Posted by marojejian 1/10/2026
Original: https://x.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/2009340857909170395
I haven't read the paywalled Science paper, but The Economist extracted a graph which shows that the purity of Fentanyl pills was stable till the first months of 2024, then dropped sharply. The purity of the powder peaked in 2023, then went down in 2024, back to its older levels. They suppose that it proves the supply was short, but another researcher even states that the supply of Fentanyl precursors didn't change until the end of 2024.
Anyway, the epidemic plateaued by the start of 2022, then went down after August 2023; Source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
Why did the death rate slow down for one year, then go down many months before any sign of supply changes?
That suggests a plausible alternative cause.
Narcan should be available, but short of a few users that know they need to keep it around, I don’t buy that making it available has meant a significant change in total outcomes because of timely deployment.
You might have got some at a rehab centre, or someone might live with a non-addict friend or partner. Community outreach workers (in cities that have embraced this stuff) might carry some around to administer.
I would be surprised if widespread availability to Narcan didn't decrease ODs.
I’m an EMT-B. I’ve had narcan in my personal kits for years.
My point being : killing your customer en masse is bad business practice in the long run. (Or even in the medium run.)
So, the drug dealer's best interest is to reduce the potency of the drug, therefore limiting the overdoses but keeping the customers alive, and willing to get the next dose.
If it happens when the prices are high, and you're able to cut your product and see it with a higher margin, it's even more value for the sharehol... Sorry, wrong analogy.
Anyway, is the number of people _using_ fentanyl also going down ? Where are the quarterly sales number published ? What's the trend ? When is the IPO ?
Sudden unlearning of aquired knowledge seems unlikely.
See: Figure 1 graph set page 4 - https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...
Even if people wanted to its not like they can all just bring a sample of their old heroin and a sample of their stronger high fentanyl laced heroin and test their purity and calculate dosages. Which is part of the problem of the war on drugs, many methods of harm mitigation and recovery are barred from users and 90% of their drug information is based on hearsay or personal experience.
That is a problem for the US, sure. Australia, where I live, has supervised shooting galleries and more of an addiction as health issue approach.
That said, if you had a chance to look at the US graphs linked above - there was a plateau period of high deaths in the US of some three and half years showing no much evidence of users learning to "safely handle and dose fentanyl" followed by a sharp decrease in deaths that corresponds more with a change in policy than an increase in user knowledge.
I would suggest this may be a somewhat more complex and multivariate issue than your initial upthread postulate acknowledges.
echo "
foreground=no
[ economist ]
accept=127.0.0.127:80
client=yes
options=NO_TICKET
options=NO_RENEGOTIATION
renegotiation=no
sslVersion=TLSv1.3
sni=www.economist.com
connect=172.64.145.237:443
"|stunnel -fd 0 -- 50b76b93
x=https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/08/why-overdose-deaths-are-falling-in-america
(
echo GET /${x#*//*/} HTTP/1.0 @
echo host: www.economist.com @
echo user-agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" @
echo @
)|tr @ '\r'|nc -vvn 127.127 80 > 1.htm
kill $(busybox pgrep -f 50b76b93)
firefox ./1.htmPossibly re-directed some of the fentanyl to other markets where addicts could no longer get heroin? Thus reducing supply elsewhere?
The opioid epidemic was caused by COVID pandemic and its devastating economic effects and also by cheapness of the fentanyl pills which were going as low as $1 a pop on the streets.
One problem mentioned was that other drugs were being laced with fentanyl. Simply supply a licensed, guaranteed clean version through a legal source at a lower price?
Then people who want actual fentanyl, supply that in the same way too.
Are you sure about what you are seeing, is it possible this is just for a few US imports and maybe you aren't looking at the shelf sticker? Or maybe it's a province-specific thing?
Edit: Found the regulation. In general,
> On consumer prepackaged foods, the net quantity must be declared on the principal display panel in metric units [221, 232, SFCR]. However, consumer prepackaged foods that are packaged from bulk at retail, other than individually measured foods, can declare the net quantity on the principal display panel in Canadian units [241.4(2)(b), SFCR].
https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/indust...