How the US Drug Supply Became an Ungodly Synthetic Cocktail of Death

Zach talks to Chapo Trap House's Felix Biederman about how idiotic drug policies now result in 100,000 preventable overdose deaths each year.

This week I sat down for an interview with Felix Biederman of the irreverent left-wing podcast that goes by the name Chapo Trap House. It’s certainly not the funniest or sexiest topic, but I got to go off on America’s bat shit pharmaceutical supply chain, the draconian criminalization of drugs, and how in the hell it happened that more than 100,000 people now die of totally preventable overdose deaths each year.

Zachary Siegel 💊💉 @ZachWritesStuff

Really enjoyed talking to ⁦@ByYourLogic⁩ about the overdose crisis and America’s inept response to it. patreon.com/posts/64735826

The episode (available on their Patreon) is fittingly titled, “Opiate Whack-a-Mole,” which pretty much encapsulates America’s primary approach to drug policy. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Chapo you probably can’t listen to the episode for free. So I’m going to give some synopsis of what we talked about along with an elaboration of stuff I didn’t fully cover in the hourlong, free-wheeling interview. The overdose crisis so sprawling, so horrendous, that I couldn’t really do the topic justice in one session.

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To start, Felix asked me to set the scene by explaining the last 20 years of pharmaceutical and drug policy that paved the way for the mass death we’re witnessing today.

Welcome to Opioid Whack-a-Mole:

First, it was OxyContin, and when that became too big a problem, the FDA politely asked Purdue (OC’s manufacturer) in 2010 to put out a new “tamper proof” formula that couldn’t be snorted or injected. After that, people switched to other pharmaceutical opioids, like Opana (brand name for oxymorphone). Then, Opana got taken off the market because it was linked to a massive HIV outbreak in Indiana. But by this point there was already a mass exodus from the pharmaceutical “white market” toward the illicit black market where heroin was cheap, plentiful, and ready to fill the void. The problem was, and remains to be, that the illicit market is unregulated. Drugs on the street come with no list of ingredients, no marker of potency, and zero dosing instructions.

Thousands upon thousands of people made the leap from pain pills to heroin and didn’t survive.

Then, around 2013, heroin started being cut with a cheap and much more potent opioid called fentanyl. In 2016, the CDC put out prescribing guidelines that helped reduce the volume of opioid prescribing. And that pretty much brings us to where we are today: The heroin and pharmaceutical supply has almost completely dried up and been replaced by an ungodly synthetic cocktail of death that’s taken the shape of counterfeit pills and mystery powders that contain god knows what. In the rare event some illegal drugs are ran through a lab, here’s what we find:

Zachary Siegel 💊💉 @ZachWritesStuff

I don't think we've adequately comprehended how disastrous and horrifying the illicit drug supply is right now. Our brain's don't really process what 100,000 ODs in a year means. So here's something specific: ALL this in just one $10 bag.

People have asked me: Why is fentanyl everywhere now?