The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Fentanyl Isn't as Lethal...What Happened? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

How about some positive news to start your day? A study was just released showing that fentanyl deaths in the US peaked in 2022 or early 2023 and have been declining since.Study link: https://opioiddatalab.ghost.io/peak-od-phenotypes/Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/fentanyl-isnt-as-lethalwhat-happened

Peter Zion here coming to you from Orlando with some good news. The good news is not that I am in Orlando. It's that the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has recently released a report that pulls together all the statistics from all the health authorities in the United States. And according to the data, at some point in 2022 or early 2023, fentanyl deaths peaked and have been falling dramatically since then. about one third down on average across the country and in North Carolina specifically down more than half. This is like the first good news we've had in the fentanyl situation in quite some time. Quick review. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, so it is manufactured as opposed to grown and processed, which means that it can be produced faster and at a much lower cost than the natural, the organic drugs that are processed with gasoline. Anyway, because of that, the time to target getting into the system is a lot lower.

and gram per gram, it's something like 500 times as powerful as cocaine or heroin. And that means a lot of people have shot up with it and just died. And it has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States for the last several years. So a one-third drop is amazing news. We can probably attribute that drop to four main factors. First of all, the Mexicans who are producing this stuff. This is not coming from the cartels. This is coming from small mom and pops that are basically cooking the stuff up in a garage.

and those folks have not been interfacing directly with customers. There's a few supply chains for distribution between them or customers. And so it took them a while to realize that they were just killing everybody, and that's bad for business. So when they make it into, say, pills, they have been, which are then, you know, dissolved or crushed or whatever. They're making them less strong. So less than one third of the dose that they used to have a few years ago,

giving people a chance to, you know, not die. Second, for the addicts in the United States that are dying from fentanyl, you could only die once. And so if enough addicts do this drug, then the remaining addicts, you're like, huh, maybe that's not the high I'm after, which brings this number to three. It's like, if it is the high that you're after,

maybe I shouldn't just pop a pill or inject it. Maybe I should crush it, turn it into something I can smoke, and that way I can meter how much goes into me. Those three things combined have really contributed to a significant drop in lethality. And then finally, there's something called Narcan, which is an anti-narcotic drug that you can give to somebody who's overdosed,

and it's now not just available in hospitals, you can actually get it and take it home with you, so if you have a friend or a loved one who you know is going to overdose, you can have the Narcan standing by and hopefully revive them. And those four factors have really helped out. Does this mean that the fentanyl crisis is over? Oh, God, no. Again, it's a synthetic. You can cook it up in your garage. And even if every single drug lab in Mexico were to vaporize tomorrow, The technology is so easy. We're talking about middle school to high school chemistry here that it would just pop up somewhere else like I can say, I don't know, Oklahoma, Illinois. So this is part of the drug milieu now. We're not going to get rid of it. All we can do is hope to

cope with it better than we've been doing so far. Still, I'll take my good news where I can.