These overdoses are an an expected and predicted consequence of opioid prohibition.
See, before opioid prohibition, deaths from opioid use were quite rare. You ever heard a pothead drone on about "it's nearly impossible to overdose from smoking marijuana"? The same thing applies to smoking opium. It's nearly impossible to overdose on that. But prohibition (which optimises for potency/volume, in order to reduce the risks of ending up in a concrete box) has pushed us from opium smoking and oral laudanum to injectable heroin to fentanyl and now (in the late 2010s) we're at fucking carfentanil (which is so potent it's been used as a chemical weapon).
The current USian "opioid crisis" is another manifestation of opioid prohibition pushing people from safer, cheaper, less disruptive and deadly drugs to more deadlier ones. Two decades ago some USian opioid users could go to pill mills and get prescriptions for pharmaceutical grade opioids but the DEA kicked down doctor's doors a bunch and that ended up pushing people to the illicit market. Maybe next time you see those scary increasing graphs of opioid deaths vs time, give that a thought? Sum up all those deaths (compared to the baseline, prior to the increased LEA focus on "pill mills) and ask yourself: are all those needless deaths worth it?
The DEA cracking skulls over opioids and investigating doctors is literally the only reason illicit fentanyl (and fent analogues) even is a thing. I am so very doubtful that skull-cracking and door-kicking will miraculously work after decades of it not working. The only way out of this hell is a total unconditional surrender in this "war on drugs".
> See, before opioid prohibition, deaths from opioid use were quite rare. You ever heard a pothead drone on about "it's nearly impossible to overdose from smoking marijuana"? The s
I'm not an expert. Can you please link to studies to verify this?
We're talking about overdosing and I don't think marijuana falls into that category.
Sadly, you're very right. "Spice", or "bath salts", as synthetic cannabinoids have been called, with much higher potency than marijuana, have already hit the recreational pharmacutical market with predicably negative consequences.
Yeah, "designer drugs" -- the products someone trying to make a drug that works on the same systems but is different enough in structure from anything on a Controlled Substances list are bad news. The problem lies in the fact that many drugs with long histories of human use (opium, marijuana) have long histories of human use, and so they've been tested extensively and are known not to produce horrid adverse effects. Trying to replicate a compound that has been tested for efficacy and safety over literal millenia (and not being allowed to just change tiny things on the molecule) is not something that is likely to give results close to the original.
Ironically, the obverse task -- trying to create a molecule that acts on similar neurobiological targets as an illegal drug but doesnt get people high or look like a molecule from an illegal drug -- is similarly fraught. A flagrant example is BIA 10-2474, an experimental drug meant to target the endocannabinoid system in a roundabout way -- not by directly activating receptors, but by inhibiting an enzyme that degrades endogenous chemicals that activate endocannabinoid receptors -- which would have similar effects as directly activating those receptors. A trial of it killed one person and irreversibly neurologically damaged a few others.
We criminalise drugs at deep costs to research and medecine (I haven't even gotten into the use of MDMA in psychotherapy or ketamine for depression), and regardless on what side of the law they work on, it is a very difficult task for chemists to try to imitate drugs that have been with humanity for millenia when they aren't allowed to make molecules that look like blacklisted ones.
> We're talking about overdosing and I don't think marijuana falls into that category.
I mentioned the (commonly known) lack of marijuana overdoses to analogise it with the (lesser known) utter rarity of overdoses with smoked opium: low potency mixed with a route of administration that acts as a dead man's switch (if you nod out, you'll likely drop the opium pipe) makes for safe drug use.
See, before opioid prohibition, deaths from opioid use were quite rare. You ever heard a pothead drone on about "it's nearly impossible to overdose from smoking marijuana"? The same thing applies to smoking opium. It's nearly impossible to overdose on that. But prohibition (which optimises for potency/volume, in order to reduce the risks of ending up in a concrete box) has pushed us from opium smoking and oral laudanum to injectable heroin to fentanyl and now (in the late 2010s) we're at fucking carfentanil (which is so potent it's been used as a chemical weapon).
This is the "iron law of prohibition" at work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition
The current USian "opioid crisis" is another manifestation of opioid prohibition pushing people from safer, cheaper, less disruptive and deadly drugs to more deadlier ones. Two decades ago some USian opioid users could go to pill mills and get prescriptions for pharmaceutical grade opioids but the DEA kicked down doctor's doors a bunch and that ended up pushing people to the illicit market. Maybe next time you see those scary increasing graphs of opioid deaths vs time, give that a thought? Sum up all those deaths (compared to the baseline, prior to the increased LEA focus on "pill mills) and ask yourself: are all those needless deaths worth it?
The DEA cracking skulls over opioids and investigating doctors is literally the only reason illicit fentanyl (and fent analogues) even is a thing. I am so very doubtful that skull-cracking and door-kicking will miraculously work after decades of it not working. The only way out of this hell is a total unconditional surrender in this "war on drugs".