This is a good example of why a strongly regulated legalized market would be a better drug policy than fostering an unregulated black market.
Authorities playing whack-a-mole with the drug cartels are making the situation actively worse in all regards.
It’s bad but not terrible in Europe. That is, addicts can get straight diamorphine (aka heroin) in many countries, often locked behind failing methadone therapy but at least it’s there, and we generally don’t have issues like in the US where there’s a straight oxycodone to black market pipeline. Also, socialised healthcare and everything.
If opioid addiction was left completely to the medical profession we’d have much much better results, the best treatment is tapering flanked by psycho-social treatment. Tapering means: Diamorphine addiction gets treated by diamorphine, in lower and lower doses, at a pace the patients can tolerate. The German term is very appropriate, “ausschleichen”, “to sneak out”. When addicts don’t have to worry about getting their dose they start to function again in a social sense, can hold a job, their overall situation improves, and with that the reason why they drowned their sorrows in the first place. Even if they happen to be too far gone to really get the curve you still get improved lives for the patients and lower costs to society because diamorphine is dirt cheap per dose (if not bought on the black market) and you get rid of all the drug-related crime.
Here in Germany heroin is starting to get laced with fentanyl prompting drug consumption rooms (for people not in treatment) to offer tests and the consumers by and large aren’t clueless, but even if you have a laced dose you don’t want to take, if it’s the only available dose it’s going to get shot up. What are you going to tell people, as a social worker? “Let’s wait for a doctor’s appointment to get you methadone”? Not going to happen. Only thing they can do is watch carefully and already have the Naloxone in their hand.
What’s stopping us from providing proper therapy is, more or less, moralising. “Giving the junkies their fix”. The kicker is the actual fix for junkies in the end is not the drug, but the ability to live a decent life. Gazillions of US soldiers were hooked to morphine in Vietnam, many doctors were shit-scared what would happen once they came back. Nothing happened: Figures that when you take a person out of hellish conditions, they lose interest in escaping those hellish conditions. And now that I’ve said that, let me tell you the actual truth: It’s moralising and capitalism as that shit is the almost sole reason why people in western countries have lives inhuman enough to resort to those kinds of escapes in the first place.
I just want to point out that the Oxy to black market pipeline ended about a decade ago in the US. The pendulum has swung back the other way so hard that doctors are terrified of prescribing even short term scripts. Oxy average street value is now somehow more than $1/MG. A gum wrapper (stanard dose) of H (Fent mix) is like $6-$10 depending on market and qty. People who have lost access to their pain meds and started using H say a dose is the equivalent of like 15 to 20 MG of oxy. It would be more, if it didn’t have much shorter legs.
But without the war on drugs, how are all our capitalist oligarchy’s masquerading as democracies supposed to criminalise and persecute the filthy proles?
And how would they peddle propaganda to make you hate others if you’re a chill psychonaut hippie and not a pissed off wageslave backstabbing for a bigger piece of the pie?
Why is heroin following Moores law?
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Cops are gonna faint while in the same zip code as that stuff now
This is the best summary I could come up with:
London — As authorities clamp down on fentanyl distribution and the amount of heroin produced in Afghanistan decreases under the Taliban, criminal enterprises have turned to a deadly alternative.
2-Benzyl Benzimidazole opioids, commonly known as nitazines, are a class of synthetic compound developed in the 1950s as painkillers, but which were never approved for use as medicines.
“Nitazenes pose a credible threat and… predicted changes in heroin availability in Europe could herald an increase in the use of synthetic opioids with possibly profound implications for public health,” the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction wrote in a letter to the Lancet public health journal in February.
“We cannot assume that existing approaches to responding to opioid problems will be sufficient without adapting to the challenges posed by the appearance of a range of highly potent but pharmacologically diverse substances.”
“Synthetic opioids are significantly more toxic than heroin and have led to thousands of deaths overseas,” Britain’s Crime and Policing Minister Chris Philp said in a statement.
Holland said the gap in the European heroin market created by the Taliban’s crackdown on production in Afghanistan could lead to a boom in nitazenes across Europe.
The original article contains 466 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What does it mean for drug B to be X times stronger than drug A? Is it per milligram? Per LD50?
That would be the required dosage to get a regular hit (or to feel something maybe)
Measured by weight (mg)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_benzimidazole_opioids
There is the Analgetic Potency listed, which would be the weight factor. However looking at the individual compounds the numbers can vary drastically, i didnt find any LD50 information and many of them being just completely new.
For reference Heroin has a potency of about 2 compared to Morphine and Fentanyl has a potency of about 100.
So this is uncharted territory both in terms of potency and the compounds themselves. There exists no knowledge about the precise effects, about side effects, long term harm, addiction…
Yep
Didn’t the taliban use opioid sales to finance themselves? Why are they cracking down now?
Nope! They sold opiates. Opiates derive from plants, usually poppies, while opioids are synthetic. The Taliban doesn’t need/hasn’t really needed synthetic opioid production, because Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium poppies.
If anything, in the new era of lab-made chemicals that fry your brain like an egg the first time you hear about them, the Taliban are likely falling behind in the drug trade.
Opiates are opioids. Opiate:opioid::square:rectangle
Opioids are a class of drugs that derive from, or mimic, natural substances found in the opium poppy plant.
Sorry I misspoke, I was referring to opiates from poppies not synthetics.
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