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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US Advice to Diplomats: Communicate a Non-Ending Sense of Hopeless Conflict

Your government dollars at work. Stella Assange is the wife of Julian Assange. This bizarre directive from Neocon Anthony Blinken (one of the architects of the Iraq War) brings to mind US efforts to blow-up an early opportunity to settle the Ukraine-Russia dispute.

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Quotes for Our Troubled Time

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

"It should be blindingly obvious by now that the identity politics of race, religion and ethnicity are deeply poisonous, blinding us from seeing our common humanity. The left and the right are equally capable of weaponizing identity to justify violence." Lee Fang

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Selwyn Duke

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The Wisdom of the Kalven Report

Should Universities (and businesses, sports teams, professional associations) take public positions on hot issues of the day? Or should they leave expression on those issues at the discretion of their individual employees and members?

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Now Is the Time for Administrators to Embrace Neutrality: The Israel-Hamas war might finally show colleges the virtues of the Kalven Report.". An excerpt:

The extent to which college leaders should, in addition to their administrative roles, express institutional positions on contestable social and political issues is a matter of legitimate dispute. At one pole are the sentiments expressed in the 1967 Kalven Committee report of the University of Chicago, which argues for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day ... not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity … but out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.” Exceptions should be made only for situations that “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry”

Excerpt from the Kalven Report:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.

  

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