the current Mayor of Portland, the feckless Ted Wheeler, and the populace of the greater Portland area, has lead to this moment. Kate Brown should never be forgotten. Years from now, she should be remembered as the Destructor of Portland.
Fentanyl is just the next wave to come in through the wide open doors they installed. Portland is already lost. Fentanyl will just be the latest gruesome realization of a series of awful, childlike decisions by those in that area. You get more of what you subsidize, less of what you tax. You can choose to incentivize civil behavior or you can choose to subsidize anarchy, praise bad behavior, and dismiss traditional culture while making room for destructive culture. And you can keep doing this until you one day look up and your city- or civilization- has disappeared.
Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. All once beautiful cities, great cities. All being brought to their knees by out of control, one-party political decisions that cannot have a good ending. We all know it. We all see it. And it's like watching a car crash in slow motion.
Kate Brown. Nice work.
The Chinese lost the Opium War, and were colonized until Mao won against Chiang. And Mao was a disaster of genocide and repression for generations of Chinese, with his kleptocratic totalitarian government continuing to be a parasitical disaster for the Chinese, and soon the whole world. Should the US lose this version of the Opium Wars, I suspect the outcome worldwide will make Mao's history look like a picnic.
There's a need for a fifty times stronger downer.
Try that in a small town.
Small towns prefer oxy and meth.
The left has no incentive to end homelessness - there is too much graft involved. The drug problem won't get solved because defense attorneys feed off of it, and because the left sees it as another good way to undermine the middle-class. The right like the war on drugs in order to feed the DEA and other police agencies. Both sides like the fact that drugs 'allow' them to meddle in foreign countries. Follow the money and the destructive ideology.
Remember when all the sophisticates liked to say, pace Marx, that religion was the opiate of the masses? Well, they killed God, ushering us into a secular golden age… where opiates are now the opiates of the masses. And benzos, and amphetamines, and SSRIs… good work leaders!
It really mystifies me why Joe Biden doesn’t have a favorable rating of 10%.
— The humiliation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
— Record inflation that is not abating.
— Six million plus illegal aliens; 3x the population of Nebraska.
— Drugs and fentanyl pouring in with record numbers.
— Human trafficking and slavery.
— Giving Putin the green light to invade Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands dead.
— No accountability of the ChiComs for Covid.
— No doubt that he’s been bribed by foreigners.
— Insane spending and tax credits for solar and wind.
— Child genital mutilation is okay with Joe.
— Plenty of evidence that he’s both senile and some kind of sex pervert.
I guess people really are clueless. It speaks volumes of the Press and the other Dems that they go along with this.
What RSM said.
We have spent hundred of millions $ dealing with the consequences of drug abuse- heroin, meth, cocaine, and now fentanyl.
Nothing has worked, but we have an entire subculture, mostly black, that is in prison or have felony records now due to their involvement in it.
None of this has net helped anyone (except the addiction counselors, rehabs center employers, and prison guard union).
Hunter B. is the face on the Wheaties box for this- he had money, political connections, and brains (smartest man I know, says his father), yet can't stay away from the powdered sugar donuts.
What to do:
1. Fund small, well controlled studies that have a chance of finding a way to beat addiction.
2. Legalize everything.
3. Flood the schools, Instagram, TikTok and all the rest with info that if you get involved with drugs there's a good chance that you will end up bankrupt, brain damaged, or dead.
4. Stop wasting money and resources on programs that have proven worthless, or worse.
5. Sit tight. The problem will resolve. There will be short term misery, but long term net improvement in our society.
The fiction that this is an affordable housing problem is the latest Democrat way of monetizing the homeless issue. The Colorado Governor and the newly elected Denver mayor are beating this drum, we need to do away with single family zoning. Needless to say, the developers are salivating at the idea of turning every dwelling into duplex and fourplexes. Meanwhile, no one mentions that 80% of the homeless are choosing to live on the streets to support their addiction.
US is the land of liberty where identifying with liberty puts you on Joe Biden’s terrorist watch list.
If you identify liberty as license you win the fentanyl-filled kewpie doll and become the darling of the Left and the Biden regime.
War is peace.
100,000 dead per year due to fentanyl. The fentanyl dead would make it the third largest city in Nebraska.
White left (NOt homeless) white left Antifa-Nazis burned municipal buildings... because antifa nazis hate Trump and the police and that is how they showcase their displeasure. All for White Left Nancy.
what does that have to do with fentanyl or drug use?
Fentanyl has legitimate medical uses. They gave it to me for my last colonoscopy. TMI, I know. But I did not get up from the procedure and think to myself, boy, I need more of that stuff. So I question whether it is all that amazingly more addictive than other opioids. Isn’t this a little bit like the difference between wine and whiskey? You can develop a serious life problem with alcohol in either form.
Mao supposedly got rid of the opium problem. He killed off the users and suppliers both. Meantime the holy Kuomintang financed itself with the opium trade.
How much of the extremist revolutions in China and Iran and Russia were really about crushing pervasive drugs and criminality?
Yeah it could get bad.
Problems...
Gotta wanna quit
Gotta believe you deserve better
MayBee said...
"Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, LA. People thought they were being kind in allowing homeless people to find a life on the street, and people thought they were being cool decriminalizing drugs, and people thought they were being big-hearted in not enforcing the southern border."
Said people are being reminded the hard way that there's a difference between "helping" and "enabling".
I agree with ride space mountain above, stop using Narcan. Its availability has made drug users more reckless. At a music fest in New Haven a few years back, some had to receive narcan two or three times during the weekend.
RideSpaceMountain is correct. Currently there's no consequences for attempting this suicide dance.
The problem is so huge, and the wreckage all around is so visible, how do potential users start down this road despite the evidence all around them?
Do they think it won't happen to them? Are there a lot of moderate users who are ok and go on to lead ok lives? Do they only see the moderate users who are ok, and the tragic users somehjow disappear from their world?
Here's a thought: close our borders. The Chinese and Latin Americans are just returning the skewer the West stuck in China at the end of the 19th century.
Small towns prefer oxy and meth.
Perhaps where Freder lives. Here in the Shenandoah Valley the drug of choice is fentanyl, same as elsewhere.
"Remember when all the sophisticates liked to say, pace Marx, that religion was the opiate of the masses? Well, they killed God...."
Did they? One would never know it with all the churches one finds everywhere, as well as busy-body god-pushers in one's own neighborhood or infesting local school boards and on early morning or late night TV where vastly prosperous preachers push their heretical doctrines of "prosperity" as the acme of god's wish for us (talk about "opiate for the masses!"). Nope, we haven't killed god at all...we've just Americanized him!
I live in Oregon. Portlanders are idiots. They can't recognize that may of the things they abhor are visibly connected to the decisions they have imposed on their community.
"Stop. Using. Narcan. Heartless though it may seem, it is actually the most logical way to solve this problem."
Yes, best way to teach personal responsibility. Actually it's the only way to teach it. When others realize that the police or EMT no longer carry Narcan, some of them will learn the PR lesson and make changes. The rest won't.
"struggle"
There's no struggle. This was done intentionally and with great enthusiasm. And if it is not working, then that means they need to try harder.
>He died from a fentanyl overdose, his sister said.
Not long after his friend’s death, Mr. Hollenbeck got word that the insurance company was offering to compensate Mr. Saldana
He would have received $16,600, enough to cover many months of rent.
“The conditions that we have created as a society didn’t let me get that money to him in time,” Mr. Hollenbeck said. “That is something that haunts me.”<
And there, in a nutshell, you have how these deluded lefty do-gooders think. Mr. Hollenbeck actually believes that this OD'd junkie would have spent his insurance money on many months of rent rather than continuing to lie in his skanky tent, pissing the money away on a few months worth of Fentanyl up his arm.
Yeah, right, fools like this are going to lead Portland out of its homeless crisis.
Reading the 2,000+ comments on the NYT is illuminating. Many are from Portlanders and the most liked comments reject the leftist claim that this is all just a problem of there not being enough low cost housing, and want enforcement of the laws against public camping. Is there a majority in favor of building lots of new mental hospitals (which are very expensive) and institutionalizing the crazies now living on the streets, self-medicating with hard drugs? I don’t know but the public seems to be moving in that direction.
In Milwaukee I looked at drug deaths on the Medical Examiner site and the fentanyl deaths in the white community were in two separate groups. There were people in their fifties and up who I am personally sure were suffering pain from work-related or age-related conditions and were not able to get legal, effective pain help. What they bought from somewhere had fentanyl in it, they became addicts and they are dying in relatively large numbers - about 40 in a city where large numbers. They would have Oxycotin/fentanyl concoctions. Second, there were thirty-year-olds who I think were druggies and who would have meth/fentanyl concoctions. The black community had about half its drug deaths from fentanyl, the rest from mostly cocaine.
There was approximate equity in the number of drug deaths in the white and black communities which in Milwaukee are approximately equal in numbers.
NB
The black vote in Milwaukee is decisive not because the black community is much larger but because the whole group always votes for Dems whereas the white vote is split between parties. However these days, the black community doesn't seem to get anything from the Dems for their loyalty vote unless you call de-schooling and de-policing and a doubling of the murder rate within the community good for the black community. It isn't white supremacy that's killing that community; it's the persisting in a voting strategy which worked in the past but which has been overtaken by events. Rotary phones and Franklin D Roosevelt are gone; fentanyl from the border is here.
"You can choose to incentivize civil behavior or you can choose to subsidize anarchy, praise bad behavior, and dismiss traditional culture while making room for destructive culture. And you can keep doing this until you one day look up and your city- or civilization- has disappeared."
Progressives appear determined to prove (over and over again) that they don't understand human nature and insist that incentives don't motivate people except when it's convenient for progressives to believe so.
How does science know what brains have “seen” before?
Science has become really annoying.
Leland said...
Try that in a small town.
I'm in a small town. I assure you there is no shortage of fentanyl and methamphetamine around here. This stuff is everywhere, it's just a bit more visible in the cities.
Leland said...
Try that in a small town.
7/30/23, 6:36 AM
Sadly illegal Fentanyl is becoming easier and easier to obtain and invading small towns. That’s the trade: small and mid sized business move to Mexico in exchange for Fentanyl.
- The average annual growth rate of drug overdose deaths from synthetic opioids was 31% while Donald Trump was president.
- Between 2019 and 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, the increase in drug overdose deaths from synthetic opioids was 55%.
The Left Coast sowed the wind. City by city they are reaping the whirlwind. It’s not a new story.
Reap what you sow.
Compassion needs to be balanced with 'tough love'.
The far left has no idea what that means. Everything is a learned behavior. Learn to work for a living and not beg is a learned behavior. Learning not to work and beg is also one.
You see signs that say, "Don't feed the wildlife". Why? Cause it encourages them to come and get 'free stuff'. You are making the mistake of giving people 'free money' or 'free food' just encouraging them to not work for it.
So you need signs that say, "NO WORK, NO EAT". And give make work for the homeless. Clear highway trash, help build infrastructure, fixing graffiti, cleaning streets, even highway flagmen (not all homeless are crazy, some are just lazy.) I am sure there are ways they can work for their meals and lodging such as pre-fab houses they can stay in (for a low rent) as they work.
Now I am not saying to refuse to help the TRULY NEEDY. The crippled, blind, deaf, those that have a very hard time fitting into society. Yes there is compassion for those. Places like the Salvation Army where there are RULES (no drugs, go to church, try to find a job, etc..) I've toured the Salvation Army.. nice little apartments. They serve food there to. But they require some effort on those that go there.
Seems like long time ago this guy, Captain John Smith, said the same thing at Jamestown a three hundred years ago or so... so did St. Paul, two thousand years ago, wrote in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, If any will not work, neither let him eat. "
So.. NO WORK, NO EAT. Stand up on your own damn feet and get a job.
"According to a National Association of Realtors study using USPS change-of-address data, Oregon was one of the top states people moved out of. Oregon’s net migration loss for 2022 was 17,331 people, or.4% of its population." Yikes!
People vote with their feet.
If I were a nineteen or twenty year old with a history of occasionally indulging in pot or cocaine and read this report about how fentanyl is fifty times stronger than any known drug and productive of a high never seen before by the human brain, then I might be tempted to give fentanyl a try. Just once. What's the harm....Maybe the NYT can write a feature article on the dangers of auto-asphyxiation with a brief side note on how orgasms from such practices are fifty times more intense and subject the brain to such bliss as it has never known before. That would really help to stamp out that nefarious practice among teens and young adults.
"perennial problem into a deadly crisis and a challenge to the city’s progressive identity"
So, at the risk of being overly cynical, doesn't the fentanyl problem take care of itself?
The city's "progressive" policies have led to their logical consequences. RIP Portland.
Darwin has a solution for the homeless crisis.
Remember when Reagan was president, and every homeless person was his fault? "The Homeless Crisis" was constant headline news. It led the network broadcasts. Reagan's policies were directly responsible for the constant increase of homeless people, and I'll of their suffering. Homeless advocates like Mitch Snyder became celebrities. Sometimes homeless people died within blocks of the White House! But Reagan, the cold s.o.b., didn't care. No trickle down economics for the homeless! And his successor, G.H.W. Bush, was just as cruel.
Then Clinton was elected, and the problem went away.
This current homeless crisis is 100 times worse than what we had in the 1980s, and not once do I hear Biden or his policies being blamed.
I do blame the homeless industry, progressives (pro broken family and other stupidity) and border policy. But we would still have the same problem w/o their throwing gas on the fire - maybe 30,000 dead/yr instead of 100,000. So I only blame the Democratic party for say one Nagasaki per year of needless deaths.
But. . .
This is largely a problem of the human condition. Maybe 2-5% of us have severe addictive personalities and lack self-control. As science advances we see more powerful and sophisticated crap like Fentanyl and that small % of population is going to continue to become irreversible addicted / stop functioning.
What do we do? Keep doing what we're doing (d/n work). Become draconian (ala Phillipines - execute drug dealers). Maybe take the addicts and put them in opium dens and say you want to spend the rest of your life hooked up to some drug, fine but do it away from us and you may not have children.
In the long term maybe we can do genetic therapy, engineering or screening.
My liberal friends laugh at me when I argue with them about this. But they have no f-ing idea what to do. So right now it's all a big grift to make money and not solve anything.
It's hard to be as smug as the political/government "elites" of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and now Los Angeles. They know what they know--and they know that the proles just don't understand the wonder of the elite's vision.
Of course the end rulst is that the cities simply circle the drain and disappear into a hole. And when the time comes to attempt to repair the damage, even if the will is there, the institutional ability to recover won't exist.
Isn't this just a capsule of Progressive sensibilities? It seems to me that Progressives have industrialized / democratized the business of saving people from their worst selves. It's a great way to seize control of government machinery and budget, with a steady stream of clients.
But as we have seen in the Great Pacific Northwest experiment, it doesn't work, it just makes it worse - and steadily more expensive. It's the permanent payoff from a giant incentive system.
First thing to do is eliminate the incentives, staunch the bleeding of municipal revenue, and then the cleanup of the human debris. We don't have the will, maybe even the ability, to stop the trafficking of drugs and people across the border, but we do have control over budgets and man-made incentives.
They haven't been 'grappling' with it, they've been encouraging it.
The only people I have sympathy for are the ones who didn't ever vote for any of this. They should leave.
Outlawing 'fun' stuff is hard (oops, misspelled "impossible"). Tends to make a bad situation worse, (see Prohibition).
The government went all 'Bad Cop' on a number of drugs that caused harm when abused. Oxy was made Public Enemy # 1 in spite of the fact many people depended on it for pain management and others used it for an occasional encounter with pleasantness (Guilty!). Some people gobbled it up with abandon. Some people do the same with booze, sex and other kinds of Rock 'n Roll.
The fact is, when government and the rent-seeking medical establishment got tough, opioid perscriptions were cut in half (A couple of my Docs of many years acknowledge that threats to licences, hospital privileges and standing within individual practices are real and quite effective in creating a "Just say NO" environment).
So, difficulty of access created a hungry market for far more deadly stuff of unknown strength and safety that benefits only criminal enterprise. Sky-rocketing death tolls are the unintended but not unforseeable consequence.
As for the homeless. I think the vast majority are addicted to "street life" and aren't about to get their act together elsewhere, regardless of clean safe shelter and counseling. I'm thinking they need to be held in camps in isolated areas until they demonstrate they're ready and able to leave.
The problem isn't fentanyl. The problem is narcan.
The difference in a small town is nobody is inviting and encouraging addiction or homelessness losers taking over their streets. What an imbecilic and dishonest comparison. This ain’t about the drugs. It’s about civilization and Oregon, California, Washington, Illinois, New York , Pennsylvania, Massachusetts has rejected it. Gulf shores has not. You’ll get your ass kicked here.
In my used-to-be small town, we have two black sections: one an historical area that unfortunately has four "new" streets developed next to the major thoroughfares and, a Section 8 area: the only two precincts that voted for Hillary more than Trump in 2016. The former, but more so the latter, are where you buy fentanyl (and crack) in Jupiter. Wild accusation? No. Not at all. A bunch of local law enforcement agencies got together and identified the amount of business trafficking in drugs that were emanating from those neighborhoods and decided to do something about it. In a multiple-year investigation that included two undercover agents, wiretaps (that included cell phones and text messages), and the turning of small-time buyers into informants, they arrested 25 people and shut down the majority of the drug dealing. I have read the affidavit from the undercover team outlining everything they did including records of conversations. Many of the offenders are in jail. It put a real dent in the drug trade here. But you can still get heroin/fentanyl caps, "hard" (crack), and, to a lesser extent, some opiates (percs 10/325 at $14-18 a pill!). Because I am involved in the recovery field, I know or have heard of some of the people they arrested. Two females got minor charges and the word is that they were the informants. I know a 33-year old female who decided to have a baby with a local dealer -- it was "great" for her: she got pregnant, her soon-to-be "baby daddy" moved in and she helped him facilitate dealing crack and caps -- while sneaking product and doing 3-9 caps a day (smoking it) while the BD remained clean and sober. (Some dealers are "smart" enough, if you will, to not indulge in their product and lose the monetary portion to their own habit). Long story short: her poor baby was born addicted and I watched the little boy shake violently, crying, as he went into withdrawals. Took about two days for DCF to get involved: the mother went into a 90 day rehab with the child: she's now clean and subject to surprise drug testing and continual supervision, the baby is fine and the BD continues his trade, but keeps the product away from her. When he found out she had been using the whole time and saw the baby go through that, he wanted to kill his baby mama. I talked to him during that period and he relented, only wanting to "hit her so hard she might wake up in the ER" and planning to take the baby away from her. End of story: they are together, reconciled now that she is clean and the baby is doing well -- but continuing his trade.
Sad.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Dave Begley said...
The fentanyl dead would make it the third largest city in Nebraska.
STILL would be more lively than Kearney Neb. and not NEARLY as creepy as Carter Lake Ia.
I may have mentioned this before, but don’t invest in Portland. My in-laws have lived in Portland since 1957.
In 2010, they bought a beautiful condo within walking distance to the Keller Opera house, The condo has beautiful views of Mt Hood, and the Willamette. To the north you can see up the river to the Moda Center.
Fifteen years ago, they purchased the condo for $850;000. They also dropped one hundred grand on condo improvements. Later this month.
Soon, they will be closing the condo sale for $800,000. The lure of living in downtown Portland is gone.
Did I mention how the downtown Apple store is wrapped in ballistic glass?
I think voter fraud runs rampant in Oregon?
Who knew enabling an activity would result in an increase in the activity?
Nancy Reagan: "Just say 'no' to drugs."
Joe Biden: "Here's a free crack pipe!"
Massive immigration = high housing prices.
Open Borders = Drugs flooding in. Plus, Central American gangs.
Drug Legalization = skyrocketing number of drug addicts.
Homelessness = made worse by importing large numbers of illegals and poor foreigners
However this doesn't affect the soccer moms in their well-to-do parts of town or the suburbs. So its not a problem that needs fixing. Just slap a bandaide on it, and feel good about throwing a few dollars at a "housing program" or more drug counselors.
In the good old days, the Well-to-do didn't care about some poor immigrant dying in the streets, or what went on in the "Red light district" or "the wrong side of the tracks". It hasn't changed, its just that instead of talking about "survival of the fittest", the well-to-do pat themsevles on the back for loving illegal immigrants, globalism, and not putting people in jail.
Just an idea here: but how about if we send the entire Sackler family (health care experts) down to meet with the cartels down in Mexico (they're the manufacturers and distributors) and have them work it out. It should be in some quiet private place, and I think we should make sure that there are no police, or military or administrative types around - so the meeting can be honest, sincere and productive. Give 'em a week or so.
. . . . . let's see how it goes.
Try meth or fentanyl in a small town.
If its Oregon, they'll give you a needle.
mikee @ 7:56
YES - you cannot talk about fentanyl without talking about China. How on earth are city mayors supposed to fight something that inserts itself into the trillion-dollar import stream?
Look at the litany of "causes".
All roads lead to the left.
I would like to see a remake of The Iceman Cometh, set, instead of a Raines law hotel, in a tent camp. Problem is, the cast would be dead quicker than the story could develop.
"Fentanyl sets off a high that 'human brains have never seen before.'"
Bullshit. As someone who has experienced both fentanyl (administered by a medical doctor) and black tar opium, I can say with some authority that the former is a piss-poor alternative to the latter. Not even close, really.
"100,000 dead per year due to fentanyl. The fentanyl dead would make it the third largest city in Nebraska."
Two questions:
- Are that numbers as "accurate" as the numbers for Covid deaths?
- If the numbers are indeed accurate, then why is something that kills nearly twice as many Americans in one year than America's direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War did, where are all of the marches and demonstrations? Where's the Fentanyl Memorial?
"Kate Brown. Nice work."
Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
Their body their choice.
Narrator's voice, "It's not the fentanyl. It's bad social policy. New-fangled and trendy though it be".
Team Clipboard dropping the ball while Pedo Pete continues the "surge".
Voter turnout even in national elections isn't great in the US but it's even lower in local elections. In addition, many jurisdictions are one party towns so the real election is the primary where the turnout is even lower. The result is that a relatively small activist base, or relatively small donations (Think Soros.) can have an outsized influence. And so you end up with a district attorney who, for example, doesn't think drug crimes should be prosecuted.
Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, LA. People thought they were being kind in allowing homeless people to find a life on the street, and people thought they were being cool decriminalizing drugs, and people thought they were being big-hearted in not enforcing the southern border.
MayBee, exactly this.
Read and listen to Michael Shellenberger. He has a lot of useful things to say on this topic, starting with the fact that "homelessness" is a euphemism (recall the roots of that word: something designed to sound pleasant, in this case designed to sound as if this is a problem of housing, and sort of romantic, and easy to solve) for mental illness and - often resultant - drug addiction.
Just had a death from overdose Wendsday 27 years old, she has a ten month old baby.
Fourth one. Three were full time working, middle class young people
Doing it in moderation for fun.
One was a stereo typical junkie.
The junkie, along with a companion, was found in his van by a friend whose father had asked him to look for his son. Been dead two weeks according to police.
It's the Prog Democrat party of death: Abortion, Fentanyl, War, Defunding, and Deprivation. Vote (D) for free student loans, reparations, open borders, etc.
Blogger Free Manure While You Wait! said...
Bullshit. As someone who has experienced both fentanyl (administered by a medical doctor) and black tar opium...
That black tar isn't opium my friend, it's heroin. Middle class white people like to call it opium because they are squeamish about using heroin. That vinegary smell it has? That comes from acetic anhydride used to convert raw opium to heroin.
But yes, I agree with you that most users would prefer heroin to fentanyl. Fentanyl is just so cheap and compact that it has taken over.
I was given fentanyl last year in a hospital (you don’t want to know) and it made me forget to breathe. It was the O2 sensor plus the nurse/ attendant prompting me to breathe that kept me alive. I am not sure I want any ever again for whatever reason.
"That black tar isn't opium my friend, it's heroin" "That vinegary smell it has?"
The black tar opium I smoked was given to me by Laotian immigrants s in 1982. And it smelled nothing like vinegar; when smoked, it smelled like all the flowers in the Garden of Edan. So, I'm going to need more than your say so on this. You got a link?
If we only knew who was supplying these drugs and how they got here............
Posting in two parts due to length:
My understanding from talking with addicts (both active and clean) is that not only is the high pleasurable (many talk about wanting to "be out of it" -- free of life's problems and just escape into nothingness -- instead of dealing with them so there is a possibility of them becoming less of a problem or just going away), but the fear of going through withdrawals (dope sick). Once they have been dope sick, these "weak" individuals will spend money they may have gotten through prostitution (at low rates I might add) or stealing -- money from the mouths of their children -- anything to keep from being dope sick. Then there are those who get on Suboxone or Subutex. Some are lucky to manage withdrawal off of them but addicts tell me (seems like a lie, but addicts lie) that dope sick from subs is worse; and either stay on them "forever" or return to active use of heroin/fentanyl).
Part two follows, I hope
Part two of I hope three:
I have saved the life of a woman who lived with me off and on when she OD'ed shooting heroin (by calling 911 and giving her CPR until they arrived) - she returned to use hours later when she fled the ER. Later on, she "smoked" it. Safer? Not really. As recounted on this blog's comments a ways back, my oldest daughter OD'ed smoking heroin. He ex-husband got back into her life and she and him smoked while their youngest, a daughter, was playing outside. My daughter passed out. The ex with help from his 9 year old daughter, carried her to her bed where she lay on her back, dead to the world. Well, not yet. He went about his business and the daughter went out to play. My daughter vomited and choked on it, not coming to. She was without air for 30 minutes according to the ER doc when the ex discovered her and called for the EMTs. Hours later, after I told her two children that their mother was not going to make it (very hard to do but needed not to give them false hope), I was present when they disconnected life support. She had been brain dead for those hours. Her organs were not usable as she had major organ failure. The ex's fault? Maybe a little, getting her back into addiction - they had lost everything for opiate and Xanax addictions (oxycodone -- daughter was doing a dozen "blues" a day -- and was "functional" to all appearances). But I blame my daughter. Not only was it her choice to use (her brain was addled with psychosis due to abuse of Adderall and couldn't hold a waitress job as she could not remember the orders) but a few days later the police investigating the dealer who supplied the drugs that resulted in her death at 39 years of age showed me a surveillance video that indicated that my daughter was the one who picked up the caps for her final high. When the coroner/med examiner report came back for the final, official cause of death certificate, it turned out that she did not have any heroin in her system. It was all fentanyl.
Final: part three:
Postscript: both children taken by DCF as the father could not stay clean and pass a drug test. Grandson just graduated high school after several years in a Boys Town sponsored program. Doing well. Gave him his mother's car on his 18th birthday since he managed to stay in school, get good grades and stay out of trouble.
My granddaughter first failed in a trial living arranged with her maternal aunt as she began to do early teenage things such as lie to hang out with boys, break rules and such. DCF placed her in my church's House of Hope program, where she lived with a Christian sponsor family in a nice home owned by the church and had gotten admitted via test application to the King's Academy. Very rigorous Christian-based high school, filled with rich kids. But just this summer, her father's younger brother and his wife took her in, approved by DCF and plan to adopt. She's going to a Christian high school here in my hometown. They survived. On multiple occasions, I make no bones about their situation, telling them that their parents ruined their own lives with drugs -- one in pathetic addiction and one dead -- that they are in danger by genetics to be pre-disposed with addiction and alcoholism -- and that they have a chance to live a better life and do well -- if they totally avoid drugs. At this point, so far, so good.
Lastly, a local dealer told me that the "product" he gets to sell is usually fentanyl-laced or 100%. Apparently, the medication is easier to obtain than heroin.
For those of you that have read my account of this prior, I apologize for the repeat. But I wanted to update on the children's condition. I miss my oldest daughter every day. I have grieved and moved on. In a terrible thought, I believe my daughter is better off out of her psychosis and struggle to survive as a single mother with little chance for employment. She became paranoid delusional, though she was hearing voices (walked around the house with one hand atop her head to prevent the "radio waves and voices" from affecting her. I regret what I said to her the last time I saw her alive: she came over to "borrow" gas money (yeahrite) and she was very thin, had tremors, was sweating and appeared sad. She was a shell of her former self. I thought it was just the progression of her amphetamine abuse -- I sincerely had no idea that she was smoking heroin (fentanyl). My last words to her? (shaking my head in sad disapproval) "Tiffany, you look like shit."
Marcus Bressler, you and your family are in our thoughts tonight.
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