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British Columbia’s medical health officer recently gave nurses the ability to prescribe opioid replacement drugs to improve the supply. Many more people are dyi
by ttul 6y ago
British Columbia’s medical health officer recently gave nurses the ability to prescribe opioid replacement drugs to improve the supply. Many more people are dying from toxic street drugs than are dying from COVID-19. It’s a “shadow pandemic” that has been raging for decades and is only getting worse as border closures make it harder for gangs to move drugs like heroin and fentanyl across borders, leading to shortages of “safe” ingredients and a shift toward exotic, extremely toxic alternatives like carfentanyl.
- edogg 6y agodo you think some pay back from China for the opium wars is part of the dynamic?
- ttul 6y agoThat’s going back a ways...
- edogg 6y agoTo the century of humiliation starting in 1839 with the opium war [1]. I’m told saving face is very important in Chinese culture. I could see it being quite easy for people in China whose job it might be to prevent the export of fentanyl or fentanyl precursors to only do the minimum to keep up appearances. not nearly as blatant as the British but were but we aren’t getting any help from China in preventing the deadly drugs from being shipped here. It would be better if they would just send actual heroin instead of having casual mdma and cocaine users dying from fentanyl. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
- pjc50 6y agoThe opiates crisis was driven and enabled by US pharma marketing practices. Internationally-mailed fentanyl was only a small part of the problem.
- monoideism 6y agoUS opiate deaths are now dominated by fentanyl and related synthetic analogues: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0318-data-show-changes-overdose-deaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0318-data-show-chan...
- mkatx 6y ago> Many more people are dying from toxic street drugs than are dying from COVID-19. It’s a “shadow pandemic” In America, the worse year of the opioid crisis killed ~65k people from my recollection. The "real pandemic" killed that many americans in the past 2 months. Am I misunderstanding something? Edit: I cannot spell.