Steve Breen for April 03, 2023

Head of DHS says this is not a problem. It’s not like the poison comes over the southern border.

Don’t buy it, don’t use it, dry up what drives the market.

Some of us are pre-wired to respond to opioids and become addicted. Why the cartels want to kill their customers makes no sense.

The fentanyl program has been around for years. Trying to hang it on Biden or his policies is STUPID. We’d still have the same problem if the indicted former president was in office.

We’ll have the same problem until we admit that it is US that is using and that WE are the ones causing it.

Demand is the killer.

Some here politicizing a tragedy. Very sad.

From the VERY conservative CATO Institute: In 2021, U.S. citizens were 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers—ten times greater than convictions of illegal immigrants for the same offense.Over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, so U.S. citizens (who are subject to less scrutiny) when crossing legally are the best smugglers.

Oh, but most of the fentanyl comes in by boat from China. So what have we seen come out of the house to fund the screening of cargo ships and immigration reform? Bush was the last president to propose immigration reform, and the Republican congress went berserk.

A self induced tragedy. I doubt any of the users are unaware of the risk and sadly a risk they think worth taking.

Let’s get right down to the FACTS on fentanyl:

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid analgesic that is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent. In its prescription form it is prescribed for pain, but fentanyl is also made illegally.

Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are the most common drugs involved in overdose deaths…

The high potency of fentanyl greatly increases risk of overdose, especially if a person who uses drugs is unaware that a powder or pill contains it. They can underestimate the dose of opioids they are taking, resulting in overdose.

Naloxone is a medicine that can be given to a person to reverse a fentanyl overdose. Multiple naloxone doses might be necessary because of fentanyl’s potency.

Medication with behavioral therapies has been shown to be effective in treating people with an addiction to fentanyl and other opioids.

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/fentanyl

Final point: Treatment for chronic pain is the use for opiates in general. What we need to recognize is that not all pain is physical. I worked in this field for about 10 years in the 1970-80’s, and the clinical people saw both the addictions due to physical pain and due to mental stress.

The head of a police union in the San Francisco Bay Area faces federal charges for allegedly smuggling thousands of synthetic opioids into the U.S. from multiple countries with the intent to distribute them.

San Jose Police Officers Association Executive Director Joanne Marian Segovia, 64, has been charged with attempt to unlawfully import a controlled substance — specifically valeryl fentanyl, a fentanyl analog — according to a complaint filed in federal court earlier this week.

Between 2015 and 2023, Segovia received 61 shipments that were labeled “Wedding Party Favors,” “Shirts Tops,” “Gift Makeup,” “Chocolate and Sweets,” “Food Supplement,” “Health Product” and “Supplement,” originating from countries including Hong Kong, Hungary, India and Singapore, according to the complaint. In reality, they were illicit drugs, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California allege.

Between July 2019 and January 2023

That’s not how drugs work. They don’t take you; you take them. We wouldn’t have a fentanyl problem if America wasn’t so addicted to drugs. Drugs aren’t pushed; they’re sold to willing customers.

The fentanyl problem in the USA is the fallout from legal drug pusher Pharmaceutical Corporations selling oxycontin and other assorted “pain killers” through a network of willing feelgood doctors for decades, and then cutting off their users when the heat came down from the FDA and DEA. Pharmacies were complicit too, some tied directly to their pusher doctor. Now there are uncounted numbers of junkies (your friends, family, coworkers and neighbors) that are forced to hit the street for their fentanyl fix. This also leads to new customers on the street that could be your friends, family, coworkers and neighbors.

PROSECUTE the Sackler family for INTENTIONALLY promoting opioids.

The number one killer of children. Not guns.

I’d put in a post about the opioid receptors, but it would be a waste of space here. Don’t pass judgement on addiction’s hows and whys until you have some reasonable knowledge of them.