The Real Dangerous Drug Problem
how did fentanyl take over the market?
The heart of it is a Bad Drugs problem. Most of the overdoses of the last 10 years are due to street fentanyl, mostly in the form of counterfeit opioid pills. Most of the casualties were addicts who had got hooked on Oxy back in the 1990s-2000s when it was easy to find a State with loose regs (some of them, like Florida, were ridiculous), hop State borders with a prescription (or without one), doctor shop, find a pill mill and buy mass quantities for a habit and/or the diversion market to funnel it into the high schools.
The whole thing kicked off in the mid-1990s, when Purdue pharma salespeople were doing all the "drug education" for doctors who hadn't had any in medical school, telling them it was okay to prescribe Oxy for every little back sprain. Typical "time release" dose was 40mg- 8 times as much as 5mg Percodan that was the same drug. All anyone had to do was chew the pill and boom, better than street heroin. Powerful enough that overdoses from Oxy outpaced heroin by the end of the 2000s. So the Feds cracked down on the pill mills, and now most every state is signed up to a central Federal database, which should have been policy 25 years before it happened.
But the rapid cutoff of legit manufactured pills without any alternatives available led the addicts to the street heroin market, which rapidly turned into the fentanyl market, because this is the age of designer drugs. And ever since fentanyl, we've had a REAL drug problem. 30 times the number of overdoses, compared with heroin in the 1990s. 4-5 times the annual death toll from Oxycontin and the other prescription opioid pills in the first decade of the 2000s.
Nowadays the surveys show that teenagers are scared off of opioids, because almost all of them are aware of the counterfeit problem and the fentanyl contamination problem that affects other drugs. New users of opioids are down by 2/3 in the early 2020s- but the cartels have started to put it into every drug that passes through their hands, and it's gotten dirt cheap.
At a dollar a pill, some suckers will try that shit. It's an introductory offer.
There’s an effective way to save people curious about opioids—it’s inevitable that there will be some—from the folly of relying on the street market. We need a legal opioid option for adult consumers, like opium cough medicine, quantity and ID controlled at each outlet. We have the technology to do it: I've had my ID copied when purchasing a 6-pack of beer, I've bought booze from stores with quantity limits. We can do the same thing for people buying a bottle of liquid suspension of opium. Also, tightly regulated physician prescribed opioid maintenance for the people with the heaviest habits. The rest of the opioids should remain illegal, but the criminal marketplace will shrink drastically, and that's the most important thing. Not a perfect solution, but it would work a lot better than most people think. I’m fine with throwing the book at anyone who sells to minors, or who diverts supplies to the illicit market.
Straight talk: I'm tired of hearing the problems of our catastrophic Drug War policy diverted into another issue. Drug use is overwhelmingly voluntary. That’s the part of the decision path that matters the most. Consider that drug and alcohol consumption is a situation where men are just plain more reckless with their decisions than women: males start underage more often, they experiment more widely, they take more dangerous drugs, they combine them together more, they care less about the source, they take them in greater quantities, they get addicted more often than females. As a result, men die from overdoses 2-3 times as often as women. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/men-died-overdose-2-3-times-greater-rate-women-us-2020-2021
That situation will not be helped by targeting Anti-Male Sexism.
It isn't Misandry. It's Us, males. XYs. Most of drug addiction is a side effect of Type-R personality, which has a heavily male bias. Drugs are the wrong place to push limits and take risks, because there's no effort involved beyond ingestion, and hence none of the natural checks and brakes that are part of most other type-R challenges. The reward from ingesting a substance comes in one step, bypassing any authentic benefit from testing ones limits. (1) Men like to find an edge to be tested with, but drugs are deceptive like nothing else. It's like testing how deep you can sink in quicksand. And as Stupid Guy Tricks go, playing with drugs that can swallow you whole seems to have an enduring popularity.
I'm recommending liberalizing the laws on a dilute opium formulations because nothing else is going to ensure regulated product safety and starve the money supply of the criminal business, which has been booming for half a century. That's the only reason. I'm advocating it because I throw up my hands.People are going to do what they’re going to do, especially my fellow Americans. I’d like to see more social responsibility and a less self-absorbed notion of individual autonomy in my society, but that’s a long term project—and one that, in my opinion, is severely undercut by a regime of severely coercive prohibitions applied to even the mildest opioids. If some people want to get high on opioids, let them have them. In a safer form, one less frightfully lethal than the fentanyl and other super-potent synthetic opioids that are rampant on the illicit retail market.
I'm also tired of seeing Criminal Culture continuing to assert—inevitably, due to its economic clout—a controlling influence in the realm of music lyrics, music venues, clothing fashions, slang, the youth attitudes of cynicism, nihilism, conspicuous consumption materialism, alienation, the social divides.(2) The guns, the violence, the home invasions, the internecine gang wars, the climate of lawlessness that's resulted from decades of over-policing peoples personal decisions. We know that some of those decisions are reckless per se, when it comes to drug use. The lawlessness of criminalization makes those hazards incomparably worse.
Alcohol Prohibition repeal stopped the 14-year process of the gangsterfication of America- for a while. Then it came back worse with Other Prohibited Drugs, 30-odd years later. No top-down conspiracy- just the return of the repressed, plus the mobility and affluence of postwar American society, in an era when half of the country was under age 30.(3) And this society has been in denial about it ever since. For over 50 years. Roughly three generations, according to the 18-year rule. A time period four times as long as the duration of Alcohol Prohibition, with its 14-year span of the Roaring 20s, Jay Gatsby, the introduction of coed college students to binge drinking. The 1920s was the era that invented the drive-by shooting. How much worse is the decadence and corruption now than it was then- I dunno, 50 times worse, 100 times worse?
All that needs to end. We need to face the answer and take the steps required to provide safe and mild opioids in regulated quantities at licensed outlets, instead of forcing the users and addicts to the ultrapotent lethal on the street market. We have to divert enough demand to legally regulated sources and rigorously supply-controlled physician prescription addict maintenance to shrink the illicit and diversion market down to a level where law enforcement stands a chance of being effective.
But, sure, go on. Let’s go in unproductive circles with blame games. Blame it on neglected men, not getting our egos stroked enough, dying "deaths of despair." The despair is real. But very often the despair shows up at the end stage of addiction, not the beginning. Read some of the stories anonymously recounted in reddit threads on opioids or alcoholism or meth or anything that users get over their heads with. The ride often feels so carefree at the outset. So carefree that few of the addicts even read so much as a single piece of paper outlining the hazards. Especially not the fine print. Most of the illegal drug users I know just jumped in head first, beginning as teenagers- purchasing their products, incidentally, from their schoolmates. Most of them have been men. Nobody pushed them. Some of them have fallen hard. Both the men and the women in that situation deserve a better fate than to be pushed into a corner and poked at with sticks, at the mercy of both their criminal suppliers and the guards of their jail cells.
Yes, psychedelic drugs are a different story. But only in respect to the fact that the experience often has the aspects of an ordeal, struggle, existential challenge, particularly at high dosage amounts. But it’s also important to note that none of those disorienting and occasionally terrifying effects entirely discourage the instinctual inclination of some males to push limits, in both quantity and frequency of use, often as a competitive exercise. Or to gain some imagined extra level of “enlightenment”, of “trascendent consciousness”, based on the postulate that More Must Be Better. If only it was that simple.
Some readers might think they’re encountering an indictment of Blackness and Black Culture here. What a racist assumption. As if Criminal Culture could only be Black Culture. As if Black Culture could only be Criminal Culture.
The most “top-down conspiracy” feature of the Illegal Drug Culture is the Criminal Monopoly over the supply of the high-demand substances, which is a side effect ordained by Drug Prohibition. I’m not conspiracy-brained enough to claim that the lawmakers intended the results that have followed. All that “Sixties Counterculture Was A CIA Project That Worked” fake history narrative? That vaguely insinuative “Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon” drivel? Dope, Inc. by Lyndon LaRouche’s EIR? Rat dung. Anybody who thinks they can challenge me on that conclusion had better have read this Book List, because I have. Read. All of them. I own most of them, as hard copies. So I know that just because LaRouche’s mysteriously durable org cribbed a few provocative passages from some of those books, that does not make the narrative interpretation found in Dope, Inc. anything other than stem-winding nonsense. Written for the sort of audience that thinks a “bread-crumb trail” is a pathway to the Concealed Truths of History, rather than the original meaning of “bread-crumb trail”: a trail of false clues that appear to be valuable data, used for the purpose of misleading the researcher. The classical definition. The “MI6/CIA/FSB/every intelligence agency out there” meaning.
Yes, there was an MK-ULTRA, and MK-NAOMI, and similar projects. But they were local beta test experiments that did not yield success, because psychedelic experiences defy predictability. CIA researchers weren’t even able to use those substances to produce predictable results in clinical settings, much less controlling the youth culture from above like Svengalis. Just imagine the reports to headquarters if the Agency ever ran across Steve Jobs and tracked his life path between age 15 and 22, for example. Their minds must have been already blown by acidhead cases like Tim Scully- of whom the Feds were most assuredly aware, at least after he was arrested, convicted, and sent to Federal prison. Read that last link. Read about Scully’s accomplishments, even before he was arrested for LSD manufacture at the age of 24.
Respect your Baby Boomer geniuses. Don’t insult your own intelligence on this matter, either. I don’t doubt that intelligence agencies—from all over, potentially—still surveill the psychedelic scene, and some of the more well-known people associated with it. But the CIA doesn’t run it behind the scenes. That genie escaped their grasp around 1964.
By contrast, the Social Media platforms, entirely legal, have provably been effectively and profitably engineered as a mind control project with impacts that exceed the wildest imaginations of 1950s MK-ULTRA investigators. It can’t be said to be a conspiracy any more, because this information is public and widely known. But it started out as one. All nice and legal-like, to be sure.
My way of dealing with this circumstance of Modernity is to treat my cellphone as a phone, not as source of information or communication on the Internet, much less a social media feed. The phone in itself is only a problem if it’s misused; it isn’t a conspiracy, Steve Jobs could not have anticipated the way it would eventually be adapted for social media. But the phone is easily misused. I often leave mine off, or at home- a much healthier option than many suspect. I almost never use a phone to read news on the Internet, and I never use it to chat of “platforms.” I use a laptop, an adult computer; the keyword search and multiple reference link capabilities are incomparably superior, simply as a function of screen and keyboard size. (I suspect that most Substack readers use phones, because few of you bother to offer link support for your Substack comments. You basically talk through your hats. For cheap talk, and worthless talk.)
I pick and choose my social media selectively, aware that there was plenty of social media available in the pre-Facebook era. We just didn’t call it social media back then. I can’t stand being fed by an algorithm. Fortunately, I can ignore it on Substack. Beware: the Information Stovepipe is Mind Control. That goes a long way toward solving the mind control situation, which is real- and actually quite concerning, viewed from the outside looking in. The rest of you are on your own. But you should know what you’ve gotten yourselves into, if you’re an addict of the Attention Economy. You’ve been recruited to join a mind control project. As a test subject.