The overall death rate for drug overdoses in the US is about 0.3%, but the death rate among regular drug users is naturally much higher. Here's an estimate for different drugs:
Among ordinary drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth, regular users run about a 1-2% chance of overdosing in a given year. Among regular fentanyl users, more than 20% die each year. This is based on a SAMHSA estimate of 330,000 regular fentanyl users in 2022 and a CDC estimate of 75,000 deaths from fentanyl overdoses.
Fentanyl is very addictive, so that will hook new addicts as old ones die. It is insidious.
How do you even get addicted to fentanyl? Given these overdose rates, by the third time you've tried it, you're probably dead.
trace amounts in other drugs, though they may use other opiods for their fix.
And other opiod users move to fentanyl when the usual is no longer is effective
This, and sometimes not just "trace" amounts (although it doesn't take much!). Fentanyl is cheap to manufacture, and it's sometimes added -- not exactly with laboratory precision! -- to other substances to boost their kick and/or simply as a substitute because it's less expensive.
Most likely, no longer available.
"...Given these overdose rates, by the third time you've tried it, you're probably dead."
The overdose rates are per year not per use.
'The overdose rates are per year not per use."
That's what fentanyl addicts tell themselves until ... oops.
If Kevin's stat is correct, the average regular fentanyl user is dead within five years.
It would appear that at least for fentanyl legalization works solve the problem in a few years.
Except you just can't legalize nonmedical use of fentanyl. It's too dangerous. Repeating an earlier comment, there is a small but predictable stream of fentanyl overdose deaths among medical residents -- MDs, with laboratory training and access to pharmaceutical-quality drug! About the only way in which it could be used reliably (ie nonlethally) "legally" would be clinically, eg as part of a management program, for which there are other better alternatives.
You don't get it.
If you make fentanyl universally and cheaply available then the people who want to try it do so and are gone in a few years.
It's official: MF gets all his infromation from bad SF.
Yes, as we all know, the population of potential fentanyl users is fixed, and won't ever change.
Conservatives: people who believe that the population of trans people is so fluid that just reading a book can convert you, but that the population of drug users is so static that legalization won't make a difference.
I know an old woman who has extremely severe arthritis in her spine. Fentanyl patches are the only thing that makes her life bearable.
I've never heard of doctors overdosing on pharmaceutical fentanyl before. More information is called for.
I think the implication of the comment is that medical professionals are ODing while using Fentanyl recreationally.
For medical use Fentanyl comes in liquid form and is administered IV, so the chance of accidental exposure is as close to zero as it gets, or in patches that already have the dosage set to provide a benefit without killing the person.
A one in five chance of death...
How in the hell does that market survive unless there's a pipeline to enter it ... oh wait.
I understand why fentanyl addicts keep using it - they are addicted.
But given what we know about fentanyl (and who doesn't know about homeless fentanyl zombies), why the heck does anyone stay using it?
Mostly it's super cheap and tiny, so it's used to punch up and extend other illicit drugs.
There's no FDA for illegal drugs, no one to track adulteration and mismanufacture.
If it's cheaper and less likely to get caught to dope sugar pills or heroine with fentanyl, or replace them with fentanyl, people do it.
Worse, that spreads to other drugs.
I wonder how many if the regular users of the other drugs listed are also getting regular exposure to fentanyl. A 1.5% death rate for cocaine users seems pretty high.
This problem will take care of itself eventually. The cartels (or your personal dealer) have poisoned the drug supply and so this will be a problem until they decide it's not in their interest to stop poisoning it.
There is no rehab solution.
There is no law enforcement solution.
There is no solution offered by decriminalization.
“The drug supply is poisoned,” he said during a virtual news conference on Tuesday. “That even for those who are using other substances, like cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines, fentanyl is the likely contaminant that is driving overdose deaths.”
https://www.masslive.com/politics/2023/12/the-drug-supply-is-poisoned-report-highlights-fentanyls-deadly-role-in-mass-opioid-crisis.html
It's all in the hands of the cartels and the dealers.
Your statements are all false.
You seem to take the view that you've tried none of the options and so must just kill people.
Gross
Wanting or wishing people dead is kind of Justin's wet dream every day.
Decriminalization is a bad compromise, since it continues to make production and sale illegal, thereby ensuring a continuing complete lack of quality control. The answer is legalization.
Here’s what your criminal drug dealing friends are up to. You feel sorry for them. Police shouldn’t be so mean. Sweden, no less. All cops are bad, right?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/11/sweden-freedom-of-information-laws-deadly-bombings
The blast was one of hundreds of instances of potentially deadly explosives planted at residential addresses across Sweden in the past three years. In 2020 there were a total of 107 detonations, according to police figures, and 13 attempts. In 2023 the number soared to 149 detonations and 62 attempts.
After a wave of explosions and gang violence in the autumn, Sweden is in the midst of another surge of violence – with four explosions at domestic addresses in the past nine days alone, including in Stockholm and in the city of Gävle north of the capital. Many of the recent explosions are believed to have been directed at addresses linked to the notorious criminal network Foxtrot.
...how about unlikely and irrelevant?
People ODing on fentanyl may not be regular fentanyl users or even knowing fentanyl user.
Yep.
The discussion concerning fentanyl tends to be very imprecise. I am uncertain if fentanyl is truly more dangerous than heroin - where danger is defined by the ratio of the LD50 dose to the minimum effective dose. LD 50 stands for the lethal dose that kills 50% of the exposed population as expressed in drug dose per body weight. But the fentanyl family is far more dangerous in practice because it is so much more potent and hence users are likely to die as a result of dillution errors. Even more important, why should an illegal chemist produce straight fentanly when they could easily produce an alkyl or acetyl substituted variant that may be 40+ times more potent than the base fentanyl itself. Carefentayl was available for ~ $7/gm in 50 gm lots about 10 years ago from China (numbers from Science magazine) before the ban. But that gives some idea of the price for synthesizing it in relatively small lots. Carefentanyl is one of the substituted fentanyls that is exceeding potent - my best estimate was that its LD50 was comparable to VX nerve gas. With a kilogram of Carefentanyl having approximately as much opiod potenial as a ton of heroin, it is evident that smuggling controls will not be effective. My understanding is that smuggling controls over the past few decades were able to block <50% of heroin in transportation.
Societies are going to have to deal with such drugs by demand reduction. In time, absent other effective action, the lethality of the fentanyl class of drugs will do this for us.
Have vast illegal black market for drugs because the drugs are illegal, and no way to regulate those drugs. People die from overdoses of fentanyl while trying to get off on cocaine, MDMA, or whatever-the-fuck they're trying to get off on.
Have vast legal market for drugs because people are going to use drugs if they exist and there is no way to stop people from using drugs. Drugs are well regulated and no one is out snorting rails of mystery substance that just so happens to be laced with fentanyl.
Pick one.
Apart from the various ethical issues people are fighting about above, there's a fundamental reason this situation is what is, intrinsic to drug use and not to be solved by happy words like "legalization" and "quality control".
Intrinsic in the biology of these drugs (one of the reasons they are dangerous in a way that caffeine is not) is habituation, in other words the need for a stronger and stronger dose to keep getting the same effect. But the rest of your body (autonomic nervous system, heart, and all that) aren't getting habituated in the same way that your brain is. If you keep pursuing the same level of blissed-out-ness, that's synonymous with continually upping the dose, which is synonymous with eventually dying...
Yes, you could settle for not getting as much blissed-out-ness each successive month, but the kind of person with that degree of self-control is mostly also the kind of person who won't go down this path in the first place. And even if you try to maintain that self-control, all it takes is one bad event (breakup or whatever) and you decide "I can't take it, I need the full bliss tonight".
I'd say one piece of evidence for this is the extent to which even wealthy junkies overdose. These are people who have doctors on staff and are buying pharma grade stuff, not random street junk. And they still land up OD'ing, I suspect for the reasons I gave.