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Fentanyl Is Killing American Kids. Most Don't Even Know They're Taking It
- lenerdenator 3y agoIn 20 years we went from drinking and smoking weed being the worst things a teen could do, to those being the drugs you would hope your teenagers are doing if they're doing drugs while you're not around.
- tokai 3y agoAre you serious. No other drugs than drinking and weed was consumed by youngsters in 2004? That's a ridiculous statement.
- lenerdenator 3y agoIn my beige suburban Midwestern world, that was what kids did. shrug I'm sure that some did harder stuff but that was the majority of it.
- tokai 3y agoYou would properly have the same sentiment if you were young now. Turns out you can't rely on your own personal experience when gauging a population wide phenomenon. Especially when one is an outlier.
- sigmonsays 3y agoi'm sorry, i'm from michigan, and that is not all we did. LOL
- silverquiet 3y agoI mean, we call them the hard drugs which implies that there are soft drugs. The thing is that fentanyl is sort of in a class by itself. I don't know the specifics, but isn't a lethal dose on the order of a couple milligrams? An amount that you could not perceive if you picked it up.
- lukan 3y agoI get the sentiment that it has gotten worse, but already 20 years ago(and earlier) the list of avaiable drugs to determined teenagers was a bit longer. If all fails, there are some hellish drugs right in the bushes. I didn't, but mates tried some. But they knew, the were doing something stupid (supposed to be cool, but they did not enjoy it). The danger with fentanyl is, that it can be even put on weed in small drops, to make garbage weed seemingly strong. That is messed up and dangerous.
- ilovetux 3y agoI am not sure where you are, but opiates (morphine, heroine), benzos (valium, xanax), stimulants (Aderall, cocaine), hallucinogens (mushrooms, acid, mescaline) and more have been available for a very long time and teen substance abuse can be very experimental partially because of limited availability. It can be hard to get their drug of choice so they try something new.
- lesuorac 3y agoI mean the war on drugs is from 1971 [1]; the US signed a drug treaty in 1961 [2]. I think kids have been doing opioids for far longer than 20 years. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...
- davidmurdoch 3y ago[flagged]
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- tekla 3y agoI was not aware that we were fielding 155mm howitzers on the border.
- dgb23 3y agoIt seems more like a self-made, systemic problem.
- zmgsabst 3y agoWhat part would you describe as “self-made, systemic”? The Mexican cartels? …Chinese labs providing them with fentanyl precursors? Edit to reply: That was shut down by the FDA when one of the dead children was still a toddler. You’re talking about a problem over a decade old, while ignoring the actual problem, because far from “pointing the finger in the right direction”, you’re distracting from it with your historical grievance. Edit 2: If the point is that unlike China, the US doesn’t execute drug traffickers, okay. I agree — it’s a systemic failure of the US we don’t execute people smuggling fentanyl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa170162011en.pdf https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa170... Edit 3: Again, the crackdown started during Obama. > Like many Americans with chronic, disabling pain, Fowlkes felt angry and betrayed as state and federal regulators, starting in the Obama years and intensifying under President Donald Trump, cracked down on opioid prescribing to reduce the toll of overdose deaths. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/28/how-the-opioid-crackdown-is-backfiring-752183 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/28/how-the-opioid-cra... We also invested at the federal level, exactly as you’re suggesting: > While Trump has stressed a law enforcement approach — including broader use of the death penalty for traffickers — his administration has also invested billions in prevention, treatment and research, and last week authorized a respected science group to develop better guidelines for doctors about how to safely treat patients with severe pain. Claiming that I don’t understand systems or am “myopic and ignorant” when you’re wrong about basic facts is about what I expect in these discussions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kylecazar 3y agoSurely the fentanyl test strips are useful if you have a bunch of a powder, and that powder should not contain ANY fentanyl. Maybe not as much in the pill scenario, but anyway -- some of these kids are 13. That's one of the real problems (beyond the systemic one).
- MrDresden 3y agoAs is mentioned in the article, the test strips only help if the quantity being tested has Fentanyl. Powder might increase the likelihood of having some hit the strip, but it is still a long way off being reliable.
- jeffbee 3y agoWhat a messed up world. How much of this can be solved by flooding the market with 10-cent Vicodin? Why didn't the kid with the tooth removed have a prescription for something safe? Also when did Percocet of all things become a party pill? Narcotics aren't fun as such, at least as I understand the phenomenon of "fun".
- mmcconnell1618 3y agoThe backlash to the Oxy abuse in the US has caused doctors to swing to the other direction where they don't want to prescribe stronger pain killers or narcotics to anyone for fear of being labeled as a drug dealer. The consequences are that many people turn to other markets where fake pills laced with fentanyl are lurking. I have several friends with real chronic pain issues and they are treated like drug seekers by their physicians and have to "justify" every single pill request like they are children. I can totally see why even adults would seek alternative options.
- MyFirstSass 3y agoThe US has become a frightening country in many ways to a travelling EU citizen. I like to stroll around cities aimlessly but have met so many drug addicted, homeless and mentally unwell people just walking around like zombies with apparently no help it's almost unbelievable in the last years. Last time i visited NY it had become so bad it honestly killed all joy - there were wandering rambling half naked people everywhere. I've never seen anything like it in the EU despite poverty in the East. I also tried taking the subway just a little bit out of the rich downtown areas and wow, abject poverty, dirt in the streets, open drug use just a few kilometers from the centre with no end in sight. After watching various documentaries about the Sackler family and the medical industry in general i've come to one conclusion, it's entirely the fault of your own deregulated oligarch controlled system and not "the brown, yellow or russian people on the other side of earth that are doing the bad things yet again". You have a wonderful country and so many great people so it really saddens me it's become so dystopian, so unequal and with so apparently little safety net for the very vulnerable.
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- reducesuffering 3y agoAre you implying it’s mostly Democrat areas? Have you seen a fentanyl death map before? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor... Top fentanyl deaths are in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana…
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIn addition, painting the Democrats as the party "who fought civil rights" is just nonsense. Can't reply to the GP because it's dead, but this particular bit of baloney seemed to me to be worth calling out.
- junaru 3y ago
- tmaly 3y agoHonestly, they need to take the route that you see in big bold letters on the immigration documents you have to fill out prior to entering the Philippines. Drug trafficking is punishable by death. Think of all the people dying from fentanyl.
- theGnuMe 3y agoI think we need drug education classes like we have for sex education. I know parents will fight it but we need to teach kids how to administer naloxone and if they are going to take pills, make sure they tell someone who is someone nearby who can help administer it. That and we need labeled pill packs w/ secure traceable verification codes. If fentanyl is coming in as fake adderall we need kids who have legitimate prescriptions to know that what they get is real. The other thing would be the technology with blood ox sensors to alert first responders. This might be hard to get right false positives but could help.
- everforward 3y agoThere is no problem with legit prescriptions as far as I've heard; nobody's getting fentanyl instead of Adderall from a pharmacist. It's still a problem, but your prescriptions are safe. > The other thing would be the technology with blood ox sensors to alert first responders. This might be hard to get right false positives but could help. This feels like a hard sell. They're going to need GPS so you can find the person, and perma-tracking teens and adults is generally unpopular. In a practical note, I'm also not sure whether someone's O2 SAT dropping is an early enough warning for first responders. It might be, but if someone's O2 SAT drops then they're already having trouble breathing, and EMS still needs to get a truck out there, find their body and administer Narcan before their O2 drops too low.
- SilverBirch 3y ago>his family are waiting on the results of a toxicology report. I'm finding this hard to process. What this journalist appears to be saying is that he's about to write an article about the dangers of fentanyl laced drugs. And the way he's going to do that is by telling us about a recent death that by his own admission is yet to have anything to do with fentanyl? >He was poisoned. That's a hell of a sentence to put in it's own paragraph when the conditional it's predicated on is burried in the previous paragraph. It just seems such a poor way of writing about presumably is actually a real issue. It's such a frustrating article, it tells a story of a girl who was meant to be taking adderall, but died of a fentanyl overdose. I wish they actually explored that - why would someone take fentanyl in the place of adderall? >As part of the organization I launched last year, Not Even Once Oh right. It's not a journalist at all. This isn't reporting, it's an activist pushing an agenda with dodgy misleading facts. It's pretty egregious this site hasn't made it clear this is just an opinion piece from a campaigner.
- wakawaka28 3y agoPerhaps you're right that he should have reported on a story where the actual facts are established, but he did put in the appropriate disclaimers. >Oh right. It's not a journalist at all. This isn't reporting, it's an activist pushing an agenda with dodgy misleading facts. The "journalists" in the media do worse than this all the time. An activist going after a common issue that everyone knows is a problem gets a bit hysterical or dramatic to reel people in, perish the thought!
- antisthenes 3y agoDon't give someone a free pass just because there are people somewhere getting away with worse. If you see bullshit, call it out.
- SilverBirch 3y agoI'm so tired of this. No, it's not an excuse to say "It's fine this guy is writing misleading politically motivated drivel, other people do it too!". Firstly I don't care what other people do, and secondly go take a look at that website's about page - > The Free Press is a new media company founded by Bari Weiss and built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence. This rag isn't just publishing activist nonsense as investigative journalism, it's doing so whilst actively trying to sell itself as adhering to higher standards than everyone else. Slipping in that you're a motivated activist 90% of the way into the article is dodgy as hell, and it goes a long way to explaining some of the extremely weird logic early in the article. Test strips for Fentanyl are apparently bad? Well if you want to focus on solutions to the actual problem, you've missed the point - they're bad because they are a practical alternative to the reheated 1980s "Just Say No" movement the author is trying to push. This article would've been fine as an opinion peice but pretending it's real journalism is just disingenuous and actively makes me question even the basic facts of the article.
- readthenotes1 3y ago"He was poisoned." Should say "He poisoned himself." People have been overdosing on drugs for the entirety of written human history and probably before.
- uslic001 3y agoToo bad the Blob, drug cartels, and China have neutralized any type of response by our government.