How about some positive news to start your day? A study was just released showing that fentanyl deaths in the US peaked in 2022 or early 2023 and have been declining since.
The decline in fatalities can be attributed to a few factors: less potent doses, fewer users, safer consumption methods, and more widespread availability of Narcan (Naloxone). Despite these improvements, this crisis is far from over; the ease with which Fentanyl can be produced makes it a sustained priority for the US.
Regardless, I’ll take my good news where I can get it, especially when it comes to the drug epidemic.
Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.
For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.
Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Orlando with some good news. The good news is not that I am in Orlando. It’s that the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has recently released a report that pulls together all the statistics from all the health authorities in the United States. And according to the data, at some point in 2022 or early 2023.
Fentanyl deaths peaked and have been falling dramatically since then, about one third down on average across the country and in North Carolina, specifically down more than half. This is like the first good news we’ve had in the fentanyl situation in quite some time. Quick review. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, so it is manufactured as opposed to grown and processed, which means that it can be produced faster and at a much lower cost than the natural but organic drugs that are processed with gasoline anyway, because of that, the time to target to get it into the system is a lot lower.
And Graham, for Graham, it’s something like 500 times as powerful as cocaine or heroin. And that means a lot of people have shot up with it and just died. And it has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States for the last several years. So a one third drop is amazing news. We can probably attribute that drop to four main factors.
First of all, the Mexicans who are producing this stuff, this is not coming from the cartels. This is coming from small mom and pops that are basically cooking the stuff up in a garage. And those folks have not been interfacing directly with customers. There’s a few supply chains for distribution between them and their customers. And so it took them a while to realize that they were just killing everybody.
And that’s bad for business. So when they make it into, say, pills, they have bit, which are then, you know, dissolved or crushed or whatever. They’re making them less strong. So less than one third of the dose that they used to have a few years ago, giving people a chance to, you know, not die. Second, for the the addicts in the United States that are dying from fentanyl.
You can only die once. And so if enough addicts do this drug, then the remaining addicts, you’re like, Maybe that’s not the high I’m after. Which brings us number to three. It’s like it’s. It is the high that you’re after. Maybe I shouldn’t just pop a pill or inject it. Maybe I should crush it, turn it into something I can smoke, and that way I can meter how much goes into me.
Those three things combined have really contributed to a significant drop in lethality. And then finally, there’s something called Narcan, which is an anti narcotic drug that you can give to somebody who has overdose. And it’s now not just available in hospitals. You can actually get it and take it home with you. So if you have a friend or a loved one who you know is going to overdose, you can have the Narcan standing by and hopefully revive them in.
Those four factors have really helped out. Does this mean that the fentanyl crisis is over? Oh God no. Again, it’s a synthetic. You can cook it up in your garage. And even if every single drug lab in Mexico were to vaporize tomorrow, the technology is so easy. We’re talking about, like, middle school to high school chemistry here that it would just pop up somewhere else like and say, I don’t know, Oklahoma or Illinois.
So this is part of the drug milieu. Now we’re not going to get rid of it. All we can do is hope to cope with it better than we’ve been doing so far. Still, I’ll take my good news where I came.
