A pharmacist, earlier today
Despite the horrors the media-junkie (such as myself) finds every day, it takes a lot to shock me. I seem to have developed a second immune system which inures me to some of the stories that used to make my head reel and my stomach retch. It could just be that it is a sort of psychical adjunct to my ordinary immune system (pleasingly robust as it has been over the years) and designed to keep one's blood pressure down. But I read, and heard, something this last week that staggered me.
It concerned the number one killer of people aged 18 to 45 in the USA. My immediate suspects were obvious. Auto accidents? Firearms? Suicide? If it is anything like the UK, even domestic mishaps could have a chance at top slot. You would be surprised at the amount of people who die falling off ladders in the kitchen or attempting to do their own re-wiring. But is was none of the above.
It's Fentanyl overdose.
Note I don't write 'drug overdose'. This is specifically the drug Fentanyl, although street drugs are usually the delivery system of death.
Fentanyl was synthetically produced in the 1970s and originally designed as an anaesthetic for use during surgery. Now, it is both the ultimate street drug as well as being the angel of death for many as lungs collapse and hearts stop.
Fentanyl is increasingly being found in every street drug from cocaine to heroin to Xanax, and overdoses have quadrupled in the last two years.
The first question here has to do with basic business economics. Now, I am no businessman and can barely haggle for mangoes at the local Feria, but even I can see that killing your customer base is perhaps not a four-square business model. But, hey, when demand is high, piggy goes to market.
Fentanyl is shockingly powerful. The average coke addict would have to snort a hell of a lot to wind up in the morgue. With Fentanyl, a few grains will send you to the country from which no traveller ever returns. The government - always traditionally ready with a war on drugs - make this their top priority, right? Wrong.
In the past month, the White House has let us know that they are pushing for an Asian-Pacific museum, they have made a number of bathrooms on Capitol hill gender neutral, and Kamala Harris is being made some sort of online Tsar (Tsarina?) with a brief to stop cyber-bullying.
Harris, of course, was famously put in charge of the southern border between Texas and Mexico. She visited once, some quiet sleepy town about 800 miles from the hot-spots on the Rio Grande where thousands of illegal immigrants cross into the land of the free every day.
Many of them carrying Fentanyl.
The famous English politician Sir Enoch Powell once stated that the job of the politician was the prevention of avoidable evils. The only possible conclusion to draw from the fact that America's borders are Fentanyl portals is that they are quite happy with the death rate. Gender-neutral toilets in the West Wing are, I think we can all agree, more important than dead people dying from a drug which could be apprehended at the point of entry.
At what exact point will the American people realise that their government doesn't just want them subservient, in some cases they want them dead?
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