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by fc417fc802
37 days ago
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It seems like you've already made up your mind what to believe. In particular you've failed to critically analyze the broader context in which overdose deaths went up and I also have to question your suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended. Sure, marijuana is largely accepted at this point. Most other things you still buy from gangsters on a street corner or via the darknet and will still be arrested for having, frequently losing your job as a side effect. To overdose deaths, those largely correlate to the Sacklers (ie medical professionals inappropriately pushing product with a veneer of legitimacy) and to fentanyl. The latter is particularly deadly due to the combination of accessibility to amateurs with the inherent difficulty of safely compounding such a potent chemical as part of a clandestine operation. |
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> suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
It has not happened evenly across the country, but it happened on the Pacific coast. Drug use stopped being punished, with people openly consuming drugs in front of the police. Oregon even made that official.
This is an important point. Drug enforcement operations did not stop, because no large-scale bureaucratic system can stop at once. But they became a futile theater.
Curtailing cocaine/opium traffic was hard, but not impossible. Cocaine had to flow from growers high up in the mountains, through multiple countries and transportation modes. Each step increased the price for the end-consumers. And cocaine/opiates are relatively bulky, so smugglers couldn't just do one high-risk operation, they had to build a robust supply chain.
Fentanyl upended that. It can be cooked in a lab in Mexico just outside of the US border. The precursors aren't particularly expensive either. It's also highly potent, so that one milk jug of pure fentanyl powder can supply a large-ish state in the US for a year. So high-risk high-reward one-off smuggling operations are much more feasible.