Some More News - Some More News: Where Is All This Fentanyl Coming From?

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Hi. In today's episode, we look at why fentanyl is so dangerous, why it's being imported into the U.S. at higher rates than ever, and why American greed is partially to blame for the current overdose crisis. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15p3Ppv1ntSnHzxtGkY7MZZReOWXFAvwMyUwgcjuO0JU/edit?usp=sharing  Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/somemorenews. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Check out our MERCH STORE: https://shop.somemorenews.com   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA   Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/  TikTok:

Okay, just breathe, just breathe. It's okay, just stay calm. Okay, they want the news, they want the news. You're gonna give them the news. It's that simple. It's gonna be fine. Hey, yeah, I actually don't think that news is a good safe word for this. I kind of say it like all the time.

What about like, vulva? No, I say that all the time too. Papoosa? That's good. I could do, day. We really gotta make that light brighter on the camera. Hi, it's time for the news. You want it, you want the news.

And I'm just here to give you the news. And here's some more news. It's just the regular news that we always do, per-yoo-j, Joo-wo, even if it crosses state lines. So today I want to talk about the hip new groove all the popular kids are falling into piles of fentanyl. What's going on with that stuff?

Where is it coming from? Does anyone have some in the room right now? And while many may poo poo such activities, No, no, no, abort, abort. I said poo poo such. I said poo poo such, okay? Yes, it's a strange thing to say. I have to go, all right? I don't think they know what's going on yet.

Hopefully they won't. They're idiots. They're barely paying attention. So they're not gonna catch on, but just like don't, just you focus. And if I say poo poo such, I'm not saying the other thing. Just, all right, love you.

Hi, sorry, I got this, I had this weird cough. It looks like I'm talking to a hidden microphone in my chest, but I'm actually just talking about fentanyl, that drug I mentioned, this episode about the drug. Do a title. Where is all this fentanyl coming from? Good question, us, fentanyl or fentanyl, as I might pronounce it throughout this episode,

is very much the current boogeyman plaguing Americans, the media, and especially the very sensitive police officers who can't even hear the word without passing out in their own urine. It's very funny. And while those cops might be, dare I say, big babies, I also don't want to act like fentanyl isn't a problem. It's a synthetic opioid that's famously 50 times stronger

than heroin, 100 times stronger than morphine, and 10 times stronger than 10 morphines. Fentanyl is cheaper to produce, more potent and deadlier than heroin. And thanks to all that, fentanyl overdoses are now responsible for roughly two thirds of the 110,000 American deaths each year, while synthetic opioids in general

are the number one killer of Americans ages 18 to 45. It's the latest phase of the ongoing opioid crisis that the Department of Health and Human Services first declared an emergency back in 2017. And as they tend to do when most crises hit, American leadership has not responded with practical solutions, but rather whatever they do when a swarm of killer bees is coming,

you know, freaking out about it. There's of course your classic urban legends, like when the DEA issues warnings that dealers make fentanyl look like candy just to ensnare and addict the younger generation, which is absolutely not okay unless you're a cigarette company. As I expertly alluded to, fresh reports of police officers

suffering severe medical symptoms from either inhaling or touching powdered fentanyl on the job now arise every few weeks, even though that's not really an actual biological thing that happens when you inhale or touch fentanyl. Former police chief turned addiction and drug policy scholar Brandon Del Pozo suggests that cops are likely reacting to a combination of stress and fear. So just for clarification, every few weeks,

our brave protectors get so scared at the sight of street drugs that it puts them in the hospital. Good thing they don't have guns. I mean, can you imagine? Overall, the current proposed solution is almost always punitive. These solutions have been largely, ah, I knew it, bad, as in not effective solutions that tend to make things worse.

Local governments are using overdose deaths as an excuse to expand the power of prosecutors. Dozens of states have enacted tough on crime policies involving harsher penalties for anyone caught buying or making fentanyl, or even using it socially around someone who later dies from an overdose. In 2023 alone, hundreds of fentanyl crime bills were introduced nationwide.

In Virginia, the drug is now legally considered a freaking weapon of terrorism. In Iowa, you can get 10 years in prison for selling someone less than five grams of the stuff. In some states, sharing fentanyl recreationally with someone who dies from an overdose can now be prosecuted as a homicide. Meanwhile, approaches that seek to treat the root causes of drug abuse are increasingly difficult to pass and fund.

Approaches such as public health clinics, where addicts can go to inject their drugs under medical supervision. These clinics are not just a safer environment than what drug users find on the streets. They also provide assistance in case of overdoses, as well as counseling services that long-term help some people get clean for good.

But of course, doing that wouldn't look tough on crime. So we opt for prison instead. If throwing people in prison was a highly effective way to get them off drugs, there might be some logic to this approach. Instead, prisons offer severely inadequate healthcare services to inmates. And as anyone who's ever seen any TV show

about prison ever can tell you, their rates of substance abuse significantly outpaced that of the general public. So we're taking addicts off the street and putting them into what's effectively an addiction incubator. This is such an ineffective method that prisons themselves are going out of their way

to create rehab programs. Durham blames the opioid epidemic for the jail's population surge in recent years. The jail has 1800 beds, but there are 2300 people here now, so many sleep in cots on the floor. Despite the high levels of drug abuse among the jail population nationwide,

few US jails offer drug treatment programs. They don't allocate the funds or have the physical space. Basically, since politicians won't do it, it seems that some are taking it upon themselves. And when I say politicians, I don't just mean Republicans, mind you. I mean, politicians. Last year, Pennsylvania's state Senate voted to outlaw

supervised drug injection sites in a bipartisan move supported by many Democrats. Philadelphia Senator and Democrat Christine Tartaglione sponsored the bill and said that these clinics enable addiction, even though decades of research demonstrates the exact opposite. Also last year, Idaho's state legislature passed a new law that caps funding for naloxone, also known as Narcan, The exact opposite. Also last year, Idaho's state legislature passed a new law

that caps funding for naloxone, also known as Narcan, a drug that can help reverse fentanyl overdoses. This actually dismantles a preexisting state program that aimed to more widely distribute Narcan at substance abuse centers, which would have made sense because it reverses fentanyl overdoses. It's like capping anti-venom funding

in the middle of snake season. Officials with Idaho's Department of Health and Welfare warned that the overdose rate in 2023 would likely have been four times higher without the Narcan distribution system they'd already set up. In other words, they are punishing addicts for being addicted and the punishment is death.

Similarly, many states have laws on the books criminalizing life-saving fentanyl test strips, which help drug users determine if their cocaine, meth, heroin, or other drugs are mixed with fentanyl. The strips aren't entirely foolproof, but research suggests that they help lower the risk of fentanyl overdose, particularly among younger users. None of these ideas are a magic bullet

that will fix the problem overnight, hence the term harm reduction and not magic bullet, which is apparently just a blender, which is a huge letdown. Painkiller abuse is at this point deeply entrenched in American society and will require a variety of approaches from various angles over an extended period of time

to make better. Or, hear me out, or, we can just blame immigrants. Just since the time I was elected speaker, less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration. American school children have been forced into virtual schools. Why? So migrants can sleep in their school buildings. Korean war veterans of the U.S. have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants.

Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Grr! You tell him, Mike, you weird little cabbage. See, with most debates around drug addiction in America, it all comes down to supply versus demand. We can either make it harder for Americans to get their hands on the drugs they desperately wish to purchase and consume,

or we can treat the underlying issues that get Americans hooked on those drugs in the first place. As evidence from all the stuff I already said, we aren't doing great when it comes to addressing the demand stuff. Maybe a D, D minus. In this case, D stands for dick poor. So then we have the supply. That's typically seen as something the GOP is primarily concerned about, and gets mad at Democrats for not caring about.

Ugh! And gripped by a cold fear usually reserved for space marines who realize the alien they're fighting has acid for blood, right-wing pundits and politicians assure us that America's fentanyl problem is directly linked to immigration and border security, and by extension, our fentanyl-loving president. Last July, Illinois Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller tweeted that the Biden administration

opened our borders and flooded our streets with fentanyl. And here's Republican Arizona Rep Andy Biggs opening a House Judiciary Committee session on border security last year. It is open. The border is dangerous. Drugs pour across international terrorists, criminal gang members, people from all over the world, indeed over 150 nations have come through. We can't even vet most of those individuals. The reasoning is clear. If we want to get America off the fentanyl train and onto the sobriety blimp, all we need to do is keep out the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to distribute drugs shaped like candy.

By the way, forget lollipops, go for a fake pixie stick. All right, it's way easier. There you go, some free fentanyl advice. You're welcome. And much like our solutions for drug addiction, our solutions for drug smuggling are even more punitive. Some might say, horrifying. Greg Abbott put out an official disaster declaration

about the border saying, President Biden's open border policies have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities. Ronald Fleshbag DeSantis supported the idea of just fucking shooting any migrants that might be smuggling drugs. And Vivek Ramaswamy, well, he's just doing his own thing,

I guess. He might be an idiot. The point being that the GOP has largely agreed that in order to stop fentanyl deaths, the most pressing goal is to crack down on the border, specifically stopping migrants. That is their number one solution to this crisis. But you might notice that whenever these pundits and politicians talk about immigration, they

always kind of tack on fentanyl in a vague sense. It's always like, we've got this open border for all these migrants. Plus, you know, fentanyl is a problem. I mean, if you get what I'm saying. Every American recognizes that they're not safe with this open border. His lawless actions have resulted in, you know, 150,000 fentanyl deaths. That's Republican Tennessee rep Mark Green on Fox News.

Here he is doing it again on Instagram, along with helpful captions. Well, we've learned a considerable amount of what's going on right now on the border, and it's much of what we already anticipated. But just in this one sector, we found out today that the cartels are making 32 million dollars a week. That's one of nine sectors, 32 million dollars a week, just trafficking humans. That's not counting the, you know, fentanyl that are pouring into this country. See, there's a reason that fentanyl is always kind of lumped in like that. It's a bit of a reveal

for this episode, actually. And that reason is because, spoilers, immigrants aren't actually smuggling fentanyl into the United States. Seriously, the thing the GOP is hinging all their fentanyl policies on is not happening. At least that's not the primary way it gets brought in. And when you stand back and think about it for a second, of course that's not what's happening. A lot of the people seeking a new life in America by crossing our southern border

are fleeing from drug cartels in the first place. They're so anti-fentanyl, they picked up their lives and moved to another country to get away from it. Can you say the same? Last year, 88% of entrants to a migrant shelter in Nogales on the Mexico-Arizona border said they were coming to the US to escape violence, as opposed to coming here for new economic opportunities.

So it's pretty silly to think that these people went to the cartels and said, hey, I'm about to embark on a several thousand mile extraordinarily dangerous trek with my family to an extremely hostile nation trying to keep me out with barbed wire fences, largely in order to avoid being killed or kidnapped by you, the person I would have to talk to to make this happen.

And I was wondering, you want me to bring some pills along? See if we can make this a win-win. That's how you get yourself kill naps. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that fentanyl isn't coming from Mexico, nor am I saying that there isn't an international component to this whole dilly.

We're gonna do the ad dance, and when we come back, we will one, two, cha cha cha, and then tell you who is to blame for the fentanyl crisis. It's so exciting. Please stick around, at least as long as it takes to trace an IP address. Ah! Sorry, that was a fart.

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No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code morenews. Do it. Hey, welcome back to the Sting Show. It's just a show. We're just doing a show here. No one's being secretly monitored from a van outside

called Big Cody's Heating and Plumbing. I mean, why would my real name be on the van? Use your head, idiot. All right, so before the break, we revealed with gusto that immigrants aren't actually smuggling fentanyl into the United States, defying everything the GOP says about the border crisis. Can you believe it?

They lied to us. So who's really bringing the fentanyl into this country? Any guesses? I feel like Detective Poirot over here. Is it the Lord or perhaps the manager? Which vaccine skeptic will it be? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?

What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?

What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?

What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? journey of black market fentanyl into the country. Ideally, we would have made a brightly animated schoolhouse rock style musical number out of this, but we couldn't think of anything that rhymes

with N-phenyl-N12-phenyl ethyl-4-piper-dinolepropanamide. More like N-phenyl-N12-phenyl ethyl-4-piper-dinolpropanadide. Oh, perfect. Let's get that cartoon in the works then. Awesome. Much like everything these days, Fentanyl is like a hip and slimmer and worst version of the stuff we used to have.

If heroin is one of the clunky CRT televisions, Fentanyl is the QLED 4K smart TV that makes you watch ads in order to swap inputs. See, the fact that heroin is a crop means producing it in mass quantities takes a lot of effort and manual labor. You have to pay farmers to grow your poppies and one assumes that drug cartels hate paying vendors

for services, not to mention their company retirement plan is a hole in the desert. Fentanyl on the other hand is relatively easy to produce, requiring only a small lab that you can set up basically anywhere. Because it's so potent, ubiquitous, cheap, and impossible to distinguish visually from drugs like cocaine or heroin, fentanyl is also commonly mixed in

with other street drugs to cut costs. In fact, a lot of surveys indicate that many people who've overdosed on fentanyl didn't even realize they'd taken it. A survey conducted among 17 British Columbia harm reduction sites found 73% of those who tested positive for fentanyl had no idea they'd ingested it. And because it's so damn potent

and gets mixed with other drugs, it's really hard to know if what you're taking will kill you. Fentanyl is so lethal that the amount in this bag is enough to kill five non-tolerant people. Do you remember the first time you took fentanyl? Honestly, I don't remember the exact time because I probably thought it was heroin. Didn't even realize I was getting fentanyl.

I had bought, like, two prescriptions of Perk Tens, thinking that they was Perk Tens, but they was fitting up here. You're talking on, you bought this on the street from somebody, but you thought it was. Yeah, I mean, they had the bottle and the name on them and everything. Did you know there was fentanyl

on it the first time you took it? Not at all. It's almost indistinguishable. That's from a local news special called Contaminated, the fentanyl crisis in St. Louis, which covers a lot of great information about the problem. Most illegal fentanyl used to come to the US directly from China, but after their government

started cracking down on drug trafficking in 2019, this pushed the market underground to be with all the cool skateboarders in Dostoevsky. Today, Mexican drug cartels coordinate with criminal organizations in China to import the chemicals used for manufacturing fentanyl powder, which the cartels process in Mexico

and then press it into pills that look like what you'd buy from a pharmacy. They then smuggle these pills across the border into the US. But believe it or not, not all Mexican people have the same job. And as we said before the break, the cartels don't use migrants who are crossing the border hoping for a better life

as fentanyl smugglers. Obviously. And not just because the migrants don't want to do it. After all, those are the people Customs and Border Patrol are stopping and harassing and putting into cages. Giving it to them is like an NFL player handing the football to someone in the crowd. According to former Border Patrol agent turned author Jen Budd, According to former Border Patrol agent turned author, Jen Budd, nearly all the incoming migrants who endeavor to cross the border walk directly up to US officials and turn themselves in

so they can apply for asylum. So who is bringing the drugs in? I'll give you a hint. That's right, our director and hundreds of other US citizens, but mostly our director. He's wanted in seven states. Not this one though, this one too?

All right, well, see, it turns out Mexican drug cartels are actually pretty good at crime, much like our director. So being smart about it, cartels use people who already have the legal right to cross the border from Mexico into the States. You know, Americans. That's right, while many Mexican nationals are absolutely benefiting financially from the drug trade, its import into this country is almost entirely an American problem. It's us! We are the problem!

USA! USA, USA. Americans are smuggling fentanyl into the US where other Americans eagerly purchase it from them. Americans like Joanne Marion Segovia, the executive director of a Northern California police union who was arrested last year for receiving fentanyl shipments from India, Hong Kong, Hungary, and Singapore, sometimes using her work computer

to arrange the pickups and drop-offs. In 2021, 86.3% of all convicted fentanyl drug traffickers were United States citizens. That's 10 times higher than the trafficking conviction rate among undocumented immigrants. Over 90% of border patrol fentanyl seizures happened at legal crossing points, not on the routes used by migrants to cross.

And more than 95% of the total fentanyl sees along the US-Mexico border was found in personal vehicles. In 2021, the border patrol encountered a total of 1.8 million people attempting to cross into the United States for asylum. Just 279 of them, 0.02% of the total had any fentanyl on their person whatsoever. 0.02%.

They're far more likely to have toy cars and cans of tuna on them than an illegal drug. We know that because we take their shit when they are caught. This is all so glaringly obvious and so clearly backed up by all of the available evidence. The issue is closer to climate change than abortion. It's less a moral quandary and closer to just plain old misinformation.

Even Fox News has been forced to adjust their anti-immigration arguments around pesky reality. And CBP sources tell Fox News, these large groups bred are creating a distraction for the cartels to move things like the deadly drug fentanyl. Here in the Eagle Pass area alone, there are more than 60 miles of unpatrolled border right now because agents are busy processing migrants.

Oh, see, it's not that the migrants are bringing it in, which they're not, they're just distracting us from checking the vehicles that are, wow, it's almost like it's somehow always the migrants' fault, even when it's not actually that. And if you're wondering, this argument doesn't really hold water either.

For starters, if we were more concerned about the fentanyl than the fact that migrants are trying to enter the US, we could easily reassign more agents to check those cars. But even if we did that, solving the problem of fentanyl smuggling still wouldn't be as simple as putting more guards along the border. After all, fentanyl is like, it's like really small.

Research from Scientific American indicates that the total amount of pure fentanyl consumed in the US in 2021 only amounted to something in the single digit of metric tons. Just one kilo of fentanyl can be cut into over 50,000 individual doses. In fact, because it's easier to conceal than other drugs, tighter controls around border crossings

actually tend to increase the flow from Mexico into the US. After all, why bother with cocaine or heroin when that's more likely to be found? So when the pandemic prompted the government to essentially shut down a lot of legal traffic across the border, it helped accelerate the cartel's switchover from cocaine and heroin to fentanyl full-time. Seizures at legal ports of entry quadrupled from 2019 to 2021, despite tighter overall constraints

on people entering the country. In that same timeframe, annual drug overdose deaths nearly doubled, primarily due to fentanyl. In other words, realistically, we're never going to stop all the fentanyl from getting in. You just won't. Fireworks are illegal in Los Angeles, but it still sounds like Stalingrad outside every time the Dodgers win.

We're bad at keeping stuff off the streets that the people enjoy. And by any measure, Americans absolutely love drugs, cannot get enough of them, and the reason for that has nothing to do with immigrants or even cartels. It's of course because of the people who started our opioid epidemic. You know the ones. I was taught when I was a medical student t pain, they're not going t a substance and to an opio taught that now that seem

right? More than 263,000 an overdose involving a p 1999 through 2020. Our job was to write out the Percocet or the Oxycodone or the Hydrocodone for John Doe, one to two tabs every four to six hours as needed for pain, 120 tabs, 160 tabs with two refills. And that was common practice after most surgical procedures. Right, if we really, like really want to get

to the heart of the issue, we of course need to start here. The CDC divided our opioid crisis into three eras, much like a Taylor Swift tour, only with an inversely proportional number of people paying attention. The first wave started in the 1990s, when drug companies first got millions of Americans hooked on prescription painkillers

like Oxycontin while intentionally misleading the public about the risk of addiction and bribing doctors to fling pills at anyone with a stubbed toe. Perhaps you saw Hulu's limited series, Dope Sick, in which a famous celebrity pretends to get hooked on opioids. See, don't you care now? If it can happen to Tim Burton's Batman, it can happen to any one of us.

The second wave hit around 2010, as addicts began turning to more widely available street drugs as substitutes for costly and increasingly difficult to obtain prescription pills. By 2015, heroin deaths surpassed annual casualties from opioid pills. As of 2016, the US consumed around 80% of the world's opioid supply, despite representing only around 4% of the global population. We just gobble this stuff up while other countries watch, or even profit off of it.

Remember when I said that this originally started in China? You might've imagined that coming from CD criminals working in the underground, perhaps in a sweet skate park filled with runaway teenage ninjas. But sadly, for everyone, that wasn't the case. I was shocked to find this giant company with hundreds of young salespeople

sitting at desktop computers. They all spoke great English. They were basically selling ingredients for fentanyl to Western customers. And it looked just like any other company. What I found out later was that the Chinese government actually subsidizes some of these companies and promotes the work that they do. These people have like retirement plans and health plans. It was considered a really good job.

Wow, they got a retirement plan selling opioids to Americans. Those drugs ironically being Americans retirement plans. And this brings us to wave three, the final insult, otherwise known as now. Opioid overdose deaths these days are mainly caused by fentanyl and fentanyl analogs bought on the black market. Related deaths in the U.S. doubled each year between 2013 and 2016 due to the proliferation

of illegally manufactured fentanyl and substitutes like the even more potent carfentanil, which was developed to serve as anesthetic for large animals and or me after shooting a Ben Shapiro episode. In more ways than one, the switch over to fentanyl has been a huge boon for traffickers the world over, making it one of the few things to which you can say,

maybe we should take heroin, it's probably safer. After all, at least heroin is a crop, you know? It's natural, man. Oh, it's organic and farm to table. It's woke is what I'm saying. Injecting heroin makes you woke. And so going back to supply versus demand, while the supply side absolutely begins in other countries,

it is Americans who smuggle the drug in. It is Americans who deal these drugs. And it is Americans who began a massive opioid epidemic due to doctors overprescribing drugs that were being pushed by pharmaceutical companies. Fentanyl pushed legally as tablets, sprays, and even, yes, lollipops. A pharmaceutical salesman went undercover to expose his company for illegally marketing

an addictive cancer drug. Bruce Boyce was tasked with promoting Actique, a pain-killing lollipop containing the opioid fentanyl for treatments not approved by the FDA. That's right, they did it. They did the thing we all fear, all that hype around fentanyl candy. And the only people actually doing that

was the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, no one hands them out on Halloween. They were made for other adults. They're a classic party favor, like cocaine gummies or ecstasy in a bread pudding. So if Republicans really think we should ignore the demand and just go whole hog into the supply problem, it's kind of funny that, by focusing on immigration, they are completely failing to do that.

Immigration has nothing to do with the issue. But since these politicians don't like migrants, possibly because they're, I don't know, racist, they have found it convenient to link these two problems together, to blame fentanyl addiction on this group of people they don't want. It's no different than if they blame child molestation on, I don't know, gay people. Can you imagine?

This is all to say that when Texas governor Greg Abbott spends hundreds of millions of dollars putting migrants on buses and shipping them off to states he doesn't personally like, it has nothing to do with drug smuggling. When he vows to put up more razor wire along border crossings, he's not out to stop Americans with bags of fentanyl under their spare tires.

He's trying to hurt and punish refugees. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they are either a liar or have been lied to. Me, I'd never lie about anything or anyone about the FBI listening to things or whatnot, anything like that. Anyway, it's time for another quick break so I can hash out some important news related stuff.

When we return, we're gonna talk about some actual ways we could deal with the fentanyl problem in this country. You know, besides blaming poor people and brown people, it seems compelling. Stick around. They're gonna stick around. Stick around. Nobody move!

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There's nobody else. Tell me all your secrets. Please. Fine. Before the break, we talked about how immigration has nothing to do with the opioid crisis, a problem that's almost entirely American in origin. Despite this, a lot of politicians seem very focused

on punishing either migrants or drug users or both. Much like our immigration policies, the war on drugs has been ongoing and a complete failure. We've been locked into the same drug war that has consistently failed us since it was first introduced racially during the Nixon administration. Going back to supply and demand,

basically the current policy is to pretend we're doing something about the supply and then punish the people who demand the drugs. So here's an idea. What if we didn't do that? You know, since none of this is working. For example, starting with supply, we could install more advanced technology

at mail inspection facilities and ports. Maybe even come up with a few uses for AI apps other than revenge porn and complicated plagiarism. Yes, more data from and less privacy for everyone. That's the solution? God, so many problems. We could establish more robust central databases on illicit drug seizures to gain a clearer idea

of exactly where fentanyl is coming from and where we actually do need to beef up security. Some of these ideas were even included in that 2021 infrastructure bill. You know, the one that most Republicans voted against? For example, US Customs and Border Protection has already spent millions of taxpayer dollars on high-tech scanners capable of x-raying cars and trucks

as they pass through legal border crossings without requiring the drivers to stop and interrupt the flow of traffic. But because Congress has yet to okay the additional $300 million required to install them, they're just sitting around taking up space in warehouses. Although, statistically speaking, several of them are probably just painted bricks of fentanyl.

And again, none of these suggestions will even approach solving the problem on their own. And honestly, it's looking like supply side tactics are always going to fall short. You don't need that many Americans throwing a few bags each under their spare tires on the way back from Ensenada to have enough on hand to precipitate mass overdoses on a national scale.

But it would at least be an actual conversation worth having rather than scapegoating a disadvantaged voiceless group with legitimately no direct connection to the problem at hand. Don't get me wrong, that was a banger idea, a real feel-good triumph of self-deluded rationalization, but we've tried it and it hasn't worked for a while. Maybe one day, no rush,

when racism is less useful politically, we could possibly consider trying something else, perhaps, if it's not a terrible bother. Cute eyes emoji, sing this frost emoji. At this point, opioids are a big enough crisis that most reasonable Americans are probably willing to try any sensible strategies that sound like they could save lives. But there's also the more existential question. Why are so many Americans addicted to opioids in the first place?

How do we solve the demand? Because obviously, if we did that, then we wouldn't have to worry about the supply side as much. For starters, many users have or had problems with chronic pain and initially took the drug as a prescribed treatment before getting addicted.

But that's not the only path to fentanyl addiction. And it doesn't explain why the US has such a uniquely significant opioid problem encompassing more than 1.1 million fatal overdoses since the year 2000. A 2019 paper from the Brookings Institution notes that opioid deaths tend to cluster in communities with recent pronounced declines in employment

and marriage rates, labeling them, along with suicides and alcohol-related deaths, deaths of despair. Whether or not that reflects a baseline link between socioeconomic disparity and opioid addiction, or just demonstrates that pharmaceutical companies and drug traffickers focus their efforts on communities that are already facing other daunting challenges,

is sort of immaterial. By tackling poverty and improving income inequality, we could probably start making a dent in the opioid problem as well. We're pretty sure those things are connected in that fashion. And even if it doesn't sober everybody up, you will have tackled poverty and improved income inequality as like, a little bonus, a little treat for yourself. It's not slashing up hopeful foreigners with razor wire, but it's still pretty good.

A 2022 analysis from the CDC backs this up, describing a strong correlation between overdose deaths and income inequality, particularly among black and Hispanic populations. A black person living in a county with high income inequality was almost twice as likely to overdose on opioids as one from a county with low income inequality. That's not to say class struggle is the only or even the primary factor at work here. Bucknell University

sociologist Jennifer Silva refers to opioid addiction as an everything problem that's linked to cumulative distress, an incredibly complex and diverse web of motivators that tend to be different for every addict. And I know that can seem daunting at first. I mean, how do you fix everything? How do you solve an addiction that can affect anyone? I think a good starting point is to look at why it can affect everyone, which is because it was marketed for everyone. Another thing especially about the Oxycontin is that I feel like a real participant again, instead of that I would just go and sit on the sidelines. This pill, that's the timer release pill, solves all the problems. That's for a video titled I have not missed one day of work and my boss really appreciates that. Lauren is there every day.

So I'm able to be very productive. That's for a video titled, I Got My Life Back that was sent to doctors in 1998. And as you can see, it sold opioids as a way to become a productive member of society again. And when you stand back and look at the problem and the fact that it's uniquely American, I think two things stand out.

The first is that we're one of the only countries that allows pharmaceuticals to advertise directly to consumers. And that we're the only developed country that doesn't guarantee some kind of paid sick leave. We have made it impossible to survive while being in pain, be that physical pain or emotional pain. And so of course, we do a lot of drugs,

specifically painkillers. And of course other countries are going to take advantage of that. This misery market we've created where companies in China can set up call centers and labs filled with people who apparently have better job benefits than us. And in true American fashion,

our solution has just been to increase that misery, to try and punish people instead of actually addressing the underlying issues with poverty and pain and a lack of healthcare. Fucking, to suggest firing missiles into Mexico to destroy the cartels easy to replicate drug labs, my goodness. But if we really wanted to fix this, like really wanted to,

we need to at the very least have a safety net for people who can't work or function because of pain or a disability and create safe and available programs to help with addiction. Like bare minimum starting point. And our solutions need to recognize the fact that we will never be able to make all the drugs

in the world vanish. And it's a reality of the human condition that some of us will always need help regulating our drug use or maintaining a healthy relationship with substances. That doesn't make drug users, and it turns out drug traffickers not a part of us. After all, you can't spell us without U-S.

The eight ball is coming from inside the house. Oxi is an inside jab. Job, jab. They jab it, I ran out. But as a nation, we're not even having that discussion. We're busy pretending that there's some kind of military solution to addiction or that we can blame it on the neighbors.

In fact, quick aside, you're not allowed to say from now on that we need to restrict immigration because of fentanyl. And if you do, you should be forced to say that more than restricting illegal immigration and asylum claims to stop fentanyl from flowing into this country, you think we should actually restrict Americans from going to Mexico and coming back from Mexico.

We can't go anywhere anymore. Us with our fentanyl problem and our public and specifically school shooting problem. We have to stay put and deal with our stuff and then we can think about going to Mexico or to Alaska via Canada. Okay, so that's the news. I thank you for sharing it with me.

And, Pabusa, Pabusa, now, now, now, go now, go now. Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Director. I tried to warn you. I made a bunch of clumsy references. I held up the mirror, the whole bit. Oh, they pushed me into a man. I'm actually, I'm super cool.

And I'm down. They found Microlab, okay? They found Microl lab and they use my grow lab against me you gotta believe me he's gone okay well send him a gift basket or something never mind I don't send him anything okay you know come to think of it I don't think cops normally dress in suits. Who's? Who's?

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