“In Minnesota there have been overdoses due to a drug that an opioid can be cut with. It is an elephant tranquilizer! One grain of it the size of a poppy seed is terribly dangerous.”
I believe that is a synthetic version of fentanyl, and there was an article in the NY Times that the Chinese government has now banned it,significant quantities were coming from dubious sources in China (where it was legal, but not abused apparently) The article pointed out something stupid about US mail, apparently they don’t screen regular mail for these kind of things and on the dark net apparently standard advice with shipping drugs is 'use the US regular mail" and a lot of this was being shipped from suppliers in China to US based drug dealers (or to Mexico where the Cartels then distributed it).
I think there is a real problem around this issue, and what scares me is the simplistic “throw addicts in jail” kind of mentality or ‘fight the drug gangs’, when it is complex. Some of it is that these drugs are being overprescribed and there are many reasons for that. I have had surgery, not necessarily major, but enough that it could be painful and was getting prescriptions for oxycontin and percoset, both pretty powerful (I never filled them, did fine with advil and then when no threat of bleeding, aspirin). Why start with the heavy duty ones, why not try less addicting ones first before bringing in the big guns? If someone is in pain and the lower dose /strenght one doesn’t work, give them one for the bigger ones. Obviously, if the doctor has a patient who they know has serious pain and regular pain relievers don’t work, something like oxycontin could be the only way to keep them comfortable, and that should not change, but we should be looking at the routine use of these kinds of things. There are also some shady doctors who thanks to lax oversight with the prescriptions they write, were writing prescriptions to feed the illegal drug trade. One thing that should be banned are paper prescriptions, when doctors write prescriptions for controlled, addictive drugs like these they should be sent to monitoring agencies and if they see patterns of questionable prescription writing, they should be audited (and no, this is not a lot of doctors, but one doctor doing this could wreak havoc).
@gouf78 mentioned something I have heard, that with pain management they tend to assume someone need more,rather than less, and i remember reading a study on the pain pumps that people who used them tended to use less than they would be given by a provider. The problem is everyone’s pain levels are different, and in trying to be proactive they may use more than necessary or may use a stronger one than necessary to start out with.
Other problems are people leave this crap laying around when they are done with it and the kids grab it, and so forth.Not to mention this addiction problem is similar to what we have seen in the past, it is tied to issues of economics and cycles of issues, just a different cast of characters is being affected. I have been reading articles where farmers, for example, are wondering who they will leave their farms to, they are often faced with kids who either have od’ed or have drug problems, read another article where employers have job openings and are desperate because so many of those applying are turning up positive for drug use, the people running the show at one company they were leery about bringing in refugees from places like Syria, but were finding them a blessing because they were ready to work and didn’t have drug problems and the like.
The basic answer to me is there are no simple answers, and that is what I fear, we saw with the last ‘war on drugs’ that the emphasis was placed on putting people in jail, and look where that left us, rather than on treatment and figuring out why people are using them in the first place.