Courtesy of an e-mail chain of which I’m a member, I came across this picture (clickit to biggit).
On the left is a lethal dose of heroin. On the right is a lethal dose of fentanyl.
The article from which I took that image warns:
Heroin and fentanyl look identical, and with drugs purchased on the street, “you don’t know what you’re taking,” Tim Pifer, the director of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory, told STAT in an interview. “You’re injecting yourself with a loaded gun.”
There’s more at the link. Highly recommended reading.
No wonder fatalities from illicit narcotics are increasing by leaps and bounds. When the difference between life and death can hardly be seen with the naked eye, it’s far too easy to make a fatal mistake.
Peter
Sounds like this may be a self-correcting drug problem.
The issue with the severity of fentanyl is that people can accidentally OD if they're around traces of it – numerous kids, cops, EMTs, etc have had it happen.
Sad thing is that fentanyl, properly prescribed, administered, and monitored, is a very effective pain medication.
What Wayne said.
My Mom had the patches in home hospice in 2010.
Mom, I miss you and Dad.
This is why if you purpose street drugs and are unsure, you should call the police and ask them to test it for you. Knuckledraggin' linked to a post about a Florida man who did this. It certainly helped keep that Florida man from suffering from bad drugs.
There are no documented deaths from being "around" fentanyl.
Look up pictures of the lethal dose of remifentanyl and carfentanyl. See also stories of folks caught with pounds of the stuff. Makes you wonder how, and why…
https://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/Powerful-opioid-carfentanil-reaches-Connecticut-11316247.php
I was on fentanyl for about a year, prescribed by my oncologist. It's dosed in micrograms rather than milligrams. It's a great pain reliever. I'm not sure why someone would take it to get high, as I never experienced anything other than pain reduction.
Drug dealers should be hung. They are nothing more than gunmen shooting into a crowd.
Funny; the people who want to take away your right to bear arms are the same ones pushing for the legalization of drugs…
PeterF does point out an interesting 'intersection' of desires, if you will.
And where is all of this Fentanyl and carfentanyl and otherfentanyl coming from?
Why, from the drug labs of Communist China. And who owns the drug labs? Why, the People's Republic Army, and various CCP leading members.
If this isn't a subversive attack upon the people of the USA, then I don't know what would be.
From the CCP, through Mexican Cartels, to your neighborhood.
If this isn't a Cassus Belli to go full-out on at least the Cartels, and against the narco-state of Mexico, then I don't know what is.
Establish a 30 mile deep dead zone between Mexico and the US. Enforce the border like it's supposed to be.
And plan on attacking the CCP also. Using nice subversive methods like sinking all their militia fishing fleet wherever it strays out of the CCP's territorial waters. Shut them down.
As to the end users? Let them die. Burn their bodies.
As to the dealers? If caught, they should be forced to use all of their product at once. Let them go if they survive. If they don't, well, see end users.
Transporting the stuff? Use it all.
Holding the stuff for someone else? Use it all.
Death to all who make, transport, store, sell and use this garbage. Death to all.
1) False.
2) Fentanyl, an actual US pharmacopia schedule narcotic, is more controlled than anything, is short-acting, and virtually impossible to get in street quantities.
3) What's being cut into street drugs like heroin (and cocaine, and methamphetamnie) is carfentanil., the garage-brew synthetic equivalent.
4) The LD50 (the dose that will kill 50% of all persons receiving such dose) is the size of three grains of table salt, not the 20-50 pictured in that misleading photo.
5) carfentanil is made from precursor drugs shipped in bulk from China, and either mixed in mexico, and smuggled over the wide-open border, or from those same chemicals shipped through that same border and cooked here in the US.
6) people who couldn't pass a 6th grade math quiz then mix carfentanil and the drug of choice, and frequently fail to mix it down enough, and stir it properly, there being no FDA oversight of street drugs, and thus they regularly OD their customers, in many instances making "hot batches" that wipe out large swaths of their clientele (Yay!), but also anyone nearby who gets contact-dosed (EMS, bystanders, police, etc.).
7) That is 99% of the actual "opioid epidemic", not teenagers boosting grannie's Norco prescription.
We've covered the topic a time or eight:
https://imgur.com/74f2xq9
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/08/once-again-heres-your-opioid-epidemic.html
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/07/heres-your-opioid-crisis-cdc.html
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2019/12/we-told-you-so-dept.html
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2017/09/medical-statistics-pt-iii-why-so-many.html
Being at the pointy end of the stick, we used to get a drunk once a week, and an OD once a month. We now get an OD per night, and on weekends, 3-5 at a time isn't uncommon.
Idiots are mixing regularly carfentanil into cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, and marijuana, including edibles, and anything else people will consume.
Ban Narcan for five years, and the problem self-corrects. We need to stop rescuing junkies; it's a waste of time. (In one case I personally witnessed, after the same twit OD'ed three times, with ER visits and sign outs afterwards all three times, in less than 12 hours, the PD that responded all three times finally put the junkie on a 5150 hold as a danger to self, just to keep them off the streets for that amount of time.)
Ban Narcan, and ODs become DOAs, and the drug dealers go out of business for a decade and more.
Stop feeding the pigeons.
QED
Aesop is a very wise man .
Aesop, are you saying that the reports from US Customs and Border Protection telling us that they picked up pounds upon pounds, even tons of fentanyl are false?
For those with short memories, in the 80s and 90s, Nicaraguans wanting a cheap high would sniff shoe glue and burn their brains out. The government would take the addicts into the jungle and shoot them. That may not be the best answer to drug addiction in the US
If you really want to stop drug addiction and the war on drugs, shut off the pipeline of money to stop drugs. Ever since the War on Drugs was declared, US drug use skyrocketed as politicians, municipalities and cop shops got rich on Federal drug money.
I sat on a grand jury where the US wanted to seize the property of a US drug runner. This guy would pick up large quantities of illegal drugs in SoCal, drive them to the Pacific Northwest and distribute them there. The US did not want a 25 year old car in good condition that he had. I asked the agent why not and his reply was that they could only sell it for 2 grand or so and it wasn't worth their time.
No, I'm saying reporters don't know the difference between Fentanyl and carfentanil, because they're the ones who weren't bright enough to get into medical school, law school, engineering, or anything else requiring actual IQ points.
Stopping the Slap Fight On Some Drugs (With Collateral Damage) won't end the drug problem, it will triple-to-tenfold increase it.
Legalizing pot in CA opened the floodgates here for what I've described so far, but what do I know? I've only had a ringside seat for twenty-plus years.
We've beaten the "End The Drug War" idiocy to death on three blogs and a hundreds posts, and the idea hasn't gotten any smarter in the interim. Starting from the idea that there's ever actually been anything close to a War On Drugs. That's pure mythology.
When you see Arc Light strikes mounted on cartels, and junkies and dealers in this country getting stacked in bodybags like civilians are in Ukraine, give us a holler about a "war".
Until then, it's smoke and mirrors.
As to the guy you sat in judgement of, if they'd simply executed him, that would've been a better plan. If he'd ratted out all his contacts, above and below, I'd be magnanimous and provide anesthesia before that execution. 0% recidivism, rolling up an entire network in a week, and they could have parted out his internal organs for something close to $50K. Win-win-win.
That's what a drug war looks like.
And all the people too squeamish to face that are the reason for why things are the way they are now, and will remain so. Nobody wants their kids to get bitten by the rabid dog, but everyone's too chicken-$#!^ to put it down.
An actual military war on drugs if fought might work if we were willing to take and inflict millions of casualties civilian, police and military and spend more money than the gulf war 100x over.
It would require massive political will and we are too corrupt to do any of the things much less something as basic as close the border.