• WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    This reminds me of that joke about a surgeon working tirelessly on a heart surgery and the patient thanking god afterwards. America spent a trillion dollars and slaughtered a million Iraqis in part to help opiates flourish. Now the epidemic is China’s fault? That’s the most convenient thing I’ve ever heard.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      as far as my history knowledge goes china had historical troubles with all of their population being opiate addicts so this tracks. No I will not check how this came to be or how it shapes chinese politics to this day.

      • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        22 hours ago

        Their criminal vendetta against free enterprise by eradicating opium, our nation defining tossing tea leaves into a harbour. They are both made from plants, see

    • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 day ago

      They got me addicted and to continue chasing that high, I sold my kids to Xi. At least they’ll have a better life than me!

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    US wants to categorize them

    Why do people get such a hard on when a court “moves to do” something, or a politician “calls for” something else. Who fuckin cares. People act like it gets carved into the fabric of reality when some official US body decides something. If the US decides to categorize a group a certain way, it doesn’t change the reality of that group, for better or worse

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      As someone that has lost numerous friends and acquaintances to it, fentanyl sucks and is pretty much exclusively killing the poorest people. I alsondont think it’s a Chinese scheme to topple America by killing mostly homeless people.

  • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    That was such a fuckin wild thread. Still laying claim to having the best reply when they accused me of getting emotional being the response to me telling him to fuck off. No buddy that took zero emotion, just the cold calculation that if I told him what else I could do and feel nothing would just be redacted-1redacted-2

  • roux [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    Maybe a dumb question but isn’t fent just a manufactured crisis anyway? You only ever hear about it from chuds that are deep at the bottom of the Kool-aid punch bowl.

    E: I guess I don’t get out much.

          • roux [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 day ago

            Fair. I’ve only ever been directly exposed to weed but I have family that has history with cocaine. And I had an great uncle that was a meth cook but I never really talked to him. I guess the only time I might be exposed to addicts is when I’m doing outreach for the homeless.

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 day ago

              One of my friends who died was an occasional keybump doer, it’s in everything now. I used to dabble I’m harder stuff here and there, coke/crack doesn’t really hook me like it does others and I don’t feel like doing meth more than once a year ever.

    • WafflesTasteGood [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      It’s real in the sense that there is fent on the streets and being mixed with other drugs.

      The whole China smuggling it through Mexico is silly nonsense. Even if that’s the exact process it takes to get to the US black market, it’s not some evil ploy from China, rather that’s just the most economic method for the drug business.

      • roux [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 day ago

        I didn’t believe the China/cartel bit for a min honestly. That reads like someone throwing random conspiracy theories against the wall and seeing what sticks.

        • Wheaties [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          15 hours ago

          Yeah, fent is a synthetic opioid, typically manufactured for medical use. Cartels traffic in plant derivatives, which only require land rather than… you know, a whole pharmaceutical laboratory. I think it’s far more likely to be distributed by some official manufacturer with a McKinsy consultant.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      Definitely real.

      At my job I’ve seen data from my city on adulterants in the drug supply and it shows up even in non-opiates. Also others like xylazine which don’t receive as much focus

      E: Yeah fentanyl present in over a quarter of all drug samples tested and nearly 90% of drugs sold as heroin

    • its absolutely the framing being pushed in the NatSec genre slop machine, so it is not going anywhere. it is a key feature of Clancy-verse and the Sheridan-verse political thrillers. [I watch all that shit because I like stories about people sneaking into your base and killing your dudes.]

      by “it” I mean specifically that the PRC MSS is backing drug cartels to destabilize the southern US border.

      the thesis, I guess, is that there would be no drug demand or diseases of despair in the US, and therefore no reason to militarize the border, because everything is actually so great and full of hope in the US, no one would even be doing illegal drugs and dying in the street. just the good, orthodox ones from GSK, Phizer, and the Sackler capital formations prescribed by an insurance compliant AI physicians assistant.

      it would be less insulting if financing and arming drug trafficking gangsters along the border of a rival or uncooperative country to destabilize it wasn’t the gold standard move out of western playbook of the last hundred plus years.

      the people who believe this shit are deeply cooked in ahistorical propaganda and straight up flag-fucking ignorance.

        • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          23 hours ago

          The opioid crisis is definitely real, but par for the course the foreign boogie man explanations are a fig leaf for the pharma interests that pushed doctors to overprescribe opioids for the stonks-up (just look into the Sackler family to see what I mean).

          • roux [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            22 hours ago

            Oh, wasn’t the Sackler family the ones that were thrown under the bus from the oxycotin bullshit even though it was another “too big to fail” company that was at fault or some shit?

            • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              16 hours ago

              I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were the sacrificial lamb so the rest of the industry could act like the problem was solved. But no way their hands were clean.