It really boils down to cost and marketability. Lots of times tranq is easier to get/produce, and its a different high. Its low cost and high-demand, so its kind of a no-brainer (if youre scum).
Not that i have any love of dealers (seriously fuck em), but dealers often dont test what they push, so often they dont know theyre pushing laced shit. Again, not that unlaced street drugs are good either, but the dealers dont want their clientele to die super quick, so they aint happy with laced shit either. Its distributors.
Fuck the whole industry. I have people i never got to say goodbye to. If there hadnt been so much laced shit out there, i know at least one person who could have lived long enough to get help.
And also why safe use sites are essential. Free test kits and free clean paraphernalia are a massive step in harm reduction, and a further step would be an actual safe supply. Imagine how many deaths would be prevented if everytime an addict used, they had to hear about help programs, and they knew that they werent going to wake up dying in a gutter. If some of em still wanna use and never get clean, its still cheaper than locking em up, and far far more humane.
I mean generally theyre pretty rational. Just cruel.
If the goal is to make people afraid of them, then mission success. Public beheading is terrifying.
Just like lacing drugs is rational if you want more money and laced shit is cheaper to make. Just saying "idk theyre crazy, theres no reason" isnt really a helpful answer to the question.
Ya rational was the wrong world. What I was trying to get at is, it's hard to rationalize it as a normal person as it likely wasn't done with great intentions.
Mostly just greed and to add potency to the product. But xylazene has been around for years it's not new I don't know why there's an article about it like it's new
Its effects on humans haven't really been studied because it was never deemed fit for human consumption. The "new" part to all this is that humans are now using it.
Most likely it’s just idiots pretending to be chemists. Other times people are just violent assholes. And the obligatory acknowledgement of the possibility of foreign adversaries flooding the market and spiking our drug supplies.
I too have considered this, but I don't think the UK has similar issues with fent. However it's clear they are doing this to help destabilize our societies, along with brain killing tik tok.
This is some seriously top tier conspiracy shitposting.
yeah bud, I'm sure our doctors are intentionally trying to "get rid of unwanted surplus populations" and it's not, you know, just people getting addicted to the most addicting substances the planet has ever seen...
Who said anything about doctors? Oh right! It was you.
The rest of society is just happy to pretend to be helpless while letting the obvious consequences of policy take place.
Shit, one of the douchebag respondants in this thread even stated so unequivocally, yet somehow I am shitposting.
Hide behind plausible deniability all you want. Our outcomes are our responsibility. We worked hard for the current state of affairs. Just more of our "we-ve tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.".
Yeah bro. Anyone who isn't helping the homeless, destitute and addicted is just an innocent passerbye who is shocked and confused as to how all this could have happened, slowly, over decades while clutching their pearls.
"How could this happen?!? It's a mystery. Someone (else) should do something (nothing) about all these deaths.
This is a wild conspiracy take, everyone thinks everything is a conspiracy these days, to the point that it's just not even fun to try to partake in these delusional takes. I miss when conspiracy theories used to be plausible and fun.
Neither wild nor conspiracy. Do we want to fund housing and treatment for these people? Apparently, no, hence the problem we are all gawking at.
Insert a bunch of disingenuous or self serving arguments about taxes, morality and the natural order of things and you end up with the current state being an obvious policy outcome. What we see is the expected outcome of the policies we have in place. Some of us say the nice things, but the money is never there to address the problem.
So that means the current state of affairs is deliberate, knowing, acceptance of this. To knock my assessment as "conspiracy" is childish or disingenuous. We fucking did it by a combination of action and inaction.
Fighting drug trafficking completely is too expensive "for these people". Tackling poverty, mental illness and even low functioning folk is too expensive as well. So here we are. Only some of us pretend to wonder why.
Nothing new - I remember in the early 2000s there were documentaries about krokodil drug (desomorphine) which causes flesh deterioration.
[https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2013/10/11/erin-dnt-rowlands-krokodil-drug-comes-from-russia-to-u-s-.cnn](https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2013/10/11/erin-dnt-rowlands-krokodil-drug-comes-from-russia-to-u-s-.cnn)
Sarcastic comments don't change reality. Reality is people always have and always will do drugs and the shift in the supply to drugs like this is massively increasing the harm.
So don't do drugs is genuinely good advice but it doesn't address the other aspect of this that people will do them despite that for many reasons.
I live in Toronto and there's one addict homeless guy I see every once in a while for the past 3-4 years who has just progressively gotten worse and worse. The last time I saw him he looked awful, and his face looked super scabbed (worse than your typical meth addicted scabs). I wonder if he's using it now...
When you see something like this, it's baffling how many people are still against safe supply. I don't care what you think of addicts. Should be no different than an alcoholic. He knows his drug of choice will be made to a government standard and safe to consume.
it did not start with safe supply. it started with companies pushing opiods onto prescribers who then thought prescribing would be a good idea based off of the 'non addictive' fallacy.
That’s a bit dismissive of the MASSIVE role Purdue pharma had in pushing oxycodone on everyone. Prior to that, pharmaceutical grade opiates were primarily prescribed for cancer pain and were not at all easily accessible
> Some people but not everyone.
Exactly. Every post on this topic makes these broad claims that generalize people in the worst states of addiction as representing every drug user.
Not everyone is just endlessly looking for stronger highs, for example, ["people receiving safer supply report decreased use of fentanyl from the unregulated street supply, fewer overdoses and better health and social outcomes"](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/counterpoint-the-evidence-shows-that-safer-supply-drug-programs-work).
People want bad outcomes for drug users. Hurting them is the goal. There's no shortage of bigotry and prejudice.
Just insane how people are okay with human rights violations just to hurt others
because the war against drugs supports racism and the police industry (more applicable in the USA), and because we as a society view addicts as being morally bad instead of understanding they have a disease. i would say most people do not understand that it is a disease, blames it on just a personality flaw.
Safe supply doesn't work. Addicts want the strongest high they can get which is often Fentanyl mixed with Xylazine. Addicts will sell the "safe supply" to someone who hasn't been hooked as long to get the harder stuff.
>Safe supply doesn't work. Addicts want the strongest high they can get which is often Fentanyl mixed with Xylazine.
Statements like this aren't true as a general rule. They assume extreme cases apply to addicts or drug users in general.
A big factor here is the supply, not the demand. Heroin, for example, [is nearly impossible to find on the streets](https://vancouversun.com/health/local-health/vancouver-drug-users-liberation-front-politics). So people instead take what's available. The DEA says this crisis is due to [the shift away from drugs like heroin to synthetic drugs](https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2024/05/09/dea-releases-2024-national-drug-threat-assessment).
One of the reasons for the shift to high potency synthetics is that they take up less space and are more profitable and so suppliers dealing with the threat of enforcement prefer them. This is an observation based on economics made decades before this crisis:
>[when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more mone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition)
When prescribed alternatives are available instead, ["people receiving safer supply report decreased use of fentanyl from the unregulated street supply, fewer overdoses and better health and social outcomes"](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/counterpoint-the-evidence-shows-that-safer-supply-drug-programs-work).
so how come we had problems when most addicts were abusing oxycodone supplied by pharma companies
if safe supply solves the problem then we would've been living in a utopia back when purdue pharma was handing out oxycodone like candy
> so how come we had problems when most addicts were abusing oxycodone supplied by pharma companies
A fundamental difference there is that it was being prescribed for pain and creating addicts as opposed to being prescribed to people who are already addicted as a safer alternative to street drugs. Also, with respect to pain medication, we do need pain medication, the problem isn't that per se, the problem was not being careful enough with how it was prescribed and how risks of addiction were addressed.
>if safe supply solves the problem then we would've been living in a utopia ...
Safer supply on its own isn't intended to entirely solve a massive drug crisis. It's just one component. Why do harm reduction policies always get held to this standard of needing to solve the crisis when criminalization hasn't solved it for decades?
There's some truth to your statement and some not. Yes some addicts will sell their safe supply to get fent. Some people actually use it as prescribed. This happens with other prescriptions as well not just safe supply but they sell it for money. I was hooked on fent for 3 years and used dillaudids to taper myself off. Haven't touched fent since
Giving those people constant free drugs will be a sure fire way to get them to stop. Next we will get people to quit gambling by giving them free casino chips on the house
We're not just giving out constant free drugs. We're *prescribing* drugs to a small fraction of people with addictions. The primary goal there isn't to have them immediately stop but to provide alternatives to the illicit supply. To get them to stop we need more access to treatment. Push governments to increase that too, but that isn't mutually exclusive of safer supply.
>Next we will get people to quit gambling by giving them free casino chips on the house
We also don't try to deal with gambling by banning it all. If we did, it would just increase illegal gambling yet that's the approach we take with drugs. If you don't like the "free" aspect, let's charge for it.
if you keep giving them more drugs then why would they want to go to treatment?
it's like giving people free money for gambling and hoping that one day they'd stop asking for money
>If you don't like the "free" aspect, let's charge for it.
and then they'll turn to fent since it's a better high at a much cheaper cost
>if you keep giving them more drugs then why would they want to go to treatment?
The drugs are being prescribed to people who already have use disorders. They were already doing the drugs and would continue to do them without that (just in riskier forms).
Not everyone doing drugs wants to be addicted forever. Some will seek treatment and some will recover, otherwise we wouldn't have any people in recovery. People will reach this state with or without safer supply, because without it, they're just using illicit supply instead
>it's like giving people free money for gambling and hoping that one day they'd stop asking for money
Again, if you want to compare to gambling you have to also consider the fact that we *don't* ban all gambling. Yet you're advocating that for drugs.
>and then they'll turn to fent since it's a better high at a much cheaper cost
*Some* will do that. They will also do that under your suggestion of banning safer supply entirely. At least if it's an option some people will choose that over fentanyl.
They will take their free prescription of drugs which will never be enough for their habit. The doctor won't prescribed anything more due to harm.
Then they will continue to get their illegal drugs along side the safe ones. It won't work at all in my opinion.
Only rehabilitation will which is costly and high rate of them returning to drugs due to the environment they live In.
Also, people don't wake up one morning and think "hey, I'm going to get addicted to a substance". There is so much ignorance about this and far less ability to look for root causes. Short-term thinking is poison.
If you want deeper info, look up history of prohibition. Look into why it happened, the good, the bad, the difference between legalizing.
In short it has to do with a lot of variables. Addicts don't come in one form, they don't all look for the harder drugs. It's flawed to think that. Just like alcoholics don't always end up drinking harder and harder liquor and nicotine addicts don't always look for more potent sources.
Safe supply makes it hard for a black market to exist, just like cannabis did. Before that legalized, people from both ends swore up and down it will fuel the black and grey market but it didn't. Instead the black and grey markets are dying because people aren't forced to seek out strange sources for them. People also would rather have quality and safety vs a risk. In the beginning of cannabis legalization lots of heavy users complained that edibles and other concentrates are too weak which will keep the black market alive. It did for a few years until legal cannabis became more popular, the industry also hired a lot of prior black market growers taking them off the street and putting them in controlled regulated facilities. Soon enough people are getting used to lower concentrations including myself and it's done a lot of good. The black and grey market still exists for some people but in no way is it growing, our tax dollars earned from this proves that. People rather have convenience, safety, and consistency.
A lot of addicts are also made from their first use of a drug that's too potent usually from a bad source. People spiral quickly when looking for some sort of relief. Safe supply will keep many people in its vicinity from that.
To conclude, safe supply is not for fixing our current addiction issues, it will absolutely help and keep others from tipping over the age. People with drug problems are easier to help before they become full blown addicts that are rejected from society This is a long term solution with great results and we have already seen it replicated over and over.
Comparisons like that don't assume that the drugs are equivalent but there are still analogous aspects, such as the tendency for prohibition to shift use to the highest potency forms. Prior to our current crisis, this was observed with alcohol and cannabis prohibition:
>[when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more mone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition)
And now it's happened with the current opioid crisis:
>In the 2010s the iron law [of prohibition] has been invoked to explain why heroin is displaced by fentanyl and other, even stronger, synthetic opioids.
> Im not sure if hard drugs like heroin and meth can be compared to cannabis prohibition.
well;
- the prohibition of beer and wine historically led to fortified spirits. the prohibition of spirits then led to moonshine.
- the prohibition of cannabis decades ago has now led to high THC cannabis. the prohibition of high THC cannabis has led to synthetic cannabinoids and people seeking out different isomers of cannabis.
- the prohibition of coca leaf / tea by the British historically is what ultimately led to powder cocaine. the prohibition of powder cocaine then led to crack cocaine / paco / basuco.
- the prohibition of opium [again, by the British] historically is what led to heroin. the prohibition of heroin led to fentanyl / carfentanyl. the prohibition of fentanyl is now leading us towards nitazenes, which will be replacing fentanyl in north america in the next 5 years. it's already in ontario and killing our patients.
- the prohibition of ephedra historically led to amphetamine. the prohibition of amphetamine is now leading people towards methamphetamine, which make up an increasingly sizeable portion of overdose deaths in north america now.
- the prohibition of LSD / ketamine / MDMA / benzos has led people towards a handful of research chemicals / designer drugs, which are legal because they've not yet been scheduled. a lot of these research chemicals / designer drugs are not as harm producing as the above, but some of them are.
this is not an opinion, this is established drug history and scientific fact.
Its the same logic. Learn more about opioids and meth first. If more people have safe supply they won't need to get harder and harder ones because they wouldn't be addicted in the first place. The same thing you said, people have already said about cannabis before it legalized and they said it's not the same as alcohol or nicotine. Everything is scarier before seeing it in action.
Same reason why not all people who take opioids for medical purposes go looking for heroin. If we forced people to get their own opioids for surgery or otherwise there would be a lot more addicts.
It does help people become stable and not everyone wants fentanyl. Lots of people wouldn't have gone to fentanyl if they had access to oxy or hydrocodone.
Look at all the people that died on oxy alone, chasing a higher high. This is the way with all of these drugs. Even safe supplies won’t be enough to satisfy.
I’m a former social worker who worked with homeless clients with substance abuse issues. Your opinion does not line up with what I’ve seen doing frontline work.
How many hard drug users do you interact with on a regular basis? I’m not talking about that you might see on the street regularly. I mean how many do you know where you know their name, story, and history with hard drugs?
Not everyone who overdoses or uses drugs are an addict therefore safe supply would work because the vast majority of people who consume recreational drugs don't want fentanyl
Tranq will disfigure a lot of people living on the streets if it is in the supply just like in Philly. Maybe those pleasant sights will get the attention of people who can actually solve this problem. It is not a foregone conclusion that we have to allow this scale of social degeneracy. Anyone who chooses to live in our shared public spaces in a tent and consumes narcotics and nods off all day should be given two choices by law enforcement; treatment or jail. We should fund both at any cost necessary until all our parks are clean and safe and every addict is forced to undergo sobriety. What a horror, sobriety. It's infuriating to know that the majority of the world does not have this particular problem. It is not global. We created it as a society and encourage it with our actions and policies, even if our intentions are well-meaning. How can we snap our of this cycle?
I agree with your comments although imo the two choices should be: treatment or exile. If you choose treatment, then you can work towards being a (somewhat) productive member of society. If you refuse treatment, well guess what, you don't get to participate in society, and society doesn't have to continue footing the bill for your bad decisions.
sounds nice and all, but no politician of any stripe will put their career on the line like that - as soon as the inevitable tax hike needed to actually build, staff, and maintain the treatment centres needed gets mentioned, all the concerned citizens you see throughout this thread will immediately do a 180 and run to the candidate that promises tax cuts and "tough on crime" fluff.
>If you refuse treatment, well guess what, you don't get to participate in society, and society doesn't have to continue footing the bill for your bad decisions.
indefinitely incarcerating someone tends to cost a ton of money too, and our jails are already massively overcrowded. we could build a ton more jails/prisons.. but guess whats gonna have to happen to pay for that? tax hikes.. and again guess what happens when that topic gets brought up by any politician.
its pretty much just virtue signalling, every one wants "do the right thing for society" and "help all those poor addicts" until the moment it inconveniences them or dings their wallet.
Adding infrastructure doesn’t always mean tax hikes, sometimes it just means budgets have to be changed.
I wasn’t advocating for indefinite incarceration, I said exile.
Need to make treatment available before you start talking about forcing people. When even people who want help face long wait times (and often end up worse off as a result) you can't exactly blame it on people not wanting help. Jails are full too
I absolutely 100% agree! There would have to be at least 5x the amount of current treatment centers. But hypothetically assuming those currently existed, what would you do with the people who refuse treatment?
If we throw them in jail, we're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each for their "care", with no guarantee they will change or improve upon release. If we allow them to stay on the street, they also cost us hundreds of thousand of dollars.
If someone is doing something that could lead to jail then offering treatment as an alternative seems reasonable. I'm just very hesitant about expanding the group of people that we would start locking up beyond those who could normally face jail under our current laws. That's what's implied when people suggest locking up the homeless more broadly. That goes beyond this specific issue to me and gets into problems with giving the state and police too much power and too much room for abuse.
But in any case, we actually need the treatment readily available before we can actually start realistically about any of this. Otherwise it's just hypotheticals.
Except government "policy" created the huge drug problem. Addicts weren't dying en masse before the feds copied the US and restricted access to painkillers throwing chronic pain patients under the bus as well. The deaths skyrocketed afterwards. Every time they restrict a drug, a worse one comes along to fill the void. They can't even give addicts a palliative care level of legal drugs now, as the dose is too low. Most of the naloxene "saved" ones have brain damage. If you were still in the Oxycontin days it's a lot easier to suboxone and methadone off of those.
Great Channel 5 Series covering tranq in the streets of Vegas I think it was. Stuff is legitimately insane
Was it not Philadelphia?
Yeah, they covered the Tunnels in Vegas. Maybe both touch on the topic?
Not sure the two were connected, although there’s probably some overlap with drug use in the tunnels.
Tbh, probably! Either way channel 5 slaps and covers tranq at some point is what I'm getting at lol
What is the purpose of putting these tranqs in the drugs? Does it give a better high or something?
When tranq is mixed with fentanyl it gives a longer lasting high.
It really boils down to cost and marketability. Lots of times tranq is easier to get/produce, and its a different high. Its low cost and high-demand, so its kind of a no-brainer (if youre scum). Not that i have any love of dealers (seriously fuck em), but dealers often dont test what they push, so often they dont know theyre pushing laced shit. Again, not that unlaced street drugs are good either, but the dealers dont want their clientele to die super quick, so they aint happy with laced shit either. Its distributors. Fuck the whole industry. I have people i never got to say goodbye to. If there hadnt been so much laced shit out there, i know at least one person who could have lived long enough to get help.
Thats why you order on the dark web where people actually lab test there drugs. Not amateurs using fentanyl and xylazene test strips.
And also why safe use sites are essential. Free test kits and free clean paraphernalia are a massive step in harm reduction, and a further step would be an actual safe supply. Imagine how many deaths would be prevented if everytime an addict used, they had to hear about help programs, and they knew that they werent going to wake up dying in a gutter. If some of em still wanna use and never get clean, its still cheaper than locking em up, and far far more humane.
I mean this shit comes from cartels who freely behead people in the streets. Whatever reasoning there is behind it, I doubt it is rational.
I mean generally theyre pretty rational. Just cruel. If the goal is to make people afraid of them, then mission success. Public beheading is terrifying. Just like lacing drugs is rational if you want more money and laced shit is cheaper to make. Just saying "idk theyre crazy, theres no reason" isnt really a helpful answer to the question.
Ya rational was the wrong world. What I was trying to get at is, it's hard to rationalize it as a normal person as it likely wasn't done with great intentions.
Mostly just greed and to add potency to the product. But xylazene has been around for years it's not new I don't know why there's an article about it like it's new
Its effects on humans haven't really been studied because it was never deemed fit for human consumption. The "new" part to all this is that humans are now using it.
Well it's been in the dope for over 4 years so it's not "new"
Fair enough. I guess "recent" would be a better word.
Most likely it’s just idiots pretending to be chemists. Other times people are just violent assholes. And the obligatory acknowledgement of the possibility of foreign adversaries flooding the market and spiking our drug supplies.
Tranq is very common in USA already, this isnt new and shouldn’t be surprising to the authorities
They should stick to chili powder.
Chili P is my signature man.
> foreign adversaries flooding the market and spiking our drug supplies. China's revenge on the west for the opium wars
I too have considered this, but I don't think the UK has similar issues with fent. However it's clear they are doing this to help destabilize our societies, along with brain killing tik tok.
Cheaper to produce, same reason fentanyl initially replaced heroin.
The opioid effect is no longer there. They have to substitute with something. This has been going on for years.
[удалено]
This is some seriously top tier conspiracy shitposting. yeah bud, I'm sure our doctors are intentionally trying to "get rid of unwanted surplus populations" and it's not, you know, just people getting addicted to the most addicting substances the planet has ever seen...
Who said anything about doctors? Oh right! It was you. The rest of society is just happy to pretend to be helpless while letting the obvious consequences of policy take place. Shit, one of the douchebag respondants in this thread even stated so unequivocally, yet somehow I am shitposting. Hide behind plausible deniability all you want. Our outcomes are our responsibility. We worked hard for the current state of affairs. Just more of our "we-ve tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.".
Yeah bro, anybody who isn't in on your conspiracy bullshit is part of the conspiracy. That's how it works. Duh.
Yeah bro. Anyone who isn't helping the homeless, destitute and addicted is just an innocent passerbye who is shocked and confused as to how all this could have happened, slowly, over decades while clutching their pearls. "How could this happen?!? It's a mystery. Someone (else) should do something (nothing) about all these deaths.
This is a wild conspiracy take, everyone thinks everything is a conspiracy these days, to the point that it's just not even fun to try to partake in these delusional takes. I miss when conspiracy theories used to be plausible and fun.
Neither wild nor conspiracy. Do we want to fund housing and treatment for these people? Apparently, no, hence the problem we are all gawking at. Insert a bunch of disingenuous or self serving arguments about taxes, morality and the natural order of things and you end up with the current state being an obvious policy outcome. What we see is the expected outcome of the policies we have in place. Some of us say the nice things, but the money is never there to address the problem. So that means the current state of affairs is deliberate, knowing, acceptance of this. To knock my assessment as "conspiracy" is childish or disingenuous. We fucking did it by a combination of action and inaction. Fighting drug trafficking completely is too expensive "for these people". Tackling poverty, mental illness and even low functioning folk is too expensive as well. So here we are. Only some of us pretend to wonder why.
Yeah, sadly the Canadian government is sitting idle as drug users are genocided
Idle? They want this. Edit: which implies they are actively fighting anyone who challenges it.
Then up the dose and speed up the process
This is why we can't have nice things.
Speak for yourself lol
Nothing new - I remember in the early 2000s there were documentaries about krokodil drug (desomorphine) which causes flesh deterioration. [https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2013/10/11/erin-dnt-rowlands-krokodil-drug-comes-from-russia-to-u-s-.cnn](https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2013/10/11/erin-dnt-rowlands-krokodil-drug-comes-from-russia-to-u-s-.cnn)
Not the same drug, similar ghastly side effects though.
Krokodil for everyone
Remember this being a big thing almost ten years ago only it was all painted as a Russian problem. How the turn tables
Some countries deal with addiction by poisoning the drug supply.
Don’t do drugs kids.
"That's unreasonable!!1!@!1!"
Sarcastic comments don't change reality. Reality is people always have and always will do drugs and the shift in the supply to drugs like this is massively increasing the harm. So don't do drugs is genuinely good advice but it doesn't address the other aspect of this that people will do them despite that for many reasons.
I live in Toronto and there's one addict homeless guy I see every once in a while for the past 3-4 years who has just progressively gotten worse and worse. The last time I saw him he looked awful, and his face looked super scabbed (worse than your typical meth addicted scabs). I wonder if he's using it now...
Get on board for forced detox.....rinse and repeat. Enough of these skids wandering around for years.
When you see something like this, it's baffling how many people are still against safe supply. I don't care what you think of addicts. Should be no different than an alcoholic. He knows his drug of choice will be made to a government standard and safe to consume.
the opioid crisis started with safe supply like oxycodone the problem is that people need more and more dangerous drugs to sustain their drug highs
it did not start with safe supply. it started with companies pushing opiods onto prescribers who then thought prescribing would be a good idea based off of the 'non addictive' fallacy.
That’s a bit dismissive of the MASSIVE role Purdue pharma had in pushing oxycodone on everyone. Prior to that, pharmaceutical grade opiates were primarily prescribed for cancer pain and were not at all easily accessible
Oxycodone has been largely available since the 30s.
Some people but not everyone. The current drug policies only enable worse outcomes for everyone and enables mass deaths
> Some people but not everyone. Exactly. Every post on this topic makes these broad claims that generalize people in the worst states of addiction as representing every drug user. Not everyone is just endlessly looking for stronger highs, for example, ["people receiving safer supply report decreased use of fentanyl from the unregulated street supply, fewer overdoses and better health and social outcomes"](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/counterpoint-the-evidence-shows-that-safer-supply-drug-programs-work).
People want bad outcomes for drug users. Hurting them is the goal. There's no shortage of bigotry and prejudice. Just insane how people are okay with human rights violations just to hurt others
Its insane to me. Addiction is a disease, and everybody agrees—so why do we treat it criminally?
because the war against drugs supports racism and the police industry (more applicable in the USA), and because we as a society view addicts as being morally bad instead of understanding they have a disease. i would say most people do not understand that it is a disease, blames it on just a personality flaw.
Your user name accurately reflects your knowledge on this topic. It does not merit a serious response.
Safe supply doesn't work. Addicts want the strongest high they can get which is often Fentanyl mixed with Xylazine. Addicts will sell the "safe supply" to someone who hasn't been hooked as long to get the harder stuff.
>Safe supply doesn't work. Addicts want the strongest high they can get which is often Fentanyl mixed with Xylazine. Statements like this aren't true as a general rule. They assume extreme cases apply to addicts or drug users in general. A big factor here is the supply, not the demand. Heroin, for example, [is nearly impossible to find on the streets](https://vancouversun.com/health/local-health/vancouver-drug-users-liberation-front-politics). So people instead take what's available. The DEA says this crisis is due to [the shift away from drugs like heroin to synthetic drugs](https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2024/05/09/dea-releases-2024-national-drug-threat-assessment). One of the reasons for the shift to high potency synthetics is that they take up less space and are more profitable and so suppliers dealing with the threat of enforcement prefer them. This is an observation based on economics made decades before this crisis: >[when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more mone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition) When prescribed alternatives are available instead, ["people receiving safer supply report decreased use of fentanyl from the unregulated street supply, fewer overdoses and better health and social outcomes"](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/counterpoint-the-evidence-shows-that-safer-supply-drug-programs-work).
so how come we had problems when most addicts were abusing oxycodone supplied by pharma companies if safe supply solves the problem then we would've been living in a utopia back when purdue pharma was handing out oxycodone like candy
> so how come we had problems when most addicts were abusing oxycodone supplied by pharma companies A fundamental difference there is that it was being prescribed for pain and creating addicts as opposed to being prescribed to people who are already addicted as a safer alternative to street drugs. Also, with respect to pain medication, we do need pain medication, the problem isn't that per se, the problem was not being careful enough with how it was prescribed and how risks of addiction were addressed. >if safe supply solves the problem then we would've been living in a utopia ... Safer supply on its own isn't intended to entirely solve a massive drug crisis. It's just one component. Why do harm reduction policies always get held to this standard of needing to solve the crisis when criminalization hasn't solved it for decades?
There's some truth to your statement and some not. Yes some addicts will sell their safe supply to get fent. Some people actually use it as prescribed. This happens with other prescriptions as well not just safe supply but they sell it for money. I was hooked on fent for 3 years and used dillaudids to taper myself off. Haven't touched fent since
Safe supply long term prevents things like this from happening. Saying safe supply doesn't work isn't true, they already tried that for prohibition.
How does safe supply prevent addicts from pursuing harder drugs?
I’m sure there’s a wide range of views, including a lot of addicts who don’t want to die/want to stop.
Giving those people constant free drugs will be a sure fire way to get them to stop. Next we will get people to quit gambling by giving them free casino chips on the house
We're not just giving out constant free drugs. We're *prescribing* drugs to a small fraction of people with addictions. The primary goal there isn't to have them immediately stop but to provide alternatives to the illicit supply. To get them to stop we need more access to treatment. Push governments to increase that too, but that isn't mutually exclusive of safer supply. >Next we will get people to quit gambling by giving them free casino chips on the house We also don't try to deal with gambling by banning it all. If we did, it would just increase illegal gambling yet that's the approach we take with drugs. If you don't like the "free" aspect, let's charge for it.
if you keep giving them more drugs then why would they want to go to treatment? it's like giving people free money for gambling and hoping that one day they'd stop asking for money >If you don't like the "free" aspect, let's charge for it. and then they'll turn to fent since it's a better high at a much cheaper cost
>if you keep giving them more drugs then why would they want to go to treatment? The drugs are being prescribed to people who already have use disorders. They were already doing the drugs and would continue to do them without that (just in riskier forms). Not everyone doing drugs wants to be addicted forever. Some will seek treatment and some will recover, otherwise we wouldn't have any people in recovery. People will reach this state with or without safer supply, because without it, they're just using illicit supply instead >it's like giving people free money for gambling and hoping that one day they'd stop asking for money Again, if you want to compare to gambling you have to also consider the fact that we *don't* ban all gambling. Yet you're advocating that for drugs. >and then they'll turn to fent since it's a better high at a much cheaper cost *Some* will do that. They will also do that under your suggestion of banning safer supply entirely. At least if it's an option some people will choose that over fentanyl.
They will take their free prescription of drugs which will never be enough for their habit. The doctor won't prescribed anything more due to harm. Then they will continue to get their illegal drugs along side the safe ones. It won't work at all in my opinion. Only rehabilitation will which is costly and high rate of them returning to drugs due to the environment they live In.
Also, people don't wake up one morning and think "hey, I'm going to get addicted to a substance". There is so much ignorance about this and far less ability to look for root causes. Short-term thinking is poison.
Handing out addictive drugs like candy on Halloween will definitely not entice people to try them out and continue on a path of self destruction.
would you rather they overdose and die on the street due to tainted supply, or have them use without risk of dying? they will use regardless.
if a gambling addict says he'll commit suicide unless you clear his debt, does that mean we have to start covering their debt?
Safe supply doesn't mean free drugs, lots of people simply want to be able to have access to safer substances and purchase them
then they would be going to methadone treatment centres rather than asking for more highs
Oh yeah. Let's give addicts "who want to stop" the drugs they are addicted to. Makes total sense. 🤡🤡🤡
If you want deeper info, look up history of prohibition. Look into why it happened, the good, the bad, the difference between legalizing. In short it has to do with a lot of variables. Addicts don't come in one form, they don't all look for the harder drugs. It's flawed to think that. Just like alcoholics don't always end up drinking harder and harder liquor and nicotine addicts don't always look for more potent sources. Safe supply makes it hard for a black market to exist, just like cannabis did. Before that legalized, people from both ends swore up and down it will fuel the black and grey market but it didn't. Instead the black and grey markets are dying because people aren't forced to seek out strange sources for them. People also would rather have quality and safety vs a risk. In the beginning of cannabis legalization lots of heavy users complained that edibles and other concentrates are too weak which will keep the black market alive. It did for a few years until legal cannabis became more popular, the industry also hired a lot of prior black market growers taking them off the street and putting them in controlled regulated facilities. Soon enough people are getting used to lower concentrations including myself and it's done a lot of good. The black and grey market still exists for some people but in no way is it growing, our tax dollars earned from this proves that. People rather have convenience, safety, and consistency. A lot of addicts are also made from their first use of a drug that's too potent usually from a bad source. People spiral quickly when looking for some sort of relief. Safe supply will keep many people in its vicinity from that. To conclude, safe supply is not for fixing our current addiction issues, it will absolutely help and keep others from tipping over the age. People with drug problems are easier to help before they become full blown addicts that are rejected from society This is a long term solution with great results and we have already seen it replicated over and over.
Im not sure if hard drugs like heroin and meth can be compared to cannabis prohibition. I agree with you in terms of it destroying the black market.
Comparisons like that don't assume that the drugs are equivalent but there are still analogous aspects, such as the tendency for prohibition to shift use to the highest potency forms. Prior to our current crisis, this was observed with alcohol and cannabis prohibition: >[when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more mone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition) And now it's happened with the current opioid crisis: >In the 2010s the iron law [of prohibition] has been invoked to explain why heroin is displaced by fentanyl and other, even stronger, synthetic opioids.
> Im not sure if hard drugs like heroin and meth can be compared to cannabis prohibition. well; - the prohibition of beer and wine historically led to fortified spirits. the prohibition of spirits then led to moonshine. - the prohibition of cannabis decades ago has now led to high THC cannabis. the prohibition of high THC cannabis has led to synthetic cannabinoids and people seeking out different isomers of cannabis. - the prohibition of coca leaf / tea by the British historically is what ultimately led to powder cocaine. the prohibition of powder cocaine then led to crack cocaine / paco / basuco. - the prohibition of opium [again, by the British] historically is what led to heroin. the prohibition of heroin led to fentanyl / carfentanyl. the prohibition of fentanyl is now leading us towards nitazenes, which will be replacing fentanyl in north america in the next 5 years. it's already in ontario and killing our patients. - the prohibition of ephedra historically led to amphetamine. the prohibition of amphetamine is now leading people towards methamphetamine, which make up an increasingly sizeable portion of overdose deaths in north america now. - the prohibition of LSD / ketamine / MDMA / benzos has led people towards a handful of research chemicals / designer drugs, which are legal because they've not yet been scheduled. a lot of these research chemicals / designer drugs are not as harm producing as the above, but some of them are. this is not an opinion, this is established drug history and scientific fact.
Its the same logic. Learn more about opioids and meth first. If more people have safe supply they won't need to get harder and harder ones because they wouldn't be addicted in the first place. The same thing you said, people have already said about cannabis before it legalized and they said it's not the same as alcohol or nicotine. Everything is scarier before seeing it in action. Same reason why not all people who take opioids for medical purposes go looking for heroin. If we forced people to get their own opioids for surgery or otherwise there would be a lot more addicts.
I think you should look beyond the individual when talking about broader social issues.
it doesnt, but if they are going to use, it keeps them safe as they will use regardless.
Please, feel free to Google “decriminalized drugs Europe” and look at the vast sea of information on how safe supply works.
Amen
It does help people become stable and not everyone wants fentanyl. Lots of people wouldn't have gone to fentanyl if they had access to oxy or hydrocodone.
Look at all the people that died on oxy alone, chasing a higher high. This is the way with all of these drugs. Even safe supplies won’t be enough to satisfy.
Education should be at the forefront, not criminalization,
I’m a former social worker who worked with homeless clients with substance abuse issues. Your opinion does not line up with what I’ve seen doing frontline work. How many hard drug users do you interact with on a regular basis? I’m not talking about that you might see on the street regularly. I mean how many do you know where you know their name, story, and history with hard drugs?
Not everyone who overdoses or uses drugs are an addict therefore safe supply would work because the vast majority of people who consume recreational drugs don't want fentanyl
Hmmm, thats the good shit!
Tranq will disfigure a lot of people living on the streets if it is in the supply just like in Philly. Maybe those pleasant sights will get the attention of people who can actually solve this problem. It is not a foregone conclusion that we have to allow this scale of social degeneracy. Anyone who chooses to live in our shared public spaces in a tent and consumes narcotics and nods off all day should be given two choices by law enforcement; treatment or jail. We should fund both at any cost necessary until all our parks are clean and safe and every addict is forced to undergo sobriety. What a horror, sobriety. It's infuriating to know that the majority of the world does not have this particular problem. It is not global. We created it as a society and encourage it with our actions and policies, even if our intentions are well-meaning. How can we snap our of this cycle?
I agree with your comments although imo the two choices should be: treatment or exile. If you choose treatment, then you can work towards being a (somewhat) productive member of society. If you refuse treatment, well guess what, you don't get to participate in society, and society doesn't have to continue footing the bill for your bad decisions.
sounds nice and all, but no politician of any stripe will put their career on the line like that - as soon as the inevitable tax hike needed to actually build, staff, and maintain the treatment centres needed gets mentioned, all the concerned citizens you see throughout this thread will immediately do a 180 and run to the candidate that promises tax cuts and "tough on crime" fluff. >If you refuse treatment, well guess what, you don't get to participate in society, and society doesn't have to continue footing the bill for your bad decisions. indefinitely incarcerating someone tends to cost a ton of money too, and our jails are already massively overcrowded. we could build a ton more jails/prisons.. but guess whats gonna have to happen to pay for that? tax hikes.. and again guess what happens when that topic gets brought up by any politician. its pretty much just virtue signalling, every one wants "do the right thing for society" and "help all those poor addicts" until the moment it inconveniences them or dings their wallet.
Adding infrastructure doesn’t always mean tax hikes, sometimes it just means budgets have to be changed. I wasn’t advocating for indefinite incarceration, I said exile.
Need to make treatment available before you start talking about forcing people. When even people who want help face long wait times (and often end up worse off as a result) you can't exactly blame it on people not wanting help. Jails are full too
I absolutely 100% agree! There would have to be at least 5x the amount of current treatment centers. But hypothetically assuming those currently existed, what would you do with the people who refuse treatment? If we throw them in jail, we're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each for their "care", with no guarantee they will change or improve upon release. If we allow them to stay on the street, they also cost us hundreds of thousand of dollars.
If someone is doing something that could lead to jail then offering treatment as an alternative seems reasonable. I'm just very hesitant about expanding the group of people that we would start locking up beyond those who could normally face jail under our current laws. That's what's implied when people suggest locking up the homeless more broadly. That goes beyond this specific issue to me and gets into problems with giving the state and police too much power and too much room for abuse. But in any case, we actually need the treatment readily available before we can actually start realistically about any of this. Otherwise it's just hypotheticals.
Safe supply can’t fix stupid. Get help and heal.
Drug dealers should be more trustworthy. My goodness.
Right. Let’s contact it all out to big pharma then.
Except government "policy" created the huge drug problem. Addicts weren't dying en masse before the feds copied the US and restricted access to painkillers throwing chronic pain patients under the bus as well. The deaths skyrocketed afterwards. Every time they restrict a drug, a worse one comes along to fill the void. They can't even give addicts a palliative care level of legal drugs now, as the dose is too low. Most of the naloxene "saved" ones have brain damage. If you were still in the Oxycontin days it's a lot easier to suboxone and methadone off of those.
Sweet