10 ms·

Overdose deaths are falling in America because of a 'supply shock': study

• marojejian 10mo ago
  archive: https://archive.is/C0Y0G#selection-1303.143-1303.175 https://archive.is/C0Y0G#selection-1303.143-1303.175 this is my best guess for the research cited (paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6130 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6130 If true, the next question is what caused the supply shock?
• Analemma_ 10mo ago
  I thought this was already well-established public information? That fentanyl came mostly from China was never in doubt, what people were arguing about was whether this was happening with the tacit approval of the Chinese government. Then in 2023 China cracked down on it, and supplies dried up. Whether that was because it was a big enough issue to get their attention, or it was on purpose and they decided it was no longer serving their interests I suspect we'll never know, but I definitely read multiple articles in 2023 about the fentanyl crackdown in China.
  • defrost 10mo ago
    Biden era cooperation with China on the issue was at the heart of this. It wasn't about the direct supply of Fentanyl, or even (by that stage) the direct supply of Fentanyl precursor drugs .. (that gangs used to industrial shed chem lab into Fentanyl) ... this was cutting back and limiting bulk supply of the precursor precursors to shady onselling networks to starve the labs. Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet. Some of this is covered in The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. ADDENDUM: 20 page PDF of data, graphs, suppleentary material from the original 8th January 2026 Science paper Did the illicit fentanyl trade experience a supply shock? Kasey Vangelov et al (doi/10.1126/science.aea6130) here: https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/suppl_file/science.aea6130_sm.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/su...
    • alephnerd 10mo ago
      Mexico also began enacting extremely heavy handed tariffs against China and other Asian exporters like South Korea, India, and Vietnam in 2023 onwards [0][1][2][3] in order to protect their domestic manufacturing capacity against an export-driven supply shock, which hit Mexico really badly in the 2000s [4]. > Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet Yep, but as long as Mexico continues to enact trade barriers to protect against an Asian export shock, the APIs needed for synthesis will remain difficult for organized crime to acquire. Already, cartels have begun tariff arbitraging by targeting the CEE and the Balkans as a new base for synthetic opioid operations [5][6][7], especially because Romanian [8] and other CEE gangs had been collaborating with Mexican organized crime on financial and human trafficking crimes in Mexico for over a decade now. [0] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-temporary-import-duties-25-more-588-non-fta-tariff-items https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-tempo... [1] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-tariff-hikes-ranging-5-50-over-544-goods https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-ta... [2] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-significant-customs-and-tariff-reforms-part-2026-economic-package https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-sign... [3] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-and-expands-import-tariffs-more-1400-products-key-impacts https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-an... [4] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf [5] - https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/largest-ever-synthetic-opioid-laboratory-in-poland-dismantled https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/larg... [6] - https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe-sees-pockets-of-rising-synthetic-opioid-use/ https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe... [7] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-the-sinaloa-cartel-and-cjng-part-v-europes-supercoke-and-on-the-horizon-issues-and-the-middle-east/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-t... [8] - https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-criminals-conquered-the-world-of-atm-skimming https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-crim...
      • defrost 10mo ago
        That absolutely played a part also. The biggest takeaway that deserves stressing over and over again is that Things Take Time .. it generally takes 18 months and longer to substantially impact global flows. The work has to be put in early, kept up in practice, and results are often credited to political actors down the road of time. TTT - Piet Hein - https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks
  • cyberax 10mo ago
    No, it was in doubt. Now fentanyl is produced from readily available precursors in Mexico. In underground labs: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fentanyl-lab-mexico.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fen... Fentanyl is so potent that just one lab can easily satisfy all the US demand with it, around 10kg a day. That's also why it's ridiculously hard to fight, one smuggled barrel of pure product can supply the entire US for months. So no, there is no "supply shock". There's just more free Narcan (naloxone).
    • cogman10 10mo ago
      Cocaine death decreases is the hard thing to explain with either theory, supply or naloxone. Fentanyl supply doesn't affect cocaine in any way and naloxone doesn't work on a cocaine OD. Maybe some percentage of cocaine deaths are misattributed fentanyl deaths? I also wonder if there's any link to the Oxycontin reforms. Perhaps now that prescription is reigned in, we are seeing a lot fewer oxy->fent cases which has cut back on the deaths. Or maybe it's actually that the drug dealers have gotten more careful. Drug dealers don't want to kill their clients, so maybe they've been purposefully diluting to make sure they get repeat customers.
      • jddj 10mo ago
        In Europe the per kg price of cocaine has apparently halved. If that's the case in the US as well, it could be that as a result there's more cocaine in the cocaine and fewer adulterants.
        • mjanx123 10mo ago
          People don't have the money to buy drugs, deaths go down and price as well (albeit slower).
          • zdragnar 10mo ago
            For addicts, the drug is the last thing they cut back on when money is tight.
  • tehjoker 10mo ago
    People are always talking about this precusor from China, but I have no idea what this precursor is. Are they chemicals that are useful for lots of things or is it only useful for this? Because if it is the former, then China is just selling regular ass legal chemicals because they are the worlds number 1 supplier of manufactured goods.
    • defrost 10mo ago
      The challenge in international drug operations was not to get China to stop selling bricks to house builders to but get China to cooperate in stopping the sale of bricks to groups that only use bricks to throw through windows and at heads.
      • tehjoker 9mo ago
        That’s tricky because if the US asks to stop the sale of precursors used for making medicines to an organization they name, it’s not always clear whether they are doing illegal sanctions or legitimate activities with the consent of the country in question. China probably just wants to be a neutral supplier and stay out of it.
        • defrost 9mo ago
          Tricky, yes. Insurmountable, no. Despite the difficulty the former US administration was able to diplomatically achieve cooperation from China on this matter which bore fruit and gained traction until a seris of wild accusations and tariffs from a later administration killed a number of US / China working arrangements. See, for example, The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
    • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
      Fun fact: The "traditional" way of making it was extracting piperine from black pepper and reacting that with nitric acid. Nowadays it's made in other more industrial scalable ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_medications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_... But yes, the same base precursors (and their siblings) are used to manufacture ADHD meds (ritalin/concerta), antidepressants (paxil), insect repellents (picaridin/bayrepel), hair loss medications (rogaine), allergy meds (claritin), anti-psychotics (haldol), anti-diarrhea meds (imodium), and many others. And also PCP. So it's non-trivial to prevent. The core of the issue is that the one pot Gupta method came about in the 2000s and it made it extremely easy to manufacture fentanyl using these basic building blocks for so much of the pharma industry. Not only just making it easier to source ingredients but it took out all the steps and made the process easy as hell as well.
• broochcoach 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • exe34 10mo ago
    hint: fentanyl doesn't travel from Venezuela to the US.
    • RickJWagner 10mo ago
      Exactly right. The article says it starts in China, travels to Mexico before being smuggled across the border.
      • moralestapia 10mo ago
        Unsure why you're downvoted. The article says that. It's not even your opinion, you're just citing the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        • exe34 10mo ago
          [flagged]
  • Analemma_ 10mo ago
    The article is about how overdose deaths began falling in 2023, so perhaps you owe 2023's "dear leader" an apology.
  • amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
    The paper is talking about a pre-trump downturn. Blowing up boats had nothing to do with it.
  • jeltz 10mo ago
    If so it is Biden who is owed the apology.
  • pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
    > dear leader lol what, this is insane, we don't live in 1984
• mythrwy 10mo ago
  "Supply shock" might not be the only, or even primary cause. As far as I know fentanyl is still widely available and inexpensive. My guess is only a subset of the population is willing to both A) Use a substance like street fentanyl with known lethality. and B) Do so in a risky and unsafe manner (alone, no narcan, shooting instead of smoking, etc. etc.). That subset of the population has already been decimated to the point we are seeing a decrease, and survivors have become more educated on how to use without dying.
  • DoctorOetker 10mo ago
    Is there a graph of the decline in overdoses with time? Your explanation suggests an exponential decay (ignoring aggravating conditions, like seasonal temperature, violence, ...)
    • maxbond 10mo ago
      In the article, yes. https://d9258mdc7ql01n.archive.is/C0Y0G/696eb2f917764f004c5fe65e3afb685ae92c62f6.avif https://d9258mdc7ql01n.archive.is/C0Y0G/696eb2f917764f004c5f...
  • kayodelycaon 10mo ago
    A major factor is Narcan being far more available and usable by people who are not trained.
  • diego_moita 10mo ago
    That seems the most plausible explanation. The article says something along these lines. Every pandemic has a peak point when people become alarmed, and there is a clear way to avoid contamination. It happened with AIDS when people began stopping having risky relations. It is only natural that it would also happen in drug addiction when everyone sees its devastating effects. The same thing might be happening to tobacco and alcohol consumption. Deaths for lack of vaccines (e.g. measles) will also behave the same way. When people see very explicitly that risky behaviour has consequences, they think twice before doing it.
• dopa42365 10mo ago
  If the cost didn't go up, it can't have been a supply shortage. Even at its US peak, there wasn't much of a "fentanyl epidemic" in Mexico either. The overprescription of opioids in the US (especially in the past) is hardly a secret.
  • conformist 10mo ago
    “Even as quality worsens, prices in drug markets are sticky, so the decreasing potency probably meant people were taking less fentanyl.”
• lazarus01 10mo ago
  >> Researchers have pondered what could have caused this sudden turnaround, pointing to the end of the covid-19 pandemic or a rise in drug treatment. A new article, published in Science on January 8th, suggests, instead, that a supply shock drove the decrease. The supply shock sounds right. I was volunteering at a state run institution, who had an addiction data science team, at the peak of the opioid crisis. I was developing ml models to predict patient dropout early in a 32 week program. The data and funding for such research was very scarce and it didn't go anywhere. Treatment for opioid use disorder with medication is highly effective for 50% - 90% who respond well to treatment. The problem with the bottom 50% was early dropout, due to the lack of dissemination of proper treatment protocols and stigma attached to medication for treatment (methadone). I stopped following the work, I became too sensitive, it was pretty depressing. The pandemic coupled with the increase in illicit fentanyl was just tragic in what it did to people. I remember reading the DEA research, where the precursor for fentanyl came from china and was manufactured and distributed from mexico. Mexico was also manufacturing high quality meth and displaced most of the meth labs in america, coming with increases in meth overdose during the same period. The fentanyl was so cheap compared to traditional heroin manufacturing. I'm glad the supply seems to have dried up. It was nuts, what was going on a few years ago.
  • 20after4 10mo ago
    I think that many methadone clinics are operating very unethically, to the point I would call it fraudulent. Certainly it's cruel to the patients. They essentially set up the patient to be a lifetime methadone addict. This may be an improvement over getting your fix on the street but it's still addiction dependence and it's expensive (profitable!). I'm unsure if it's just a few or a large fraction of them that operate this way. Maybe my data point is a unique outlier but here's what I saw: I had a friend who was going through the program in Springfield Missouri, approximately 10 years ago, and the clinic literally increased his dose every week or two. They also had strict controls to make sure the patients actually take the full dose (because otherwise they might sell some of it on the street). So they were left with just 2 options, either drop out of the program and find their fix elsewhere, or accept a gradually increasing dose of methadone, forever. It's a sick program that is set up to make sure patients gradually descend deeper into addiction while they rake in huge profits. It's not really any different from what the drug dealers on the street are doing except that it's even more exploitative and dishonest. The doctors had zero plan for weaning people off of the methadone and some people had been on the program for years, with correspondingly huge doses doled out to them every time they came in. This was 10 years ago, at the time it cost something like $50 per visit, paid by the patient or possibly medicaid. Edited slightly for clarity.
• idoubtit 10mo ago
  The reporter rightly queried other researchers about this article, and all of them were skeptical that a "supply shock" could be the cause, or even the main cause. My own skepticism is because the death rate went down many months before any sign of shortage appeared. I haven't read the paywalled Science paper, but The Economist extracted a graph which shows that the purity of Fentanyl pills was stable till the first months of 2024, then dropped sharply. The purity of the powder peaked in 2023, then went down in 2024, back to its older levels. They suppose that it proves the supply was short, but another researcher even states that the supply of Fentanyl precursors didn't change until the end of 2024. Anyway, the epidemic plateaued by the start of 2022, then went down after August 2023; Source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm Why did the death rate slow down for one year, then go down many months before any sign of supply changes?
  • jfengel 10mo ago
    The article says that deaths peaked in mid 2023. Narcan was approved for over the counter use in March 2023. That suggests a plausible alternative cause.
    • SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
      What is your supposition here? That addicts are keeping narcan around just in case? That good friends of addicts are standing by with the spray in case it is needed? That your local opium den had staff with it on hand? Narcan should be available, but short of a few users that know they need to keep it around, I don’t buy that making it available has meant a significant change in total outcomes because of timely deployment.
      • swamp_donkey 10mo ago
        First responders would carry narcan or equivalent. I am sure it is readily available in areas where people are dying daily from overdoses.
        • 9mo ago
• greygoo222 10mo ago
  The claim that fentanyl death rates are decreasing because fentanyl products are less pure does not make much sense. Even on their provided charts, deaths dropped months before purity did. The article points to a 50% decrease in purity, which a habitual user would compensate for by taking twice as much. Lower average purity also increases the risk of inconsistent purity, where rare batches are unexpectedly strong and carry high accidental overdose risk. Less pure fentanyl floating around might mean lower chances of unsuspecting non-fentanyl drug users being poisoned with it, but it's hard to see how this could cut into overall overdose cases.
  • sheepscreek 10mo ago
    > article points to a 50% decrease in purity, which a habitual user would compensate for by taking twice as much I’ll be first to admit I’m generally pretty ignorant on this topic but I’ve heard a plausible explanation for how Fentanyl is actually used. A medical professional shared with me that Fentanyl is too potent to be consumed as is. So generally, dealers use it as an additive. They lace other drugs with trace amounts of to make them more addictive. It’s the MSG of drugs. So while ODing on say, drug A is possibly with 5 uses at once. When laced with Fentanyl, a person might OD in just 3 uses (because Fentanyl is much more potent than the actual drug the user bought). Hence, less Fentanyl = less chance of ODing.
    • sneak 10mo ago
      Fentanyl isn't too potent to be consumed as-is, but the dosage is very very small. The amount of fentanyl that will kill you is literally invisible. The LD50 appears to be well under 0.01mg/kg (that is, a milligram will kill a 220lb person).
    • fc417fc802 10mo ago
      > I’ve heard a plausible explanation To be blunt it was total bullshit. Pharmaceuticals have an extremely wide range of dosages. Fentanyl is on the extreme low end, benadryl an adult might take 25 mg or 50 mg, tylenol an adult might take 500 mg, and something like amoxicillin an adult might take as much as 3000 mg for a severe infection. There are standard, extremely reliable ways to prepare pills that contain the correct dosage regardless of the potency of the pure chemical. Obviously fentanyl (or its precursor) is imported (ie smuggled) in highly pure form in order to minimize the size of the shipment. Obviously it can't be consumed in that form. The combination of being potent and cheap to smuggle lends itself nicely to cutting other (more expensive) products with it. That's false advertising but it won't typically kill you in and of itself. When laymen who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to proper facilities, and certainly can't set up proper quality controls process something that potent it's no wonder that things go wrong and people die. If (for example) the same victims had purchased fentanyl from a pharmacy (as opposed to whatever it was they thought they were consuming) they almost certainly would not have had any issues. Almost no one ODs intentionally. The point is that it's not "fentanyl is toxic so you OD" it's "the person compounding the pill messed up the dosage, you took more than you thought, so you OD". This could happen just as easily with any other drug. The danger here is due to pills not containing the dosage that the consumer believes them to.
• awakeasleep 10mo ago
  What happened to the theory that the deaths were decreasing because we burned through our buffer of people susceptible to deaths of despair? That always seemed reasonable to me.
  • quixoticelixer- 10mo ago
    well if you read to the end of the article you might find out.
  • GrowingSideways 10mo ago
    Surely as time goes on and wealth inequality increases, the number of people "susceptible" to deaths of despair will only increase. But this attitude smells an awful lot like the stupid person's eugenics. Let's not cater to it.
    • xvector 10mo ago
      Wealth inequality doesn't cause this kind of despair. We have the greatest wealth inequality in history, but also the objectively best quality of life in history by most metrics (extreme poverty, hunger, starvation, death from disease, infant mortality...) It does not matter to me if Elon Musk makes another billion dollars if I am making more as well. That does not cause "despair" to a well adjusted person. Extreme poverty on the other hand (which has been decreasing) does cause these deaths. When people have nowhere left to go and no hope, they to turn to drugs. Mental illness is another cause. I wonder if we should have gotten rid of asylums.
      • seabrookmx 10mo ago
        Surely you mean extreme poverty has been decreasing as a percentage of population, not in real numbers?
        • xvector 10mo ago
          Yes of course.
• AngryData 10mo ago
  I would postulate that people learning how to more safely handle and dose fentanyl would be the biggest reason for ODs to drop.
  • defrost 10mo ago
    How would you explain the increase in hospitalisation, Emergency Services deployments, and fentanyl drug purity in Q1 2025 then? Sudden unlearning of aquired knowledge seems unlikely. See: Figure 1 graph set page 4 - https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1126%2Fscience.aea6130&file=science.aea6130_sm.pdf https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • AngryData 10mo ago
      Changes in purity, especially when unknown to users, is going to affect hospitalizations and such no doubt, but the people using it also adapt to the purity of a drug over a longer timespan. Even if people wanted to its not like they can all just bring a sample of their old heroin and a sample of their stronger high fentanyl laced heroin and test their purity and calculate dosages. Which is part of the problem of the war on drugs, many methods of harm mitigation and recovery are barred from users and 90% of their drug information is based on hearsay or personal experience.
      • defrost 10mo ago
        > part of the problem of the war on drugs, many methods of harm mitigation and recovery are barred from users That is a problem for the US, sure. Australia, where I live, has supervised shooting galleries and more of an addiction as health issue approach. That said, if you had a chance to look at the US graphs linked above - there was a plateau period of high deaths in the US of some three and half years showing no much evidence of users learning to "safely handle and dose fentanyl" followed by a sharp decrease in deaths that corresponds more with a change in policy than an increase in user knowledge. I would suggest this may be a somewhat more complex and multivariate issue than your initial upthread postulate acknowledges.
• Tiktaalik 10mo ago
  British Columbia declared the toxic drug crisis an epidemic in 2016, with the amount of deaths amounting to 6-7 a day through this period until now. The article's theory is compelling but given the incredible amount of deaths, thousands upon thousands of deaths in BC alone, I wonder if the rate of death is declining simply because we're running out of people to kill with our indifference.
  • hattmall 10mo ago
    Killing addicts more quickly than creating new ones would indeed eventually lead to a decrease in drug related deaths. I would really believe this because I know of multiple people that died from ODs in a fairly short window 4-5 years and that spans a range of about 12 years of people. As in to say everyone I know age 24-36 about half of those people that were opiate users died from about 2019-2023 due to fent. All of them that I know the details of were from fake pills too, so very much related to fentanyl.
    • gleenn 10mo ago
      Long term you couldn't kill more than existed, asymptotically the maximum number of ODs per unit time would be exactly equal to the number created, impossible to be more.
      • cryptonector 10mo ago
        By allowing fentanyl to kill so many so fast we might be (almost certainly are) selecting for those who are less susceptible for whatever reason (less susceptible to addition, less susceptible to even beginning to go down that road, more surrounded by loved ones willing to act, more biologically resistant to the killing effects of ODs, etc.).
  • fc417fc802 10mo ago
    > running out of people to kill with our indifference. I wouldn't call it indifference. It's the drug policies that we've very intentionally adopted in the west that result in people purchasing from the black market. It's about as indifferent as the deaths due to denatured alcohol poisoning during prohibition when the additive was silently switched.
• diogenescynic 10mo ago
  And when supply catches up, overdoses will spike because addicts tolerance will have decreased.
• wtcactus 10mo ago
  So, statistics clearly show that limiting drugs supply actually works, unlike what the hard left has been saying to us (backed by social “sciences”) since the 2000s? If we just listened to common sense instead of these people, society would be saved from a lot of pain.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• lazyeye 10mo ago
  Perhaps the closure of the southern border a year ago might have played some role in this.
  • zzrrt 10mo ago
    I wonder if Trump pardoning multiple drug dealers will also help. MAGA doctors must have figured out that drugs from political allies or “donors” are doubleplusgood for Americans. /s
  • cm2012 10mo ago
    2025 is not even in the dataset so no
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• bdauvergne 10mo ago
  Maybe they completely reversed the causality, it's a demand shock not a supply shock. There are less users because they died, and they died pretty fast compared to previous opioid users. As demand diminished there was over supply and to maintain their margins provider had to lower the supply. QED. As it's a pretty simple hypothesis to test and that it was not maybe imply that the conclusion is politically motivated. Supply-shock imply that something was done and it worked, but that the problem solved itself is not as palatable for someone politically motivated like an administration.
  • cryptonector 10mo ago
    > As it's a pretty simple hypothesis to test How would one test it?
    • bdauvergne 9mo ago
      How do they know the number of opioid users currently ? Do the same.
      • cryptonector 9mo ago
        I would think that street prices would tell us if it's supply shock (prices crash up) or demand shock (prices crash).
  • lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Supply-shock imply that something was done and it worked, but that the problem solved itself is not as palatable for someone politically motivated like an administration. Problem solving itself by killing the users is also not palatable because the conclusion is that the users are expendable in pursuit of solving the problem. Since neither conclusion is going to be politically acceptable, why is your default hypothesis that the paper must be wrong because your political conclusion is better than the paper's political conclusion?
• jimnotgym 10mo ago
  This suggests to me that the government could reduce this even further by simply outcompeting with illegal sources. One problem mentioned was that other drugs were being laced with fentanyl. Simply supply a licensed, guaranteed clean version through a legal source at a lower price? Then people who want actual fentanyl, supply that in the same way too.
  • whimsicalism 10mo ago
    And how do you know this wouldn’t result in significantly expanding the number/frequency of drug consumers?
    • jimnotgym 10mo ago
      Coffee is legal in my country, but I don't drink it. Alcohol is legal, but I drink it infrequently and in moderation. I can get codeine over the counter, but I don't take it every day.
      • whimsicalism 10mo ago
        i don’t find this a compelling argument and i think it undermines the case for the policy you are proposing.
• jimnotgym 10mo ago
  Could this effect actually be more of a customer service effect? Drug dealers were lacing things with fentanyl to make them more addictive. They were putting too much in and killing people by accident. This was bad for business in 3 ways 1) they could have saved money by using less fentanyl 2) they were killing their customers, as well as reducing the customer base this has a reputational risk. 3) They were attracting too much public interest in their activities Therefore they found that they make more money by putting less in. Not a drug expert, don't live in US, never took fentanyl. I just picked these 'facts' out of the comments. Before anyone says, 'you don't know what to you are talking about' in the sweet way that has crept into hn, I really don't, and don't claim to.
  • christina97 10mo ago
    The problem with fentanyl is not that people are putting in too much. It’s that it’s extremely potent so it’s too easy to accidentally put too much in.
    • hobom 10mo ago
      So the problem IS that people are putting in too much (even if accidentally) ?
      • 15155 10mo ago
        The problem is that the typical delivery mechanism for this drug is a highly-dilute injection or transdermal patch - not 'geometric' dilution into pills in Jose's basement with questionable fillers. The substance is too potent per physical unit of weight and volume to be conveniently dosed through other means.
• saidnooneever 10mo ago
  maybe all the addicts are running out? know it sounds like a troll but with very high death rates on newer drugs... is it really a crazy idea?
• topranks 10mo ago
  I wonder if the eradication of the heroin supply from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover has had an effect? Possibly re-directed some of the fentanyl to other markets where addicts could no longer get heroin? Thus reducing supply elsewhere?
  • ciropantera 10mo ago
    At least in Europe the heroin gap was mostly filled with crack from Latin America.
• phtrivier 10mo ago
  How good is overdose _deaths_ as an indicator of the epidemic of drug consumption ? My point being : killing your customer en masse is bad business practice in the long run. (Or even in the medium run.) So, the drug dealer's best interest is to reduce the potency of the drug, therefore limiting the overdoses but keeping the customers alive, and willing to get the next dose. If it happens when the prices are high, and you're able to cut your product and see it with a higher margin, it's even more value for the sharehol... Sorry, wrong analogy. Anyway, is the number of people _using_ fentanyl also going down ? Where are the quarterly sales number published ? What's the trend ? When is the IPO ?
  • asah 10mo ago
    Drug trade participants don't consider the long run.
    • bitmasher9 10mo ago
      Some drug trade participants do consider the long term. Specifically production and bulk transportation benefits from large long term investments.
• simianparrot 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • _bohm 10mo ago
    The reasons stated in the article have nothing to do with border enforcement, and observed supply shock started before 2024. The most recent year of data mentioned in the article ended in April 2025. But by all means, if you have information these researchers don’t, feel free to share it here.
  • seanalltogether 10mo ago
    This has been talked about lately, the drop has nothing to do with trump. The data in this chart goes up to Oct 2024, several months before trumps took office. https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jamanetworkopen/939624/zoi250489f1_1749071633.83632.png?Expires=1771156554&Signature=cyUVuWjROKC52fESIwgCHzx4LUY-vATlTy9CEBLTJtWL81p4izVu4dZU3ZGpNl-NGVx3yHrT2e19cO--STcZ5v~eE-MTSxolvy11DefsKhj0quEiTzFYakEks50Ue-7PvOuOvwz7qjumA-7H6aKbtGuzmhEwhdmSwgDhdlDmpWYomYYmfoOKjs4m-k~oF11iEZz7MNlm4DMIEHvItbocXh9ELJGtr4nMaypg74QoD5FgsousLVucaxpA162spB~DZeuzcSz-1OFiindm1dbv1CmhNnhL65JkYiCA8l-22AHSjNKB1rCIWeNzb5lVMfxsi1wvu1RlLR~at6PJojuq5w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jaman...
    • sigwinch 10mo ago
      Right, these are Biden’s policies. Biden was superior on border and immigration issues.
      • lostlogin 10mo ago
        Yeah, he never got anyone shot in the face.
    • simianparrot 10mo ago
      That’s good then the situation ought to be even better now.
  • mb7733 10mo ago
• newsclues 10mo ago
  It’s nice when the government has a leader committed to keeping drugs out of the country
  • croes 10mo ago
    It started 2023. who was the leader back then?
  • srean 10mo ago
    And offer presidential pardons to those who sell it inside, illegally
    • sigwinch 10mo ago
      I can’t tell if GP is wry about Biden, or committing Type I error over Trump. But yes today the questions are about how we treat politically-connected smugglers. What are the odds on a Justin Salsburey pardon?
• cramcgrab 10mo ago
  Stop taking drugs, get out and enjoy life. It’s really pretty simple. Most of society works that way.
  • grantith 10mo ago
    Black & white thinking is easy. Nuance is hard though and might even lead to empathy.
  • realo 10mo ago
    Some drugs, like opioids, create a physical addiction. Their body cannot function without the chemicals. Saying "Stop taking the drug" to those people is equivalent to saying "Stop eating". The body cannot physically function then. Nicotine is also a chemical that induces a physical addiction. Surprisingly, THC (marijuana) does not, apparently... Someone can stop cold with no physical issues, only psychological ones.
• hwguy45 10mo ago
  The kneejerk explanation would be the more strict border and law enforcement under the current administration. But the chart peaks in Dec 2023 and drops in 2024, so it cannot be that. Perhaps, then, it was Kamala Harris' success as border czar under Biden.
  • hwguy45 9mo ago
    I can't believe you guys upvoted this. It was sarcasm. Kamala didn't do anything as border czar. Her administration opened the border intentionally.
• _fat_santa 10mo ago
  Enshittification sucks but turns out a very certain type of enshittification is actually good for society.
• indrora 10mo ago
  Discussion by an author on the paper: https://unrollnow.com/status/2009340857909170395 https://unrollnow.com/status/2009340857909170395 Original: https://x.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/2009340857909170395 https://x.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/2009340857909170395
• amai 10mo ago
  tldr; "China began warning chemical/pharma companies, closing down websites & tightening chemical controls in 2023. It is likely if not certain that China’s actions disrupted the fentanyl trade in both the US and Canada" https://unrollnow.com/status/2009340857909170395 https://unrollnow.com/status/2009340857909170395
• znnajdla 10mo ago
  That example of "shrinkflation" sounds like plain old fraud to me. Having a dimple at the bottom of a peanut butter container so it looks like it has more than it does should be illegal fraud, plain and simple.
  • whimsicalism 10mo ago
    the containers say how much volume they have and usually are sold with a unit price as well. seems like a much simpler and general solution than defining some legal shape of jars
    • yatopifo 10mo ago
      The real issue is that those dimples prevent you from getting the last bit. I also find it very annoying that in Canada quantity is often reported in ounces. Aside from the troy ounce, i have absolutely no idea how much an ounce is and whether it measures volume or mass. The only reason we still have ounces is because of trade with the US. Since no Canadian should be buying US made stuff, we should just ban most non metric units at this point.
      • whimsicalism 10mo ago
        moral Canadians should probably also refrain from participating in any American-run website like HN
      • wasabi991011 9mo ago
        I don't remember the last time I've seen an item in a Canadian grocery store that doesn't also include a metric amount (possibly in parenthesis) on the label itself. Not to mention the shelf price has per unit, almost always per metric unit (except rarely meat being per lb). Are you sure about what you are seeing, is it possible this is just for a few US imports and maybe you aren't looking at the shelf sticker? Or maybe it's a province-specific thing? Edit: Found the regulation. In general, > On consumer prepackaged foods, the net quantity must be declared on the principal display panel in metric units [221, 232, SFCR]. However, consumer prepackaged foods that are packaged from bulk at retail, other than individually measured foods, can declare the net quantity on the principal display panel in Canadian units [241.4(2)(b), SFCR]. https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/industry/net-quantity https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/indust...
• cmiles8 10mo ago
  tl;dr blowing up boats in the Caribbean and other aggressive actions, while controversial, has probably done more to address the drug pandemic than other things tried.
  • frm88 9mo ago
    Source?
• mrkramer 10mo ago
  From what I've seen homeless people overdose the most with fentanyl and homelessness level increased during COVID so they were the ones overdosing. Also everybody knows by now that one pill can kill you so that's good enough deterrent. The opioid epidemic was caused by COVID pandemic and its devastating economic effects and also by cheapness of the fentanyl pills which were going as low as $1 a pop on the streets.
• Rakshith 9mo ago
  [dead]
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
  Works where archive.is is blocked echo " foreground=no [ economist ] accept=127.0.0.127:80 client=yes options=NO_TICKET options=NO_RENEGOTIATION renegotiation=no sslVersion=TLSv1.3 sni=www.economist.com connect=172.64.145.237:443 "|stunnel -fd 0 -- 50b76b93 x=https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/08/why-overdose-deaths-are-falling-in-america ( echo GET /${x#*//*/} HTTP/1.0 @ echo host: www.economist.com @ echo user-agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" @ echo @ )|tr @ '\r'|nc -vvn 127.127 80 > 1.htm kill $(busybox pgrep -f 50b76b93) firefox ./1.htm
  • ventegus 9mo ago
    How's this supposed to work? It doesn’t even make it through the Cloudflare captcha.
• silexia 9mo ago
  https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/frontline-against-fentanyl https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/frontline-against-fentan...