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Teen-age fentanyl deaths in a Texas county

• ct0 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/IhGh9 https://archive.ph/IhGh9
• throwayyy479087 4y ago
  85% of excess deaths in NYC are now drugs. That includes deaths from homocide, suicide, cars, everything - 85% of those are drugs. https://nytimes.com/2023/02/20/nyregion/sudden-deaths-overdoses-fentanyl-nyc.html https://nytimes.com/2023/02/20/nyregion/sudden-deaths-overdo... It's the most serious issue facing the country, and we have 0 idea what to do. It's 30 9/11s a year worth of death and misery. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
  • treeman79 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
      Texas would do well to at least pretend to care about kids mental health. From the article: > Directing blame at Mexico is also a way to avoid looking at how Texas fails children. A 2022 report from the nonprofit Mental Health America ranked the state last in the nation in access to mental-health care; nearly three-quarters of Texas youth who had a major depressive episode did not receive mental-health treatment, the worst rate in the country, according to the report. Choosing to spend billions building a wall and next to nothing on mental health access for children is the epitome of Texas thinking.
      • dang 4y ago
        Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • dang 4y ago
      Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dminor 4y ago
    On the contrary, we have medication (buprenorphene) that is remarkably effective for opioid addiction. France liberalized access to it and overdose deaths fell 80% between 1994 and 2002.
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      What about since? That's ancient history in drug terms
      • Retric 4y ago
        It’s stayed low. France had 0.6 OD deaths per 100,000 people in 2020. The US had 27.9 OD deaths per 100,000 people. In other words the US numbers are roughly 50x as bad.
        • google234123 4y ago
          Just to be clear, france doesn't have mexico on its boarder. The illegal drug trade in France is ~3b, in the US it is ~150 billion
        • tristor 4y ago
          France is not targeted by the 2nd largest economy in the world through an act of social warfare to knock them off the top rung so that their adversary (China) can take over. More than 90% of the fentanyl on the streets of the US originated in China.
          • anon291 4y ago
            And I doubt border security is a partisan issue in France whereas one of the two parties seems hell bent on open borders here.
            • rnk 4y ago
              I'm sure you are blaming democrats here. It's not true in practice. Dems don't want endless crime, they don't want open borders for fentanyl to come through. It's a lazy, incorrect statement.
  • temp_account_32 4y ago
    https://archive.is/okksn https://archive.is/okksn
  • runnerup 4y ago
    > It's the most serious issue facing the country, and we have 0 idea what to do https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13011-021-00394-7 https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      We know what to do, but we don't want to do it because it would be deeply unpopular with people. Thailand, Singapore, and other nearby countries have demonstrated how to stop the flow of highly addictive drugs - by using a culture of shame and highly punitive measures around possession and distribution. China learned this lesson during the opium wars, too. They couldn't stop the flow of opium because it would have been terribly unpopular with the people. The script has been flipped with Fentanyl (and to a lesser extent, TikTok). It remains to be seen whether we actually care about the drugs, though. Simply ignoring their presence may be a legitimate strategy.
      • runnerup 4y ago
        You say Thailand has figured it out but 4% of Thais have used illegal drugs in the past year. Which is pretty close to the 5-6% of Asians in the USA who have used illegal drugs in the past year. Interesting that two very different national legal policies have such similar outcomes among Asians. Phillipines has experimented with allowing anyone to murder anyone else they suspect of using drugs. That hasn’t significantly decreased the rate of illegal drug use in the country. This is despite making payments to people to summarily execute drug addicts. Thousands have been executed across the Phillipines. I can’t find any evidence that drug use in the Philippines has decreased in the past 5 years.
        • pclmulqdq 4y ago
          > 4% of Thais have used illegal drugs in the past year. Care to wager on the fraction of US users of illegal drugs? https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230209_11022554.html https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230209_1102... > In 2021, findings by NCDAS show about 19.4 percent of Americans have used illegal substances at least once. Out of the 280 million aged 12 and older, 31.9 million are drug users, with 11.7 percent on illegal substances and 19.4 percent either having consumed illicit drugs or misused prescription drugs in 2020. If alcohol and tobacco users are included, the number of people in the United States who are abusing substances totals 165 million. > During the past 12 months, 48.2 million Americans over the age of 18 consumed cannabis at least once. > During the past 12 months, 10.1 million Americans have consumed opium at least once.
  • pigsty 4y ago
    It’s really well past time to start considering overdose deaths amongst addicts as suicide. Yes, there are accidental overdoses where someone takes too much of a prescribed drug without realizing it or accidentally combines it with someone that amplifies the effect and results in death. That’s a different matter. Many opiate addicts who die of overdose are essentially (oftentimes even openly) accepting they’ll die due to the drug someday. We treat PTSD-affected soldiers as humans who need assistance in pulling through their difficulties before making an irreversible mistake. But we treat drug addiction as a problem regarding the addiction itself, and not that people with troubled circumstances fall into drug addiction out of despair or other difficulties in life. But I think attitudes regarding this won’t change because the US will instantly shoot ahead of the world in suicide death statistics—in a shame-based society that’s all about saving face like the US, that’s simply not going to happen.
    • zamnos 4y ago
      Okay, we wave a magic wand and now they're suicide-by-fentanyl deaths when that is the case. How does that repositioning change things? There's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what if there's no happiness to go after? There're no jobs to be had, the Earth is dying, Wall Street is taking all the money. Doing heroin is way easier than fixing capitalism.
      • speakfreely 4y ago
        https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-doomer https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-doomer
        • zamnos 4y ago
          you could at least have responded with your own words, but you chose not to. Anyway, yes absolutely don't be a doomer. I'm not, despite how I presented above. Life's not even worth living with that attitude. But if you're unable to even sympathize with someone else's plight, what are you even doing? How can you help them out of their pit if you can't see it?
    • 4y ago
  • 8note 4y ago
    Sounds like good news - it's not COVID anymore
    • cj 4y ago
      This has been going on since before Covid. Covid did a great job of brushing a lot of problems under the rug which are now inevitably popping back up.
    • logicalmonster 4y ago
      Not Covid, but indirectly from the reaction to Covid. I'm not sure how this could ever be measured objectively, but I think a lot of the extra social malaise that exists today originated from the absolutely horrendous and devastating Covid policies especially for the young. And these deaths occurring among the young are far more tragic than any conceivable Covid deaths among the elderly. I personally think that we're going to be paying the consequences for short-sighted policies for a long time and that ultimately the attempts to fix Covid will have harmed far more people than were helped.
  • cwkoss 4y ago
    We've known how to solve opioid addiction for decades: give people opportunity, hope and community and they won't choose to escape reality. Rat park generalized to humans. Our politicians would rather feed the drug-incarceration-industrial complex than serve our society at the expense of their rent seeking patrons. We don't have zero idea what to do: the solution is just something that people who are part of this machine refuse to grok.
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      Fun Fact: Rat Park has never replicated, and is now considered bunk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park#Replication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park#Replication
      • cwkoss 4y ago
        One graduate student failing to replicate does not support the assertion that it 'is now considered bunk'
        • eurasiantiger 4y ago
          You’re being disingenuous. ”There has been little subsequent interest in replicating the studies due to several methodological issues present in the originals”
          • phendrenad2 4y ago
            A paper with many egregious methodological issues is, at worst, a paper that should be ignored, as though it never happened. We cannot say that it is "wrong" or "incorrect" or "bunk" because it's a nothing, a non-argument. Until the experiments are repeated, sans egregious methodological issues, we can't logically make that determination.
            • eurasiantiger 4y ago
              So if it’s generally accepted that the world is flat, we shouldn’t listen to anyone claiming otherwise?
  • ck2 4y ago
    Based on what we've done for covid deaths, nothing, absolutely nothing will be done. Also people need to stop having kids if they are only going to raise them while cute babies and then say "oh well I tried" when they are teens.
    • rnk 4y ago
      I have kids and my wife is a teacher. The past years of covid time caused a lot of damage to kids and the educational institutions (and other adults). Everyone is hurting and struggling. It's not happening because parents just aren't trying.
  • dendrite9 4y ago
    A while ago I listened to an interview about drugs and drug manufacturing where one of the participants, and I wish I remembered who it was, said we probably should think about what is going on with fentanyl and the various other synthetic opiates through the lens of what happened with the Opium war. It didn't sound like fearmongering to me, but rather someone trying to describe to other people what he saw in his reporting or public health work. I'll try to look at what I've listened to tomorrow and see if I can find it.
  • andrei_says_ 4y ago
    If we consider increased drug use a natural response to increasingly adversarial and stressful environment, could we use this as an inspiration to maybe reverse some of the forces behind the stressors?
  • tenpies 4y ago
    > we have 0 idea what to do We have plenty of ideas. The most obvious one is to begin controlling the areas of the border through which these drugs are entering the country. Unfortunately that would require an admission by the current US administration that there is a catastrophic crisis at the southern border - one encompassing human, financial, drug, cartel, Chinese, terrorist, human trafficking, and a myriad of other elements. This harsh admission of reality is a current impossibility for the Biden administration and US Democrats. And just to be clear, the southern border isn't the only point of entry, but it is the largest and most elaborate. There is an entire industry set up exclusively for opioids. Ignoring the human trafficking, slavery, coyotes, and other elements: just the fentanyl trade alone involves at least two cartels, and an international supply chain that includes India, China, and MexicoS[1][2]. The US would be the fourth sovereign participant in that it facilitates a degree of free trade that would make anyone else incredibly jealous. --- [1] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... Note this is from 2020, and as predicted, the bulk of fentanyl did in fact shift to entering through Mexico, even if the precursors arrive from China and India to Mexico. [2] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/briefing-senate-foreign-relations-committee-countering-illicit-fentanyl-trafficking-hearing https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/briefing-senate-foreign...
    • rnk 4y ago
      The problem didn't start when Biden was inaugurated. It has been getting worse during the previous administration. It doesn't feel like Biden did anything about it, but neither did Trump. Trump made false claims about closing the border and said his work would reduce the problems. It did not. We don't know what to do to stop it, and both parties in the us have no real solution.
      • nwienert 4y ago
        He tried pretty hard but was thwarted by Democrats. This line of argument is disingenuous - for example, Biden has many plans he strongly fights for like expanding healthcare, but that he can't get through, due to the Republicans. It would be very unfair to say the equivalent of your comment about Biden/healthcare.
  • bb88 4y ago
    > It's the most serious issue facing the country I disagree. Gun deaths are. Children don't choose to use guns typically. Bullets are forced into them by others. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/ https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...
    • paperwasp42 4y ago
      > I disagree. Gun deaths are. I'm not convinced these things are mutually exclusive. When you break down the statistics, 61 kids between the ages of 0-11 were killed so far in 2023 by gun violence (just typing that makes my stomach hurt...). In comparison, 355 teenagers (ages 12-17) were killed. (1) That's 6x the amount of death in an age bracket half the size. The huge spike in death rate is largely linked to gang violence. Gangs often start recruiting around the age kids hit puberty. Take a look at the Gun Violence Archive's incident reports on mass shootings, and you find a huge percentage are tagged as "gang violence" and resulted in dead or injured teenagers. (2) When you hear about "school shootings" happening in America, very few are Columbine style events. Most are gang related, and impact the most vulnerable and poverty-stricken student populations who have the least resources to deal with the resulting trauma. There is a reason poor, inner-city schools are usually the ones with metal detectors at their doors. Gangs are still fueled by drug sales. Drugs and gun violence go hand in hand. I don't think we can solve one without solving the other. We desperately need resources and reforms poured into both issues. But I think if we treat them as unrelated problems, we're doomed to fail. 1) https://www.gunviolencearchive.org https://www.gunviolencearchive.org 2) https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/mass-shooting https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/mass-shooting
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Decrease the size of the industry that can't access state violence via the courts to solve it's petty business disputes (i.e. the illegal drug industry). A huge amount of violent crime of all types in the US is a figment of drug distributors and dealers, and to some extent users robbing, shooting and beating each other to settle scores. Hell, just making possession completely legal (none of this "civil infraction" bullshit) so that people can go to the cops when they're robbed instead of getting revenge on who they think done it would be a huge step forward.
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    Do most fentanyl overdoses come from people taking opiates? Or people taking something random laced with fentanyl? The solution to the latter would seem to be test kits, too.
  • Helmut10001 4y ago
    archive.org link [1] [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230330052658/https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-horrifying-epidemic-of-teen-age-fentanyl-deaths-in-a-texas-county https://web.archive.org/web/20230330052658/https://www.newyo...
  • the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
    > It's the most serious issue facing the country, and we have 0 idea what to do. If only there was a thing to learn from other countries. That already starts with the basics such as in which amounts pills are available over the counter. From a European's perspective the entire idea that you get pills in a bottle is so wild.
  • 0xAFFFF 4y ago
    0 idea what to do? Switzerland [1] has implemented a successful strategy that revolves around one key point: treating the drug problem as healthcare instead of criminality. The "War on Drugs" is the most ineffective strategy when it comes to dealing with addiction. [1]: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/mountaintops https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/mountain...
    • yodsanklai 4y ago
      Is it that simple though? There are probably other factors that make people in the US more prone to drug addiction (e.g. poverty, lack of opportunities...).
      • bakuninsbart 4y ago
        Lack of healthcare coverage and over-prescription of opioids are both factors as well. People are self-medicating due to not getting the pain medication they need because they lack healthcare. Or they have untreated mental issues. or, if they do have healthcare, they might very well get prescribed super addictive drugs over a long period of time.
        • Clubber 4y ago
          >because they lack healthcare. I'm convinced the "crackdown" on pills is what led to where we are today. Many doctors won't prescribe pain medication because they're afraid to lose their license or have a DEA raid. People find what they want in heroin and now fentanyl. Why we keep fighting the drug war this way is beyond me. >if they do have healthcare, they might very well get prescribed super addictive drugs over a long period of time. I think this is also why we are here today.
      • beepbooptheory 4y ago
        Having healthcare accessible in general would at least be a step towards a greater public wealth for individuals. Even a little less poverty has got to do some good.
      • 4y ago
  • gregwebs 4y ago
    We don’t know what to do because we have no idea what the root cause of the problem is. Gabor Mate worked with those dealing with addiction for many years. In his book, Hungry Ghosts, he explains that addiction is an escape from deep psychological pain usually caused by childhood trauma. The solution, then, is psychological help – something we do very poorly with for addiction right now. This is in part because psychologists often don’t understand the nature of addiction either. And we can avoid making the problem worse by not trying to punish away pain and instead implementing harm reduction strategies.
    • bakuninsbart 4y ago
      I think it is dangerous to look at addicts who lost everything or most things and derive your definition of Addiction from that. Andrew Huberman in his podcast defines addiction as a "progressive narrowing of things that bring us pleasure", which I think hits the mark quite a lot more. If you google things like "When does someone have a drinking problem?", the vast majority of sites will use a really weird and vague definition like "If you answer yes to more than 3 of these 7 statements, you might have a problem". I think this is because we want to draw a (pretty arbitrary) line between what we consider normal drug use and addiction, when in reality it makes more sense to say that everyone who drinks or smokes semi-regularly has a light addiction. Most people manage to more-or-less stagnate on this light addiction, although from my limited experience, I feel like people generally drink ever slightly more as they age, so it is just a very slow increase in addiction, others don't. The reason why I think this is really important is because a) it reduces stigma; Most of us are more or less in the same boat and b) addicts don't have a fundamental different psychology or life experience. Yes, if you have trauma or a generally bad life experience, you are more likely to binge on drugs, but the reasons for this are quite obvious given the definition above: The narrowing of pleasure comes both from addiction as well as external circumstances. I agree with you on the solutions though, we need more empathic care and therapy, harm reduction plans, and reduce poverty and the causes of extreme psychological trauma where possible.
      • gregwebs 4y ago
        Mate explains addiction as a sliding scale. He worked with those whose lives were in complete toil. But he also worked on his own addictions which made his life worse but are not comparable in terms of severity of consequence. Similarly trauma is also on a sliding scale. Agreed that low-level addiction, even in cases that it may similarly be a form of escapism, is not necessarily caused by trauma. But I think that's actually why addicts are stigmatized. I just need a little more willpower today- a good night's sleep and some exercise is often enough- to avoid addictive behaviors. But for those suffering from severe addiction it's not helpful to think with that mindset. Understanding the root cause has opened me up to truly empathizing to those with addiction- something often lacking in our society.
  • stevespang 4y ago
    [dead]
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Call me cynical but: Nothing is getting done because the deaths are concentrated among populations that a) don't pay a lot of taxes b) don't have a lot of wealth c) can't easily be manipulated as a homogeneous blob of political pawns. Basically there's little upside to solving the problem for government, big business, moralizing ideologues and the rest of the usual suspects who weigh in on these sorts of things.
  • scottLobster 4y ago
    We know exactly what to do, it's just that nobody's willing to pay for it. The poor don't have any money by definition, the middle class, particularly in New York, is already at or near its limit, the rich are too busy being the main character to bother, and the political class is entrenched enough that this issue alone won't produce enough political force to dislodge them or move them to significant action. Addicts typically aren't very motivated voters, and most of them probably didn't have a supportive family to begin with. So I guess we're back to the tried-and-true approach of charities putting as many band-aids on the broken leg as they can, politicians spouting empty rhetoric with crocodile tears around election season, and cops policing the affluent neighborhoods while largely leaving the rest to rot. How do we fix all of this, that might have a chance of actually happening? Capital controls. Make TVs, mixers and smart toasters expensive again, but made in America. We need a full economic ladder, not just the top rungs. College degrees should not be required to enter the middle class, in their current state many degrees don't even provide that anymore.
    • dash2 4y ago
      What leads you to be confident that (we already know that) making society more equal will reduce the fentanyl epidemic?
      • scottLobster 4y ago
        Because for many (most?) addicts drug use starts as a coping mechanism. So the question is what are people coping with that's so bad it causes them to turn to drugs, despite all the readily available information about how bad they are? Lack of economic opportunity among the lower classes is a big one. There are certainly other causes of addiction, but at the end of the day a lot of rehab programs fail because even if the addict gets clean, they're immediately sent back to the living situation that got them addicted in the first place. This is especially true for the homeless, "congrats you're free of heroin, now go back to your tent under the bridge where you live in constant fear of rape from other drugged-out homeless people and no employer will touch you! You're free!"
        • 4y ago
  • brightball 4y ago
    There's a reason that Texas legislators keep talking about border security and the drugs trade and human trafficking that comes with it. I get it, a lot of people don't like Texas but it doesn't make them wrong.
  • devwastaken 4y ago
    Fentanyl use is synonymous with suicide. People use fentanyl to die. So what we are seeing is a massive amount of suicides (overwhelmingly men). Yet this is never shown in media, it's not in line with the current political posturing.
• Pulcinella 4y ago
  I don’t get how the DEA is able to cause an ADHD medication shortage by limiting supply and yet at the same time pharma companies are allowed to just manufacture as much fentanyl and other opioids as much as they want.
  • treeman79 4y ago
    It’s funny/sad to ask the pro-drug crowd if I can get my prescription medication without going through a doctor. People flip out. Only took me 2 years to get a prescription for a common but off label use for one medication.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > prescription medication without going through a doctor. What does it mean?
      • sbaiddn 4y ago
        I think the OP is pointing out his observation that the folks who argue for drug decriminalization are also the ones most likely to be offended by the idea that medicinal drugs, like an antibiotic, be obtainable without a prescription.
  • blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    The fentanyl is mostly made in Mexico these days[1], I don't think the pharma companies could compete on price... 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64047688 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64047688
    • robotnikman 4y ago
      More details posted by another user earlier https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
  • 4y ago
• ChancyChance 4y ago
  Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle. However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
  • LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
    The street dealers aren't usually the ones cooking them and therefore don't know what's in them.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      but someone is and does?
      • LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
        True, but it's quite possible that people who cook illegal drugs for money often don't care because they get paid by the distributor. At the end of the day, they're just trying to make a living like the rest of us, and they usually don't have to care about what happens to their users because its outside of their feedback loop. An analog to the tech industry would be the universal frustration with end user data collection vs its continuing proliferation. Most of us don't like the lack of privacy online and how much data companies capture, and many if not most of us work at companies that aren't capturing end user data. But many if not most of us, do make tools that are sold to companies who do capture an insane amount of user data. Ultimately, we still are often paid, at least indirectly, through privacy-violating user data collection because it's an extremely common web monetization model. I'd be willing to bet that there more than a few Facebook engineers on this forum who unironically complain about the lack of privacy on the web. But what pays their salaries?
  • rqtwteye 4y ago
    I don’t think drug dealers are very thoughtful. Whatever makes quick money is fine. And they probably don’t even know what’s in their drugs.
• LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
  My Sister-In-Law is a counselor at an elementary school in the Chicago area with one other counselor sharing the caseload, she's been working almost a decade. Before the pandemic, roughly 10% of students at her school came and went through her office seeking mental health treatment. After the pandemic and school reconvened, that number shot up to about 70% of students and has now leveled out around 50% and held steady for the last year. Of course, being a public school district, they couldn't afford to bring on additional caseworkers, so she's having to ration her schedule to see as many students as she can. And the stories she's getting from her kids are often pretty terrible (lots of alcoholism and domestic-violence related issues). I read stories like this and it's completely unsurprising to see. Between the trauma of the pandemic, endless school shootings and a future that looks increasingly uncertain ecologically and economically, I get it. Who among us honestly wishes they were a kid in this world in this time? I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not.
  • rqtwteye 4y ago
    I think it’s also become much more acceptable to seek help for mental issues. When I look back at my school days there were a lot of people who had mental problems. Including me. But there was nowhere to go
    • brucethemoose2 4y ago
      Bingo. I personally knew of awful situations among classmates (not to speak of my own issues) that they never seeked help for, and I'm sure thats just a tiny fraction of what was going on. Maybe there was somewhere to go, but therapy and counselors were not part of the culture.
  • tlear 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • brailsafe 4y ago
      How can you start by saying the pandemic screwed them over, and then claim they could have it so much worse so stop complaining? I hate this attitude, it seems very Gen X to me. The fact that you can point to any arbitrary decade and find somewhere in the world with arguably more volatile circumstances isn't a reason to discourage people from being open about what they're struggling with, especially because during those times, the problems were just different. Are we regularly under threat from being nuked? Probably not. Are kids still growing up impoverished in violent and/or abusive households? Absolutely. Even in the last 10 years, prospects for having a relatively stable life have become a lot more grim, for adults, and that has a lot of carryover to kids
• ourmandave 4y ago
  I never understood why you'd supply a drug that kills your customer base. I gist I get is that cheaper-to-produce counterfeit pills laced with Fentanyl are causing accidental overdosing because people think they're taking something else. And the bogus pills are wildly inconsistent in the dose they deliver. Before I'd only heard the complete bullshit from Fox News that Fentanyl laced Halloween candy will kill your children if they even touch it.
  • LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
    It's not that dealers know their drugs will definitely kill customers, it's that they don't know what's in what they're selling and they're smart enough to know not to ask questions of their suppliers. I bought a THC vape cartridge in a non-legal state several years ago, right around the time when there was a spike in hospitalizations and deaths around fake THC carts. My guy promised me that it came from Colorado, but I googled the brand name from the packaging and quickly discovered that it was counterfeit packaging that anyone could buy on Alibaba. Maybe my guy knew that it was fake, maybe he didn't. But that's the crux the black market, unless it comes from the earth, you can't really know what it is you're getting.
    • zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
      A lot of people thought those Alibaba brands were real. By the way, it was vitamin E used to cut the carts that caused the lung problems, for those who don't know.
    • khazhoux 4y ago
      > It's not that dealers know their drugs will definitely kill customers, it's that they don't know what's in what they're selling and they're smart enough to know not to ask questions of their suppliers. Same difference. Why do the suppliers think it's smart to poison their product?
      • subpixel 4y ago
        They may not use this logic but it’s churn rate vs. customer lifetime value. When your product is consumed by people who are at one point or another in the process of killing themselves, it’s all churn all the time. Dealing opiates is a high volume, high frequency business. If cutting x or y with fentanyl both saves significant money and even helps you extract some more transactions from the customer before they OD for the last time, it’s a business advantage. The market for junkies seeking out “high quality opiates” is vanishingly small. People get hooked on fentanyl, literally want it, and then it’s game over. Basically death is where the high growth is.
• ourmandave 4y ago
  DEA's Fentanyl Flow to the United States (pdf) https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
  • tristor 4y ago
    Yeah, it's an open secret nobody wants to ever talk about in these threads. The fentanyl problems in the United States are essentially a direct social attack by the Chinese on the US. It's basically intentional in every way that matters.
    • jandrese 4y ago
      What's crazy is that the big government solution to this was to build a wall at the US-Mexico border.
      • misssocrates 4y ago
        What should they do?
        • jay_kyburz 4y ago
          I've been sitting here reading this whole thread wondering the same thing. I don't really know how I would go about it, but I think the only solution is to make people not want to turn to the drugs in the first place. Make poor people less poor? Make people feel better about their lives and prospects? I guess I would spend a heap of money working out what makes people turn to the drugs and try and help them solve those problems some other way.
          • nradov 4y ago
            Many young people are dying of accidental fentanyl poisoning because they get counterfeit sleeping pills or whatever from their friends. Sure we should absolutely reduce the factors that cause people to turn to drugs. But some people are always going to have insomnia. Some people are always going to want to alter their mental state. https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/ https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Are there any surprising demographic tilts to the populations fentanyl is hitting? (Particularly among the young.)
  • Avicebron 4y ago
    It's a huge problem here on the east coast especially in semi-rural areas (think like networks of small very poor towns and small cities). The general consensus I've gathered is that it's predominantly young white men, often very poor, who are struggling with adverse conditions in terms of gainful employment/education opportunities etc. As previously solid economies are crumbling around them.
    • misssocrates 4y ago
      That puts a rather large hole in one of the popular narratives.
      • Avicebron 4y ago
        which one? I'm not familiar with the other narratives
        • misssocrates 4y ago
          The one about them being an inherently privileged group of oppressors.
          • Avicebron 4y ago
            fentanyl addicts are oppressing people these days? I hadn't heard that..
      • retwertett 4y ago
        Really? That's the only narrative I've heard.
• superkuh 4y ago
  It's really remarkable how well the USA has done in drastically decreasing the total number of childhood deaths the last 50 years. It's depressing that the remaining statistical noise for a population of ~75 million kids can so dominate the news and public consciousness as if there were net increases in the per population rates.
  • yawnr 4y ago
    The statistical noise of opioid deaths is the depressing part?
  • macintux 4y ago
    I would have some vague sympathy for your argument were it not for the fact that death is far from the only negative consequence. Opioid addiction is a lifelong curse.
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    For anyone interested, here is how the US has done. Not great since 2000, pretty great before that. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infant-mortality-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infa...
    • superkuh 4y ago
      Infant mortality is pretty good too, yes. But I was using the entire 0-18 year old range of US citizens. And now that we're down to just a trickle of preventable childhood deaths the relative proportion of deaths to drug overdoses and firearms is higher but even those per capita numbers are significantly lower than the ~1960s.
• cduzz 4y ago
  Getting this [1] into the hands of all the kids out there seems like a good start. And of course getting the "yeah, just use it if you're even a little worried your friend can't breath anymore; it won't make things worse" "Don't take drugs" is a good start but reminding kids that they're playing in hardcore mode only goes so far -- even the good ones get unlucky or make bad decisions... [1] https://thehill.com/newsletters/health-care/3924952-fda-approves-over-the-counter-narcan-to-reverse-overdoses/ https://thehill.com/newsletters/health-care/3924952-fda-appr...
• keithalewis 4y ago
  [flagged]
• doomleika 4y ago
  Coming from SEA I always wondering why the west don't ban the drugs. Yes, illegal drug abuse is still an issue here, but it's nowhere close to major contributor of death and crime.
  • runnerup 4y ago
    We’ve tried. For 70+ years. Prohibition has caused more problems here than it’s solved…as it’s solved basically no problems. For a large variety of reasons, the Singapore model doesn’t work here. It doesn’t even work across all of SEA. The Philippines have banned drugs for a long time, but they still have 2-3 million people who regularly use illegal drugs. 4% of Thais have used illegal drugs in the past year, and both countries have very strict laws about drug trafficking.
    • anon291 4y ago
      We have not tried in the way southeast Asia does. Agree or disagree, drug laws in the west have never been as strict as southeast Asia. In Singapore, drugs are an immediate trip to the gallows. We've never had that here.
      • runnerup 4y ago
        Phillipines has experimented with allowing anyone to murder anyone else they suspect of using drugs. That hasn’t significantly decreased the rate of illegal drug use in the country. This is despite making payments to people to summarily execute drug addicts. Thousands have been executed across the Phillipines. Drug use still about the same. The “SEA Solution” isn’t even a universal solution across SEA! I mean FFS we found out we were completely wrong about the prohibition on marijuana here in the USA. and Alcohol. What’s next? MDMA?
        • anon291 4y ago
          Vigilantism is not the rule of law no matter whether it's government sanctioned or not.
    • 4y ago
• mbgerring 4y ago
  I would really like to hear from the kids about why this is happening. Any explanation from anyone other than them is just conjecture. We won’t understand this until they start speaking for themselves.
  • DoreenMichele 4y ago
    While not a bad impetus, young people tend to be talented at identifying the proximate cause but may not have any idea what the root cause is. It can take time to get the full picture, even for people directly involved.
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    My sense is that the use of drugs by teens occurs mainly due to: - ease of availability - teens being too trusting of other teens - teens having too much time on their hands and not enough vision of the long term Parents have a lot to do with this, naturally, but of course some of these teens have only one parent, and others have two working parents, and there's only so many hours in the day.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      - teens are immature and ignorant
  • csours 4y ago
    Well drugs feel really fucking good, and living as a teenager these days does not.
• matthew9219 4y ago
  The article places a lot of blame on the state of Texas: > Directing blame at Mexico is also a way to avoid looking at how Texas fails children. But also includes anecdotes like: > When Noah awoke from his coma, he was tearful and apologetic. He thought only a few hours had passed; it had been four days. Janel and her husband called treatment centers, but none would take Noah without his consent, and he insisted that he didn’t have a problem. Even so, Janel was hopeful; that summer was one of the best they’d had as a family. Noah was dating a sweet girl, and when he wasn’t with her he seemed happy enough to hang around the house doing TikTok cooking challenges. Then, the first week of school, sixteen days after Janel gave birth to another son, Noah overdosed at his girlfriend’s house. It seems to me that if a child overdoses, but refuses to accept their parents demand to seek treatment, they should be denied privileges - forbidden from spending time with unapproved friends, denied a cell phone, denied allowance, etc. This case (and a few others) seem to be clear cut cases where a parent could have forced compliance, but choose not to - I can't imagine any kid choosing no friends and no cell phone to avoid going to one hour per week of narcotics anonymous.
  • dopamean 4y ago
    You really think "you're grounded" would have helped in this situation?
  • throwmeouthn 4y ago
    In my experience, you cannot force or punish someone out of problematic substance abuse. If it was that easy, we'd already have the solution. These kids are engaging in this behavior for one reason or another and the solution isn't to make them feel worse about it than they already do.
    • matthew9219 4y ago
      I was required to attend alcoholics anonymous for three months to continue in university after passing out from intoxication on the quad. Hearing those stories led me to stop experimenting with new drugs and reduce my drinking - I didn't want to become those people. I don't know that such cautionary tales would necessarily have helped this child, but they might have. Let's not forget that attending substance abuse classes is the recommend medical treatment for substance abuse, a medical problem. Doctors wouldn't recommend it if it didn't work sometimes. Imagine if the story was about a broken leg instead of substance abuse and the child similarly said they didn't feel like anything was wrong with their leg, and so it similarly went untreated.
• throwmeouthn 4y ago
  I happen to live in Kyle and also have the experience of attending rehab twice (2016 and 2019). I was never into pills, although I would gladly take them if they were being offered by a friend at a party, or there was a prescription lying around the house. Thankfully I got my shit together and don't engage in that type of destructive behavior anymore. Some of the comments and replies posted in this thread seem quite out of touch with reality though... I spoke to a few folks I attended rehab / lived in a halfway house with, and those who had been using fentanyl said that nothing compared - subs, heroin, morphine, you name it. The first time I went to rehab, the majority of people there were there for pain pills and heroin. The second time around, almost all the opiate users were using or had at least tried fentanyl. The problem with subs and methadone, is that it gets into your bones and both substances are addictive in themselves. Trading one addiction for another, even if less harmful, never works out well. Drugs being illegal isn't the problem here - I used to think that if the US followed in the steps of Portugal, the country would be much better off - we're talking school age kids here though. They're not thinking about legal consequences nor are they going to seek out help. They're going to try something out of boredom, some sort of mental state or because their friends are doing it, and with fentanyl many are going to end up dead. It's easy to understand why kids are becoming increasingly despondent and increasingly turning to drugs for an escape. They don't have a chance to grow up before the weighty issues of the world are thrust upon their shoulders. Between social media, the news cycle, and the education system in our country - they're being done no favors. When they can't handle the load anymore, they often have no one to turn to as their parents are busy working to sustain a family. It's going to require a reckoning (for all of humanity) of what is truly valuable in life - chasing a dollar or being present. Reading the headlines, seeing the billboards, hearing the stories on the radio while driving is all pretty surreal. I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is, other than making sure one's children know that they are loved and being the best parent one can. I know for me, fear is what caused me to use and that fear manifested itself in many forms - mostly a dissatisfaction with reality. I pretty much had to reshape my entire perspective regarding my existence and reason for being, before I found a way to move past my substance abuse issues. I'm not sure how you help a child realize there's more to life than what can be perceived with our five senses, and that every life is worth infinitely more than a pill or a fun time, but I suppose I get to figure this out with my own son. I hope that we can all show one another a little more love in this world, and that we can also stop being sold on so much fear.
• rayiner 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • chasd00 4y ago
    In the 90s high schoolers were dying every weekend in Plano TX when heroin rolled through. MTV even made a show about it. High schools have thousands of students, three overdoses in a year doesn’t seem that high to me. (As depressing as that is)
    • akiselev 4y ago
      I think it’s very region and socioeconomic class dependent. During my four years in the late aughts, at a high school of 1,500 in a wealthy LA suburb, we had one person drown in a bathtub after a seizure, one fell to his death climbing a waterfall, and one died from cardiac arrest playing tennis in the heat of summer. We didn’t have a single fatal overdose despite a significant amount of drug abuse, both illicit and prescription (mountains of amphetamines and benzos especially). A student overdosing at school would have been nothing short of shocking and would have brought down the entire town on the school
      • horns4lyfe 4y ago
        Well sure, but now fentanyl is everywhere. The game has changed entirely.
      • kubectl_h 4y ago
        Plano was (and still is AFAIK) a wealthy suburb of Dallas at the time it became famous for heroin. That was part of the national narrative about it, in fact.
  • kibwen 4y ago
    > You have to fight the drug war to win. Is it perhaps possible that you were placed into a medically-induced coma in 1971? If so, then congratulations on awakening here in 2023, a lot has changed. However, I regret to inform you that the US has been furiously fighting a war on drugs for 50 years, and the result so far has been unequivocal, ignominious defeat for the US.
• fzeroracer 4y ago
  The problem to me at least seems obvious; Politicians (and especially a certain side) have been using children as political fodder and a lot of these problems have started coming to roost. Kids are given less hope for their careers and futures. They have to deal with constant training fearing that one of their classmates could pick up a gun and kill their friends or teachers. Parents (and especially the more toxic kind) encroach more on schools, handcuffing them from providing aid, taking away books, telling them exactly how to behave even when such behavior causes no problems. Schools get less funding for teachers and support staff so when kids have issues or need help they struggle to do so. Then there's the increasing squeeze that lower and middle class parents see where even if they are supportive and love their kids, their daily lives get a little bit worse every day. It shouldn't be a surprise that they're anxious messes. But fixing it requires recognizing that America is broken.
• nine_zeros 4y ago
  For so many years, I always wanted to have a kid. But life had its own plans. Now, I am glad I don't have a kid. This world is ruthless - and I speak with the sword of layoffs hanging on my neck because that's how the system is designed.
  • throwmeouthn 4y ago
    The world has always been ruthless and humanity has somehow persevered.
    • phendrenad2 4y ago
      People have persevered in the most abject conditions, it doesn't mean it's a noble thing to make more people go through it.
• zeeshanmh215 4y ago
  Everything about US makes me so mental. Seems like a terrible place to live in. I wish I could go back to before I saw this.
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    I hate to burst your bubble but what do you think goes on in Karachi Lahore and Peshawar.
  • txsoftwaredev 4y ago
    If what you feel is true then explain why 50% of the world moves the US each year.
• di456 4y ago
  The only thing that's going to solve this is safe and regulated access to clean drugs. Cut the black market dealers out of the market, and dump all the profits into harm reduction and addiction prevention and treatment resources. The "tranq" additive that's becoming endemic in streets drugs doesn't respond to narcan either. It's only going to get worse. Wait till carfentanil gets into the supply.
  • rnk 4y ago
    This is what I support too. If you could buy safe, laboratory made & tested cocaine or whatever in the drug store, the overdoses would basically end. We'd still have to deal with people who want to just shoot up in the back of busses in big cities. But we already have that problem. We have a problem with drunk drivers, but we already learned that prohibition didn't work. We'd have to sell it cheaply enough that the black market wouldn't under cut it. And I can't see this every passing in america. Maybe if every congressman in america had a kid who almost overdosed?
  • seandoe 4y ago
    This is the best and quickest solution. It's not without its own problems but they pale in comparison to the situation we currently have. Too bad more people don't know how or don't have access to darknet markets. They are a panacea for drug safety problems.
    • di456 4y ago
      Maybe this is the way. Spread knowledge of how to safely order from dark net markets and receive the orders, and saturate high drug use areas with quality and purity testing labs. The average street drug user won't have capacity to learn how to order from darknet markets and may not have an address to receive it either. Wealthy, tech literate demographics get their drug of choice safely while the poor or the youth getting drugs from "friends" or dealers keep filling body bags.
• di456 4y ago
  Best book on addiction, period https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/ https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/
• ROTMetro 4y ago
  The stories the cartel guys told in federal prison about what they made people do to get their supply still makes my skin crawl. If you support keeping drugs illegal you support teenagers (that society has decided aren't responsible enough to buy alcohol) being subjected to the worst things cartel guys can up with to be 'entertained'. Period. If you want to keep this garbage illegal you support and are OK with a level of abuse that you can not shake once you hear about it.
• tayo42 4y ago
  > “Illicit drugs are flowing into the country at an alarming rate because of Biden’s open border,” the Republican National Committee tweeted, in February. Texas Governor Greg Abbott cited the rise in youth fentanyl deaths as a justification for building a state-funded border wall. lol politicized everything. clueless people making statements, nothing good will ever happen. what can you do but laugh at this point to cope?
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    It's not politicization if it's true.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      It can’t be false because it contains no facts.
      • xikoxip960 4y ago
        [flagged]
• hoseja 4y ago
  Opium Wars payback.
• rusk 4y ago
  The real reason there’s such a public outcry about Fentanyl, I’m willing to bet, is that it’s not American corporations making money off it. Nowhere else in the world that I can see is having a problem with it, and there was nowhere near the same level of concern about oxy EDIT I read about Fentanyl nowhere other than US media, and it is made in china, and as I say nobody made so much as a peep when perdue were taking in billions
• nibbleshifter 4y ago
  When fentanyl properly "arrives" here (Ireland) its going to be a fucking bloodbath, and our government will wring their hands and go "there's nothing we could have done". I mean, it (fentanyl) exists here, but is relatively rare for now. We have large numbers of opiate users, most of whom are not the "homeless drug addicts" you would expect (though we have fucking loads of those). We also have a massive number of people hooked on benzos and similar drugs, which here are almost all "legit contents, but dodgily branded generics from Asia". Again, the vast majority of these addicts you wouldn't notice/know about. From the data I've seen, in the US and Canada, both opiates and benzos are supplanted by fentanyl - fake benzos that are actually fentanyl, fent sold as oxys, sold as heroin, etc The quality of heroin here tends to be pretty low, so whenever a stronger batch arrives there's often a number of deaths or near fatal overdoses. Once fentanyl starts showing up in any significant amounts, there's probably going to be a fucking massive spike in overdoses. The opiate problem here is only getting worse too, the governments been sitting on its hands and various plans to try deal with it besides just arresting people have languished in committees/planning for as long as I can remember. Pretty much daily when out walking in a residential area I come across discarded syringes, the frequency of which increases the closer you get to the city center. I regularly see users nodding off or shooting up in public, and that's just the visible ones. Seen a fair few OD's too, called ambo for a couple. Narcan and similar aren't really accessible here - our health service has made a lot of noise about an access program, but the iron grip of the regulator won't simply make it OTC for private persons to purchase without paperwork. Supervised injection rooms and such have also stalled out entirely due to nobody wanting one near them. Which is a bit daft. If you walk around central Dublin, Temple Bar, etc, you will see dozens of people openly using "hard" drugs on the street. That is where the addicts are. So building a facility there makes sense, right? The local businessmen disagree, due to magical thinking that if its built somewhere else, the addicts will move. They won't. I'm almost glad that the worst we have to contend with (for now) is the crack epidemic finally hitting our shores.
• fredgrott 4y ago
  I wonder how much of that is ADHD based as we have 7 variants of ADHD among 3 neurotransmitter groups; Dopamine, Serotonin, and GABA which would imply its not recessive 7 percent alone for dopamine but closer to 21 percent of population. My bias, I have type 2 ADHD.
• itsagavin 4y ago
  I'm late to this discussion and don't expect anyone to read my comment. If America is so great why aren't we able to find the labs producing fentanyl and bomb them back to rare earth mineral. No empire in the past would of accepted such an attack and that's what it is. If it was a 50/50 if vodka killed you we would murder and imprison until it wasn't.
  • wil421 4y ago
    China is creating all of it and doing Opium wars 2.0 on the US. All the fentanyl precursors are sent from China to Mexico and Chinese Chemist train cartel goons to make fent and press pills. The place to bomb would be Mexican border states and I’m not sure anyone wants about Iraq 2.0 in our back yard. An ex Mexican police/reporter I saw on podcast claimed the US military was the only one who could stop it. https://youtu.be/GHxM8cX_OdA https://youtu.be/GHxM8cX_OdA Fentanyl lab: https://youtu.be/jZFjV9BRyNw https://youtu.be/jZFjV9BRyNw The labs are smaller now and operate very lean so if one gets busted they have 5 others.
    • itsagavin 4y ago
      Yes its messy but we are fully capable of cursing any bloodline that produces poison for consumption for the next 100 years and we should. Red or Blue we should all be together on this. Drugs are a tough issue but fentanyl and the grift that involves murder of the most vulnerable is disgusting.
      • giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Trying to bomb your problems away is why some of us are neither red nor blue. The human cost of a literal war would be so so high, and mostly incurred on bystanders and children who have nothing to do with this. We have no right to inflict that horror, even to stop our own catastrophe, which it's debatable it would even do.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    "We're going to solve the problem of people dying by killing a lot more people" is such a morally bankrupt idea, as well as not working. > If it was a 50/50 if vodka killed you we would murder and imprison until it wasn't. I urge you to look at what actually happened in the US prohibition era.
• amrb 4y ago
  No one cares are drug users.. till they break into your house or car for valuables. This sort of issue is a community problem but the West is so geared to the individual I don't see this being solved.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    Drug users are people's children first. Parents suffer the most.
• datkam 4y ago
  What is the most effective method to teach children that drugs are bad?
• chasd00 4y ago
  i wish there was a way to disable the effects of opioids on the brain. Then you could give an addict a shot and their drugs become worthless to them. Like a vaccine for the chemical reaction of opioids or something.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    You are basically proposing lobotomy, which was tried.
• dash2 4y ago
  I see a lot of posters confidently saying that the solution is obvious and it's [insert their favourite social panacea here]. The level of confidence does not seem related to the amount of evidence presented. Examples include: more equality; more opportunity; less democracy; reducing gun accidents; less stress; and less teenage parenthood. Many of these problems have been around for a long time. For example, the US has long been unequal and long been a democracy. Teenage parenthood has actually been falling. The fentanyl epidemic is relatively recent. You cannot explain a change by a constant. I would support more intellectual humility and attention to the evidence in thinking about this terrible problem.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    A simpler explanation is there's just a LOT more fentanyl on the streets now then there use to be. And then, it's very potent and easy for users to overdose. It's easy to make the jump from those two factors to a rapid increase in fentanyl addiction and deaths. If you remove one of those two factors then you reduce the increase in addiction and death. So either reduce the amount of fentanyl on the streets or reduce the risk of overdose. I think Narcan being made OTC recently is an attempt at reducing the risk of overdose ending in death at least.
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Narcan only works if there's someone else who can administer it. And that someone else should be sober enough to do it.
      • antihero 4y ago
        I’m in the U.K. and how do you even get this? I’d happily keep it on me but there’s not much info Edit: oh it’s illegal unless you’re in a very specific position that will likely not save anyone unless it’s very lucky thanks U.K. government. Dickheads.
        • mrguyorama 4y ago
          There are lots of people who believe someone ODing on fentanyl deserves to die.
• enono 4y ago
  Spicy thread
• fisherjeff 4y ago
  Wait, fentanyl testing strips are illegal in Texas? What?
• natpalmer1776 4y ago
  This is one of those cases where I think we should treat the symptom (first) rather than the problem. Teach them basic pharmacology, dosage calculations, and give access to free test kits to know how strong the stuff they're about take is. This doesn't solve any societal problems at a grander scale, it doesn't improve the mental health of teenagers, and it won't eliminate overdose deaths entirely... But it will save the lives of some children who haven't had a chance to really live their life in the first place. It will give them time to look for help they didn't know they needed.
  • jamal-kumar 4y ago
    this is fucking fentanyl how are you going to get children to measure micrograms
    • natpalmer1776 4y ago
      It’s usually going to be diluted in something if my spouse’s experience with this subject still holds true. From there you’re measuring concentration, which opens a host of options from community labs to minimal test kits.
      • jamal-kumar 4y ago
        yes children measuring the concentration of something that can kill if you breathe around it wrong i think you're on to something
• kayge 4y ago
  If you are a drug user, a parent, someone who works with kids, or maybe just want to be a hero someday: you can and should keep a box of Narcan in your house. You can even receive it for free at some pharmacies (just ask), or by filling out this form: https://redcap.uthscsa.edu/REDCap/surveys/?s=8NDKCYKXJW https://redcap.uthscsa.edu/REDCap/surveys/?s=8NDKCYKXJW . Also there is a link at the bottom of that page for a site full of resources so you can learn how to administer it, recognize signs of overdose, etc. I know this isn't the solution to the overall problem, but it is one way to make a difference.
• txsoftwaredev 4y ago
  We have an open border that allows anyone and anything to be imported in to the US. TX bears the brunt of it due to its proximity.