💉🍪🍁💩 The DEA Guide to Drug Emojis
The Drug Enforcement Agency is worried about counterfeit pills sold online. But where did all the real pills go?
With an annual budget of just over $3.1 billion, what is the Drug Enforcement Administration up to these days? How do they spend their time? What kind of projects are they launching in the face of 100,000 Americans dying annually from overdose deaths—deaths that experts not only consider largely preventable, but the direct result of bad laws and bad policy?
As part of Substance, we plan to keep tabs on the DEA and document their activities as best we can, given much of what they do occurs beyond the scrutiny of the public gaze. Sprawling government institutions are, after all, run by people. Someone, somewhere, decides what the DEA does. For instance, somebody at the DEA thought the public could benefit from a drug emoji “Decoder” guide. Behold:
“The Drug Enforcement Administration is aware of drug trafficking organizations using emojis to buy and sell counterfeit pills and other illicit drugs on social media and through e-commerce,” according to the DEA. Some of the emojis are fairly obvious, like for “magic mushrooms.”
Others are a bit of a head scratcher; who knew the maple leaf was such a sinister symbol?
Or that something innocuous as a cookie refers to a “large batch” of drugs?
The DEA Cut the Drug Supply
The emoji decoder is part of the DEA’s “One Pill Can Kill” campaign, meant to alert the public to the very real danger of counterfeit pills. In all seriousness, counterfeit pills have become a major problem. Like with every other product during the pandemic, drugs are increasingly available online. Pills being sold today may look like an ordinary Xanax or oxycodone, but in reality, could be of illicit origin and may contain unknown ingredients of unknown potency and purity. That’s a recipe for a fatal overdose.
There are horror stories of young people buying a pill they think is Adderall or Xanax, but turns out to actually contain fentanyl and then they die. This trend is emblematic of the current nightmare that is America’s drug supply. It wasn’t long ago when people could actually purchase prescription pills on the street and they could bank on those pills being what’s advertised. A 2mg Xanax was, in fact, 2mg of Xanax. Those days are fading, and illicit fentanyl has contaminated the market, from cocaine to pills to heroin. It’s simply a very dangerous time to buy any substance on the street, and that really sucks.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that all of this just happened one day. The truth is that overdoses, addiction, and the drug supply have gotten progressively worse over recent years. That’s despite suing the entire prescription opioid supply chain, tightening the prescription drug market, installing surveillance in the form of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, and intimidating doctors in to prescribing fewer opioids. Many of these policy decisions carried out by the DEA and DOJ have had predictable and foreseeable consequences that have made the overdose crisis far worse.
For years, government regulators stood watch while pharmaceutical companies unleashed a flood of pills that made their way to the streets. (Is there an emoji for deregulation and unfettered hyper-capitalism?) People purchased these pills from dealers and became addicted; thousands died. In 2011, the year opioid prescribing peaked, some 15,000 people died of overdoses that were attributed to prescription pills (to be sure, multiple drugs tend to be found in their system). Since then, opioid prescribing has declined by over 60 percent, but overdose deaths during this time have risen exponentially. With prescribing way down, there was over 100,000 deaths in 2020, compared to 15,000 deaths when prescribing was at its highest. The steep reduction in prescribing has not resulted in fewer overdose deaths or cases of addiction, but has resulted in chronic pain patients losing access to medicine.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you know anything about the nature of addiction, this makes complete sense: You can’t just take away someone’s drugs and expect that to cure addiction. Here’s what happened: People switched from OxyContin to heroin; then illicit fentanyl replaced heroin; now, even more dangerous forms of fentanyl are out there and that has spread to all kinds of non-opioid drugs. Meanwhile, researchers find that drastic prescription opioid tapers are associated with higher suicide rates and other adverse events in the patient population.
What does all this have to do with counterfeit pills and the DEA? Part of what’s happening to the drug supply is what policy analysts call the “Iron Law of Prohibition,” which posits that law enforcement crackdowns on drugs invariably lead to more dangerous and more potent forms of that drug. For instance, during Alcohol Prohibition, it didn’t make sense for bootleggers to bother with barrels of beer when, by volume, hard liquors could get way more people drunk. Smugglers will move to more potent and compact substances to better evade detection.
This is where the DEA should put on a gigantic hot dog suit (🌭🌭🌭🌭) and yell: WE’RE LOOKING FOR THE GUY WHO DID THIS! The whole reason for their drug emoji decoder and counterfeit pill crisis in the first place is, in part, due to the DEA’s crackdown and surveillance on the pharmaceutical drug supply. When the market for real pills shrunk by over 60%, that left a void which was filled by underground chemists cooking up far deadlier batches (re: 🍪) to meet the demand.
Is the drug emoji decoder guide ultimately harmless? Probably. Is it a big waste of time, resources, and ultimately useless? Most likely. But here’s the point: The DEA’s crackdown on doctors and punitive oversight of their prescribing practices is a big reason why the pharmaceuticals people actually want to take are gone in the first place. And now there’s yet another new, totally predictable, deadly crisis of counterfeit pills.
Thanks for reading the first post of what will be many that outline the pure idiocy of the DEA as an institution. Until next time.
Decode this: 💉🍪🍁💩