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7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

dea.gov

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#51

Why not make trafficking the big F an offense punishable with lethal injection? Seems just.

I see the appeal of simply killing every drug dealer, smuggler, and producer. I expect it would be a net improvement in lives saved.

But I don't trust our governments to administer such a policy justly. I think the false-positive execution rate would be more than I could stomach.

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#53
Is there any way they could guard against selection bias here? We don't know what percent of lethal dose exists in pills that weren't confiscated, how likely is it that they're disproportionately picked up those most likely to be selling the worst drugs?

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#54
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More drugs? Why is that bad?

Because we simultaneously give people the freedom to do whatever they want to do, and also catch them when they suffer the consequences of their actions. IMO, you either have freedom and responsibility, or control and care. I'd be ok legalizing drugs tomorrow if non-drug users do not need to subsidize the care for drug users.

If you think society has an obligation to you to give you a cradle to grave safety net (and I do), then you have to accept the reciprocal responsibility of maintaining yourself as a productive member of that society. It’s antisocial in a very specific sense of the term—reducing your capacity to take care of someone else who might need the help for reasons outside their control.

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#56
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined every day, week, month, and year. US drug policy is not about harm reduction or life saving, and never has been.

> Cigarettes are already legal despite killing 7x as many in the US as all opioids combined Is that true? I am not denying it, but the opiate overdose rate is staggering.

Yeah it's somewhere near half a million people per year in the US die from diseases caused by cigarette smoking. Fent's body count last I checked was like 77,000.

Whether they are a fair comparison I'm not sure. It might be more accurate to say that while fentanyl can kill you, cigarettes make you live less long, rather than to say they kill you. No one drops dead from lighting a cigarette. Meanwhile, if it weren't for unreliable dosing due to black market pressures, I'm not sure regular, reliably dosed opiate usage would kill you slow the way cigarettes do.[citation needed] Anecdotally, I've noticed that ex junkies often look ten years younger than they have any right to.

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon tried it, and it failed. So no, not they way they did it. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/oregon-governor-signs-...

Oregon legalized it and then skipped doing any of the other stuff that was advertised as coming with it, like free addiction treatment, social programs, etc. It's a 'we've done nothing and we're all out of ideas' approach consistent with the state's approach to homelessness at various levels, where agencies won't even spend the money they already have because they don't even know roughly how many homeless people ther…

Some people say we should legalize drugs and then spend billions on drug addiction treatment, because somehow people should feel free to try and get addicted to drugs, because society will pay the bill to make them better afterwards? Either people should take responsibility for their own actions, or we should disallow the actions, I’m not sure how allowing the actions without personal responsibility for the consequences was ever going to workout from a moral hazard standpoint.

The problem with local approaches to dealing with the homeless crisis is that the better you do, the worse your problem becomes. Portland doesn’t just grow homeless on trees, they have one of the busiest greyhound stations in the country, and everyone else is just so much at dealing with the problem.

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#58
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon tried it, and it failed. So no, not they way they did it. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/oregon-governor-signs-...

Oregon decriminalized simple possession by end users. You would still need to purchase the drugs from the exact illicit supply chain the DEA is profiling here, so it's no surprise it didn't solve the overdose crisis. Under legalization you could buy an exact dose from a licensed supplier.

I’m not sure legalization would change much: fentanyl is so popular as a street drug because it is so cheap. Providing a much more expensive alternative isn’t going to suck away demand from the illicit version

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#59
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opiates, and many classes of illegal drugs, do very little harm. Addiction is the main feature, and if the substance has no artificial scarcity, addiction is easy to manage. There is no basis on harm reduction for the drug policies being pursued in most of the world

Tell this to the addicts who live on my sidewalk. Many of them got started on pain killers, and now they're permanently bent over in the fentanyl flop; I'd be astounded if any of them ever get better.

Worik's argument appears to be, if people had an unlimited supply of drugs, things would be better than a limited supply. It sounds a lot like the perspective of someone who has never listened to a recovering addict.

Re: 7 out of every 10 Fentanyl pills seized by DEA contain a lethal dose

#60
post #2

So maybe start with a quarter tablet? .. Genuine question: How does it make fiscal business sense to kill your customers after one hit? Edit: thank you all for your informative replies

My friend's father was on some form of opioid for much of my friend's life, due to a motorcycle accident that busted both his knees.

Towards the end, he was on Actiq, a lozenge form of fentanyl citrate iirc. Supposedly it was strong enough to be fatal for someone without any opioid tolerance.

These pills are probably much the same. Strong enough to get someone high who has built up a tolerance to everything else, but also strong enough to kill the uninitiated.

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