The researchers behind the study said the number had grown from 71 million pills in 2022 and 50,000 pills in 2017.
The counterfeit fentanyl pills are made to look like legal prescription opioid medication — such as oxycodone and tramadol — but are often far deadlier than the originals.
"Fentanyl in pill form is now beginning to dominate the drug supply [in the US]. Pills are easy to ship and disguise and can also be marketed easily, as Americans have a reputation of loving their pills," said the study's lead author Joseph Palamar of NYU Langone Health in the US.
Fuck Nixon for coining that phrase. You can’t mitigate drug use with constraint. Addicts find a way. It’s mitigated with rehabilitative treatment. For those who claim that rehab doesn’t stick, I’d like to see how incarceration does.
Now, I'm not saying China are the good guys or anything.
However, if I wanted to stop a rogue American security agency from selling heroin to fund secret, illegal wars around the world, I'd pump Mexico full of fentanyl.
Legalizing drugs is not enough. Many people addicted to illegal opioids are addicted because they are in chronic pain and have no other option. We need a robust universal healthcare system.
We need robust universal healthcare for a bunch of other reasons, but specifically for the chronic pain management issue I don't see how making opioids (and marijuana, since AFAIK that helps some people too) available over the counter wouldn't fix it.
Sure it would. Why would people buy possibly-adulterated shit from a sketchy street dealer if they could just buy it over-the-counter at the drugstore and be assured that it was labeled accurately?
Tinfoil take: if crack was a CIA op, fent also is, they’re just targeting all drug users. They think if they make it all deadly and dangerous, everyone’ll stop. There’s some christofascist psychos who think “addicts deserve it” and they should cull the populace, just like they thought PoC deserved it with crack.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book)
Is the original expose about cia involvement with crack, and still I think a good starting place, even if it has some flaws. It was less about what crack would do to americans, (though they were completely apathetic towards the harm they were doing in the US) and more to do with what the cia wanted to do with off books funding that crack provided, secretly fund paramilitary deathsquads in Nicaragua.
I think if the CIA is still involved in US drug trafficking, and I wouldn't be surprised, it is probably still for off books funding primarily.
Anybody watching back the hit TV series, E.R., observe how earlier in the series during an emergency the docs would ask the nurses for administration of "Oxy" and "Hydro" and later in the series they would ask for "Fent".
Street names.
Tell me the producers of those drugs did not pay off the producers of the show to fit that in.
Highly addictive drug product placement.
Unreal.
There wasn't the opioid epidemic we now have when those episodes came out. Those drug companies making synthetic were just getting started.
And there's no reality. Patient comes in unconscious from an unknown malady and Stamo's character is like, "Chem 7, CBC, Fent lollipop!"