Everyday, in the news, is a story about some new tragedy and fentanyl.
There is no doubt, it's a dangerous drug. It is lethal in astonishingly small amounts.
But where did it come from?
The war on drugs.
The war on drugs made making, shipping, and prescribing opioids more difficult.
This created an incentive to create synthetic versions of them so it would be easier to eliminate the natural sources of the drugs and the criminal side of opioid manufacture.
The war on drugs is good at stopping the vehicles bringing in large amounts of drugs.
When I was young and Nancy was telling me to, "just say no!" I remember stories of boats and planes getting nailed for being loaded with marijuana. By the time I'd graduated high school, those boats and planes were carrying cocaine.
The cost/benefit analysis of smuggling mary-jane was upside down, but cocaine wasn't. Heroin, same same.
The price of cocaine created a market for amphetamines, like meth. Meth can be made domestically and cheaply. And thanks to the war on drugs, we can't get cold medicine that works anymore. Oh, and by making the chemicals that would make WW2 era amphetamines illegal; the modern version is both dangerous to make and more dangerous to the user. Winning?
Marijuana is domestically grown, or smuggled differently, but it's still widely available on the illicit market even as it becomes legal.
But let's come back to the cost/benefit curve.
If you can get the same return on a suitcase full of fentanyl as a whole narco-sub full of cocaine; what are you going to smuggle in?
It seems strange, but legalizing heroin and cocaine would, basically, end much of the problems with fentanyl.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have problems, but we know how to deal with those already and they might be lesser problems than what we're heading into.
Never mind that study after study keeps finding that treatment works far better than incarceration for drug abusers.
PS: Let is never forget that the government is in your bank account so that drug dealers can't use banks. How many other privacy items are void because of the war on drugs? How many innocent people are killed in no-knock searches? To mirror the liberal side of things, "even one is too many!"