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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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It's crazy, but fentanyl is probably making a dent in the homeless population. With 3,000 deaths in last 3 years, that means 0.1% of the county's population has died of an overdose.

Possibly something like 10% of the people living on the streets have died of a fentanyl overdose in the last 3 years.

A few years ago I read an article from a group of journalists in some Midwest city on their experiences following police and ambulances for a week. All the drug addled homeless they saw. All the fatal overdoses they saw, seemingly miraculously reversed and the dead brought back to life by narcan.

I can't seem to find the full write up now, but here is one of the fun parts.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

But more seriously, yes, fentanyl and it's equivalents have surely killed off a significant minority of the would-be indigent population. And the fake not-meth cooked by the cartels is rotting the brains of much of the rest. This is an enormous tragedy seemingly unnoticed by almost everyone.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

Hmm, I've never actually seen an interosseous injection or infusion, I always assumed it involved a very sturdy needle and a hammer, but I suppose power tools make more sense.

Insane story. Yeah, Narcan has saved many. I've heard anecdotes about the same person being revived a dozen times by paramedics.

I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that I am mostly a libertarian. Addictive and deadly drugs are one of the few areas that I am not. The harms to society are just too great.

I find it bizarre that some people would defend statements like "you need a license to cut hair" while at the same time saying "if someone wants to sell an addictive and lethal drug that's fine". And yet that is the status quo we've arrived at in places like SF and Seattle.

Overdoses deaths are like 10x what they were during the so-called War on Drugs.

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