Until now I have not written about Fentanyl. The topic is fairly unpoliticized and I don’t see a lot of misinformation or media distortion. The facts are these:
America has a serious opiate dependency issue (around 1% of our adult population; the worst-hit country in the world is Iran, where > 2% of the adult population are opiate addicts, despite drug trafficking carrying the death penalty in that country)
The soaring addiction rate is tied to loneliness, community collapse, family fragmentation, structural unemployment, and over-prescription from the mid-90’s until around 2008
That medical over-prescription was partly driven by pharmaceutical companies which incentivized salespeople and doctors to prescribe huge number of new oxycodone (and other synthetic opioid) preparations. They created research studies, secured patents, and distributed bonuses nationwide. In response, the rates of opiate addiction (already rising) jumped, and many of those patients turned to heroin when their tolerance became too high or supplying their habit became too expensive
Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate around 50x more powerful than morphine (per weight). Carfentanyl is a hyper-potent form of fentanyl (with somewhere between 2-10x the binding affinity and pain suppression effects of Fentanyl) only used as an elephant anesthetic. This is just an illustration of the potency of these analogues.
Fentanyl is extremely easy to smuggle across borders, since a brick of it yields millions of active doses. It’s also easy to overdose on, although not as easy as the media would have you believe
China supplies most of the precursor chemicals to Mexican cartels through legitimate businesses. Businesses and the government and the intelligence agencies in China don’t have distinct boundaries, and it seems likely that Chinese intelligence agencies are funneling the ingredients to chemically synthesize fentanyl as a way to destabilize and hurting the U.S
About 110,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, most of which involved fentanyl
If fentanyl is used to adulterate or supplement another drug (usually heroin) it needs to be chemically reduced and mixed using solvents. If this doesn’t happen large (even a microscopic piece of fentanyl can be too ‘large’ for a human user) doses can remain, unevenly distributed all or some of the users of those drugs
Fentanyl kills through overdose like other opiates-through respiratory depression. Narcan (Naloxone) is an antidote which quickly reverses the effect of narcan in the brain but fentanyl is often too powerful for one or more doses of the drug to save the patient. Narcan also causes immediate and unpleasant sensations of withdrawal and it is not uncommon for patients to be resuscitated and leave the hospital to immediately find more opiates in order to “get well”
Until several years ago the vast majority of fentanyl deaths were concentrated in the Eastern half of the country. Fentanyl is an opiate which is usually used to cut heroin (since they have similar effects) and white powder heroin predominates East of the Mississippi. Brown tar heroin (the normal choice in the West) is harder to cut with fentanyl. However, more and more drugs are being cut with fentanyl, including fake prescription drugs and cocaine and crystal methamphetamine
Fentanyl is a border issue, a law enforcement issue, a medical issue, and a spending issue… but at a deeper level it’s a psychological and spiritual issue. Most of the people who die from fentanyl are in the throes of addiction and only the long and difficult work of rebuilding their spiritual connections, making amends, doing esteemable things, and healing the darkness which has consumed their life would have saved them.
Most addicts never get clean, and that will probably never change. Addicts have always known their ends come in “jails, institutions, and death” but now death can come from any bag, at any time, and it’s FAR more common.