This Is Not A Good News Story -- Despite The Headline -- November 28, 2024

Locator: 44446FETANYL.

This just showed up in my news feed today, November 28, 2024, but note that this story has a byline date of November 21, 2024. Strange.

Regardless, it's not a good news story. Almost every paragraph has an "are you kidding me moment?" 

Some of the relevant paragraphs that have that "are you kidding me moment"?

The fentanyl on the street is starting to become weaker. Anne Milgram, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration, announced last week that for the first time since 2021, the agency was seeing a decline in fentanyl potency, a development she attributed to the government’s crackdown on Mexican cartels and international supply chains. Last year, seven out of 10 counterfeit pills tested in D.E.A. labs contained a life-threatening amount of fentanyl, she said, but that number has dropped to five out of 10.

From seven to five? Really? Is that good news?

Addiction experts say that other interventions contributed to the declining fatalities, including wider distribution of overdose reversal medications like Narcan; an uptick in some states in prescriptions for medication that suppresses opioid cravings; and campaigns warning the public about fentanyl-tainted counterfeit pills.

That's all great, but doesn't suggest Fentanyl use is declining all that much. Worse, the authors obfuscate Narcan with completely unrelated state policy changes.

Fentanyl is now often diluted with xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that can cause horrific skin ulcers, which have even led to limb amputations. But drug policy experts said that xylazine, in some cases, might also be having a lifesaving effect.

So, at least fentanyl pills are now being diluted with non-fentanyl drugs. Okay. 

Buy why the lifesaving effect?

People addicted to fentanyl often need the drug numerous times a day. But xylazine can sedate users for hours. If someone consumes fentanyl mixed with xylazine, “you might not shoot another bag of fentanyl, because you’re knocked out,” said Colin Miller, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has been interviewing drug users in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Pittsburgh about the effects of xylazine in the street supply.

Because when you're knocked out with a horse sedative, you can't shoot up with more fentanyl.  

And, then, of course, the numbers themselves, which don't give me much comfort but apparently many in the field are seeing progress.

According to the latest provisional data from the C.D.C., overdose deaths fell to 97,000, in the 12 months that ended in June, a welcome drop below the grim 100,000 threshold that was surpassed during the pandemic but still staggering.

There were 16,000 fewer drug-related fatalities during that time period than in the period a year earlier — a projected drop of 14.5 percent. Data suggests that in many states, nonfatal overdose rates are falling as well.

But the data also shows uneven progress among racial and ethnic groups and geographic regions. Fatal overdoses among Black Americans generally increased between 2022 and 2023, while they largely decreased among white Americans, according to a recent Georgetown University analysis of state data.

For me, the article results in one observation: it appears the headline writer was focusing on the wrong metric.  

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Meanwhile, Highway Fatalities

Chart of the day: it doesn't take a rocket scientist to explain this chart: