(bumped) It's a lot, and a little. UPDATED: The President says I'm wrong — way wrong
/Acting on information from the Massachusetts state police, Greenwich Police intercepted and arrested two Hispanic drug couriers on I-95 and seized two kilos of fentanyl. Just two milligrams of this stuff will kill a person, so it’s probably a good thing that this shipment was kept off the street, but this story illustrates the futility of our “war against drugs”:
When San Francisco police seized seven kilos of powder-filled baggies containing the deadly opioid fentanyl last week, the city’s police chief warned the bust contained “enough lethal overdoses to wipe out San Francisco’s population four times over”.
But drug addiction experts say the haul may represent just a tiny fraction of the massive volume of the powerful synthetic drug that is flooding California, after being mostly an east coast phenomenon for years.
The evidence is in the rapidly surging death rates. The number of deaths from fentanyl overdoses jumped by more than 2100% in California in five years, state figures show. Overdoses of synthetic opioids (mostly fentanyl) killed nearly 4,000 residents in the state last year, according to the most recent estimate from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In San Francisco, drug users are dying at a rate of nearly two a day, many on the streets of the city’s Tenderloin District. In San Diego, fentanyl is coursing through the homeless population, [okay, so the stuff isn’t completely without merit Ed] according to experts and recent media reports.
“Fentanyl has moved west,” said Dr Daniel Ciccarone, a professor specializing in addiction medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Ciccarone said the lab-made drug was barely seen in western states before 2017. Instead, he said, it used to be distributed by drug trafficking networks supplying the east coast, who often slipped it into heroin supplies without telling users.
… In California, the drug is being sold under its own name, as powders or tablets. It’s also being mixed with stimulants, like methamphetamines.
Fentanyl is so powerful that a quantity small enough to fit under a fingernail can be deadly within minutes. Dr Aimee Moulin, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, Davis medical center in Sacramento, said she was seeing adolescents as young as 13 overdose on counterfeit opioid pills available for home delivery over the internet.
I’m not sure there’s an answer to this.
Severe punishment meant there were few, if any fentanyl dealers in the 15th century, but modern sensitivities would probably bar the reintroduction of the classic drawn and quartered penalty*
*As explained in British Criminal Law2, first the prisoner is dragged on wooden frame to the site of his execution (drawn). Then he is hung repeatedly by the neck until almost dead and is released before the final moment – this is meant to act as pre-emptive torture. The executioner will then strap the naked prisoner down onto a rack (usually to a public audience) and perform the most gruesome part of the method. He is castrated and disemboweled on the spot, and his respective body organs (genitalia, entrails, and others) are set aflame in front of his very eyes. He would still be alive at that point and will be decapitated. His body parts would then be cut up in four pieces to be gibbeted (put on public display) in different parts of the country to deter future treason,
UPDATE: Ol’ Dependables says I’m just being hysterical. He said it, I believe it, that settles it. Whew!
