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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sam Quinones
Read between
November 17 - November 21, 2024
This methamphetamine, meanwhile, prompted strange obsessions—with bicycles, with flashlights, and with hoarding junk. In each of these places, it seemed mental illness was the problem. It was, but so much of it was induced by the new meth.
The twelve months ending September 2020 tallied the highest number of overdose deaths in the country’s history—87,000, according to a preliminary estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Much of that was due to illicit street fentanyl.
“Meth unleashed charge after charge in German brains,” Ohler wrote. “Neurotransmitters were released, exploded in the synaptic gaps, burst and dispersed their explosive cargo: neuronal paths twitched, gap junctions flared, everything whirred and roared.
Likewise, an addict, with natural communal impulses muted, devolves into an antisocial state. Her sole focus is on self-gratification, obeying her me-first impulse, isolated and alone, even as she lives amid millions of others. Any relationship serves her only inasmuch as it can help her score. In her addicted brain, Me has won the battle over Us. As a culture, it seemed to me, we did more or less what she did. Not, of course, that we were all on heroin. But like a drug addict, we came to believe that we were fine alone. Communing with others was messy, awkward, put us in contact with people
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McKinsey also estimated how many customers might develop addiction to, or die from, OxyContin. At one point the consultant suggested Purdue pay its drugstore distributors rebates of $14,000 for every addiction and fatal overdose OxyContin caused, to ensure that chains like CVS and others would keep distributing the pill.
Meth supplies increased in part because of two seemingly contradictory events. First, hundreds of labs were seized and tons of meth destroyed; and second, meth prices plummeted. Between 2015 and 2019, the Mexican military raided 333 meth labs in Sinaloa alone. But no one was ever arrested. Far from being a deterrent, the lab seizures showed that no one would pay a personal price. More people entered the trade as a result. At one point in 2019, DEA intelligence held that, despite the hundreds of lab seizures, in Sinaloa alone at least seventy meth labs were operating, each with the capacity to
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