Tag Archives: Oxycodone

You Don’t Have To Invade A Country To Destroy It

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There are two major problems caused by our currently porous southern border–how to care for all of the people entering America illegally and the wreckage caused by the drugs coming across the border. The havoc caused by those drugs is often overlooked, but it has impacted a lot of families in America.

On Wednesday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported the following:

  • Beijing fuels America’s fentanyl crisis by subsidizing manufacture of drugs 
  • China’s leaders even tip off dodgy firms being investigated by US agencies 

The article notes:

China‘s leaders give tax breaks to companies that produce fentanyl chemicals and cause some 80,000 US overdose deaths each year, a damning House report warns.

Beijing is fueling America’s fentanyl crisis by subsidizing the manufacture of materials used by traffickers to make pills outside the country, say papers from a committee on China.

Researchers accessed a government website that revealed tax rebates for the production of specific fentanyl precursors and other synthetics — as long as those companies sell them outside of China.

‘Through its actions, as our report has revealed, the Chinese Communist Party is telling us that it wants more fentanyl entering our country,’ said Rep Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the special House committee.

Admittedly, this wouldn’t be an issue if there were not a market for the drugs, but this is a major problem for America both now and in the future.

The article concludes:

The groundwork for the US fentanyl epidemic was laid more than 20 years ago, with aggressive over-prescribing of the synthetic opioid oxycodone.

As US authorities clamped down on its prescription, users moved to heroin, which the Sinaloa cartel happily supplied.

But making its own fentanyl — far more potent and versatile than heroin — in small, easily concealed labs was a game changer.

The cartel went from its first makeshift fentanyl lab to a network of labs concentrated in the northern state of Sinaloa in less than a decade.

A single cartel ‘cook’ can press fentanyl into 100,000 counterfeit pills every day to fool Americans into thinking they’re taking Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone.

The pills are smuggled over the border to supply drug addicts across the US, including the homeless users seen stumbling around on the streets of San Francisco, New York and other big cities.

Fentanyl is so cheap to make that the cartel reaps massive profits even wholesaling the drug at 50 cents per pill, investigators say.

The drug’s potency makes it particularly dangerous.

The narcotic dose of fentanyl is so close to the lethal dose that a pill meant to ensure a high for a habituated user can easily kill a less experienced person taking something they didn’t know was fentanyl.

How many families have to be impacted by this drug before we seal our southern border?

The Consequences Have Arrived

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On Tuesday, The Conservative Review posted an article detailing what has happened in Oregon as a result of decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine in 2020.

The article reports:

Oregon became the first state in the union to decriminalize possession of hard drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine in 2020. This radical experiment in lawlessness has been an unmitigated disaster.

While initially deaf to the concerns raised by Republicans, recovery specialists, and Christian groups concerning Ballot Measure 110, state Democrats are now poised to re-criminalize drug possession and bring their four-year experiment to an end. After all, the majority of Oregonians want the measure repealed.

…The so-called “Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act” eliminated criminal penalties for possession of various quantities of hard drugs. As a result, junkies can now carry one gram of heroin; 2 grams of cocaine; 2 grams of meth; less than 40 user units of methadone; 1 gram or 5 pills of MDMA; less than 40 user units of LSD; and fewer than 40 pills of oxycodone.

Possession of such quantities amounts to a non-criminal Class E violation, which at most can result in a $100 fine or a recommendation for a health assessment with an addiction treatment professional.

Those caught with even more of these once-controlled substances have also seen penalties softened, such that they now face a misdemeanor charge with less than a year in jail, a fine, or both.

Extra to decriminalizing hard drugs, the measure mandated the establishment or funding of recovery centers throughout the state funded by taxes on marijuana.

The article lists the results of the law:

According to Oregon Health Authority data, fatal overdoses have skyrocketed in recent years. In 2020, there were 824 fatal overdoses. The year M110 went into effect, there were 1,189 fatal overdoses. Preliminary data indicates the number of deaths from overdoses in 2022 was north of 1,100.

Fentanyl is proving especially lethal. OregonLive.com noted that in the year ending September 2019, there were 77 known fentanyl deaths. In the year ending September 2023, there were reportedly 1,268 overdose deaths.

There appears to be a correlation between fatal overdoses and M110.

Please follow the link for further details and possible solutions. This really should not be a Republican/Democrat or Liberal/Conservative issue. I believe all of us want to protect our children and young adults from the dangers of hard drugs. Hopefully Oregon will pass a law that moves the state in that direction.

Be Careful On Halloween

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On Wednesday, Townhall reported that federal agents and New York City police officers had stopped a car in the Lincoln Tunnel containing 15,000 “multicolored” fentanyl pills and had an estimated street value of $300,000, according to WPVI. Letitia Bush was arrested.

The article reports:

Reportedly, Bush was in the backseat of the vehicle when police and agents showed up. She had two black tote bags and a yellow LEGO container. Inside the LEGO container were “brick shaped” packages covered in black tape next to LEGO blocks. Inside the black-taped packages contained the “rainbow” fentanyl pills, which were reportedly imprinted with “30 M” to resemble 30mg oxycodone hydrochloride pills. 

New York City’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan warned that the pills “look like candy” and began showing up on the West Coast earlier this year. 

Frank Tarentino, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Division said that the pills are similar-looking to “party drugs” and are “everywhere.” 

“Rainbow fentanyl is a clear and present danger and it is here in New York City,” Tarentino said to Fox 5. “Approximately forty percent of the pills we analyze in our lab contain a lethal dose.”

The article concludes:

Last month, Townhall covered how a California middle schooler was arrested after bringing 150 fentanyl pills  disguised as Percocet to school. The student’s pills caused a campus supervisor to overdose. 

The supervisor came into contact with the drug when they searched the student’s belongings after they were involved in an altercation with another student at school. Police were en route to the school as the overdose occurred. Police who arrived on the scene administered Narcan to the supervisor, who survived.

Like it or not, we live in a world where taking any pill that is not out of a prescription bottle with your name on it can be deadly. Please tell your children not to accept even an aspirin from a friend. On Halloween, my family will be giving out chocolate. Hopefully no one is creating drugs that look like chocolate bars.

Too Close To Home

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We lost a family member this week due to drug addiction. She wasn’t particularly young, but she was too young to die. Opioid addiction is becoming a major problem in America, and it is time to take a good look at how to address the present problem and take action to prevent future problems. Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennet recently made some comments on the subject. His comments were posted today at The Daily Signal.

Here are a few of his comments:

For example, nearly 70 percent of our nation’s opioid deaths do not come via prescription abuse. In 2015, there were 33,091 opioid overdose deaths. Heroin deaths constituted 12,990 of those deaths. Synthetic opioids (mostly illegal fentanyl) constituted another 9,580 deaths.

The main problem today, and the growth for tomorrow, is illegal opioids such as heroin, illegal fentanyl, and a hundred other synthetics, not legal drugs used illegally or in ways not as prescribed.

If we are going to tackle the opioid issue head-on, we must take illegal drugs head-on, with strategies aimed at better border enforcement, better monitoring of international mail services, and a crackdown on cartel activity, both here in America and in source countries.

Second, most of the talk and money spent on our current crisis is on treatment, recovery, and urgent overdose reversal. All are important. But simply improving access to treatment is not enough. We need to improve engagement in treatment, reduce dropout, and address the far too common outcome of relapse with sustained recovery—meaning no use of alcohol, marijuana, or other drugs.

One of the most successful drug treatment programs in America is Teen Challenge. They have a program for both men and women that is Christ-centered.

Wikipedia reports the following about Teen Challenge:

Aaron Bicknese tracked down 59 former Teen Challenge students in 1995, in order to compare them with a similar group of addicts who had spent one or two months in a hospital rehabilitation program. His results, part of his PhD dissertation, were published in “The Teen Challenge Drug Treatment Program in Comparative Perspective” [13]

Bicknese found that Teen Challenge graduates reported returning to drug use less often than the hospital program graduates. His results also showed that Teen Challenge graduates were far more likely to be employed, with 18 of the 59 working at Teen Challenge itself, which relies in part on former clients to run the program.

Much of these results were to Teen Challenge’s benefit, and the high success rates (up to 86%) he found have been quoted in numerous Teen Challenge and Christian Counseling websites.

There are other successful programs, but this is the one I am familiar with and the one that I trust.

Secretary Bennett talks about prevention:

But the main unaddressed nature of the opioid crisis is focus and energy on prevention.

Unlike many other chronic diseases, addiction is entirely preventable. Too few are talking about or spending time on stopping the problem before it starts. We must save every life we can, but to focus exclusively on treatment and recovery at the expense of prevention is like building prosthetic limb stores on shark-infested beachfronts. We need to warn people not to swim in those waters and we need to kill the predatory sharks.

We need look only to the recent past as a guide for today. We had major drug problems in this country in the late 1970s and 1980s. The nation rolled up its sleeves, went to work, talked about it, taught about it, and reversed it—and by 1992 we had cut drug use in half, and even more in some age groups.

But it took a national, kitchen sink strategy: Hollywood got involved, professional athletics got involved, and even presidents talked about it and gave speeches on it. Law enforcement was key, but so was direct messaging to the public at large.

That means getting serious about the goal for youth of no use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or other drugs. That is where 90 percent of addiction starts. This clear prevention message needs to come from parents, educators, political leaders, the entertainment industry, and health care professionals—just as in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

We are losing too many good people to addiction. It is time to stand together as a nation and make drug use culturally unacceptable. That message hit home this past week.

There Are More Than Two Sides To This Story

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A website called Politicker.com posted a story about New York Mayor Bloomberg’s new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms. The idea of the initiative is to fight what the Mayor calls ‘a growing addiction problem in the region.’ On one level this makes sense–drug addiction is a growing problem, but beyond that, why are the Mayor and the City Council practicing medicine?

Having recently undergone some minor surgery, I understand that doctors and hospitals like to ‘manage’ the pain of their patients. That is very nice, but I really think we have become a nation of wimps. The day or two after surgery is generally tough, but to give a patient a two week supply of pain killers is questionable at best.

The article reports:

Mr. Bloomberg also argued the number of pain pills currently being prescribed had even contributed to an uptick in violent crimes outside of pharmacies from robbers looking to steal the drugs.

“You see there’s a lot more hold-ups of pharmacies, people getting held up as they walk out of pharmacies,” he explained. “What are they all about? They’re not trying to steal your shaving cream or toothpaste at the point of a gun. They want these drugs.”

This reminds me of the gun control argument–a government official is going to control the behavior of law-abiding citizens in order to change the behavior of those who choose not to follow the law. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?Enhanced by Zemanta