For more than a decade, the United States has faced a relentless and heartbreaking increase in fatal drug overdoses driven by synthetic opioids. A new analysis suggests this trend has suddenly reversed due to a major disruption in the global supply chain of illicit fentanyl. Published in Science, the study indicates that regulatory actions taken by the Chinese government, following high-level diplomatic engagement with the Biden administration, may be the primary driver behind this unexpected decline in mortality.
“I bombed Venezuela and look what happened!”
-Trump
Maybe, but I feel like making intranasal narcan so readily available had to play a not insignificant part.
On the one hand I am grateful it exists, but I do find it odd the manufacturer is a shady bioscience company that has a long history of very concerning issues regarding their partnership with the U.S. government as a biodefense contractor.
And Trump will take credit for it!
He’s certainly being given credit by right wing idiots
Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin looked at a graph that finished in 2024 with a large dip and praised Trump for that effect.
And Lemmy will deny Biden credit for it.
I lost a very close friend to fentanyl in 2025. They even had narcan at home when it happened, but by the time their partner found them it was just moments too late.
I’m still not over it and probably never will be, the anger and grief is just so strong. Their death was so preventable. But they decided to take the risk and buy some shit from the dark web and not test it first, and they decided to hide it from their partner and friends.
I wish we lived in a world where drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, maybe my friend would have felt more comfortable giving their partner a heads up before trying some sketchy dark web product. Unfortunately, there is just nothing that truly helps severe chronic pain, and our medical system sucks.
Anyways y’all, please be safe out there if you’re inclined to try anything off the street. Get ahold of some test kits and narcan, and please have someone you trust supervise. Fent has been put into so many things – including coke, Adderall, Xanax – nothing is “safe” anymore (not saying drugs were safe before, but the risks are so much higher than they used to be ~15 years ago)
It would have been nice if they had published this before the election. It might have made a difference.
I kept trying to tell people Biden’s policies were intelligent, but it would take time to see the quantifiable result. It’s hard to cite sources that haven’t been published yet. Science moves too slow to keep up with a four-year electoral cycle.
And now all this progress will be undone and worse due to anti-intellectualism taking the helm. Typical…
It might have made a difference.
If it was a fair election.
It was, there’s no proof that it wasn’t and you make us sound exactly as stupid as they are.
Except this time there’s actually some evidence of tampering worth looking into, and there’s been no investigation. Whereas investigations were conducted last time and there was no evidence.
Election data was uploaded over starlink, and Elon Musk bragged about winning the election for trump. He also openly paid people to vote republican.
And there were some weird requirements in some districts for wifi-enabled surge protectors, whatever that was about.
And Dominion voting machines were bought by a trump sycophant.
And there were multiple districts in swing states that voted blue down the ballot except for the presidential election.
All in all, these are anomalies at least worth investigating, especially since some bs claims of fraud warranted investigations in 2020. But no, there was no investigation in 2024.
So you’re saying “there’s no proof,” but how would there be “proof” if an investigation was never conducted?
I’d bet money there was an investigation, it just got buried with the admin change
No, the DNC was too intent on taking the high ground and proving that they’re not like maga. They fell into the trap that had been laid. Maga spouts nonsensical accusations, most of which are projection, so that once it comes to light that they’re doing the thing, nobody is willing to accuse them because they already made it sound insane.
They’ve done this about many things, and it’s unnerving how effective it has been. “Weaponization of government,” “targeted political prosecutions,” etc.
Now when you call it out they say “You didn’t mind when your side did it.” That’s because the other side wasn’t even doing it to begin with!
They effectively created the “both sides” -ism, because it obfuscates all the ways in which they’re demonstrably worse.
Apparently you can just talk to other countries and ask them to help dealing with issues your country faces.
Good luck trying to talk to China now after Trump.
The US could have also taken the Sackler family out to sea and disappeared them, but we didn’t. I think that would have been an appropriate punishment (if a little too lenient) for engineering a nationwide addiction crisis.
But your point stands.
The American brand is permanently tarnished, and it’s going to be a bummer to see the consequences unfold in the coming years.
The coming decades, probably. This won’t be right in my lifetime.
It’s wild to think that with the same amount of power Obama and Biden had, that Donald has completely rearranged the landscape of American politics, and once the post-tariff trade agreements kick in (rerouting supply chains around rather than through the US) and the BBB puts the kill shot on the poor and middle class, I think that the next year or two will be a clear historical demarcation line.
I’m not sure about that. This presidency is more than 50 years in the making, involved a stolen vote, multiple billionaire co-conspirators, even Obama was like “how do we stop this??” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnhBrVb_aaw
They have all the authors of p25 behind them, the house, the senate, the judiciary, the POTUS, the whole shootin’ match.
I’m with you dude. Solid points all around.
We need to have a viable plan for when he cancels elections. I don’t know how to make such a plan, but we need it yesterday.
Personally, I don’t think it’s going to end up being logistically possible for Donald’s government to do that, owing to elections being run at the state level instead of federal. I am sure they will identify a few key races and counties and attempt to intimidate voters though.
Even with his Gestapo, he can’t even control a handful of major cities.
Did Biden ever have a majority in both houses? I know Obama had it for the first two years and that’s how he got Obamacare through. Neither of them had SCOTUS stacked in their favour and ruling them immune from their own intervention.
No, he did not. Both houses flipped with the midterm.
As is tradition, unfortunately.
Idk I say we should’ve just given them a taste of their own medicine, but only like a week’s taste, then strip their wealth.
The first ones free and after that I will rinse you
It’s wild because in China they would have done exactly that. Well, they tend to be more efficient with corporate criminals than charter a whole damn boat. A brick wall and a revolver is the normal way enemies of the people meet their end. (When they haven’t cut the leadership in enough at least in some cases.)
The American brand is permanently tarnished
I wish this were true. But after Iraq? After Vietnam? A Cold War that nearly wiped out the entire human race? After CIA sponsored coups from Brazil to Guatamala? Henry Ford was passing out copies of “The International Jew” all over Germany during the 1920s. Roosevelt forced the Platt Amendment down Cuba’s throat. McKinley oversaw a genocide in the Philippines. Polk gave us the Annexation of Texas and the revitalization of the North American slave trade. Anyone ask Andrew Jackson what happened to all the Cherokee down in Florida?
America is a country with unlimited do-overs. Our brand is never tarnished. We are always and forever a Shining City On A Hill even as Ronnie fucking Raygun is sponsoring nun rape down in Nicaragua.
The events you’re describing are the history of every major world power. The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.
The difference here is the loss of domestic rule of law and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade, which yes, will create significant future problems for the US and its brand. This will become more evident in a year to a year-and-a-half when the post-tariff trade agreements take effect, for a start. China is the obvious beneficiary.
But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster depending on how far Donald decides to push his unilateral warmongering, and whether or not Congress does anything about it.
The global power that hasn’t participated in numerous atrocities does not exist.
Almost as though power is accrued at the expense of the vulnerable.
The difference here is the loss of domestic law and order and its cascading downstream effects for global cooperation and trade
The only countries that the US has alienated are ones it is explicitly sanctioning. Nobody else is actually cutting ties.
China is the obvious beneficiary.
China’s the trade-alternative for countries under US sanctions, precisely because Trump’s done a ham-fisted job of diplomacizing with his counterparts overseas. But a future Pete Buttigieg administration can patch that up if he chooses. There is more to be gained by doing business with the US than with Venezuela or Iran or Cuba. Chinese leaders know that and act accordingly.
But could get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster
Sure. Or it could come to a grinding halt if Trump loses control of Congress and falls into lame duck status three years early. Already, we’re seeing sharp divides even inside the GOP, which already operates on thin margins in the face of a Dem election wave.
Plenty of precedent for an unpopular President to get sidelined by skilled and ambitious legislators. And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.
We’re almost certainly going to face a nasty recession going into the next few years. But we’re still a massive, hugely populated, highly technical, heavily industrialized economy. Losing unipolar status isn’t the end of the empire. A bad few years of economic contraction isn’t the end of the world.
Now… the long tail of climate change… that’s another story. If the Colorado River dries up before it reaches Arizona, we’re going to see some shit flying.
And the US has demonstrated time and time again that it has the manpower and the infrastructure to rebound quickly under strong, competent leadership.
A lot of the manpower has been sacked. Replacing those people and getting them to a point of strong competency will take years and years and a lot of money.
Second best time to plant a tree is today. #guesswebettergettowork
There might be a difference now. The US has always warmongered, but it did know who it could gonafter without consequences. Geopolitically, Vietnam, Iraq, and all these other countries hardly mattered. These could be attacked and nobody would lift a finger to stop it.
Greenland would be different. That would damage the relationship with its European allies a lot. A relationship the USA has depended on for a long time.
“talking” was never their intention and fentanyl is just the excuse to do the shitty things they wanted in the first place.
This is the problem with progressive movement, it’s slow. It works but you need patience. People aren’t going to be patient about fent killing their whole town. They’re going to be reactionary and elect a bullshitter who will sell them a lie about how he’ll round up all the people bringing in fent and stop it dead in its tracks. But it never works.
This is the problem with the average voter. They don’t understand that policy takes more than 30 seconds to shows its effects. Biden also almost had inflation beat back too, but the public wanted deflation and wanted it now, and trump said he’d lower prices!
The American electorate genuinely isn’t very bright. I really hate to say it.
Most people on this planet are just straight up dumb as fuck. You can never convince me otherwise. My whole life this has been confirmed over and over and over again.
Even if a person is smart, they still have blind spots and areas in which they are still indeed dumb as fuck. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, those blind spots lie in things like politics, economics, and civics.
Even if person is smart and highly educated he still seems to have the ability to dwell in stupidest bubbles.
I travelled a lot and met people from a lot of countries. Plenty of them were stupid. The country from where I met most stupid people is the USA, both in quantity of people and in how stupid they can be. They win over any other country by a very large margin.
I think depending where you travel people have limited access to education, where as Americans are willfully ignorant and uneducated, which does infact make us come off as dumber. I know really smart people who believe a lot of fucking foolish shit or just don’t know anything outside of their narrow expertise.
The U.S. is unreasonably stupid given the wealth
I really hate to say it.
No you don’t
I assume they also live here and then yeah it does fucking suck to deal with it day to day
Naw, people love saying shit like that about large groups of people.
Yeah, I like the simple example with roads. If you have a two party system where one party builds roads then it’s pretty easy for the other party to say “look how much they’re spending” then get in power they can choose not to invest in roads for a term or two before anyone notices the negative effects of not investing. That true of most policies but its easier for some people to grasp with basic physical infrastructure they need
People who expect immediate rewards are children. It’s no wonder people who are so prone to take advantage of children also find success in promising all sorts of toys and candy for the immature masses.
Seriously, there is connection here, this is why pedo-con theory is a real thing… the more someone is prone to manipulate others, the more likely seem to be to be to use those same manipulation tools on children, or have learned the skill from manipulating actual children.
its actually in disarray, not many “dems” are part of the progressive movements, most are likely moderates or center right at best.
Biden wasn’t typically referred to as a progressive.
Plus, the bullshiter has absolutely no interest in actually solving the problem.
And you can always light the house on fire if you can’t wait for the heat pump or furnace to warm it up enough.
Yeah, making life harder for as many people as possible tends to not have the effect of lowering crime. Investing in people is the way to go. But it takes more than 4 years to really show, sometimes it takes multiple generations before the positive effects are felt. But they are felt.
WRONG! It’s because Trump just PARDONED an International Drug Trafficking Extraordinaire Stupid LIBTURDS!
Guess who’s going to take credit.
The guy with two thumbs and is sittin over here! You’re welcome!
You mean threatening allies and making racist statements wasn’t the answer to fentanyl ODs? What a world. Also, expect China to stop whatever helped because more dead (especially young) Americans are beneficial to them in the long run.
Thanks Biden!
no but because trump is president now he gets to take credit, and blame biden for it not happening sooner
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Maybe presidential term should of 10 years
No, and they should be easily removed, I have lived with 5 presidents in my lifetime so far, and I can tell you it fucking sucks being stuck for just 4 years with one and when they get two terms it’s a fucking nightmare, I kinda think we should get rid of the president entirely
Get rid as in have a parliamentary system or not have a singular head of government?
Yeah, maybe, I’m not sure. I do know we at least need to kneecap the executive branch asap
