Well by definition the illegal fentanyl isn’t coming from legal drug companies. But believing it has always been illegal fentanyl seems somewhat ahistorical. It wasn’t that long ago that Purdue Pharma, the Sackler Family, and other pharma companies settled for billions of dollars for their role in the opioid epidemic. It hasn’t always been cartels and China.
Seems odd to me we just smoothly slid from the prescription opioid crisis to non-prescription, illegal fentanyl. I’m not saying it’s some big conspiracy where pharma is secretly selling to cartels or anything. It just seems like a weird coincidence. E.g. did the crack down on prescription opioids lead to a large backlog of unused precursor chemicals and feedstocks that could end up in the criminal supply chain?
The crackdown on pill mills lead to a huge increase in demand for black market opioids, which was initially met by heroin and later fent. I think criminal fent manufacturing just happened to develop in that time period but market forces can’t be ignored.
