Comment by AngryData
20 hours ago
I would postulate that people learning how to more safely handle and dose fentanyl would be the biggest reason for ODs to drop.
20 hours ago
I would postulate that people learning how to more safely handle and dose fentanyl would be the biggest reason for ODs to drop.
How would you explain the increase in hospitalisation, Emergency Services deployments, and fentanyl drug purity in Q1 2025 then?
Sudden unlearning of aquired knowledge seems unlikely.
See: Figure 1 graph set page 4 - https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...
Changes in purity, especially when unknown to users, is going to affect hospitalizations and such no doubt, but the people using it also adapt to the purity of a drug over a longer timespan.
Even if people wanted to its not like they can all just bring a sample of their old heroin and a sample of their stronger high fentanyl laced heroin and test their purity and calculate dosages. Which is part of the problem of the war on drugs, many methods of harm mitigation and recovery are barred from users and 90% of their drug information is based on hearsay or personal experience.
> part of the problem of the war on drugs, many methods of harm mitigation and recovery are barred from users
That is a problem for the US, sure. Australia, where I live, has supervised shooting galleries and more of an addiction as health issue approach.
That said, if you had a chance to look at the US graphs linked above - there was a plateau period of high deaths in the US of some three and half years showing no much evidence of users learning to "safely handle and dose fentanyl" followed by a sharp decrease in deaths that corresponds more with a change in policy than an increase in user knowledge.
I would suggest this may be a somewhat more complex and multivariate issue than your initial upthread postulate acknowledges.