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Carfentanil is an elephant sedative one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, which is twenty-five to fifty times stronger than heroin.
He’d read recently that enough opioid painkillers had been prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult around the clock for a month.
“But you can’t put a corporation in jail; you just take their money, and it’s not really their money anyway. “The corporation feels no pain.”
Nothing’s more powerful than the morphine molecule, and once it has its hooks in you, nothing matters more.
When a person’s natural opioids are shut down by the deluge of synthetic ones, she told the audience at the community meeting, it creates a growing tolerance to the drug, making the brain crave ever-larger quantities of opioids just to keep from being violently ill.
tried to crush an abuse-resistant Oxy, following Purdue’s long-awaited reformulation in 2010, and it worked exactly as Barbara Van Rooyan envisioned it would when she petitioned the FDA, demanding an opioid blocker, or antagonist, be added to the drug: “If you tried to crunch ’em, they’d gel up on you. You couldn’t even snort ’em, let alone shoot ’em. After that, the pills either went dry or were just too expensive to get. And everybody who used to deal pills starting dealing heroin instead.”
You don’t yet know that the first time is the best. After that, you’re just chasing that first high.”
in which drug users are arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs.
“The places with the lowest overdose mortality rates tend to be in farming-dependent counties” with a more diversified economy,
“When work no longer becomes an option for people, what you have at the base is a structural problem, where the American dream becomes a scam.”
“In the United States, we are very attached to our twelve-step rehabs, which are not affordable, not standardized from one place to another, and not necessarily effective” for the opioid-addicted.
“We’ll score a huge drug bust that we’ve been working on for maybe a year, and all that does is create a vacuum in the market that lasts maybe five to seven days,”
The culprit was fentanyl, once a popularly diverted opioid prescribed in patch form for advanced-cancer patients that was now being illicitly imported from China and mixed with heroin or manufactured into pills.
“Well, you should be. Rehab is a lie. It’s a multibillion-dollar lie.” An annual $35 billion lie—according to a New York Times exposé of a recovery industry it found to be unevenly regulated, rapacious, and largely abstinence-focused when multiple studies show outpatient MAT is the best way to prevent overdose deaths.
Doctors didn’t trust people of color not to abuse opioids, so they prescribed them painkillers at far lower rates than they did whites.
In the 1970s, America decided to deal with drug addiction and dependence as a crime problem rather than a health problem,
cited Portugal, which decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin, in 2001, adding housing, food, and job assistance—and now has the lowest drug-use rate in the European Union, along with significantly lowered rates of drug-related HIV and overdose deaths. In Portugal, the resources that were once devoted to prosecuting and imprisoning drug addicts were funneled into treatment instead.
