Tag: opioid epidemic

Legalizing Medical Marijuana Leads To ‘Significant Reductions’ In Opioid Prescriptions, Another Study Shows

Medical marijuana legalization is “associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” yet another new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Georgia and University of Colorado analyzed prescription claims for 15 to 20 million insured Americans annually from 2007-2020, comparing the prevalence of opioid prescriptions in states with and without medical cannabis programs in place.

“We find that [medical cannabis laws, or MCLs] are associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” the study, published in the American Journal of Health Economics, found. “Among treated states, the rate of patients receiving opioid prescriptions fell by 16% on average, masking substantial heterogeneity across states, with individual state declines reaching 22%.”

“We also find significant decreases in the intensive margin, both in the daily supply and prescriptions per patient,” the researchers said. “Among subpopulations, decreases were relatively uniform across sex, age, and race/ethnicity, though cancer patients, and non-cancer Black patients experienced a larger reduction (over 20%).”

The study also identified increases in the frequency of use of NSAID pain medications, “suggesting that MCLs are associated with substitution away from opioids toward safer alternatives.”

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US Bombs Another Boat Off the Coast of Venezuela, Trump Claims Six ‘Narcoterrorists’ Killed

The US military has bombed another boat off the coast of Venezuela, according to a statement from President Trump, who claimed, without providing evidence, that the vessel was carrying drugs.

The president also claimed that the strike killed “six male narcoterrorists,” bringing the total number of people extrajudicially executed by the US military since the bombing campaign started on September 2 to 27. The Trump administration has not presented any evidence to Congress to back up its allegations that the boats it has been bombing were carrying drugs or that the victims were “narcoterrorists,” a term used to justify the killings.

“Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility — just off the Coast of Venezuela,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route. The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike. No U.S. Forces were harmed. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!” he added.

The president’s post included a video that appeared to show a boat that wasn’t moving getting struck with a missile, then exploding.

The latest US strike on a boat in the Caribbean comes amid reports that the Trump administration is considering bombing Venezuela as part of an effort to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The administration is using drug trafficking allegations as a pretext to push for regime change in the country and could potentially take military action directly against Maduro.

In response to the pressure, Maduro and his top officials have denied the drug trafficking allegations by pointing to data that shows the majority of the cocaine that is produced in Colombia doesn’t go through Venezuela. President Trump has framed the military campaign in the region as a response to overdose deaths in the US due to fentanyl, but fentanyl isn’t produced in Venezuela, and it does not go through the country on its way to the US.

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Study: Recreational Marijuana Legalization Linked to Fewer Opioid Overdose Deaths

Using event studies and a two-way fixed-effects, difference-in-differences approach modeled on the work of Callaway and Sant’Anna, the study found a consistent negative relationship between legal marijuana markets and opioid mortality. According to the data, recreational legalization is associated with a reduction of about 3.5 opioid overdose deaths per 100,000 people.

The study was conducted by researchers from West Virginia University, Angelo State University, New Mexico State University, and the American Institute for Economic Research

The researchers also discovered that states that adopted legalization earlier tended to see stronger declines in overdose deaths compared to later-adopting states. The findings held up through numerous robustness checks, suggesting a stable association rather than a temporary or coincidental effect.

These results add to a growing body of research suggesting that marijuana access may play a role in reducing reliance on opioids, potentially informing future public health and drug policy decisions. The authors note that their work highlights the importance of considering marijuana laws as part of a broader strategy for addressing the opioid epidemic.

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Report: PA Dem House Candidate Funneled Money Meant to Help Recovering Opioid Addicts to Bring Kids ‘LGBTQ+ Youth’ Center Offering ‘Medical Transition’ Seminars

According to a disturbing report from the Washington Free Beacon,  Democratic House candidate in Pennsylvania, Bob Harvie, funneled money away meant to help recovering opioid addicts and instead sent them to push an LGBTQ agenda.

According to the report, the funds went to transport minors to an “LGBTQ-youth” center that offers “medical transition” seminars for kids as young as 14.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Bucks County, Pa., Board of Commissioners, which Harvie chairs, approved a $13,500-grant in December to Planned Parenthood Keystone for “Expanding Services and Transportation” to the Rainbow Room, a local center that caters to gay and trans youth. The grant was used to transport high school students to Rainbow Room functions, the Delaware Valley Journal reported earlier this year. Its funding came from the county’s Opioid Settlement Fund, which is due to receive $70 million from drug distributors and pharmacy chains over the next 18 years.

Rainbow Room functions include seminars like “SEX ED NIGHT / M*STURB*TION,” which the center held in May 2024. A pamphlet advertising the event shows a photo of a woman’s hand massaging a watermelon designed to represent the female anatomy. In 2023, the Rainbow Room hosted a “Queer Prom,” where attendees as young as 13 were given goody bags with condoms, lubricant, and dental dams, used to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases during oral sex.

Earlier this week, meanwhile, the center held a “translating transition” seminar meant to teach kids as young as 14 “the basics of transgender identities, social transition, medical transition, and more!” In 2020, it hosted representatives of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Gender Clinic to discuss “transition issues for trans kids.” The hospital has faced intense scrutiny for providing hormone treatments like puberty blockers to young trans children, and for performing “gender-reassignment” procedures, more commonly known as sex-change operations.

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Trump Admin Expands Targets Across Global Narco Networks 

President Trump’s “America First” strategy – also described as “Hemispheric Defense” and alignes with the century-long Monroe Doctrine of the early 1800s – has expanded through increased border security, elevated pressure on allies such as Canada and Mexico, punitive measures against adversaries including China, Venezuela, Colombia, and Afghanistan, and declaring fentanyl crisis as well as both a public health crisis and national security threat, while also expanding list of nations designated as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries. 

A White House statement to begin the week announced that the Trump administration invoked Section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228) to designate Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries.

Trump’s new designation for the countries listed above provides the administration with additional leverage, including the ability to impose severe consequences on foreign assistance programs if those governments fail to meet counterdrug obligations.

In effect, the designation gives Trump another bold tool to bring into line countries it views as complicit in the global drug trade network with drugs that eventually end up on the streets of U.S. cities, which have fueled an overdose crisis killing more than 100,000 Americans annually.

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US Official Warns Of New Deadly Synthetic Opioid From China

U.S. authorities are warning of a new synthetic opioid from China that can be up to 50 times more potent than fentanyl.

Nitazenes pose an emerging threat as they are more resistant to naloxone, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses. They are often mixed with other drugs and delivered in the form of counterfeit pills mimicking drugs such as Xanax or Percocet, according to authorities.

Frank Tarentino, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) New York Division, said that the presence of nitazenes coming from China has been increasingly prevalent on the illicit drug scene.

“Here in the United States, we have found it in heroin, methamphetamine, in some cases fentanyl, and more alarmingly, we have now seen it pressed into pills,” he said in a Sept. 10 interview with NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.

“What we have seen is that these cartels, these transnational criminal organizations that are operating on a global scale, are intentionally lacing their drugs with fentanyl and now nitazenes to increase the high, to increase the addiction, to make more money.”

Tarantino said that traffickers are selling counterfeit prescription drugs such as oxycodone on the streets, online, or on social media. He warned that the only safe place to buy prescription drugs is through a legitimate pharmacy.

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Fentanyl Financiers: Treasury Links Mexican Banks and Chinese Networks to Cartel Money Laundering

The U.S. Department of the Treasury is stepping up its efforts to identify the ways that drug cartels move their funds. Most recently, Treasury officials identified the presence of Chinese money laundering networks that are working with Mexican drug cartels and other criminal entities to move large sums of cash.

In a series of notices from the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, authorities warned financial institutions about the methods that criminal organizations are using to launder money. According to FinCEN, investigators reviewed 137,153 Bank Secrecy Act reports from 2020 to 2024, identifying $312 billion in suspicious transactions tied to Chinese money laundering networks.

Of significant concern to FinCEN is the apparent ties between Mexican drug cartels and Chinese money laundering groups. The report comes just weeks after FinCEN and the U.S. Treasury sanctioned two Mexican banks and one brokerage firm that they alleged had been laundering money for various drug cartels and had also been helping funnel money into China to pay for fentanyl precursors, Breitbart Texas reported at the time.

The ties between drug cartels and Chinese groups are fueled in part by currency laws in both Mexico and China, which limit the amount of U.S. dollars that can be deposited and moved in Mexico, as well as China’s control of international currency within its country. Treasury officials claim that money laundering groups from China buy U.S. dollars from drug cartels and then sell them further ahead to Chinese individuals or businesses who are trying to evade China’s cash control laws.

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FBI, DEA and others target international drug conspiracy affecting the Tri-State

They say it was enough fentanyl to kill 70 million people.

The feds announced in Cincinnati on Wednesday the breakup of an international drug ring. FBI Director Kash Patel was in Cincinnati for the announcement.

Operation Box Cutter yielded three arrests and the indictments of 22 foreign nationals and four companies in China. The particulars of the operation were disclosed at the FBI’s Cincinnati field office.

“We’re done playing whack-a-mole,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

He stood with the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio and the DEA, describing how the team unraveled a complex web that was an international drug ring.

“We didn’t just arrest a couple of people,” said Patel. “We charged an enterprise-wide system in mainland China to include dozens of individuals in banks and companies that are responsible for making these lethal precursors and shipping them here. And you should ask yourself this: what other country in the world has a fentanyl crisis? None. Just us.”

Because of that, Patel says the feds focused on the companies that make the drugs used to cut fentanyl. They are based in Hebei and Guangzhou, China, shipping the drugs via U.S. Mail and other standard carriers to Tipp City, just north of Dayton. The drugs are used to mix with fentanyl, increasing the yield multiple times, without losing the potency of the drugs.

“Two were arrested recently in Dayton by our FBI SWAT team. And the third is in another state, and we are coordinating their arrest. So through the investigations, we have seized multiple kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine, metatomidine, and other drugs,” said Elena Iatarola, the Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Cincinnati Field Office.

Local 12 went to the websites of a couple of the companies indicted. They are still online selling the same drugs to anyone who will buy them. The U.S. Attorney was asked how he expected this to dent the drug distribution network if there is no way to extradite those responsible in China.

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Bipartisan bill targets nitazenes: Synthetic opioids 40 times stronger than fentanyl

A new bipartisan bill is aiming to stop the spread of nitazenes, a deadly synthetic opioid that’s 40 times stronger than fentanyl and already causing a new wave of overdose deaths.

The two lawmakers spearheading the bill, Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., and Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash., both of whom took to social media to lobby for the legislation.

These drugs are the next fentanyl: cheap to make, easy to traffic, and devastating families across America,” Vindman wrote on ‘X.’ “This threat won’t wait, neither can we,” Baumgartner also posted.

While speaking with Dr. Shravani Durbhakula about nitazenes last fall, she told The National News Desk the synthetic opioids were first detected in the U.S. over five years ago. The most common form, five to nine times stronger than fentanyl. But others could be up to 40 times more potent. All are resistant to Narcan.

They were developed in the 1950s and the 1960s but they were not approved by the FDA because of how potent they actually are. They quickly make people stop breathing. Sedate them,” said Durbhakula.

This year, the U.S. is seeing a rise in nitazene overdose deaths. A map put together by the New York Post showed the areas most affected, which span from New Mexico to Virginia. Drug Enforcement Administration Houston Division Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen recently told the Post, just as authorities in the U.S. and China increased efforts to tackle the surge in fentanyl, drug manufacturers shifted production to nitazenes.

I do think we are behind the curve. But that’s been the case with these synthetic opioids — that they shift,” Pullen said.

According to Pullen, nitazenes are produced in China, often with the help of Mexican cartels who then move north across the border. But although the federal government is making headway to tackle the threat, including President Trump’s border crackdown, more work needs to be done.

It’s very very difficult to stay ahead of it, so we’ve got to continue to step up our enforcement along the border,” said Pullen.

In addition to increased border security, the Trump administration has also hit China and Mexico with sanctions and tariffs to force foreign governments to act against illicit drug producers.

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Opioids More Likely To Kill Than Car Crashes Or Suicide

The National Safety Council reports that Americans are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car crash or suicide.

As Statista’;s Katharina Buchholz shows in the following chart, the likelihood of dying from opioid use in the U.S. increased from lifetime odds of one in 96 in 2017 to one in 57 in 2023 (down from one in 55 in 2022).

The same year, someone living in the U.S. only had one in 87 odds of dying of suicide and a one in 95 chance of dying in a car crash.

Potent and deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl – which is often mixed with heroin without the knowledge of drug users – contributed to this dismal development together with the ongoing crisis of prescription pain killer misuse.

The U.S. experienced 105,000 overdose deaths in 2023, down from 2022 after a severe uptick during the coronavirus pandemic.

The most likely cause of death in the U.S. continues to be heart disease with lifetime odds of 1 in 6, followed by cancer and stroke.

Covid-19 lifetime odds were similar to those of stroke in previous years, but are no longer reported by the source.

Despite being a common fear, the chances of dying due to gun assault stand at only one in 238, but are still greater than drowning or choking to death, which have odds of around one in 1,000 and one in 2,500, respectively.

Dying in a dog attack remains highly unlikely with the chances of that happening at one in 44,499.

Dying in a hurricane or tornado or any other storm event is actually more likely at one in 39,192.

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