Officials seized more than 115 million pills containing fentanyl in 2023. The opiate is often mixed with street drugs and linked to overdoses.
Counterfeit fentanyl pills are being seized by law enforcement in the United States at an unprecedented rate. A study published May 13, 2024, in the International Journal of Drug Policy indicated that more than 115 million pills containing illicit fentanyl were seized by US law enforcement in 2023.
The researchers behind the study said the number had grown from 71 million pills in 2022 and 50,000 pills in 2017.
The counterfeit fentanyl pills are made to look like legal prescription opioid medication — such as oxycodone and tramadol — but are often far deadlier than the originals.
“Fentanyl in pill form is now beginning to dominate the drug supply [in the US]. Pills are easy to ship and disguise and can also be marketed easily, as Americans have a reputation of loving their pills,” said the study’s lead author Joseph Palamar of NYU Langone Health in the US.
China has been supplying the cartel w fentanyl. It’s another facet of asymmetrical warfare
Now, I’m not saying China are the good guys or anything.
However, if I wanted to stop a rogue American security agency from selling heroin to fund secret, illegal wars around the world, I’d pump Mexico full of fentanyl.
legalize genuine drugs how about that
This won’t stop china from smuggling fentanyl into the states.
Sure it would. Why would people buy possibly-adulterated shit from a sketchy street dealer if they could just buy it over-the-counter at the drugstore and be assured that it was labeled accurately?
The same reason people buy street weed instead of buying it from a dispensary
Legalizing drugs is not enough. Many people addicted to illegal opioids are addicted because they are in chronic pain and have no other option. We need a robust universal healthcare system.
We need robust universal healthcare for a bunch of other reasons, but specifically for the chronic pain management issue I don’t see how making opioids (and marijuana, since AFAIK that helps some people too) available over the counter wouldn’t fix it.
Making a highly addictive substance like opioids available OTC is not a way to cut down on opioid addiction and abuse. Cannabis is different because it’s not (physically anyway) addictive.
There’s nothing, in my opinion, wrong with opioids being prescription-only, as long as doctors aren’t handing them out like candy, which was part of the problem. But another issue is that cannabis and opioids are not the only pain treatments out there. I suffer from chronic pain and I do use cannabis to help, but I also need to take anti-convulsants because they have a secondary effect of treating the pain of the kind of nerve disorder I have (atypical trigeminal neuralgia). No amount of opioids will help me, and I know because I had a bunch of opioids thrown at me in a row. I’m glad I didn’t get addicted. Withdrawal is a bitch anyway.
But if I thought they could help me and they were OTC? I would have tried every type and probably ended up addicted.
It’s bad enough cigarettes are OTC. My probably unpopular opinion is that they should transition tobacco and nicotine products into also being available by prescription only so that doctors can help patients quit, finding the best method for each patient since addiction does not have a one-size-fits-all approach. The amount of money saved in healthcare bills would be enormous. But our government is way too beholden to the tobacco industry for that to ever happen.
Making a highly addictive substance like opioids available OTC is not a way to cut down on opioid addiction and abuse.
Who said it was? Certainly not me!
What it is, is a way to cut down on overdoses due to sketchy street drugs being laced with shit the consumer didn’t expect.
[Edit] Let me put it this way:
Which is more important, trying to prevent people from becoming addicted (which, let’s be honest, is at least as much a moral crusade as it is a health concern), or trying to prevent the drug from destroying their lives (whether via overdose, exorbitant cost, or criminal prosecution) if they do become addicted to it?
Legalizing it does not prevent overdosing, it also would make it less likely to treat the root cause of the pain.
And I didn’t say legalization shouldn’t happen, I said it shouldn’t happen alone. Preventing addiction should be a priority if you legalize drugs.
Legalizing it does not prevent overdosing
[citation needed]
Really?
How about the fact that legal alcohol causes college kids to die of alcohol poisoning on a regular basis?
Congratulations to drugs for winning the “war on drugs”.
Shout out to terror too
We’re going to win the trade war for sure.
Fuck Nixon for coining that phrase. You can’t mitigate drug use with constraint. Addicts find a way. It’s mitigated with rehabilitative treatment. For those who claim that rehab doesn’t stick, I’d like to see how incarceration does.
Incarceration absolutely does stick.
I have bad news for you. 65% of prisoners have active substance abuse problems. Prisoners are statistically more likely to develop an addiction than recover from one.
That was my point. They’re locking people up in order to create a criminal underclass that can be exploited and used to scare the rest of the population. High recidivism rates are part of the design.
I follow. My prior comment was intended to compare efficacy of incarceration vs. rehabilitation in mitigating illicit drug use and addiction in the nation.
I agree that this would be a better way to go about things. But the US “justice” system isn’t interested in mitigation.
Tinfoil take: if crack was a CIA op, fent also is, they’re just targeting all drug users. They think if they make it all deadly and dangerous, everyone’ll stop. There’s some christofascist psychos who think “addicts deserve it” and they should cull the populace, just like they thought PoC deserved it with crack.
Anybody watching back the hit TV series, E.R., observe how earlier in the series during an emergency the docs would ask the nurses for administration of “Oxy” and “Hydro” and later in the series they would ask for “Fent”.
Street names.
Tell me the producers of those drugs did not pay off the producers of the show to fit that in.
Highly addictive drug product placement.
Unreal.I don’t think drug manufacturers want their products associated with pill-seeking addicts. A simpler explanation is that the show reflects reality.
There wasn’t the opioid epidemic we now have when those episodes came out. Those drug companies making synthetic were just getting started.
And there’s no reality. Patient comes in unconscious from an unknown malady and Stamo’s character is like, “Chem 7, CBC, Fent lollipop!”
