Fatal Chico Fentanyl Overdose – Legalise Drugs Now

It could be considered more than a little perverse to greet the news of a fentanyl overdose event in Chico with a demand that drugs should now be legalised. But it is actually logical to do so. For what has killed here is the dosage of the drug and dosage is the very thing that full legalisation would cure. People are not deliberately trying to kills themselves by taking opioids, they’re being killed by not knowing how much of which opioid they are taking.

Thus legalisation and yes,this does mean full legalisation. Legal companies being able to manufacture package, brand, and yes even market, opiods like heroin and fentanyl:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] One person is dead and four are in critical condition after apparent drug overdoses Saturday morning in an incident that Chico police Chief Mike O’Brien described as “horrific.” “Every indication is that this mass overdose incident was caused from the ingestion of some form of fentanyl in combination with another substance,” O’Brien said at a press conference Saturday afternoon. “That is yet to be confirmed but we do anticipate confirmation in the coming days.” [/perfectpullquote]

Opiods, opiates, are not all that dangerous in and of themselves as long as dosage is known. People taking clean stuff might well be doped for decades but they’re also just fine for decades. What harms health is the rubbish that they’re often cut with. What kills is the variability of the does. Fentanyl compounds this problem for it’s very much more powerful than heroin. It also has a much smaller gap between the dose that produces a high and the dose that does in fact kill.

So, these days there’s a lot of fentanyl around, it’s very cheap as a result. It’s often enough used to dope what people think is heroin. That being a problem – for how much fentanyl is in there? Enough for a high? Enough to kill? As incidents like this tell us, often enough it’s enough to kill. And this is a problem that will persist while such drugs are illegal.

For no one can or will be producing packets of the drugs with known dosages. Each injection thus becomes a crap shoot. And thus people die. Now, if it were possible to set up a legal company, which legally processed, packaged and marketed, then we’d know the dosage. And the overdose rate would plummet. Obviously, there’d be less rat poison and brick dust in the stuff which would reduce health problems. But known dosages would pretty much kill off the overdose problem.

So, yes, it is correct to meet a story of fentanyl overdose with a call for the legalisation of all drugs. Because legalisation would reduce the harm done. After all, the overdose rate on stolen pharmaceutical fentanyl and heroin is very much lower than that on the illegally blended stuff, isn’t it?