Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 104 posts

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#71

Post by fragmede »

jmyeet wrote: post #39
phone8675309 wrote: post #3

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 s…

> 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 its…

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.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#72

Post by pfisch »

crooked-v wrote: post #44
pfisch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#73

Post by bermuda4you »

jrflowers wrote: post #67
bermuda4you wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not necessarily arguing for treatment. Drug addiction is a very serious chronic disease, so treatment would be a better choice than enablement. However, I do agree that success rate of treatment must be pretty low.

This makes sense. “Treatment works” is not an argument for treatment, it may in fact not work very well. Nonetheless we must focus solely on prohibition because treatment either does or does not work to an acceptable degree and criminalization obviously increases the amount and/or efficacy of treatment

I acknowledge that treatment works and decriminalization of (highly addictive hard) drugs does not. I don't necessarily advocate for treatment because we already spend too much money on this problem.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#75

Post by alephnerd »

fathyb wrote: post #55
Fauntleroy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it doesn't encompass the entire issue, China's involvement in the fentanyl (and other US drug crises) should be mentioned more often. America needs to wake up and do something—anything—about this asymmetrical warfare attack.

Isn't opioid addiction the root cause? People dying of fentanyl are mostly opioid addicts who started with prescription meds [1] such as Oxycontin. Heroin is close to fent in lethality, and oxycodone is next in line [2]. [1] https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/prescript... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_09-508.pdf - Figure 1.

Opioid addition is a major cause, yet Fentanyl is popular because the margins are INSANE while access to prescription opioids became much more restricted.

In 2019, Indian companies were a major source of precursors as well [0], yet Indian authorities cracked down on this path [1]. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities turned a blind eye [0].

That said, China is semi-federal as well, and depending on which Province the companies are from, it might be difficult to crack down, especially given that Chinese organized crime has transnationalized in Myanmar and Cambodia [2]

None of this can actually work at scale without financing and ease of operation, and the fact that authorities in multiple countries are turning a blind eye and sometimes actively using Organized Crime as a hybrid tool of power projection (eg. Triads in the Chinese diaspora, Punjabi Organized Crime in the Indo-Canadian Diaspora, the Russian and Caucuasian Vorys, etc)

That's how you have a DoJ lead brothel crackdown in DC and Boston that was because they were being used as an attempted honeypot [3]

[0] - https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/india/ncb-arrests-tamil-nadu-ba...

[2] - Highly recommend Peng Wang's research at HKU (https://sociology.hku.hk/people/wang-peng)

[3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/high-end-brothels-serviced-e...

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#77

Post by dzhiurgis »

endofreach wrote: post #54
skeaker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably fair to say that neither are any good.

As someone who started doing drugs at a young age, i am happy that i am now too old for this.

Do you regret it or did you had fun?

Personally I kinda miss it but also it was such a waste of time. Esp not miss unproductive hippy conversations around bonfire.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#78

Post by bsder »

quickthrowman wrote: post #31
bsder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rand…

> 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 a…

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.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#79

Post by crooked-v »

pfisch wrote: post #72
crooked-v wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Fentanyl is fueling a record number of youth drug deaths

#80

Post by heavyset_go »

cpncrunch wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes you can. they put it in patches and prescribe them at the hospital. people go to work on those. dead addicts can't go to work the next day, but you don't hear about the ones who haven't died yet unless you know them very well personally.

Well, I think you've just proven my point, that it has to be done in a carefully controlled manner. But that isn't what addicts are looking for.

Nobody is looking to overdose, ask any opiate user and they'd rather be taking pills than random shit from dealers. The issue is that pressed pills are now fentanyl, too, and those who want to dose responsibly end up overdosing anyway.
Post reply on HN