THE OTHER MAJOR TRAFFICKING PIPELINE—FOX NEWS—CHINA UNDERGROUND LABS/DEA: “A homemade designer version of fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid which is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent, has been the center of drug busts across the country this month—with law enforcement pinpointing its origin from underground labs in China. The DEA says the China-U.S. supply is further fueling the country’s drug epidemic.”

“’This [Chinese] stuff is unbelievably potent. It is so powerful that even a tiny amount can kill you,’ DEA spokesman Rusty Payne tells FOX Business. ‘China is by far the most significant manufacturer of illicit designer synthetic drugs. There is so much manufacturing of new drugs, [it’s] amazing what is coming out of China. Hundreds of [versions], including synthetic fentanyl and fentanyl-based compounds’.”

“Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced this week details on a mail-order furanyl fentanyl smuggling ring bust. The operation had been bringing the drug — which has been dubbed ‘White China’ — into the U.S from Asia. NYPD Chief of Detective Bob Boyce said that this was the first time investigators have seen this type of fentanyl in New York City.”

“Also this week, Cincinnati Customs and Border Protection agents said they seized 83 shipments of illegal synthetic drugs, including 36 pounds of furanyl fentanyl, from China.”

The Boston Globe: “An extremely powerful drug used as an elephant tranquilizer has quickly become a new killer in the nation’s opioid epidemic, and New England authorities and health workers are bracing for its arrival.”

“The drug, carfentanil, is a synthetic opioid that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, another deadly synthetic opioid.”

“The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a nationwide alert about the drug, which its acting chief called ‘crazy dangerous.’ In Massachusetts, State Police have warned their crime lab staff about how to handle carfentanil during analysis. Even inhaling the drug or absorbing it through a cut can be fatal.”

“Law enforcement and health officials believe most users do not know they are ingesting carfentanil, which apparently is often mistakenly thought to be heroin or a mixture of heroin and fentanyl, a weaker but still lethal synthetic opioid.”

“If carfentanil’s trade route is similar to that of fentanyl, the path stretches from Chinese manufacturers to Mexican processors to smugglers who supply dealers in the United States, law enforcement officials said.”

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/the-deep-state-trafficking-killer-opioids/

The truth about the US ‘opioid crisis’ – prescriptions aren’t the problem

When prescription drugs are involved, methadone and oxycontin are at the top of the list, and these drugs are notoriously acquired and used illegally.

Yes, there has been an upsurge in the prescription of opioids in the US over the past 20 to 30 years (though prescription rates are currently decreasing). This was a response to an underprescription crisis.

Severe and chronic pain were grossly undertreated for most of the 20th century. Even patients dying of cancer were left to writhe in pain until prescription policies began to ease in the 70s and 80s. The cause? An opioid scare campaign not much different from what’s happening today.

Certainly some doctors have been prescribing opioids too generously, and a few are motivated solely by profit. But that’s a tiny slice of the big picture. A close relative of mine is a family doctor in the US. He and his colleagues are generally scared (and angry) that they can be censured by licensing bodies for prescribing opioids to people who need them. And with all the fuss in the press right now, the pockets of overprescription are rapidly disappearing.

But the news media rarely bother to distinguish between the legitimate prescription of opioids for pain and the diverting (or stealing) of pain pills for illegal use.

Why not clarify that most of the abuse of prescription pain pills is not by those for whom they’re prescribed?

Wouldn’t it be sensible for the media to distinguish street drugs such as heroin from pain pills? We’re talking about radically different groups of users.

Virtually all experts agree that fentanyl and related drugs are driving the overdose epidemic. These are many times stronger than heroin and far cheaper, so drug dealers often use them to lace or replace heroin. Yet, because fentanyl is a manufactured pharmaceutical prescribed for severe pain, the media often describe it as a prescription painkiller

*It’s remarkably irresponsible to ignore these distinctions and then use “sum total” statistics to scare doctors, policymakers and review boards into severely limiting the prescription of pain pills.

By the way, if you were either addicted to opioids or needed them badly for pain relief, what would you do if your prescription was abruptly terminated? Heroin is now easier to acquire than ever, partly because it’s available on the darknet and partly because present-day distribution networks function like independent cells rather than monolithic gangs – much harder to bust. And, of course, increased demand leads to increased supply. Addiction and pain are both serious problems, serious sources of suffering. If you were afflicted with either and couldn’t get help from your doctor, you’d try your best to get relief elsewhere. And your odds of overdosing would increase astronomically.

It’s doctors – not politicians, journalists, or professional review bodies – who are best equipped and motivated to decide what their patients need, at what doses, for what periods of time. And the vast majority of doctors are conscientious, responsible and ethical.

Addiction is not caused by drug availability. The abundant availability of alcohol doesn’t turn us all into alcoholics.

No wonder there’s an addiction problem. And how easy it is to blame doctors for causing it.

And not the previous Administration for bringing it in from the Mexican Drug Cartel, Illegals, M13 and China. Don't forget a huge blame for the makers of Oxycotin and their fraudulent practices.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/07/truth-us-opioid-crisis-too-easy-blame-doctors-not-prescriptions

Illegal /Illicit sources and use of opiates which is the true problem.

I've just been reading this article in the New Yorker, recommended to me by my other half, who is a doctor:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

You would have to read the whole thing (and it's long and well researched) to get the full picture of how this all started, which is by a sustained and shockingly dishonest marketing campaign by the Sackler family, through their company, Purdue, to get doctors to 'get over' their worries about opiate addiction and prescribe their drug, OxyContin (since reformulated, but somewhat too late - and, with the reformulation paradoxically bringing its own problems).

Re your specific point about addiction rates, from the article:

According to training materials, Purdue instructed sales representatives to assure doctors—repeatedly and without evidence—that “fewer than one per cent” of patients who took OxyContin became addicted. (In 1999, a Purdue-funded study of patients who used OxyContin for headaches found that the addiction rate was thirteen per cent.)

Again from the article:

Purdue has been sued thousands of times over OxyContin since its release… (In 2003) a New York trial lawyer named Paul Hanly assembled a lawsuit, signing up five thousand patients who said that they’d become addicted to OxyContin after receiving a doctor’s prescription. In discovery, Hanly obtained thousands of documents. “They demonstrated that this company had set out to perpetrate a fraud on the entire medical community,” he told me. “These pronouncements about how safe the drug was emanated from the marketing department, not the scientific department. It was pretty shocking. They just made this stuff up.”

In 2006, Purdue settled with Hanly’s clients, for seventy-five million dollars. Shortly afterward, the company pleaded guilty, in a case brought by federal prosecutors in Virginia, to criminal charges of misbranding, and acknowledged that Purdue had marketed OxyContin “with the intent to defraud or mislead.” …Michael Friedman, the executive vice-president, pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor, as did Howard Udell and the company’s chief medical officer, Paul Goldenheim.

Yes, a big part of the problem has been the misuse of the drug and yes, a big part of the misuse lies in the poverty and hopelessness that gives rise to drug addiction everywhere, but it's very very far from being the whole story.

Last quotation from the article:

As Sam Quinones details in his 2015 book, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” heroin dealers from Mexico fanned out across the U.S. to supply a burgeoning market of people who had been primed by pill addiction. This is one dreadful paradox of the history of OxyContin: the original formulation created a generation addicted to pills; the reformulation, by forcing younger users off the drug, helped create a generation addicted to heroin. A recent paper by a team of economists, citing a dramatic uptick in heroin overdoses since 2010, is titled “How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.” A survey of two hundred and forty-four people who entered treatment for OxyContin abuse after the reformulation found that a third had switched to other drugs. Seventy per cent of that group had turned to heroin.

The Sacklers have reportedly made some 53 billion dollars of revenue so far from the drug. One wonders how many billions it will take to undo what they did.

It's Real Shilly in here…