When the history of the fentanyl crisis is written, 2023 may be remembered as the year Americans woke up to an unprecedented threat scouring communities - and a deepening cultural divide over what to do about it.
For the first time in U.S. history, fatal overdoses peaked above 112,000 deaths, with young people and people of color among the hardest hit.
Drug policy experts, and people living with addiction, say the magnitude of this calamity now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s.
“We’ve had an entire community swept away,” said Louise Vincent, a harm reduction activist in North Carolina, who says she still sometimes uses street opioids including fentanyl.
Still kills less than booze, but it’s starting to compete
As insane as this is, fentanyl has surpassed alcohol deaths.
And alcohol is massively damaging. Just want to put that in perspective. So I guess booze up cause alcoholics have to catch up?
I think it depends on who you ask, and how they get to their number.
This link says >140,000 USA deaths per year.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-topics/alcohol-facts-and-statistics/alcohol-related-emergencies-and-deaths-united-statesOh I see, that includes those affected by alcohol related deaths like a drunk killing a pedestrian. I suppose you have a good point. At least fentanyl only kills it’s user’s.
For a loose definition of “fentanyl users”. It’s unfortunately not unheard of for a tiny amount of cross-contamination from a dealer’s scale to cause an OD after taking totally unrelated drugs.
I have to imagine that fentanyl related suffering/death has driven others to suicide or violent crime. Every addicted person’s suffering ripples through their family and community.
Legalize anyone over the age of 21 (after signing tons of wavers and watching educational videos about how life ruining it is) buy real oxycodone from a Walgreens or CVS, and you will solve your fentanyl crisis overnight, bonus points for hurting a giant revenue source for the cartels.
Let’s all just take it, od, and give the world back to non human animals.
They have their own drug problems:
I’m convinced this is actually a suicide epidemic, not just an overdose epidemic.
The best advertising a dealer can get is to have someone die from their batch.
I just made a suicidal post before I read this. Maybe people are sick of living… Life kinda sucks for a lot of people.
The best advertising a dealer can get is to have someone die from their batch.
Any source on that.
I was paraphrasing a Vice article.
… though now that you mention it, it’s not sourced in Vice either. Just: “All of my heroin friends wanted to try the stuff that had killed the guy in M’s bed.” So take that with a grain of salt I guess.
It doesn’t sound to me like a real claim. I don’t think anyone is keeping stats on drug dealer advertising, nor would validating it change the point in any way. It just serves to illustrate how some are / may be profiting off of a deadly product.
Interesting thought but I can only see a distinct minority being suicide.
I suspect it comes down to this: we think of suicide as a deliberate act by which a person kills themself. But, what about people who are aware they are playing a dangerous game but no longer care enough (or no longer have the wherewithal to even make an attempt)? At the end of the day, they themselves put the drug into their body. Strictly speaking, they did kill themselves, just in the same way that someone popping a bunch of pills in the medicine cabinet may be trying to do.
Where it gets dicey is if we consider the person in question to be completely “out of control”, at which point it’s common to anthropomorphize the drug and turn it into a kind of killer. But again – drugs must be acted upon to kill.
