For those confused by the P2P acronym as I was, it's apparently a synthesis route that was developed in response to the crackdowns on OTC ephedrine products. It's apparently a lot more pure than the older stuff, at least according to https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
The Atlantic wrote a really good deep dive piece into the differences recently. Highly recommend reading through it. There are a lot of unknowns about the long term consequences. Anecdotally, people close to me in the mental health industry are really distraught about it.
It’s cheaper now and way more socially acceptable (decriminalized) to use meth in public (at least in west coast states). My dad was a meth user and only got clean when he was incarcerated. I bet there are thousands who just spiral downward further and further until they just die because now there are no consequences or barriers or repercussions to stop this behavior. Not only that, we incentivize and subsidize drug use in some cities. San Francisco has an “adult” support program that gives homeless people a debit card which they can withdraw cash from. I guarantee 90% of that cash is spent on fentanyl and meth. They give out dozens of needles at a time (once saw one dude with literally 300-500 needles) to drug users but not to diabetics. We have really skewed/inverted our priorities.
Jesse and Walter steal a barrel of methylamine so Jesse no longer has to boost ephedrine across the state. It does not, however make the end product blue
Sort of a little case study in how clamping down on precursors just drives producers to change the formula, while making things more difficult for all the legitimate users of the precursor materials.
Not sure what fentanyl death rates did in a particular neighborhood in the US, what I know is that CDC reported 100k overdose deaths /year for 2020-2021. That pales in comparison to the 600k excess deaths we had in the first 9 months of the pandemic in the US.
Specially if you consider that the overdose deaths did not suddenly appear in 2020.
Numbers are tricky though. There’s much less than 100k covid deaths for those under 50. Whereas I would guess that’s the lion share of opioid deaths. 50-64 is another weird inflection point. It’s totally possible for covid to kill 6x as many people but for opioids to have a bigger impact of life expectancy. One 20 year old death is only offset by 60 or so 80 year old deaths.
That’s simply because fentanyl is cheap enough that the drug syndicates in the golden triangle are flooding the market with it. It’s so cheap to produce in industrial quantities using perfectly legal, easily acquired industrial chemicals that they really don’t care how many shipments get seized because a small amount can be cut into a whole lot of sellable product, so they don’t try as hard to smuggle it in.
Too many fentanyl shipments got sized in 2020, so they partially switched to the 100x more potent (and lethal) carfentanyl. Since it's so powerful a slightly badly mixed product that would have been safe-ish using fentanyl become assuredly lethal with carfentanyl.
