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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!"
Excellent points and right on all.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with lawmakers is they seem to think all they gotta do is outlaw something. None of them ever seems to stop and say, "and then what happens?" What changes are they going to cause. Just like every mass shooting results in knee-jerk "let's outlaw every gun" with no politico ever saying, "if they're willing to die to shoot up a school or mall or whatever) how is another law going to stop them?"
Too much, "somebody's got to do something" and nowhere near enough, "what else will the something do?"
I like to tell my GOP friends that, thanks to the War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs they support so rabidly, the Constitution they revere is all but a dead letter.
ReplyDeleteActual pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl is harder to acquire in quantity than the Minuteman nuclear launch codes.
ReplyDeleteWhat's hitting the streets is exactly the designer surrogate, which is carfentanil. Made entirely from precursor chemicals shipped to Mexico from China.
LD50 for that (i.e. the dose that would kill 50% of people receiving it) is the equivalent of three salt-grain-sized bits.
The only other substance of which I am aware with similar lethality would be the G- and V-series organophosphate nerve agents.
But even carfentanil isn't the problem.
Narcan is.
Stop reviving the ODs with Narcan, and the problem self-corrects in about a month, and recidivism is 0%.
One case of which I have personal knowledge was a person who OD'ed three times in one shift in the same city. The local constables responded all three times along with EMS, and the third time, they placed the individual on a 72-hour mental health hold, just to preclude a hospital discharge, and the inevitable fourth OD. Multiply that times 1000, per city, per day, to appreciate the extent of the problem.
And while treatment may have a higher percentage success rate than incarceration, it's still only in single-digit percentages on its best day. Incarceration, meanwhile, precludes 500 crimes - burglary, auto burglary, larceny, robbery, prostitution, etc. - the average junkie commits per month while on the streets. So putting one away for a couple of years literally drops the citywide crime rate a full percentage point for each person thusly incarcerated. Who also get the benefit of the state's cold-turkey drug habit cessation program.
Someone should give a holler we have an actual War On Drugs.
You'll know it when you see it, because we'll be carpet-bombing much of northern South America 24/7, executing illegal border crossers caught smuggling drugs on sight, and shooting down or sinking any vessel or aircraft entering the US Defense Identification Zone without clearance. And probably start seizing every shipment of precursor chemicals from China, or simply sinking the ships carrying them, at will.
That, I'd like to see.
Trump shut the southern border down virtually overnight.
We didn't even break a sweat to do it.
Now ponder why no one else has done that, for even one single day, any time in the last 70 years, since Eisenhower's Operation Wetback.
"War On Drugs"? The suggestion it ever existed is risible.
For the last 100 years, it's been a Slap Fight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage.
And predictable non-effectiveness.
Exactly as intended.
If anyone thinks their congressweasels are only getting rich from insider stock tips, I've got a bridge for sale, cheap. Cash only.
Drugs aren't really the problem.
Government is using them to gain carte blanche power to usurp and ignore the Constitution.
And get a fat cartel payday.
If we got rid of drugs and drug use tomorrow, they'd switch to terrorism, with the same result.
If they ran out of foreign terrorists, they'd invent homegrown ones, even if they had to staff it from inside the FBI.
We've already seen that happen, multiple times.
Execute drug dealers on sight, and withhold any medical care or treatment for junkies, and the problem of drugs in this country would disappear like fog on a sunny day.
And government would lose another excuse to abrogate half of the Bill of Rights, at will.
And promptly find another excuse to do so.
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ReplyDeletePeople would use it if it was legal. There will even be people who can use regularly who'd you'd never suspect were using. Perhaps even a surprising number of them.
DeleteThere will also be people who will die from using.
Which group is bigger?
Because it's illegal, it's hard to know; but I suspect there's a LOT of people using silently and discretely because of the massive volume coming into the country and how relatively few junkies we see around us on a daily basis.
Not sure I wanna run this experiment live, but I know I am sick of all the violations to my rights in the name of keeping the people who will die from taking drugs alive.
PS: Sign your work and people will get to see what I'm replying to!
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