7 ms·

When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? Fentanyl's rise is 100% attributable to smuggling in drugs due to the War on Drugs. I

When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? Fentanyl's rise is 100% attributable to smuggling in drugs due to the War on Drugs. It allows the smugglers to move the maximum potency with the minimum risk and minimum quantity. Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate. Legalizing opiates, providing safe and clean areas for people to use, and using those safe and clean areas to get people help to quit, help finding a place to live, help getting food to eat, and help reintegrating into society will go much, much further than continued prohibition.

Clubber 2y ago
I never heard of fentanyl until the government did their crackdown on pills in the 2010s. Regular doctors (not pill mills) were terrified of getting arrested for prescribing them legitimately. When the they started the crackdown, I predicted heroin use would start to spike again, and as we all know, heroin doesn't have the dosage written on the side of a bottle. We've been doing the same shit for 50+ years, and the results are always the same: more drug use of ever harder drugs, more deaths, more destitution, more prison, more homelessness. We should try something else, but when all you have is a hammer ...
- bermuda4you 2y ago
  How do you explain the failed drug decriminalization in Oregon?
  - bsder 2y ago
    No funding ever materialized for the support and treatment programs that were supposed to be part and parcel of the decriminalization. You can't solely decriminalize drugs, throw everybody to the wolves and expect a good outcome.
    - bermuda4you 2y ago
      Oregon already has a large number of safe injection sites, support groups, rehabs, soup kitchens, etc. Like the failed homelessness industrial complex - it's never enough, we just need to spend a few more billions, and then just a few more.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    What was your personal experience with decriminalization in Oregon?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bermuda4you 2y ago
      I have no personal experience with decriminalization in Oregon. What's your point?
      - jrflowers 2y ago
        This is a good point. Firsthand experience and secondhand opinion are interchangeable so why would anyone ask a question like that
        bermuda4you 2y ago
        Totally agree with you - great point! HN is known as the hub for drug addicted homeless people from Portland, OR. I should probably find a different forum since I don't share this experience first hand.
  - pfisch 2y ago
    Because they actually have a homeless problem and it was conflated with drugs. They are unwilling to run homeless people out of their cities. San Francisco has the same issues but drugs aren't legal there.
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      Run them out... where? Into the woods? Into other cities? This whole "just make homeless people go somewhere else" mindset is part of why things are screwed on the national level. It just results in money being set on fire to bus people around in giant circles.
      - pfisch 2y ago
        To a place with cheaper cost of living. There shouldn't be any homeless people in California. It doesn't make economic sense. They will never be able to get back on their feet again. Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net and draining it ruins any city's ability to have a good social safety net. It punishes and ruins the cities that try to lead with compassion.
        crooked-v 2y ago
        > It doesn't make economic sense. The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap. > Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the Dust Bowl.
        pfisch 2y ago
        >Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the Dust Bowl. This is not a realistic goal, and it would still result in homeless people gathering in cities. >The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap. There is an entire southern half of the country where that won't happen.
  - pfisch 2y ago
    Also decriminalization doesn't solve the fentanyl problem. That would require regulating drugs and selling them legally.
  - Clubber 2y ago
    >How do you explain the failed drug decriminalization in Oregon? Oh it will take a generation. Most people who are currently heavily addicted to fentanyl, meth, crack or even alcohol are lost causes. I think 10% of current addicts getting into recovery is extremely optimistic. The objective is to reduce addiction in future generations. At our current trajectory, the next generation will be more addicted than the current. The last 10 years after the crackdown have been an utter disaster with drug deaths doubling in that time and opioid deaths quadrupling. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
bermuda4you 2y ago
Legalization of hard drugs doesn't work long term. If you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. Why is this utopian view so persistent?
- notfed 2y ago
  > you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. So?
  - bermuda4you 2y ago
    Ah, the "progressive" argument. Let people rot to death, it's the compassionate way.
    - com2kid 2y ago
      It is also the libertarian argument: The government shouldn't tell people what to do with their own body. Then again, ideally the government would be hard at working making society nice enough to live in that people don't turn to opiates...
      - bermuda4you 2y ago
        Letting people have full agency in their choices - sure. But not the big government part.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        The government is concerned with outsourcing manufacturing to make widgets cost less.
    - heavyset_go 2y ago
      There are millions of people on opioids like Suboxone, Tramadol, hydrocodone, etc that aren't "rotting to death". Opioids, in general, don't have many deleterious effects on the body the way that things like alcohol, cigarettes or amphetamines do.
bsder 2y ago
> When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? That's not enough. You have to legalize everything with restrictions like cigarettes and alcohol. The problem is that fentanyl is so powerful that it contaminates everything. Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. The only way to avoid that it to clean up the manufacturing. And the only way to do that is to force it to be made in actual medical manufacturing facilities.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  > Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). > You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. Nobody is dying from fentanyl laced marijuana. However, people are dying due to buying and eating pills that contain fentanyl when they think they’re buying xanax or oxycontin. None of the fentanyl is accidentally in these pills. The manufacturer knows about the fentanyl, but the customer might not be aware. People have died from doing cocaine that had allegedly unknown fentanyl in it, as this news story details the deaths of three people who claimed to have done cocaine with unknown fentanyl in it: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-05/three-dead-of-overdose-early-saturday-morning https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-05/three-de...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    The 4D chess game there is cartel B is undercutting cartel A. Cartel A gets wind of this and gets pissed. they get some of their guys to put fentanyl in their bricks, but instead of marketing it as coming from cartel A, they mark it with the cartel B stamp. voila, fentanyl-laced cocaine
  - bsder 2y ago
    https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2024/05/09/largest-fentanyl-spike-in-decade-puts-austin-on-high-alert https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2024/05/09/larg... > “The thing that makes this surge so different than others is most of these people weren’t trying to take opioids,” Stedman said. “They were trying to use multiple different substances — crack cocaine, methamphetamine, K2.” They're not putting it in marijuana intentionally, as I understand it. It's simply so hard to keep from contaminating it that it is practically impossible to avoid the contamination.
yodsanklai 2y ago
> Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate. I don't really have an opinion on opiates legalization, but I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. It could be legal, but smugglers could still sell cheaper drug with higher potency. One may wonder why these people get addicted in the first place. It seems rather specific to the US.
- sharadov 2y ago
  People seeking illegal drugs ( Fentanyl ) stems from the fact that the government went after pill mills and illegal prescriptions, so people started seeking these elsewhere. I would rather people do Heroin than fentanyl which is 10X worse and a small dose can kill. The problem is that regular pills from the street like oxycodone are being laced with fentanyl. Someone seeking a cheap high, but with the laced pill can end up on the deathbed. At this point, I would rather legalize opiates than people killing themselves with these tainted pills.
- fragmede 2y ago
  having to manufacture something clandestinely costs more than manufacturing it with the full force of the industrial revolution. What dealer is going to compete with $5/gram of drugs that's actually pure and hasn't been stepped on?
- harry8 2y ago
  The argument runs like this. Legal, regulated opiate availability implies a known quality, purity and therefore dosage. Any drug user who prefers heroin takes uncut heroin in the precise amount they choose. They would not choose to take cut fentanyl where they can be precise about nothing, including the knowledge that it is fentanyl not something else they might prefer. The secondary argument is the reduction in crime committed to finance addiction. Burglary, mugging, prostitution all are said to expect to decline. The tertiary argument is the reduction in corruption of law enforcement enabled by the sugar bags of cash in the illegal drug trade, a trade that just got undercut by the government to the point where it is out of business. In addition the additional police resource made available by the collapse of the illegal drug trade and reduction in "drug use financing" crime is very useful in reducing other crime and corruption. Whether you believe it or not is up to you. If you have strong views either way it would pay to research results from countries where it has been tried while noting it's a hugely emotive issue so your bullshit detector has to be well tuned. Also keeping in mind any good idea can be ruined in implementation through incompetence, inexperience or malice. Also people do get very excited about ideas they think are fantastic but turn out not to be. Good luck.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
We did. The pharma industry prescribed them and got millions addicted, then they took the drugs away, so people turned to Fentanyl.
jmyeet 2y ago
> It allows the smugglers to move the maximum potency with the minimum risk and minimum quantity. Mostly true but there's another factor: fentanyl is synthetic. There's no dealing with opium poppy crops, farmers, processing of crops (in places like Mexico and Afghanistan), transportation and as a result it's cheap. > Legalizing opiates ... I agree that the legalizing these drugs is better than prohibition but, by itself, is an insufficient solution. As an aside, the US loves criminalizing things. Building prisons is jobs. Prisoners are slave labor. Felons count for the census but can't vote. Often you'll have private prisons thrown in there too. These are an abimination but still represent only a small minority of prisoners. The Louisiana State Prison, known colloquially as "Angola", is basically a cotton plantation with slave labor. People need access to their basic needs like housing, food and water. A lot of drug addiction comes out of homelessness as people self-medicate. A bunch of heroin addicts were originally on an opiate prescription. The American medical system compared to other countries hands out opiates like candy. People need access to mental health care, have security and have hope and dignity in their lives. All of these things are substantially cheaper than our carceral state but there's no profit in it and nobody wants to live near "homeless" people. At the core of this is the American belief in the myth of meritocracy because the other side of that coin is that homelessness, drug addiction and other awful circumstances are viewed as deserved or at least a personal moral failure. As such, such people almost deserve those outcomes. So my point is that legalization just barely scratches the surface.
- fragmede 2y ago
  War on Drugs I was a failure. Time to declare a War on Drugs II, fought with counseling, mental health resources, government assistance programs for food, housing, jobs, hope.
lenkite 2y ago
Isn't Pharmaceutical fentanyl already physician approvable ? Why would making an it a recreational drug reduce the number of deaths ? Or is your position that all drugs - including antibiotics should be freely available for recreational use without any physician advice ?

Clubber 2y ago

I never heard of fentanyl until the government did their crackdown on pills in the 2010s. Regular doctors (not pill mills) were terrified of getting arrested for prescribing them legitimately. When the they started the crackdown, I predicted heroin use would start to spike again, and as we all know, heroin doesn't have the dosage written on the side of a bottle. We've been doing the same shit for 50+ years, and the results are always the same: more drug use of ever harder drugs, more deaths, more destitution, more prison, more homelessness. We should try something else, but when all you have is a hammer ...

bermuda4you 2y ago
How do you explain the failed drug decriminalization in Oregon?
- bsder 2y ago
  No funding ever materialized for the support and treatment programs that were supposed to be part and parcel of the decriminalization. You can't solely decriminalize drugs, throw everybody to the wolves and expect a good outcome.
  - bermuda4you 2y ago
    Oregon already has a large number of safe injection sites, support groups, rehabs, soup kitchens, etc. Like the failed homelessness industrial complex - it's never enough, we just need to spend a few more billions, and then just a few more.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  What was your personal experience with decriminalization in Oregon?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bermuda4you 2y ago
    I have no personal experience with decriminalization in Oregon. What's your point?
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      This is a good point. Firsthand experience and secondhand opinion are interchangeable so why would anyone ask a question like that
      - bermuda4you 2y ago
        Totally agree with you - great point! HN is known as the hub for drug addicted homeless people from Portland, OR. I should probably find a different forum since I don't share this experience first hand.
- pfisch 2y ago
  Because they actually have a homeless problem and it was conflated with drugs. They are unwilling to run homeless people out of their cities. San Francisco has the same issues but drugs aren't legal there.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    Run them out... where? Into the woods? Into other cities? This whole "just make homeless people go somewhere else" mindset is part of why things are screwed on the national level. It just results in money being set on fire to bus people around in giant circles.
    - pfisch 2y ago
      To a place with cheaper cost of living. There shouldn't be any homeless people in California. It doesn't make economic sense. They will never be able to get back on their feet again. Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net and draining it ruins any city's ability to have a good social safety net. It punishes and ruins the cities that try to lead with compassion.
      - crooked-v 2y ago
        > It doesn't make economic sense. The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap. > Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the Dust Bowl.
        pfisch 2y ago
        >Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the Dust Bowl. This is not a realistic goal, and it would still result in homeless people gathering in cities. >The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap. There is an entire southern half of the country where that won't happen.
- pfisch 2y ago
  Also decriminalization doesn't solve the fentanyl problem. That would require regulating drugs and selling them legally.
- Clubber 2y ago
  >How do you explain the failed drug decriminalization in Oregon? Oh it will take a generation. Most people who are currently heavily addicted to fentanyl, meth, crack or even alcohol are lost causes. I think 10% of current addicts getting into recovery is extremely optimistic. The objective is to reduce addiction in future generations. At our current trajectory, the next generation will be more addicted than the current. The last 10 years after the crackdown have been an utter disaster with drug deaths doubling in that time and opioid deaths quadrupling. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

bermuda4you 2y ago

Legalization of hard drugs doesn't work long term. If you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. Why is this utopian view so persistent?

notfed 2y ago
> you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. So?
- bermuda4you 2y ago
  Ah, the "progressive" argument. Let people rot to death, it's the compassionate way.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    It is also the libertarian argument: The government shouldn't tell people what to do with their own body. Then again, ideally the government would be hard at working making society nice enough to live in that people don't turn to opiates...
    - bermuda4you 2y ago
      Letting people have full agency in their choices - sure. But not the big government part.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      The government is concerned with outsourcing manufacturing to make widgets cost less.
  - heavyset_go 2y ago
    There are millions of people on opioids like Suboxone, Tramadol, hydrocodone, etc that aren't "rotting to death". Opioids, in general, don't have many deleterious effects on the body the way that things like alcohol, cigarettes or amphetamines do.

bsder 2y ago

> When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? That's not enough. You have to legalize everything with restrictions like cigarettes and alcohol. The problem is that fentanyl is so powerful that it contaminates everything. Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. The only way to avoid that it to clean up the manufacturing. And the only way to do that is to force it to be made in actual medical manufacturing facilities.

quickthrowman 2y ago
> Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). > You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. Nobody is dying from fentanyl laced marijuana. However, people are dying due to buying and eating pills that contain fentanyl when they think they’re buying xanax or oxycontin. None of the fentanyl is accidentally in these pills. The manufacturer knows about the fentanyl, but the customer might not be aware. People have died from doing cocaine that had allegedly unknown fentanyl in it, as this news story details the deaths of three people who claimed to have done cocaine with unknown fentanyl in it: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-05/three-dead-of-overdose-early-saturday-morning https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-05/three-de...
- fragmede 2y ago
  The 4D chess game there is cartel B is undercutting cartel A. Cartel A gets wind of this and gets pissed. they get some of their guys to put fentanyl in their bricks, but instead of marketing it as coming from cartel A, they mark it with the cartel B stamp. voila, fentanyl-laced cocaine
- bsder 2y ago
  https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2024/05/09/largest-fentanyl-spike-in-decade-puts-austin-on-high-alert https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2024/05/09/larg... > “The thing that makes this surge so different than others is most of these people weren’t trying to take opioids,” Stedman said. “They were trying to use multiple different substances — crack cocaine, methamphetamine, K2.” They're not putting it in marijuana intentionally, as I understand it. It's simply so hard to keep from contaminating it that it is practically impossible to avoid the contamination.

yodsanklai 2y ago

> Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate. I don't really have an opinion on opiates legalization, but I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. It could be legal, but smugglers could still sell cheaper drug with higher potency. One may wonder why these people get addicted in the first place. It seems rather specific to the US.

sharadov 2y ago
People seeking illegal drugs ( Fentanyl ) stems from the fact that the government went after pill mills and illegal prescriptions, so people started seeking these elsewhere. I would rather people do Heroin than fentanyl which is 10X worse and a small dose can kill. The problem is that regular pills from the street like oxycodone are being laced with fentanyl. Someone seeking a cheap high, but with the laced pill can end up on the deathbed. At this point, I would rather legalize opiates than people killing themselves with these tainted pills.
fragmede 2y ago
having to manufacture something clandestinely costs more than manufacturing it with the full force of the industrial revolution. What dealer is going to compete with $5/gram of drugs that's actually pure and hasn't been stepped on?
harry8 2y ago
The argument runs like this. Legal, regulated opiate availability implies a known quality, purity and therefore dosage. Any drug user who prefers heroin takes uncut heroin in the precise amount they choose. They would not choose to take cut fentanyl where they can be precise about nothing, including the knowledge that it is fentanyl not something else they might prefer. The secondary argument is the reduction in crime committed to finance addiction. Burglary, mugging, prostitution all are said to expect to decline. The tertiary argument is the reduction in corruption of law enforcement enabled by the sugar bags of cash in the illegal drug trade, a trade that just got undercut by the government to the point where it is out of business. In addition the additional police resource made available by the collapse of the illegal drug trade and reduction in "drug use financing" crime is very useful in reducing other crime and corruption. Whether you believe it or not is up to you. If you have strong views either way it would pay to research results from countries where it has been tried while noting it's a hugely emotive issue so your bullshit detector has to be well tuned. Also keeping in mind any good idea can be ruined in implementation through incompetence, inexperience or malice. Also people do get very excited about ideas they think are fantastic but turn out not to be. Good luck.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

We did. The pharma industry prescribed them and got millions addicted, then they took the drugs away, so people turned to Fentanyl.

jmyeet 2y ago

> It allows the smugglers to move the maximum potency with the minimum risk and minimum quantity. Mostly true but there's another factor: fentanyl is synthetic. There's no dealing with opium poppy crops, farmers, processing of crops (in places like Mexico and Afghanistan), transportation and as a result it's cheap. > Legalizing opiates ... I agree that the legalizing these drugs is better than prohibition but, by itself, is an insufficient solution. As an aside, the US loves criminalizing things. Building prisons is jobs. Prisoners are slave labor. Felons count for the census but can't vote. Often you'll have private prisons thrown in there too. These are an abimination but still represent only a small minority of prisoners. The Louisiana State Prison, known colloquially as "Angola", is basically a cotton plantation with slave labor. People need access to their basic needs like housing, food and water. A lot of drug addiction comes out of homelessness as people self-medicate. A bunch of heroin addicts were originally on an opiate prescription. The American medical system compared to other countries hands out opiates like candy. People need access to mental health care, have security and have hope and dignity in their lives. All of these things are substantially cheaper than our carceral state but there's no profit in it and nobody wants to live near "homeless" people. At the core of this is the American belief in the myth of meritocracy because the other side of that coin is that homelessness, drug addiction and other awful circumstances are viewed as deserved or at least a personal moral failure. As such, such people almost deserve those outcomes. So my point is that legalization just barely scratches the surface.

fragmede 2y ago
War on Drugs I was a failure. Time to declare a War on Drugs II, fought with counseling, mental health resources, government assistance programs for food, housing, jobs, hope.

lenkite 2y ago

Isn't Pharmaceutical fentanyl already physician approvable ? Why would making an it a recreational drug reduce the number of deaths ? Or is your position that all drugs - including antibiotics should be freely available for recreational use without any physician advice ?