Concerned About the Fentanyl Crisis? Blame the Government

by | Aug 1, 2022

Concerned About the Fentanyl Crisis? Blame the Government

by | Aug 1, 2022

fentanyl pills dea photo

As drug overdoses continue rising in the United States, one drug has emerged as the most notorious killer of our day: fentanyl. Unfortunately, those clamoring loudest about fentanyl’s death toll support policies that actually bolster its position in the illicit drug trade.

First approved for U.S. medical use in 1968, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid used to counter severe pain after surgery, and chronic severe pain. Though similar to morphine or heroin, it’s 50 to 100 times more potent.

Most of the fentanyl circulating on the streets doesn’t come from pharmaceutical companies. According to the DEA, black market fentanyl is “primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico.” China is a major source of its chemical ingredients and some finished product too.

As with other black-market knock-offs, the inconsistency of illicit fentanyl makes it more dangerous. Worse, it’s often laced into other drugs, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana and counterfeit pills disguised as pharmaceutical-grade Oxycontin, Xanax, and Adderall.

Though its effect varies by a user’s size and tolerance, ingesting just 2 milligrams can be fatal. That fact lends itself to jolting descriptions of fentanyl’s lethality by public officials, pundits and click-chasing media. A recent Fox News headline is just one of countless examples of fentanyl sensationalism: “Colorado State Patrol seizes enough fentanyl to kill 25 million people.”

When you consider that, in 2021, there were 108,000 overdose deaths from all drugs in the entire country, you can see where headlines and rhetoric centered on such calculations aren’t meant to enlighten an audience so much as to shock it.

American discourse about fentanyl is further warped by politicians and sloppy journalists who promulgate urban legends about cops and bystanders dying from merely touching fentanyl powder.

For example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently asked Fox’s Sean Hannity if he’d heard about “a young woman who picked up a dollar bill sitting on the floor of a McDonald’s and fell down” because fentanyl was supposedly on it. “That’s how deadly it is.”

Like many similar tales, this one proved false. Fentanyl can be plenty deadly, but not that way.

Over-the-top fentanyl scaremongering isn’t just about attracting an audience. For some—like McCarthy—it’s an opportunistic means of advancing a goal of reducing illegal immigration via tightened border security.

Setting immigration policy aside and keeping our focus here on fentanyl, we now come to an essential truth that’s little-known either inside or outside of government:

The more you intensify drug interdiction along the border and elsewhere, the more you elevate fentanyl as the drug trade’s import of choice.

Blame it on the “Iron Law of Prohibition.” First put forth by Richard Cowan in 1986, the Iron Law of Prohibition states: “As law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases.”

Continue reading at Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey

About Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey

STARK REALITIES WITH BRIAN McGLINCHEY is a Substack newsletter that undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. McGlinchey has spoken at the national conference of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and has appeared on the Scott Horton Show, Tom Woods Show and Ron Paul Liberty Report. Receive new Stark Realities posts via email

Our Books

thisone

Related Articles

Related

The RESTRICT Act Is a Death Knell for Online Speech

The RESTRICT Act Is a Death Knell for Online Speech

In an era where the world has become more Orwellian than Orwell himself could have ever imagined, it should come as no surprise that the US government is once again attempting to expand its stranglehold on individual liberty. Enter Senate Bill 686, also known as the...

read more
Our Postmodern Empire

Our Postmodern Empire

The American Empire is engaged in one of the greatest rhetorical cons of the past century, one that involves an endless differentiation and deferral of meaning. Its “post-colonial” warfare is therefore downright postmodern. Many conservatives believe there is a plot...

read more
To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State

To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State

Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable and coherent...

read more
Vladimir Putin vs. The International Criminal Court

Vladimir Putin vs. The International Criminal Court

On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant of arrest for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal for allegedly deporting and transferring children from Ukraine to Russia. The 1946 Nuremburg Tribunal declared that, “To initiate a war of...

read more
The Crony Capitalist Origins of Our Oligarchy

The Crony Capitalist Origins of Our Oligarchy

Republicans have of late been setting the stage for war with China, which would seem to explain the sudden interest—after years of apathy on the part of nearly everyone but Senator Rand Paul—in determining the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Was or was not the deadly...

read more

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This