Let’s not overlook why there is an increase in deaths: people are depressed due to the disruptions in their lives.

Attacking this from the perspective of increasing drug enforcement will get us nowhere. I’d argue that enforcement needs to be relaxed, remove stigma from mental health treatment, and let all consumers walk free without even an arrest. The last thing someone needs in a spiral is a court case. The court isn’t there to help you.

Anecdata time! I take a prescription medication that is also a controlled substance. I am _supposed_ to check in with my doctor every three months, and am _supposed_ to be subjected to random drug tests to make sure I am taking this med and not selling it.

But, due to COVID, I've not had to check in with my doctor since March 2020. I am not sure when the mandatory reviews will start back up again. If I were naughty, I could make a good deal of money selling this substance. This isn't an opiate, but the story could be the same. All sorts of controls and checks flew out the window 18 months ago and haven't returned. Maybe it is contributing.

Probably it is the fentanyl though.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of drug requires testing like this? Suboxone or something similar? Seems like an invasion of privacy unless is somehow related to rehabilitation I suppose.

I'm guessing ADHD medication like dextroamphetamine.

Controlled substance agreements aren't that unusual. Usually the patient has to agree to a program and the drug tests ensure it's not diverted.

> aren't that unusual

They're unusual in countries where you are treated like a human being.

Most countries it’s much harder to get controlled substances than in the US.

I mean, we had a massive opioid epidemic, not sure you know?

Not really. I am surprised at the ridiculous hoops Americans have to go through to get controlled drugs from the pharmacy. Photo ID, special prescription pads for the doctor, a special copy filed off with the federal government... here we just pick up the prescription. As far as I can tell the difference is doctors are just less willing to prescribe opiates here for minor or transitory pain. I've always gotten Tylenol after dental surgery for example. I groan about it but it probably hurts less than a smack addiction would.

Your opioid epidemic is due to your society, not any kind of difficulty (or lack thereof) in procuring something to escape from it.

Bullshit. Just look at opioid prescribing in the US compared to say the EU. It’s an order of magnitude higher than Germany (per capita).

What point are you making?

That the reason why the US has stricter rules around controlled substances is because we have a problem due to overprescribing.

In most countries it’s easier to get controlled substances. In fact, the easier and less risky it is, the lower abuse seems to be.

There is truth to this. The difficulty in getting prescription opiates does lead some to heroin I’m sure.

Dextroamphetamine

"Many people are concerned that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic"

Every time I read a phrase like this I have to add "reaction to" in front of COVID. Whether you think our societies policies and reaction were justified or not, this has nothing to do with a disease and everything to do with how we decided to react to that disease.

Personally I know of (not direct contacts but friends or children of friends, or neighbors) three people who have committed suicide in the last year and a half and zero people who have died of covid. I'm not saying I'm a representative sample, but it's hard for me to think very positively about how our society approached this problem.

FYI Looks like this OC is about one facet of the book "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" [2020]

"From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class"

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/de...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51801314-deaths-of-despa...

Looks important.

I binged on this and adjacent topics in 2020. Mostly David Graeber and MMT. I wish I had noticed this title then. Alas, I don't think I have the heart to keep picking this scab.

I have an entire bookcase of these books, going back ~20 years, starting with my transmutation from apolitical to political. Kevin Phillips, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Krugman, Jane Jacobs, Amy Goodman, etc. I even tried to at least skim read some of the seminal texts, like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, etc. Looking back, I wish I had just started with Smith and Marx and Keynes. Oh well.

Any way. These are stories which need to be told. But at some point each of us can choose to start looking forward, fumble towards something better, starting with our own mental, physical, financial health.

Yes obviously after years of being on the losing side of the war on drugs clearly we just need to fight harder

You can do both: decriminalize possession, treat addiction as an illness, and also crack down on the channels by which the product enters the market. This is the most beneficial approach, as users get help, and you have fewer new users.

You still have a black market full of bad actors. That's the problem and that doesn't get solved. Those users of decriminalized drugs still have to go somewhere to get what they want.

Give them the drugs they need through the established channels, free of charge. Fentanyl is an extremely cheap drug when you cut the red tape. A large share - perhaps the majority - of these overdosing drug users were turned onto opioids by the medical establishment, which got away scot-free with malpractice.

You know that no one wants fentanyl? People want heroine, Oxys, xanaxs etc.

People are overdosing on fake drugs and relapses.

Yes, once you understand that drug dealing is an economic crime and works as an MLM scheme. Go after the distribution channels and make sure the cost of doing business is high enough so the MLM pyramid collapses.

Lots of countries have won the "war on drugs", it's not rocket science.

It's not an mlm scheme. It's people delivering a product where there is demand for it. The only countries that have limited drug use are the ones with excessive penalties, laws that are extremely unpopular in pretty much all of the western world. Another poster in this thread also high lights some of the issues with those laws.

Your also making the assumption that drug use it self is a problem that needs to be solved. But it's not, lack of access to clean drugs and lack of support system for people with issues is the problem to solve.

> It's not an mlm scheme.

It absolutely is. Drug addicts finance their habit by selling to other addicts, and (crucially) recruiting new users.

> Your also making the assumption that drug use it self is a problem that needs to be solved.

I'm pretty sure addiction is a problem that needs to be solved by any metric.

Where did you get this idea from? Do you use drugs?

Sure, let's just give up and allow deadly poison dealers free access to our markets. If we wanted to disrupt the cartel routes we could.

So you acknowledge that there are markets for the drugs "deadly poison" as you call them.

So would not the better solution be to regulate and tax the markets? To allow legitimate business to operate in the markets, leading to better, more consistent and safer products for consumers of those products and eliminate the black market and the criminal actors that operate in the shadows.

The war on drugs has been a complete and abject failure from every angle one could objectively look at it, unless you're goals are to have overly militarized police forces that consistently violate peoples rights and brutalize and imprison non-violent people. Current policies have turned patrol officers into thugs that rob innocent people (e.g. Civil Asset Forfeiture), that use fabricated pre-textual traffic stops and unreliable and/or faked drug dog "signals" to violate peoples right against unlawful searches.

This is LOLbertarian nonsense. We had legal, prescription drugs that started this whole mess. A generation of American families are destroyed, but, you know, creative destruction.

> Sure, let's just give up and allow deadly poison dealers free access to our markets.

We already do this in a wide variety of industries.

Chinese cartels?

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

> Currently, China remains the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail and express consignment operations environment, as well as the main source for all fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the United States

You don't know as much about drugs, their problems and their solutions as you think you do. Suggest you read up on it and inform your self before getting riled up.

You obviously have no clue what you're talking about. Good luck clearing up your confusion.

Feel free to share a source

>Ehh some one wants to post racist bull shit about mexico Ill prove them wrong with what ever tone i feel like.

Saying we should have tighter borders or that a lot of drugs come through / from Mexico is not racist. If you want to convince somebody of your position don't be a complete jerk while making libelous statements.

I don't need a government telling me where I can or cannot go. Absolute tyranny. What's next, a license to butter my toast?

I'm guessing you're being facetious. Hard to be certain except for the ludicrousness of your comment.

You would have to be familiar with the 2016 libertarian party presidential debate and the obsession with toast-related licenses in order to truly know for sure.

Closing the border doesn't affect citizens.

It's stopping non-citizens.

It certainly harms citizens that want to travel to the other country. It harms businesses with customers in the other country. It harms citizens who love someone in the other country. It harms the livelihood of citizens who trade with those on the other side of the border.

When reporters and students stop being beheaded in those countries, maybe we open the borders to them.

It's called sanctions.

We do it to Iran too.

No one is advocating for Canadian borders to be closed out they're not wholesale murdering students who disagree with them and burying the bodies in unmarked graves, at least in modern times.

I don't know what to tell you.

It sucks but they need to fix their shit.

Closing the border certainly affects citizens. It affects who I cannot do business with.

If only there was a way to communicate with people without needing to be in their physical presence.

Perhaps one day someone will invent something amazing like this.

> Hardcore drug trafficking is correlated to lax border enforcement

The problems the US has are because it is a fundamentally shit place to live and most people exist solely for someone else to step on. Living a life like that, who can blame anyone for only being able to deal with it by taking heroin.

How do you square that with the fact that there are literally millions of people willing to travel hundreds of miles on foot risking death just to live there?

Your very effective propaganda mill.

Do you live in the US? Is so, where and why? Which countries do you think aren't shit places to live?

Which border? Most sex workers don't enter via land, and the worst drugs don't either.

You can’t tighten “the border” without tightening all borders. Land, sea, air, visa overstays, etc.

Can you not tighten your belt without cutting to yourself in half?

They didn't say CLOSE the borders, they said tighten.

You can increase border effectiveness in a number of different ways.

Even incremental improvements can reduce contraband flow.

Which border do you think? In 3 seconds of googling you can find out you have the wrong opinion unless you don't think fentanyl is one of the worst drugs.[0]

What do you think happens to vulnerable children smuggled by the cartels?

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/fentanyl-seizur...

Please no. It isn't the state's job to save us from ourselves. More and more of our rights are slipping away because we need to protect the children.

If you're asking how can we dave the most lives, you're asking the wrong question. You shouod be wondering how we preserve the most liberty.