The Cost and Harms of Fentanyl

This is shocking: 5 grams of fentanyl is enough to produce 2500 doses and costs less than $1,000. Less than 50 cents per dose. This low production cost partly explains why so many markets are being flooded with fentanyl and so many lives are being ruined. I dug up this information after listening to a podcast by Leighton Woodhouse. In his introduction to the podcast, Woodhouse writes:

The public debate on how to address America’s street addiction crisis has centered on two competing approaches: the “harm reduction” strategy of keeping addicts safe as they continue to use, and the “recovery” model, which advocates mandated treatment to get addicts off of drugs altogether.

But there’s a dark reality that goes unacknowledged in that debate. With massive volumes of fentanyl and meth flooding into the country, neither approach can ever keep up with the pace at which the addiction crisis is growing.

The amount of highly addictive narcotics that are easily available to any American is so immense that supply now drives demand rather than the other way around. Fentanyl is mixed into every illegally distributed drug on the market, from street cannabis to meth to diverted prescription drugs.

Teenagers who think they’re buying Percocet on Snapchat end up dead or addicted to fentanyl. Kids are self-medicating for loneliness and depression with the most potent opioid on earth. As cities struggle to manage their existing populations of homeless drug users, new addicts are created every day.

We can never end the street addiction crisis until we cut off the trafficking of these substances into our country. But is that even possible?

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Connecticut AG files suit against numerous generic drug manufacturers for price fixing

The pharmaceutical companies sued in this case are not merely greedy. Many people who desperately need these drugs can no longer afford them, and they are going without, resulting in pain, sickness and even death. We need to stop mincing words. These defendant pharmaceutical companies are functionally assaulting and murdering innocent people through their predatory policies and their lies that there are "markets" when they have illegally destroyed any semblance of markets. Thank goodness that the Connecticut AG has brought this suit (now joined by 43 states). Shame on the U.S. Antitrust Department for not vigorously filing this suit a long time ago. Here is a key quote from the lawsuit:

For many years, the generic pharmaceutical industry has operated pursuant to an understanding among generic manufacturers not to compete with each other and to instead settle for what these competitors refer to as "fair share." This understanding has permeated every segment of the industry, and the purpose of the agreement was to avoid competition among generic manufacturers that would normally result in significant price erosion and great savings to the ultimate consumer. Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share, competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices. This "fair share" understanding was not the result of independent decision making by individual companies to avoid competing with one another. Rather, it was a direct result of specific discussion, negotiation and collusion among industry participants over the course of many years.

Try and give me a better example of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. In short, thousands of ordinary-seeming people, many of them like you and me, work for these corporate entities that have been illegally inflicting pain and death upon innocent people.

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Rick Steves’ Pragmatic Approach to Terrorism

I've long admired Rick Steves, not only for his immensely useful travel resources, but for his world view and his willingness to speak up on difficult topics, such as advocating for the decriminalization of drugs. Another topic on which he has taken a courageous stand is the way we, as a nation, react to terrorism. Here's what Steves had to say (in 2006):

I think we're 300 million people and if we lose a few hundred people a year to terrorists, that doesn't change who we are and it shouldn't change the fabric of our society. Frankly I think we should get used to losing—as long as we're taking the stance in the world of being the military superpower, you're going to have people nipping at you. And if it's hundreds or thousands—we lose 15,000 people a year to have the right to bear arms and most people think that's a good deal, year after year. We spend 15,000 people for the right to bear arms. What do we spend to be as aggressive and heavy weight on this planet? We're always going to have terrorism.
I agree with Steves. Zero tolerance regarding terrorism is ruining us. We tolerate death as inevitable in many other spheres without freaking out, clamping down on civil rights and indiscriminately bombing people overseas. Yes, you should try to prevent (all) acts of violence, but occasionally you will fail to prevent deaths, as happens with gun violence, drunken driving, texting while driving, cigarette smoking, lack of medical care, eating crappy food and lack to exercise. How many people die early because they are forced to go to terrible schools, which sends them into a downward spiral?

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