I just watched an interesting Netflix series called Painkiller where they mentioned that fentanyl is the leading cause of death for adults ages 18–49.
That's pretty scary. 2 milligrams can kill you. Most overdoses are caused by fentanyl being put into pills that are sold as Oxycontin, Xanax and other drugs.
China provides the chemicals and Mexican cartels manufacture the fentanyl.
How do we deal with this? Is Trump's war against immigrants helping?
I think we also need different protocols when treating pain, especially chronic pain; when i worked with DYFS I can think of a number of people who were hooked on opiates after going to pain management clinics/offices and would up unemployed and hustling for street drugs to feed the habit the physician created. Not to make light of the pain (many of these were auto or other accident victims who suffered what appeared to be severe chronic pain), but the eventually lost their jobs and their families. Living perpetually on opiates is not a viable treatment protocol, or at least it shouldn't be.
The mainstream pharmacies such as Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens etc have supply chains which are overseen by FDA and supply clean, kosher drugs. Online pharmacies are the ones who get their drugs from everywhere. Fake drugs which contain fentanyl - although they may contain potentially lethal doses - are not designed to kill the customers (whether traditional or criminal, killing your customers is simply not good business) but to get them hooks so they buy more shit. Online purchases, whether it is ostensibly designed to make you hard (Viagra) or less gloomy (Xanax) are channels for the introduction of fentanyl to the user.
Most of the young people and even many adults who die are getting their drugs from street dealers who are getting it through the cartels/drug trade and those are the drugs that end up being something other than they are asserted to be. I saw a recent heartbreaking Dateline about a straight A student teenager who died after taking a tab of what she thought and was told was LSD, but which was in fact a different synthesized drug with deadly (obviously) potential which LSD doesn't have - at least not from the drug itself.
Typically the only people getting fentanyl from a legitimate prescription are people suffering end stage cancer and other end stage disease with intractable pain, and those drugs come from legitimate pharmacies in highly controlled doses.
If you don't take street drugs, you are highly unlikely to encounter this issue.
Any number of other countries - Portugal being a good example - have shifted focus to treating addicts and educating about drug use rather than pouring all their resources into interdiction and criminal prosecution, and after a few years it proved to be an effective strategy to reduce ODs and deaths and to address addiction in the community.
We've been doing what we've been doing for just about my entire lifetime and it's clearly not working well.
To Big RR's point, we have seen a major shift in pain management at the legitimate doctor level in the last decade or more since the scourge of Oxy became obvious. The pain clinic where I went for treatment of my stenosis/cervical radiculopathy doesn't prescribe opiate drugs as a pain management tool anymore except in the very short term and even then it is a rare intervention. The medical community got seriously burned by the Sacklers and Purdue and they're digging out from that now. Many pain patients are angry about it but it is what it is; the most recent research seems to clearly establish that gentle frequent movement is the best intervention for chronic pain especially in the back, with mindfulness and other stress management techniques being very useful to help manage the mental aspect of chronic pain. Opiates on demand are obviously not the answer.
Pretty sure though that immigrants aren't the problem or the solution to America's drug addiction/demand problems.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
we have seen a major shift in pain management at the legitimate doctor level in the last decade or more since the scourge of Oxy became obvious
I've heard that as well and I can only hope you are right. However, I still recall a pain management doctor testifying in a deposition I was taking that "with the tools [he later testified the tools were primarily drugs available, " there was no reason anyone had to feel any pain"; he also said this belief was common among pain management specialist. This was a guy who regularly treated people with chronic pain, a guy with an education (indeed, a guy who was offered as an expert by the defendants) who honestly believed that. Given that, I am not surprised so many followed his advice/orders and took the drugs offered. I can only hope this view has changed.
On a related note, those interested in chronic pain management might be interested in Dr. Sanjay Gupta's special airing on CNN on Sunday night - about the elimination of pain through new neurosurgical techniques, and other approaches to chronic pain which don't include opiates.
I feel like I should bring it back around to the fact that a great many Americans who create the demand for illicit and prescription drugs in this country aren't, in fact, experiencing pain tied to physical injury/disability. America has a chronic despair problem which is very closely tied to its addiction and OD deaths problems.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
