alt Hacker NewsBritish Columbia declared the toxic drug crisis an epidemic in 2016, with the amount of deaths amounting to 6-7 a day through this period until now.
The article's theory is compelling but given the incredible amount of deaths, thousands upon thousands of deaths in BC alone, I wonder if the rate of death is declining simply because we're running out of people to kill with our indifference.
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> running out of people to kill with our indifference.
I wouldn't call it indifference. It's the drug policies that we've very intentionally adopted in the west that result in people purchasing from the black market. It's about as indifferent as the deaths due to denatured alcohol poisoning during prohibition when the additive was silently switched.
The article does allude to that as possibility towards the end, even though it's not included in the paper on which its primary focus is.
Killing addicts more quickly than creating new ones would indeed eventually lead to a decrease in drug related deaths. I would really believe this because I know of multiple people that died from ODs in a fairly short window 4-5 years and that spans a range of about 12 years of people. As in to say everyone I know age 24-36 about half of those people that were opiate users died from about 2019-2023 due to fent. All of them that I know the details of were from fake pills too, so very much related to fentanyl.