It would appear that the Biden-Harris Administration has accomplished in < one year more than all those advocating for the chronic pain community for decades has failed to accomplished… by allowing our southern border to be wide open and causing a lot of our border patrol to focus on the hundreds of thousands illegal aliens from coming into our country… thus leaving a lot of our boarder wide open for the Mexican cartels to bring in dramatically increasing tons of illegal drugs into our country.

Is this PUBLIC SAFETY ALERT issued by the DEA… sort of a WHITE FLAG of SURRENDER ? I guess that the volume of illegal drugs that are flooding into our country from the southern boarder is SO GREAT … and the number of OD’s are accelerating at such a rate, while the number of Rx opiates have been reduced to their lowest in over decade that the deviation between those two numbers are go great that the DEA’S agenda no longer had any facts behind it to support it.

The graph at the bottom of this post … the date at which the charts starts has two VERY IMPORTANT things that coincide with its start…. first the National Decade of Pain law expired in 2010 and Rx opiates peaked in 2011-2012.  And the charts clearly demonstrates an abrupt upswing. It would also appear that Heroin OD’s starts trailing off and illegal Fentanyl OD’s started showing the most dramatic upswing of all the illegal opiate OD’s.

It would appear that those providing the illegal drugs may not have been able to meet the demand for illegal opiates, because Heroin is derived from the poppy plant… which takes land and time to grow and labor to harvest process and illegal Fentanyl is made by a chemical process… quantity to distribute is only limited by access to the raw chemicals.  Besides Heroin is only 2-3 times as potent as Morphine but Illegal Fentanyl is 25-50 times more potent… meaning that there is more “hits” per kilogram of product and apparently the cost to make illegal Fentanyl is less than the cost to make than Heroin.

Have we reached a point where some/many of those in Congress will see how the DEA has FAILED in its nearly 50 year war on drugs and how our country has expended nearly TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in funding this FAILED SOCIAL WAR ?

DEA Issues Rare Public Safety Alert on Fake Prescription Pills

— Sharp rise in lethal counterfeit pills containing fentanyl, meth

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/opioids/94737

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a public safety alert on Monday warning of an “alarming increase” in lethal counterfeit pills containing fentanyl or methamphetamine.

The alert, the DEA’s first in 6 years, aimed to raise awareness of a significant surge in fake pills mass-produced by criminal drug networks and marketed as legitimate prescription pills.

“The United States is facing an unprecedented crisis of overdose deaths fueled by illegally manufactured fentanyl and methamphetamine,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, JD, said in a statement.

“Counterfeit pills that contain these dangerous and extremely addictive drugs are more lethal and more accessible than ever before,” Milgram added. “In fact, DEA lab analyses reveal that two out of every five fake pills with fentanyl contain a potentially lethal dose.”

So far this year, the DEA and other law enforcement officials have seized more than 9.5 million counterfeit pills — already more than in the last 2 years combined.

Besides fentanyl, methamphetamine also is being pressed into counterfeit pills. Fake tablets are made to look like the prescription opioids oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet) and hydrocodone (Vicodin), and also like alprazolam (Xanax) and amphetamines (Adderall). The pills often are sold on social media or e-commerce platforms.

The DEA alert comes as fatal overdoses in the U.S. are escalating. In July, the CDC estimated that 93,331 people had died from drug overdoses in 2020, a jump of 29.4% from the year before. Estimated opioid-related deaths climbed from 50,963 in 2019 to 69,710 in 2020, and overdose deaths from synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) and stimulants like methamphetamine also rose.

This sharp increase dovetailed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and was visible in late 2020, when the CDC issued a Health Alert Network advisory to medical and public health professionals saying drug overdose deaths had soared to the highest number ever recorded in a 12-month period. The spike appeared to be driven largely by deaths involving synthetic opioids like illicitly manufactured fentanyl, according to the CDC.

Most counterfeit pills brought into the U.S. are produced in Mexico, with Chinese suppliers providing chemicals to manufacture fentanyl, the DEA said.

The alert does not apply to legitimate pharmaceutical medications prescribed by medical professionals and dispensed by licensed pharmacists, the agency emphasized.

“The legitimate prescription supply chain is not impacted,” it stated. “Anyone filling a prescription at a licensed pharmacy can be confident that the medications they receive are safe when taken as directed by a medical professional.”

The alert also coincides with the launch of DEA’s One Pill Can Kill campaign to educate people about the dangers of counterfeit pills.

 

Filed under: General Problems