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Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#181

Post by mitchdoogle »

mynameishere wrote: post #41
323 wrote: post #20

All drugs should be legalized. That is the only solution. You should be able to buy cocaine, heroin, fentanyl at the local grocery store. No question asked. Maybe even subsidize it for poor people who can't afford market prices. The local pharmacy should provide training on how to inject/consume them safely and give for free the associated consumables.

Sure would fix it. By killing them faster

I know you are jesting in a terrible and frankly evil way. But why would it kill anyone faster? The whole issue with fentanyl is that people either don't know they are taking it or they are ignorant about its potency. Legalizing it would solve the former and probably help the latter through informative labeling and more openness among users about responsible and safe use.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#182

Post by WillPostForFood »

tyingq wrote: post #55
dizhn wrote: post #19

The phrase "leading cause of death" has circular reference there. Each article is pointing to the other. I wanted to see where they got that figure. At the bottom of the current article it says "in a provisional tally seven months ago, [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl." So fentanyl is the drug most people overd…

It's not laid out explicitly, but you can see the numbers here and pull the 2 textual representations to get the detail: "Top Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S. for Ages 1-44" https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h... "Unintentional Injury" holds overdoses, which are called "unintentional poisoning" in the breakdown in the bottom chart. For 2020: 80,208 Unintentional Injury deaths (consisti…

It is surprisingly hard to get the actual data for fentanyl/opioid overdoses, even though the numbers are on the CDC site, just spread out in multiple places.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#183

Post by ladeagaytf »

tstrimple wrote: post #151
ladeagaytf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it’s true… It’s an empty statement, neither side agrees on the fix for poor mental health and so the ball keeps on spinning.

It's worse than neither side agreeing on a fix. One side claims it's a mental health issue and then cuts funding for mental health. https://www.businessinsider.com/abbott-cut-mental-health-ser...

Their view is mental health breakdown is a part of a larger social-structure breakdown and no amount of spending will fix that problem.

Not all solutions can be fixed with infinite dollars.

So no, it isn’t “worse than that.”

Meanwhile we have folks creating problems then taxing the populace then shifting tax dollars to unaccountable private sector friends and donors. True problems.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#184

Post by giraffe_lady »

umeshunni wrote: post #109
jack_pp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I don't know the exact specifics of the situation there as I don't live in the US. I know there's a large homeless problem but not the details. Maybe the policies I mentioned also need other policies to balance them out, policies like you're not allowed to camp on the street and you're not allowed to steal, at all. Maybe don't allow people to drive under the influence of any drug that's not a stimulant,…

Yeah, everything you laid out is perfectly logical and what they should be doing, but unfortunately, progressive politics in the US philosophically opposed to enforcing camping and theft laws. E.g., in San Francisco, it’s legal to steal under $900.

No it's not, stop spreading misinformation. It's illegal as it always has been, and stop listening to police about why they do what they do. They are not honest about it and their incentives and motives are easy to decipher once you choose to.

Homeless people aren't camping! That's where they live. If you want to make homelessness a crime you could prosecute landlords who evict people with nowhere to go. Why isn't that the crime?

Just think for a minute please about the propaganda you've internalized and are now spreading with these positions. These are complex issues and the view of the police, and police-based solutions, are not the only or best approaches.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#185

Post by rhaway84773 »

thepasswordis wrote: post #69
jack_pp wrote: post #46

This would be solved if drugs were decriminalized and testing kits were very easy to use and come by but I guess a lot more people have to die before society as a whole acquires common sense

Parts of San Francisco have implemented these exact policies and they have made the problems a LOT worse.

San Francisco has 0 safe usage sites.

I think the U.S. overall has low single digits. And even those exist in an extremely dubious legal space, requiring the cops to turn a blind eye to their existence.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#186

Post by rhaway84773 »

umeshunni wrote: post #109
jack_pp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I don't know the exact specifics of the situation there as I don't live in the US. I know there's a large homeless problem but not the details. Maybe the policies I mentioned also need other policies to balance them out, policies like you're not allowed to camp on the street and you're not allowed to steal, at all. Maybe don't allow people to drive under the influence of any drug that's not a stimulant,…

Yeah, everything you laid out is perfectly logical and what they should be doing, but unfortunately, progressive politics in the US philosophically opposed to enforcing camping and theft laws. E.g., in San Francisco, it’s legal to steal under $900.

So if I don’t have the money to pay rent, what should I do?

Should I commit suicide?

And the extremely high rents means in the US you don’t even need to be jobless to not be able to afford rent. The lowest 10-20% of paying jobs may not pay enough money for a person to live in the area the job exists.

Homelessness in the US is a massive problem. But the homeless are not the cause of homelessness. They’re the victims. The U.S. has multiple failed policies which allows homelessness to exist in the richest country in the world.

And there are solutions across the ideological spectrum. You can go left and have the government give them housing. This is cheap (way cheaper than shelters) and extremely effective. On the extreme right you can stop NIMBYs from allowing housing to be built, which will in itself drop costs and rent.

The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. But the US has chosen to simply ignore the solutions altogether.

When the U.S. does pick a solution, it chooses to incarcerate them. Which is the worst possible solution because now you’ve led them to joining a gang and predictably becoming real criminals themselves who now learn know how to rob and steal and commit violence to satisfy their need for money.

And it’s also ridiculously more expensive than all the other solutions above.

(

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#187

Post by dizhn »

tyingq wrote: post #55
dizhn wrote: post #19

The phrase "leading cause of death" has circular reference there. Each article is pointing to the other. I wanted to see where they got that figure. At the bottom of the current article it says "in a provisional tally seven months ago, [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl." So fentanyl is the drug most people overd…

It's not laid out explicitly, but you can see the numbers here and pull the 2 textual representations to get the detail: "Top Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S. for Ages 1-44" https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h... "Unintentional Injury" holds overdoses, which are called "unintentional poisoning" in the breakdown in the bottom chart. For 2020: 80,208 Unintentional Injury deaths (consisti…

So it really is a huge number, and along with other overdoses it is even bigger. This is mind blowing stuff.

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#188

Post by sonjat »

bloopernova wrote: post #82

Why are people using Fentanyl? Maybe tackle that instead of further marginalizing people who use it? Are they using it to escape the grinding anxiety and desperation of their shitty lives? Are they using it instead of alcohol, again as escapism from reality? Is this use any different from how people used alcohol in past decades? I guess the point I'm poorly trying to make is that people aren't suddenly different to t…

Although I think it is hard to get firm numbers on this, a lot of other drugs are being cut with Fentanyl or outright substituted, including comparatively benign drugs like Xanax. There is a growing movement to classify a lot of fentanyl drug deaths as poisoning since it wasn't that the person took too much, it was that they were unaware that they were taking it at all. (Source: lost a daughter to what she thought was Xanax that was pure Fentanyl)

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#189

Post by tyingq »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #182
tyingq wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not laid out explicitly, but you can see the numbers here and pull the 2 textual representations to get the detail: "Top Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S. for Ages 1-44" https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h... "Unintentional Injury" holds overdoses, which are called "unintentional poisoning" in the breakdown in the bottom chart. For 2020: 80,208 Unintentional Injury deaths (consisti…

It is surprisingly hard to get the actual data for fentanyl/opioid overdoses, even though the numbers are on the CDC site, just spread out in multiple places.

I'm not usually into conspiracy theories, but it has the flavor of "bury this without outright lying".

Re: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

#190

Post by kodyo »

rayiner wrote: post #96
323 wrote: post #20

All drugs should be legalized. That is the only solution. You should be able to buy cocaine, heroin, fentanyl at the local grocery store. No question asked. Maybe even subsidize it for poor people who can't afford market prices. The local pharmacy should provide training on how to inject/consume them safely and give for free the associated consumables.

Damn libertarians. You can also ban drugs, imprison or kill the drug dealers, and ostracize the drug users. Works in Asia.

It's certainly not the fault of libertarians that none of that is happening now, and we have huge governments.
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