…land beyond the drug war
It’s more than fifty years on from our declaration of a war on narcotics, and people are getting higher on more destructive shit than ever.
Every state and every town in this country has a fentanyl problem, because for distributors, fentanyl is one hell of a product. It’s potent – up to fifty times stronger than heroin – so they can pack more highs per square inch into the back of a truck. It’s cooked up in a lab with synthetic materials, so there are none of the agricultural headaches of opium poppies. All this makes fentanyl cheap and dangerous because the syndicates manufacturing it on an industrial scale south of the border aren’t pharmaceutical companies, and they’re creating highly inconsistent batches, sometimes pill to pill. One might be an 8 out of 10, another a 4, and they’re often pressed blue with “M30” on the side to look like oxycodone (though few are under the illusion they’re using anything other than fent). People have been dying all over, from West Virginia to Maine to New Mexico.
Original Article (Esquire):
The land beyond the drug war
Artwork Fair Use: Public Domain
