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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MLK on Violence, Home or Abroad

Martin Luther King:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.

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U.S. and Texas: It is too Dangerous to Vacation in Mexico

Texas Travel Advisory regarding Mexico:. See also here for similar U.S. warnings.

The Texas Department of Public Safety warned Americans to skip spring break vacations in Mexico, noting that ongoing violence poses a significant safety threat.

The warning —which adds to State Department advisories not to travel to large swathes of the country — comes in the wake of the kidnapping of four Americans in Mexico earlier this month. There's a "Level 4: Do Not Travel" advisory for Tamaulipas, the Mexican state the Americans were in when they were kidnapped.

In the meantime, here are the numbers of murders over the past year in various American cities:

Portland Oregon: 93 Philadelphia: 516 San Antonio: 231 Saint Louis: 200 Memphis: 288 New Orleans: 280 Chicago: 697 Houston: 435 Washington DC: 203 Kansas City: 167

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Jimmy Dore Offers Some History Regarding the Ukraine War

Jimmy Dore recently appeared on Ep 237 of the PBD Podcast with Patrick Bet-David. I transcribed a portion of his interview, in which is described the relevant history of Ukraine as it pertains to the ongoing war. He contrasts the vast military aid the U.S. if providing to Ukraine to the desperate economic situation of millions of Americans.

Jimmy Dore:

Well, it's obvious that they don't want you to know the real history. They don't want you to know that when Germany was allowed to reunify the promise from NATO to Russia was that we won't expand NATO. And then of course, it did. I think there's thirteen more countries that they put it into NATO. And now they wanted to put Ukraine into NATO or threatened to do that. That would be like if Russia got into a military alliance with Mexico and they wanted to start putting military bases in Mexico. We wouldn't allow that we wouldn't allow it. And just like what happened with Cuba with the missile crisis in the 60s, we wouldn't allow stuff like that. But we're doing that and they don't want you to know that NATO is not a defensive, it is offensive. This is a war that was started and provoked by NATO and the West. Zelensky ran on peace. He brought on bringing the country back together, right? The Russian speakers in the east, the Donbas. But he didn't do it. Why? Because he got threatened by NATO and the ultra right, the Nazis, in Ukraine. And so they'll threaten to kill--he knows he's a dead man--if he does a peace deal with Russia. So that's why he won't. They had a peace deal in March and that's when Boris Johnson from the UK flew there and said, Hey, you better you don't do this. And he he killed the peace deal. So Russia is the one that wants peace in this deal. And Ukraine and NATO do not. They want to bleed Russia economically. And that's why they blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They've always said they were going to do it and they did it. For the life of me, I can't get why the European nations are going along with this. There was the foreign minister of Germany said I don't care about my people, if they don't want this. I care about the people of Ukraine. What leader of a country says they don't care about their own people, but they care more about somebody else's country? It's crazy what's going on.

People don't realize that NATO has provoked this. In fact, there was a peace agreement in 2014. The CIA helped overthrow the Ukraine Government. And then the people in the Donbas didn't want to go along with this coup'ed government, because the leader of Ukraine wanted to be friendly or economically with Russia instead of join, like the European Union, and that they couldn't have that right. So that's why they did a coup. And Russian speakers in the Donbas didn't want to go along with that coup. And so they kind of wanted to break away. The Ukraine Government started shelling the Donbas. And so they had a peace agreement called the Minsk agreements. That was supposed to give them independence. They were supposed to have their own elections and they were going to stop shelling them, but they never did. They ended up killing like 14 or 15,000 people in the Donbas over the last eight years.

And now it's been revealed that that peace agreement was never real. Merkel, the former prime minister of Germany, just admitted that the only reason they did that peace agreement was to give Ukraine enough time to build up its military. So when they finally did provoke an invasion, which is what they did, that they would have a military ready to fight Russia. People don't know this is what happens. They just think that one day Putin woke up and said, I want to go invade Ukraine, because I'm a maniac. And they think that he's the bad guy. He's acting rationally. We always knew he would do this. In fact, we were counting on him doing this. That's why we did what we did. And [Americans] don't know that Ukraine ramped up their bombing right before the war started last year. They doubled their bombing. They were really trying to provoke it. And they did it. They got it. They provoked it. And Russia would rather have a peace agreement and the rest of the world rather have a peace agreement. Not NATO. Not Joe Biden. Not the military industrial complex. That's where we are and people don't know that. That's what [Reporter Matt Lee] is saying: Hey, NATO's the one expanding. That's the reason why he said it. The reason why NATO's army is on the doorstep of Russia is because we moved, not Russia.

[More . . . ]

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Some of the Costs of the U.S. “Wars on Terror”

In the U.S., we tend to think mostly about our own losses, our own wounded and dead. The costs we inflict on other people with our war machine are estimated in Jacob Crosse's article: "Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million." An excerpt:

A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war. The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.

Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.

The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

. . . The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population. . . .Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.

Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.

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