My wife got scammed. They opened a bank account in her name tied to her email address. She contacted that bank right away. For 2 months she received messages about other people transferring money into this account. These were other people getting scammed. The wheels turn too slowly.
Lack of understanding isn't the issue. Most fentanyl deaths are accidental poisoning. Mexican drug cartels are manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs like Xanax and Oxycodone but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient because it's cheaper. They have bad quality control and sometimes put in a fatal dose.
Fentanyl is administered daily by medical professionals in all sorts of situations. If "not understanding it's strength" is not what causes people to overdose on it, then why aren't millions of people dying from its administration in a medical setting?
The claim upthread is that regulation in labeling would materially curb fentanyl deaths. It would not. Materially restricting access to high-test opiates might, but we have ample experience from well-labeled high-test opiates to suggest that uncontrolled access to any of them is likely to be deadly.
If by "regulation" you mean "restriction", then, sure, I buy that, stipulating that it's somehow possible to restrict access. But what the preceding commenter meant by "regulation" was labeling. No, that won't work.
Because we had (and still do have) an epidemic of fatal abuse of labeled, regulated opioids. I'm not saying restriction works either; I'm rejecting the pat solutionism of the original comment and acknowledging how difficult the problem is. Maybe legalization is a good idea, maybe not; what it certainly isn't is a solution to opioid deaths.
And I believe the problem isn't so much that those legal opioids are dangerous, because in theory you still have a medical system to curb access. It is that they are addictive, and that users who get addicted will either abuse them or switch to illegal drugs if they can't access them.
I am not against drug legalisation, on libertarian grounds. If you want to kill yourself, kill yourself, it's your life not mine. But I don't buy that banning drugs results in more harm that making them freely available.
And it's very paradoxical for liberal societies to want to ban or heavily control the use of alcohol and cigarettes and to consider legalising hard drugs at the same time.
I'm not advocating for legalization. I'm pushing back on what I felt was a too-pat appeal to legalization and labeling as a cure-all for opioid deaths.
I don't have to. We've had a nationwide epidemic of deaths from regulated, labeled opiates, which is a fact that refutes your argument without requiring me to provide an alternative.
The overdoses per abuser from regulated, labeled opiates is on the order of at least 100x lower than illicit opioids. The consistent formulation is hugely safer than street drugs with inconsistent dose.
Sure. But I am responding to you, not that guy upthread.
Your implied claim, as I read it, is that "opioid-ness" is "why fentanyl kills," and there's nothing special going on because we had a bunch of deaths from licit opioids in the early 2000s. But I think that there's actually something special about illicit fentanyl in particular, as opposed to regulated opioids, and dose inconsistency is one plausible difference.
Anyway, you could just share what your thoughts are more explicitly, and that would be interesting and maybe harder to misunderstand.
I was responding to a particular argument. I've lost track of what we would be arguing about here. My point was pretty straightforward: high-test opiates don't simply kill because they're unregulated; they do a very good job of killing simply by being widely available at all.
They are not at all meaningfully controlled. There are drive-thru markets for this stuff with people doing traffic control in Chicago, and presumably in every other major market.
I don't believe it much matters. The death stats on oxycodone are staggering. I'm sure the street drugs are much more dangerous dose-for-dose, but given free access to oxycodone, you're just as likely to die, perhaps on a marginally longer schedule (there are survivor high-functioning maintenance addicts on both natural and synthetic/street opioids, obviously). Remember as well that a great many street fentanyl deaths were pts started on regulated, labeled opioids who spun off into addiction; they transitioned to fentanyl because it was easier to get, not because it was stronger.
Remember as well that a great many street fentanyl deaths were pts started on regulated, labeled opioids
Primis, this is an unbacked claim. Secundo, why didn't they die from prescription opiods?
The truth is fentanyl has a low safety index which makes the dose more important.
"The calculated safety index (ORantinociception/ORrespiratory depression) for fentanyl of 1.20 suggests that fentanyl has a low safety margin, implicating that fentanyl needs to be titrated with caution."
Now you're way off the map. The originem claim was that controlled fentanyl dose would decrease overdoses. It wasn't about oxycodone being 'safe' (even though I gave you stats that showed 80% of deaths of from combining drugs), it wasn't about oxycodone vs heroin. Not to mention that way more people take oxycodone than heroin, so even from a stats 101 angle this doesn't make sense. Really, what is the point of a reply like this?
I don't think I am. The subtext of the original comment was that making opiates more widely available but more carefully regulated as to content and dosage would save lives. It pretty clearly would not do that. The high order bit of this problem is the number of people that start habitually using opiates; I think basically nothing else matters.
Clear according to what? You gave no statistics and made nothing but unbacked claims. Most of what you did say is directly contradicted by the CDC.
Fentanyl is extremely potent and has a very narrow window between therapeutic dose and an overdose that kills you. Other opiate cause deaths overwhelmingly only when combined with other drugs.
Everything you have said about increased use or more deaths is an assumption not based on data. Why won't you source your claims?
You are making a claim then saying you don't have to back it up while making another dubious claim.
Among synthetic opioid–involved overdose deaths in 2016, almost 80% involved another drug or alcohol, such as: another opioid, heroin, cocaine, prescription opioids, benzodiazepines, alcohol, psychostimulants, and antidepressants.
FWIW, 2016 is somewhat dated as far as fentanyl goes. It has really exploded since that time.
> In 2021, nearly 71,000 drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids (other than methadone) occurred in the United States, which is more deaths than from any other type of opioid. Synthetic opioid-involved death rates increased by over 22% from 2020 to 2021 and accounted for nearly 88% of all opioid-involved deaths in 2021. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2021 was nearly 23 times the number in 2013.
What I posted wasn't about fentanyl. They implied that overdoses happen just as much with prescription pain killers that have consistent doses and what I posted shows that people aren't overdosing on known doses, they die when they combine drugs.
I would recommend https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-are-drug-dealers-p... , but the TL;DR is roughly "drug addicts are highly motivated by their addiction to find the most powerful drugs they can, to get the most powerful high they can get. Fentanyl being so strong that people overdose is, in this regard, a selling point"
Not the OP but how about cheering for no one? Centralization of power leads to oppression - covid, hate crimes, centralized banking. Maybe you think these are worthwhile pursuits but they are designed to control.
> The dating of ice sheets has proved to be a key element in providing dates for palaeoclimatic records. According to Richard Alley, "In many ways, ice cores are the 'rosetta stones' that allow development of a global network of accurately dated paleoclimatic records using the best ages determined anywhere on the planet".[43]
If a civilization develops stone working, metalworking, leaded gasoline, nuclear power, etc , that's all probably recorded in ice cores (that are apparently 5 million years old in bubbles).
What would be a more cost effective way to identify signs of prior civilization?
Read the emissions off in black holes that old, (or rather, black hole accretion disks, which are apparently modified Lorentzian attractors with superfluidity and Hawking radiation)
Fly there and perform multiple geologically and geographically covering miles-deep sediment sample studies,
Doesn't this hold true for everything? It all started with painting. Then photography came around and took some work to produce. Photography finally reached the masses with 1-hour photo shops. Then anyone with a phone could create them. Now AI can do it. It's the price of lowering the barrier to entry.
We can go through this same exercise with a number of technological improvements.
Construction has led to the demise of awe around buildings.
Mass production has killed our sense of awe around products.
Cheap abundant food has led to a decline in awe around fancy meals.
I'm still in awe when I see certain paintings and buildings made by human hand, because it involves thousands of hours to become good at something in general. There is an emotional component to it that makes me like it more than computer generated stuff - that is just mid at best. Never been amazed by some ai art. There is some indirect grind component to be admired in it when you consider research and development, but that does not touch me like a masterpiece of some legendary artist.
There was an article on HN yesterday about the Carmalite monks in Wyoming building a Gothic monastery[1]. They couldn't afford the cost so they started using CNC machines to carve the rock themselves. Looking at the work they've completed so far, I can't tell the difference between their work hand carved stone.
Just because the barrier to entry is lower doesn't mean there is nothing awe inspiring produced. People in general aren't as impressed by the results because of saturation.
The article mentions supervision once and “blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization” about half a dozen times. Is the idea to just have some bearucracy around ISPs, then? It really isn't clear what the point is.
You have to use Meta? I'm not arguing for or against privacy here - just trying to point out that you still have options. It might be a pain to contact loved ones, check in on friends, etc. but so is using an ATM.
