My Sister-In-Law is a counselor at an elementary school in the Chicago area with one other counselor sharing the caseload, she's been working almost a decade.
Before the pandemic, roughly 10% of students at her school came and went through her office seeking mental health treatment. After the pandemic and school reconvened, that number shot up to about 70% of students and has now leveled out around 50% and held steady for the last year. Of course, being a public school district, they couldn't afford to bring on additional caseworkers, so she's having to ration her schedule to see as many students as she can. And the stories she's getting from her kids are often pretty terrible (lots of alcoholism and domestic-violence related issues).
I read stories like this and it's completely unsurprising to see. Between the trauma of the pandemic, endless school shootings and a future that looks increasingly uncertain ecologically and economically, I get it. Who among us honestly wishes they were a kid in this world in this time? I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not.
I think it’s also become much more acceptable to seek help for mental issues. When I look back at my school days there were a lot of people who had mental problems. Including me. But there was nowhere to go
Bingo. I personally knew of awful situations among classmates (not to speak of my own issues) that they never seeked help for, and I'm sure thats just a tiny fraction of what was going on.
Maybe there was somewhere to go, but therapy and counselors were not part of the culture.
Do you know if the proportion of reports of alcoholism and domestic violence is holding steady? I'm interested in separating traumatic environments from the normalisation of seeking help for universal stressors like exam season.
(I do not intend to imply that people don't need help for exam stress)
I disagree. When considering a broader timeline, we live in a time of extraordinary wealth, safety, and ease (especially in the west). It just happens that these things don't necessarily make us happy or even mentally healthy. Media channels constantly pump us with negativity-- fear, jealousy, and hatred of the other. I think most people just need a serious attitude adjustment. Life isn't easy no matter how many luxuries you have. Everything is likely doomed when considering the larger timeline. Suck it up and make your world a better place.
No one's emotional state considers a broader timeline though. Yes outlook and expectation are important to wellbeing but you can't reason or bully yourself into being happy when you aren't.
Whether it's true or not, in this time there is a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and impending doom. These things aren't unique to our time, other people have rightfully felt them. But also we do feel them now, even if you think we shouldn't, even if the data, when looked at in a certain way, indicates we shouldn't. My limbic system just doesn't care.
That last line makes me so sad. It also boils down to where you live. You can live in countries like china or some arab > asian > european countries and have a better life
I see a lot of posters confidently saying that the solution is obvious and it's [insert their favourite social panacea here]. The level of confidence does not seem related to the amount of evidence presented.
Examples include: more equality; more opportunity; less democracy; reducing gun accidents; less stress; and less teenage parenthood.
Many of these problems have been around for a long time. For example, the US has long been unequal and long been a democracy. Teenage parenthood has actually been falling. The fentanyl epidemic is relatively recent. You cannot explain a change by a constant.
I would support more intellectual humility and attention to the evidence in thinking about this terrible problem.
A simpler explanation is there's just a LOT more fentanyl on the streets now then there use to be. And then, it's very potent and easy for users to overdose. It's easy to make the jump from those two factors to a rapid increase in fentanyl addiction and deaths. If you remove one of those two factors then you reduce the increase in addiction and death. So either reduce the amount of fentanyl on the streets or reduce the risk of overdose. I think Narcan being made OTC recently is an attempt at reducing the risk of overdose ending in death at least.
A lot of these overdoses are because they think they are taking genuine Xanax or Percocet
Many of the Hays County kids who overdosed thought they were taking Xanax or Percocet; instead, the pills turned out to be counterfeits laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is easier and cheaper to manufacture than natural opioids. It’s also much stronger, and can be unevenly distributed in counterfeit pills, making dosing more difficult
> I think Narcan being made OTC recently is an attempt at reducing the risk of overdose ending in death at least.
Unfortunately, we're starting to face a new monster named Carfentanil, and that monster is Narcan resistant.
That said, the move to make it OTC will definitely reduce the deaths. At risk people, can now keep it readily available. In the cases where there is someone able to call a medic for their friend, and wait for a possibly too late Narcan application, that person will simply be able to administer it immediately.
> I think Narcan being made OTC recently is an attempt at reducing the risk of overdose ending in death at least
My theory is that this is why there is so much more fentanyl. If you think of a street level hard drug dealer, other than law enforcement, his biggest problem is the churn of his customer base due to overdoses/prison/going clean. The logical consequence of preventing overdoses is that his customer base will have less churn, expand more over time, and be more profitable. The effect of that is that organized crime becomes a bigger business, with all that entails.
For the most part it's not intentionally lacing drugs, it's poor quality control and cross contamination.
No one is intentionally mixing fentanyl and MDMA or cocaine but with poor lab work it's easy to get a bit of the wrong whitish powder and the people selling it down stream have no more idea than their buyers what's really in it.
Affluent recreational drug connoisseurs can use basic chemistry and test kits to be highly confident what they're taking but even they get bit sometimes if reckless and using a new source.
Fentanyl costs on the order of $1,000 per kilogram to produce and that’s enough to cut hundreds of thousands of doses of another drug while making them significantly more addictive. It makes other drugs so profitable that the loss in customers is well worth it. There’s a future user born every minute, afterall.
> Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle.
I didn't see this in the article. I read that Barnett didn't realize the trend until after a few events - but I didn't see anything indicating a lack of empathy. It's possible to both be emphatic and think an unfortunate event is a one-off caused by external factors, for which a policy change is not necessary.
Yeah the rest of the article said that it is cheaper to make than most opioids so I guess it is just the walmartification of illegal drugs: fast and cheap and shoddy.
They want their clients hooked. A few percent attrition for your SaaS product makes sense if you convert 50% more of your first month subscribers to annual.
Illegal drugs are a perfect competition market like grain or white label milk. Not really a big opportunity to differentiate with a brand as you can't register a trademark or defend it in court (lol). A minor price advantage brings vendors a magnified sales volume because it is just so cutthroat. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
> However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
I always assumed the dealers knew they had terrible cocaine and would lace it with fentanyl to give it more of an effect. The problem is that such a small amount is lethal so it doesn’t get mixed well enough or they just put too much in.
The only thing that's going to solve this is safe and regulated access to clean drugs. Cut the black market dealers out of the market, and dump all the profits into harm reduction and addiction prevention and treatment resources.
The "tranq" additive that's becoming endemic in streets drugs doesn't respond to narcan either. It's only going to get worse. Wait till carfentanil gets into the supply.
This is what I support too. If you could buy safe, laboratory made & tested cocaine or whatever in the drug store, the overdoses would basically end. We'd still have to deal with people who want to just shoot up in the back of busses in big cities. But we already have that problem. We have a problem with drunk drivers, but we already learned that prohibition didn't work.
We'd have to sell it cheaply enough that the black market wouldn't under cut it. And I can't see this every passing in america. Maybe if every congressman in america had a kid who almost overdosed?
Maybe this is the way. Spread knowledge of how to safely order from dark net markets and receive the orders, and saturate high drug use areas with quality and purity testing labs.
The average street drug user won't have capacity to learn how to order from darknet markets and may not have an address to receive it either.
Wealthy, tech literate demographics get their drug of choice safely while the poor or the youth getting drugs from "friends" or dealers keep filling body bags.
Yeah, it's an open secret nobody wants to ever talk about in these threads. The fentanyl problems in the United States are essentially a direct social attack by the Chinese on the US. It's basically intentional in every way that matters.
You don't need to invoke conspiracy theories here: the trade is vastly profitable and that's what's driving it. If China cracks down (in reality, not just on paper), production will just shift to India or Vietnam or wherever.
For what it's worth, China as a whole (both the people and the government) remember the Opium Wars quite well and are thus strongly anti-drug: stats are thin on the ground, but by all accounts drug offenses are the top reason for the death penalty. Of course, it only take a few factories to churn out vast quantities of the stuff, and the profits are sufficient to lubricate any officials who might otherwise object.
> Effective May 1, 2019, China officially controlled all forms of fentanyl as a class of drugs. This fulfilled the
commitment that President Xi made during the G-20 Summit. The implementation of the new measure
includes investigations of known fentanyl manufacturing areas, stricter control of internet sites advertising
fentanyl, stricter enforcement of shipping regulations, and the creation of special teams to investigate
leads on fentanyl trafficking. These new restrictions have the potential to severely limit fentanyl production
and trafficking from China. This could alter China’s position as a supplier to both the United States and Mexico
No. The opioid crisis is completely manufactured in the USA by US drug companies such as Purdue Pharma. China is just profiting off it. Your xenophobic conspiracy theory is laughable.
This report is a bit old. Since then, China no longer manufactures fentanyl (for the most part), and does not ship fentanyl precursors to the USA.
So the flows look much different now. The precursors are shipped to Mexico, where fentanyl is produced in small labs, often trained by Chinese associates, and then shipped to the USA.
The article places a lot of blame on the state of Texas:
> Directing blame at Mexico is also a way to avoid looking at how Texas fails children.
But also includes anecdotes like:
> When Noah awoke from his coma, he was tearful and apologetic. He thought only a few hours had passed; it had been four days. Janel and her husband called treatment centers, but none would take Noah without his consent, and he insisted that he didn’t have a problem. Even so, Janel was hopeful; that summer was one of the best they’d had as a family. Noah was dating a sweet girl, and when he wasn’t with her he seemed happy enough to hang around the house doing TikTok cooking challenges. Then, the first week of school, sixteen days after Janel gave birth to another son, Noah overdosed at his girlfriend’s house.
It seems to me that if a child overdoses, but refuses to accept their parents demand to seek treatment, they should be denied privileges - forbidden from spending time with unapproved friends, denied a cell phone, denied allowance, etc. This case (and a few others) seem to be clear cut cases where a parent could have forced compliance, but choose not to - I can't imagine any kid choosing no friends and no cell phone to avoid going to one hour per week of narcotics anonymous.
In my experience, you cannot force or punish someone out of problematic substance abuse. If it was that easy, we'd already have the solution. These kids are engaging in this behavior for one reason or another and the solution isn't to make them feel worse about it than they already do.
I was required to attend alcoholics anonymous for three months to continue in university after passing out from intoxication on the quad. Hearing those stories led me to stop experimenting with new drugs and reduce my drinking - I didn't want to become those people. I don't know that such cautionary tales would necessarily have helped this child, but they might have.
Let's not forget that attending substance abuse classes is the recommend medical treatment for substance abuse, a medical problem. Doctors wouldn't recommend it if it didn't work sometimes. Imagine if the story was about a broken leg instead of substance abuse and the child similarly said they didn't feel like anything was wrong with their leg, and so it similarly went untreated.
It's not always easy dealing with teenagers you know. That's why you have to treat them like little adults when they're younger, all the way from when they're toddlers really. Children don't usually focus on the long term, so you have to make them see the long term.
I don’t get how the DEA is able to cause an ADHD medication shortage by limiting supply and yet at the same time pharma companies are allowed to just manufacture as much fentanyl and other opioids as much as they want.
Well by definition the illegal fentanyl isn’t coming from legal drug companies. But believing it has always been illegal fentanyl seems somewhat ahistorical. It wasn’t that long ago that Purdue Pharma, the Sackler Family, and other pharma companies settled for billions of dollars for their role in the opioid epidemic. It hasn’t always been cartels and China.
Fentanyl is an opioid, most of which is produce by china which is currently trying to play the opium wars in reverse while most westerners pretend there is no precedent to what is going on.
Readit News
Before the pandemic, roughly 10% of students at her school came and went through her office seeking mental health treatment. After the pandemic and school reconvened, that number shot up to about 70% of students and has now leveled out around 50% and held steady for the last year. Of course, being a public school district, they couldn't afford to bring on additional caseworkers, so she's having to ration her schedule to see as many students as she can. And the stories she's getting from her kids are often pretty terrible (lots of alcoholism and domestic-violence related issues).
I read stories like this and it's completely unsurprising to see. Between the trauma of the pandemic, endless school shootings and a future that looks increasingly uncertain ecologically and economically, I get it. Who among us honestly wishes they were a kid in this world in this time? I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not.
Maybe there was somewhere to go, but therapy and counselors were not part of the culture.
(I do not intend to imply that people don't need help for exam stress)
Whether it's true or not, in this time there is a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and impending doom. These things aren't unique to our time, other people have rightfully felt them. But also we do feel them now, even if you think we shouldn't, even if the data, when looked at in a certain way, indicates we shouldn't. My limbic system just doesn't care.
Is there any time in history that would have been better though?
Dead Comment
Examples include: more equality; more opportunity; less democracy; reducing gun accidents; less stress; and less teenage parenthood.
Many of these problems have been around for a long time. For example, the US has long been unequal and long been a democracy. Teenage parenthood has actually been falling. The fentanyl epidemic is relatively recent. You cannot explain a change by a constant.
I would support more intellectual humility and attention to the evidence in thinking about this terrible problem.
Many of the Hays County kids who overdosed thought they were taking Xanax or Percocet; instead, the pills turned out to be counterfeits laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is easier and cheaper to manufacture than natural opioids. It’s also much stronger, and can be unevenly distributed in counterfeit pills, making dosing more difficult
Unfortunately, we're starting to face a new monster named Carfentanil, and that monster is Narcan resistant.
That said, the move to make it OTC will definitely reduce the deaths. At risk people, can now keep it readily available. In the cases where there is someone able to call a medic for their friend, and wait for a possibly too late Narcan application, that person will simply be able to administer it immediately.
Unaccountable policing strikes again, this time by running organized crime importing fentanyl.
My theory is that this is why there is so much more fentanyl. If you think of a street level hard drug dealer, other than law enforcement, his biggest problem is the churn of his customer base due to overdoses/prison/going clean. The logical consequence of preventing overdoses is that his customer base will have less churn, expand more over time, and be more profitable. The effect of that is that organized crime becomes a bigger business, with all that entails.
Might as well ban the sale of Purple Shoes as well, who knows how many lives that could save...
However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
No one is intentionally mixing fentanyl and MDMA or cocaine but with poor lab work it's easy to get a bit of the wrong whitish powder and the people selling it down stream have no more idea than their buyers what's really in it.
Affluent recreational drug connoisseurs can use basic chemistry and test kits to be highly confident what they're taking but even they get bit sometimes if reckless and using a new source.
I didn't see this in the article. I read that Barnett didn't realize the trend until after a few events - but I didn't see anything indicating a lack of empathy. It's possible to both be emphatic and think an unfortunate event is a one-off caused by external factors, for which a policy change is not necessary.
> However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?
I don't get that either. Maybe the dealers actually want their clients dead. Or maybe they're incompetent.
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I always assumed the dealers knew they had terrible cocaine and would lace it with fentanyl to give it more of an effect. The problem is that such a small amount is lethal so it doesn’t get mixed well enough or they just put too much in.
No idea if that’s why.
Deleted Comment
The "tranq" additive that's becoming endemic in streets drugs doesn't respond to narcan either. It's only going to get worse. Wait till carfentanil gets into the supply.
We'd have to sell it cheaply enough that the black market wouldn't under cut it. And I can't see this every passing in america. Maybe if every congressman in america had a kid who almost overdosed?
Too bad more people don't know how or don't have access to darknet markets. They are a panacea for drug safety problems.
The average street drug user won't have capacity to learn how to order from darknet markets and may not have an address to receive it either.
Wealthy, tech literate demographics get their drug of choice safely while the poor or the youth getting drugs from "friends" or dealers keep filling body bags.
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
For what it's worth, China as a whole (both the people and the government) remember the Opium Wars quite well and are thus strongly anti-drug: stats are thin on the ground, but by all accounts drug offenses are the top reason for the death penalty. Of course, it only take a few factories to churn out vast quantities of the stuff, and the profits are sufficient to lubricate any officials who might otherwise object.
> Effective May 1, 2019, China officially controlled all forms of fentanyl as a class of drugs. This fulfilled the commitment that President Xi made during the G-20 Summit. The implementation of the new measure includes investigations of known fentanyl manufacturing areas, stricter control of internet sites advertising fentanyl, stricter enforcement of shipping regulations, and the creation of special teams to investigate leads on fentanyl trafficking. These new restrictions have the potential to severely limit fentanyl production and trafficking from China. This could alter China’s position as a supplier to both the United States and Mexico
So the flows look much different now. The precursors are shipped to Mexico, where fentanyl is produced in small labs, often trained by Chinese associates, and then shipped to the USA.
Same thing, more steps, more plausible deniability. What's the diff?
> Directing blame at Mexico is also a way to avoid looking at how Texas fails children.
But also includes anecdotes like:
> When Noah awoke from his coma, he was tearful and apologetic. He thought only a few hours had passed; it had been four days. Janel and her husband called treatment centers, but none would take Noah without his consent, and he insisted that he didn’t have a problem. Even so, Janel was hopeful; that summer was one of the best they’d had as a family. Noah was dating a sweet girl, and when he wasn’t with her he seemed happy enough to hang around the house doing TikTok cooking challenges. Then, the first week of school, sixteen days after Janel gave birth to another son, Noah overdosed at his girlfriend’s house.
It seems to me that if a child overdoses, but refuses to accept their parents demand to seek treatment, they should be denied privileges - forbidden from spending time with unapproved friends, denied a cell phone, denied allowance, etc. This case (and a few others) seem to be clear cut cases where a parent could have forced compliance, but choose not to - I can't imagine any kid choosing no friends and no cell phone to avoid going to one hour per week of narcotics anonymous.
A large part of the problem was not having my own social group from being grounded for a full year when I wasn’t getting all my homework done.
Let's not forget that attending substance abuse classes is the recommend medical treatment for substance abuse, a medical problem. Doctors wouldn't recommend it if it didn't work sometimes. Imagine if the story was about a broken leg instead of substance abuse and the child similarly said they didn't feel like anything was wrong with their leg, and so it similarly went untreated.
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64047688
https://trone.house.gov/2023/01/08/chinas-role-in-illicit-fe...
Deleted Comment
Only took me 2 years to get a prescription for a common but off label use for one medication.
What does it mean?