I am one of the lucky ones. I was a 20+ year opiate addict. Started with pills, then heroin, then fentanyl. Which fentanyl was my favorite. I overdosed multiple times. Thank science for narcan. I am now almost 5 years clean from opiates ( still enjoy beer, weed, and mushrooms.) It’s embarrassing looking back now, but I did enjoy it while the fun lasted and honestly wouldn’t change it. I learned a lot about myself in prison and going through treatment.
Is this market saturation of a lethal product that kills you over time, then at some point after the initial global boom in popularity it kills off the majority of its customers and levels out at a generational feed rate - selected for only the most foolish young people willing to try it?
So boom of novel users nation wide. Crash because there’s a limited long term survivability for users (especially if it’s adulterated, which it is), then a drop in “use” to a basic feed rate of new users (which is bound to be smaller than the initial novel introductory boom).
My guess (complete amateur speculation) is that an insane number of people got hooked on opiates due to over prescribed pain meds. The medical industry then stopped doing that so the conveyer belt of new addicts has been turned off. I think the drop in deaths is a trailing indicator for the lower levels of new users that started as legitimate prescriptions. So now, it’s down to the people that would likely have tried opiates without being fed them by the medical industry. Just speculation though.
We’ve had a lot of huge fentanyl busts in Southern California, hopefully similar elsewhere. Narcan has become more available (I get them from a donation based non profit and have handed out over 60, with one friend using 3 to save a guy). The Biden administration has also been working to limit the sale of precursors, most of which come from china. It’s also possible the cartels have throttled back because they were killing too many of their customers. I’d think it’s some combination of all those.
