The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
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Blend uniformity is the essential step in creating “content uniformity”—which is defined as a 95 percent certainty that the same amount of the drug is in each pill or capsule the company sells to the public.
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(sugar and fat are not found together in nature).
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“I see this as a chemical attack on the United States, with the Chinese government’s complicity. They’re pushing this material in what I consider to be the third Opium War, just this time by Chinese against us and other Western countries, and fentanyl is its weapon of mass destruction.”
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Dopamine tells us that something better awaits us; serotonin says we have enough.
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Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisons its great writers, artists, and scientists. It resembles, too, any culture so numbed by the babble of marketing that it doesn’t have to lock up its most creative spirits; it just drowns them out.
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Our epidemic of opioid addiction was just an extreme expression of a culture in which, in so many ways, Me won the battle over Us.
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dates to at least the early 1960s, when Valium was marketed by Arthur Sackler as the convenient solution to the anxiety of being female—the industry’s first billion-dollar drug.
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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. Under the plan, for example, CVS pharmacies would be paid $36 million in 2019 to offset the 2,400 of its customers that McKinsey estimated would become addicted to, or overdose and die on, OxyContin that year.
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It was as if, like a brain addicted to its drug, the company could see no way forward that did not involve opioids.
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nothing is a full success or a total failure.
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“Our modern skulls house a stone-age mind.”
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“When people decide to punish somebody who has behaved unfairly, we see activation in brain areas associated with reward,” Molly Crockett, a Yale University psychologist, told the podcast Hidden Brain. “There’s a visceral satisfaction in doling out punishment.”
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tweeting and Facebook likes are to social activism what heroin, meth, and other drugs are to happiness. Both are easily achieved with little lasting effect.
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The price of a pound of meth remains low. To compete, Louisville meth dealers now offer free syringes and delivery; others offer syringes already loaded with liquified meth so users can immediately shoot up.
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Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, a fascinating book by Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California,
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They also discovered that the policies many of them once supported had left their addicted loved ones with few alternatives besides prison or the streets.
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In 2004, at the behest of folks from libertarian Northern Kentucky, state lawmakers granted government startlingly coercive powers. “Casey’s Law” allowed any relative or friend of an addict to petition a court to order him to treatment, or, if he left treatment, to jail while avoiding a criminal record. The petitioner need only show that the addict was a danger to himself or others.
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Defendants were overdosing and dying on the street before they could be tried for that first offense. So Kenton County judges kept arrestees in jail to save their lives.
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It’s difficult for the truly mentally ill to get care because the facilities are full of people who are on meth.”
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Opioid addicts on Suboxone, without that life repair, were still connected to the drug world and still wanted to get high on something. They provided a ready market for Mexican traffickers’ cheap and plentiful P2P meth. It reminded me of Nicole Avena’s experiments on sugar-dependent rats at Princeton—only now playing out on people nationwide. One drug primed them for almost anything else that was available.
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Massive supplies of P2P meth out of Mexico created demand for a stimulant out of a market for a depressant. In the process, traffickers forged a new population of mentally ill Americans.
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In the end, there was no diversifying of Purdue into a modern pharmaceutical company. Purdue and the Sacklers, it seemed to me, struggled to kick their dependence on OxyContin revenue.
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It was the final result of the opioid crisis. Two drugs, made not from plants but from chemicals, were defining the new dope world and now formed an unmercifully addictive, mind-twisting, and deadly concoction that no one demanded.
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The effect of quasi-monopolies on our economy reminds me of what happens in our brains on drugs. Drugs limit or skew competition of natural chemicals within the brain to ensure their survival at the expense of our well-being.
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Both marketing and dope invite us to confuse pleasure with happiness or fulfillment.
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The United States is the world’s leading per capita consumer of both opioids and sugar.
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He had a tent. He was fifty-five. He was nice to her. She was badly bruised from the street, and he pretended to care. “I just wanted somebody to tell me I was pretty and give me some drugs. He lured me in.”
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“We can’t arrest our way out of this.”
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found, no chain had a reputation among drug users for being easier to rip off than Walmart. I heard this over and over. They avoided Target because of its wider aisles and brighter lights.
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Walmart’s focus was not on deterring shoplifting, but on catching suspects and calling the police.
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Police spent huge amounts of their time at their local Walmarts processing shoplifters that the chain hadn’t invested money in deterring.
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“It’s hard to say, ‘Naw, I’m done.’ ” Money will do that.
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Arizona-based Insys bribed doctors to prescribe its fentanyl-based Subsys painkiller, and hired a stripper named Sunrise Lee as a sales rep to help convince physicians with lap dances; she was eventually promoted to regional sales director.
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“At first you could see them thinking they still had control of their lives because they still had their clothes, dragging around suitcases and backpacks,” Norman told me. “Then you see them day by day. It goes from three backpacks and a suitcase to a suitcase and a backpack, then they don’t have nothing, just a backpack—complaining about how their stuff got stolen.”
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“When we put up that hood,” one recovering addict told me, “we’re making the choice to separate ourselves from everyone else—instead of someone pushing us out. I think it’s our way to hide from the world that doesn’t accept us. The hood is the refuge. It’s our safe place.”
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People don’t respond to the light; they respond to the heat.
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I don’t trust American capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly. The last fifty years are replete with examples of corporations turning addictive services and substances against us, fine-tuning their addictiveness, then marketing them aggressively.
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One reason overdose deaths during the coronavirus pandemic skyrocketed is that police in many areas stopped arresting people for the minor crimes and outstanding warrants that are symptoms of their addictions. Left on the street, many use until they die.
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I suspect we’ll come to see the last ten months of 2020 and into 2021 at least in part as one long, unplanned experiment into what happens when the most devastating street drugs we’ve known are, in effect, decriminalized, and those addicted to them are allowed to remain on the street to use them.
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the job of a journalist is not to relentlessly tell us how right we are, and thus how virtuous.
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Longmire discovered CrossFit seven years ago. He dove into it with the zeal he’d once reserved for cocaine or processed food.
Banksean
This sums up CrossFit people pretty well.
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The entire model of Christianity is relationship based. That’s what you see at this CrossFit.”
Banksean
Omfg CrossFit. Cross. Fit. It’s a Jesus thing lol