Fentanyl isn’t a Scapegoat. It’s a Gamechanger
If I hear one more Millennial say that fentanyl is just stronger heroin, I swear. Wrong. Heroin is derived from a poppy plant, Papaver somniferum, which has been cultivated by farmers and used in some form by humans since 3,400 B.C. Fentanyl, one of the synthetic opioids sold on the street, is an exclusive cartel product engineered by 21st century scientists with chemicals to maximize addiction.
And that’s before AI was involved.
Portland, we have a drug problem. Twenty-five years ago, when I got involved with this topic, buying a street high as mind-blowing as fentanyl’s was NOT possible.
For starters, the chemicals required to fabricate illicit drugs were regulated and closely tracked by authorities. In addition to those obstacles, there was a lack of scientific expertise for actually making novel, new drugs.
In 2001, Information was available but not actionable
No longer. In 2025, chemistry students are being directly recruited by the cartels.
There’s no limit to what can be designed in unregulated drug labs and distributed to international consumers. Killing drug dealers won’t solve that (and frankly is a distraction), but the cartels with their scientists and paramilitary weaponry have been calling the shots.
By implementing policy in the United States that removes obstacles for their customer base (and increases demand for their exclusive product), haven’t we, in effect, helped them?
2001 Time Magazine
The new drugs that appear on the market usually do as after underground chemists read scientific papers and decide to cook something up. Scientists studying how cocaine works in the brain, for example, have developed a version 100 times more powerful. The recipe is available in academic journals, waiting to be exploited.
But the chemicals needed to synthesize such drugs are tracked by authorities…And even if the ingredients were widely available, the scientific expertise is not. According to David Nichols…a professor of chemistry at Purdue,
“The underground chemist is typically not going to discover a completely new psychoactive substance. The kinds of things that are easy to make, by and large, have been made.“
Not so fast.
In 2001, experts thought ECSTASY was the end of new drug discoveries. authorities stopped tracking the chemicals required to fuel drug labs and drug recipes became more widely available as the internet created a global marketplace.
drug laws were relaxed and an ideological shift to harm reduction contributed to the deprivation of abstinence-based treatment services as the U.S. was hit by a pharmaceutical opioid epidemic.
This became an opportunity. a public that was primed for addiction got exploited by cartels marketing them street FENTANYL.
The easier our laws and customs make street fentanyl use, the more we assist the cartels. This is why i’m no longer a Democrat.
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