Greetings from British Fentalumbia
Peak Simpsons might just be some of the cleverest television ever produced. At least my own biases convince me that it is.
Now… Canada has done two unusual things recently. They may appear unrelated at first pass, but I’m going to boldly stake a claim that whatever other name they go by in mainstream media, truth has it that they’re both stench blossoms.
- Canada opens door to expanding assisted dying
- B.C. plans to give ‘safer supply’ fentanyl to minors. And parents won’t have a say
Maybe it’s my public university education holding me back, but I’m having a dash of difficulty deciphering between these two deadly departures from decency. A fentanyl addiction is a fair shot at guaranteed death, so it’s hard for me to believe that this is reality and not some twisted TV show puked out by a loose collection of weapons-grade mental deficients.
To find out why I find this policy so abhorrent, let’s take a trip down opiate lane.
Quick, to the streets!
Hydros are the foundation of any good binge, and lots of today’s opiate addicts got started on them since doctors used to hand these fuckers out like condoms at a whorehouse. Hydrocodone, often called a dro, is dosed at 5 mg, 7.5 mg or 10 mg. Most pills are white and relatively large. An opiate user will almost always pop (swallow) these pills as they’re too big to crush up and snort (insufflate).
On a mg to mg comparison, some claim that hydros are slightly weaker than oxies. However, in practice the difference isn’t always noticeable. Traditionally hydros and oxies both sold for $1 per mg, but prices have gone up in the last few years.
Oxies are what you graduate to after the dros stop buttering your bread. It’s not necessarily that oxies are that much more powerful, it’s that they’re available in significantly higher potencies.
The dosage for an oxy can range from 5 mg all the way up to 80 mg! That’s one spicy meatball. Furthermore, due to the pill’s small size an oxy can be popped, snorted, smoked or shot up. Some oxies are designed to discourage these aberrant ingestions, by turning to thick gel if mixed with water, for example, but opiate users have found many clever ways to defeat these mechanisms.
If an opiate user is especially lucky their dealer might have some oxymorphone, more often known by the brand opana. Tastes differ, but many consider opanas to be the champagne of opiates. The high is long-lasting and intense, comparable to good heroin it’s been said.
Furthermore, opanas are unusually strong. 1 mg of opana = 3 mg of oxy and street prices reflect this. Opanas traditionally sold for $3 per mg, 3x the price for oxies or dros.
Opanas are pretty strong, but they’ve got nothing on fentanyl; that vilest of viles that’s laying waste to the west from the shores of Baton Rouge to the vast oilfields of Alberta. Fentanyl’s insane potency is illustrated by this picture from PBS. On the left is a lethal dose of (high quality) heroin, compared to a lethal dose of fent on the right.
You see those few white specks in that jar on the right? That’s enough to kill a grown man. A fact that begs the question: if that’s a lethal serving then how in the ever loving fuck is an addict supposed to measure a safe dose to get high on? Just picture it…
A wild-haired man with the shakes sits hunched in a dusty tent staked out in front of city hall in San Francisco. A scarred marred and previously discarded jeweler’s loupe is wedged precariously in one eye as he grabs his right wrist with his left hand – recollections of Dr. Strangelove – to stop the worst of the jitters while he jerkily manipulates a set of rusty tweezers to count out individual grains of fentanyl. Hopefully his memory is good because count twelve and you’re flying high, count twenty instead and oh sir unfortunately you’re oh so very dead.
Quaint as that scene may be, this is obviously not how it happens.
What happens is that some scumbag with internet savvy buys a kg of pure fentanyl off the dark web from some cock sandwich in China. Supply chains between China and America are strained but the scumbag chain is thriving.
Our American scumbag takes 30 grams of fentanyl and puts it in a giant pot with a bunch of other (hopefully) inert pill fillers. He mixes it up real good (hopefully) and then stamps his mixture into pills. These pills are called presses. The presses could be any shape, but typically they are made to resemble other painkillers.
Check out these pictures. The top is a batch of presses, and the bottom picture is a handful of real 30 mg oxies. Notice that the coloration is rather uneven in the pressed pills, the appearance is slightly waxy, and some of the edges are crumbling. Although, truth be told it’s kind of hard to tell the difference between the two sets of pills. That opens a whole other can of shit-stewed worms that we won’t get into here.
Can you spot any problems with the production of homemade pills? I can. An opiate user’s continued existence on this mortal coil depends on that scumbag mixing the powder so thoroughly that no single pill ends up with a deadly dose of fentanyl. An especially heavy concentration in one pill is called a hotspot, and many thousands of people have been hotspotted to the eternal beyond since this societal scourge began.
Even assuming the pharma chef scumbag has the best intentions, fentanyl is so potent that a pill may end up with a lethal hotspot by sheer random luck. Every dose of fent is a game of Russian roulette for the user, and there isn’t a lot you can do about this.
Well, unless you’re British Columbia that is. If you’re part of the BC government what you do is hand out pharmaceutical grade fentanyl to anyone who wants it, including kids. By their logic they’re doing the right thing because nobody is going to die of an accidental overdose from a botched press. Problem solved, right?
But wait!
Hold on!
Well-aware that modern society fucking hates drawing lines, and that I’m just asking for scorn, I’m going to draw a fucking line. I do not think a government should ever, under any circumstances, distribute fentanyl to its citizens. Especially to minors. My opinion arises from a pure first principle’s perspective. Drop all evidence, studies, arguments, justifications, and rationalizations. Let’s examine this bullfuckery in the cold light of day, without any ornaments to disguise its true form.
The government of British Columbia is going to distribute one of the most lethal narcotics ever invented in human history to its citizens, some of whom may happen to be children.
Does that strike you as a sound plan? What exactly is the fucking end game here? Is giving anyone fentanyl going to solve the problem or only make it worse? I’m of the opinion that, like so much of modern activism, this is all fluff and no substance. This is euthanasia of the citizenry by any other name, and I can’t imagine how many farts these government leaders must be smelling to actually think that they’re on the side of the angels.
Whatever it may have once been designed for, fentanyl’s primary result on this planet is killing people. It is toxic poison. There may be no easy answer to “the war on drugs,” and I understand that people are desperate for anything that looks like a solution, but just because you’re getting trampled in a clusterfucked battle doesn’t mean you start fragging your own troops. From the article…
In what constitutes a clear trampling of parental rights, British Columbia recently authorized the provision of “safer supply” fentanyl to youth across the province, regardless if parents are informed of, or agree to, this measure.
It is true that many drug-addicted youth are in foster care or estranged from their parents, and that, for them, securing parental consent is near-impossible. Yet making an exception for this subpopulation, and permitting them to receive free fentanyl, could incentivize other underage drug users to cut ties with their families and run away from home to secure free drugs.
As parents are often a youth’s greatest asset for recovery, any safer supply system that undermines child-parent relationships is harmful.
In a sad twist, the same laws that allow the government to give recreational fentanyl to kids without parental consent also prohibit parents from sending their children to involuntary addiction treatment — in other words, the government won’t help you force your kid to get clean, but they will give them unlimited “safe” drugs against your will.
Fucking Canada.
I don’t know what the hell is in the water up there, but something has clearly gone wrong with our neighbors to the north.
