This is one of my more minor quibbles with the War on Drugs.
On an icy night last month, a man entered a grocery store here, walked past the displays of cake mix and paper towels, and went into the bathroom, where he injected himself with heroin.
Hours later, the man was found dead in the bathroom with a needle still in his arm, authorities said. They believe the man was one of more than 80 across the country who have died in recent weeks after injecting heroin laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate.
As the number of people who use, and fatally overdose on, heroin has skyrocketed in recent years, authorities are seeing the return of an alarming development: heroin that, often unbeknownst to the user, is spiked with fentanyl.
Back when the prohibition of Alcohol was in the United States we had similar issues. People would drink toxic home brews, or drink dangerous compounds like Sterno, or simply profiteers selling toxic mixture as booze. These days commercial beer, wine, and spirits can be assumed as safe because they are made in the open and legally. The benefits of unsafe drinks are outweighed by the legal penalties.
Heroin is illegal, and buying, selling, and possessing it is a serious crime. Selling a dangerous mix of Horse isn’t much worse than selling good quality smack, so if the dangerous stuff is cheaper or easier to come by, there is nothing holding back dealers from selling bunk wares.
Of course bigger causes of death are the violent crime enforcing the lawless enterprise and destabilizing certain governments, and crime from junkies feeding a habit on a substance that is only expensive because it is illegal.
Still overdoses from bad stuff, and from getting product of unknown purity is no laughing matter.
If the “Gun Death” crowd gave a shit, they’d be up-in-arms against the War on Drugs. They don’t, so they’re coming for your guns!
H/T Whipped Cream Difficulties
There’s also that the concentration of the smack is highly variable.
Variable to the point that even a small “test” dose could be enough to OD on.
But, as you said, since it’s all illegal there’s no incentive for quality control. And no legal recourse for a bad batch.
Where a beer company would face legal hell if they mixed up methanol and ethanol .
Absolutely true. They don’t want to grab everyone’s guns to save any lives other than their own once they start donning their brownshirts and jackboots and goosestomping down Main Street. If their interest was saving lives, especially the lives of children, they’d be demanding the confiscation and closing of swimming pools and household cleaning products. Or better yet, they’d be in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and a dozen other places working to save the children.