Opioid

America’s Worst Drug Crisis Ever Is Causing The Streets Of Many U.S. Cities To Look Like A “Zombie Apocalypse” Has Arrived

America has been battling illegal street drugs for decades, but we have never seen anything like this.  When the COVID pandemic hit the U.S., illegal drug use dramatically surged, and that has carried over into 2021.  As I discussed a few days ago, the amount of meth that CBP agents have seized is up 9 percent so far in fiscal year 2021 and the amount of cocaine that CBP agents have seized is up 64 percent so far in fiscal year 2021.  But the largest increase has been in fentanyl traffic.  At this point, CBP agents have seized “more than 4,900 lbs of fentanyl during the first five months of FY21, already surpassing the total for all of FY20”.

The big drug cartels absolutely love fentanyl for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it is extremely inexpensive to make, and it is very easy to move it long distances.

Secondly, it is exceedingly addictive, and so customers constantly come back for more.

But the only problem is that many of those customers don’t last too long.  Tens of thousands of Americans are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses, and this has become a major national crisis.

Once again tonight, vast hordes of addicts will congregate in urban areas where they know they will be able to score some fentanyl.  One of those areas is Kensington Avenue in northeast Philadelphia…

The video looks like a scene from an apocalyptic movie – dozens of disheveled people shivering in the middle of a winter night as they camp out around a trash bin on fire among a street strewn with litter.

But the footage isn’t a Hollywood production but a candid snapshot of Kensington Avenue in northeast Philadelphia – an area that has been likened to the infamous Skid Row section of Los Angeles.

The neighborhood has previously been dubbed the ‘East Coast’s largest open-air drug market’ by DEA officials, according to the New York Times.

You can see footage of Kensington Avenue at night right here.  If you didn’t know better, you would probably be tempted to think that it was pulled right out of a post-apocalyptic horror film.

On Kensington Avenue, addicts can purchase a bag of fentanyl-laced heroin for as little as five dollars…

The Kensington section of Philadelphia, where anyone can buy a lethal dose of fentanyl-laced heroin for $5 a bag, has been known locally as the ‘ground zero’ of America’s opioid epidemic, Philadelphia Magazine reported.

It is not uncommon for locals who pass by the area to notice men lying motionless on the sidewalk.

Syringes and needles are also frequently seen out and used in plain sight.

Sometimes the men that are lying motionless on the sidewalk never get up, and that is because they have dropped dead from an overdose.

Of course scenes like this play out on a nightly basis all over America.  At this point, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have become the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States…

In 2016, synthetic opioids, primarily illegal fentanyl, passed prescription opioids as the most common drugs involved in overdose deaths in the United States, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

It is incredibly easy to overdose on fentanyl.  In fact, an amount of fentanyl equivalent to “two grains of salt” is apparently enough to put you in the grave…

Some families are facing a fentanyl crisis and law enforcement is sounding the alarm. The tasteless, odorless drug is driving up the number of fatal overdoses.

People who are battling a substance use disorder are being fooled by fentanyl. Lisa Smittcamp, the District Attorney in Fresno County, California, says the amount it takes to overdose is about the size of two grains of salt.

For a number of years, this was primarily a problem in the eastern half of the nation, but that has all changed.

Fentanyl use is now spreading like wildfire in the western half of the country, and that spike is pushing the overall death toll dramatically higher.  The following comes from NPR…

The spike in fentanyl deaths in the West contributed to a record number of fatal overdoses last year, with roughly 72,000 Americans dead.

“It’s just getting worse, and it’s killing too many people,” said Matthew Donahue, deputy chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Sadly, the final number for 2021 is expected to be even higher.

These are deaths that do not need to happen, but Americans don’t seem to be getting the message that fentanyl use is extremely dangerous.

In fact, since the beginning of the pandemic the number of Americans testing positive for fentanyl use has absolutely skyrocketed…

Use of methamphetamine and fentanyl shot up after the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, with a particularly sharp spike for the latter, according to a new report by drug testing company Millennium Health.

The adjusted positivity rate of urine drug screens was up 78% for fentanyl and 29% for methamphetamine during the first 9 months of the pandemic compared with the same period in 2019, according to the report. While cocaine and heroin saw small increases initially, both fell below pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020.

This is yet another example of how the fabric of our society is unraveling all around us, and it is only going to get worse.

For years, much of the fentanyl being used in the U.S. was coming in from China, but then international pressure forced the Chinese to ban the sale of fentanyl.

Unfortunately, since that time vendors in China have found ways around that ban…

Under international pressure, China’s government banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many of its variants in May 2019, resulting in a significant reduction in the country’s illicit fentanyl trade.

But more than a year later, Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels, according to an NPR investigation and research from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a nonprofit data analysis group.

This is one of the reasons why we need strong security on our southern border.

Right now the Mexican cartels are flooding our streets with fentanyl, and the new administration does not seem too concerned about doing anything to stop this from happening.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

Prescription Painkiller Crisis: Why Do Americans Consume 80 Percent Of All Prescription Painkillers?

Pills Prescription Painkillers - Public DomainIf Americans are so happy, then why do we consume 80 percent of the entire global supply of prescription painkillers?  Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in this country, and yet we buy four-fifths of these highly addictive drugs.  In the United States today, approximately 4.7 million Americans are addicted to prescription pain relievers, and that represents about a 300 percent increase since 1999.  If you personally know someone that is suffering from this addiction, then you probably already know how immensely destructive these drugs can be.  Someone that was formally living a very healthy and normal life can be reduced to a total basket case within a matter of weeks.

And of course many don’t make it back at all.  According to the CDC, more than 28,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2014.  Incredibly, those deaths represented 60 percent of all drug overdose deaths in the United States for that year…

A report released by the US Centers for Disesase Control and Prevention (CDC) in January revealed that drug-overdose deaths reached a new high in 2014, totaling 47,055 people. Opioids, a type of powerful painkiller that requires a prescription, were involved in 60% of those deaths.

Many Americans that start out on legal opioids quickly find themselves moving over to heroin because it is often cheaper and easier to obtain, and the U.S. is now facing a tremendous epidemic of heroin abuse as well.  In fact, the number of Americans that die of a heroin overdose nearly quadrupled between 2000 to 2013.

Finally, the federal government has started to take notice of this crisis.  A bill was recently passed to spend more than a billion dollars over the next two year fighting this problem.

But as long as doctors are writing thousands upon thousands of new prescriptions for these painkillers each year, this crisis is not going to go away any time soon.

In the Appalachians, these prescription painkillers are commonly known as “hillbilly heroin“, and all of the attention that the New Hampshire primaries received focused a lot of attention on how this crisis is destroying countless numbers of lives up in the Northeast.  But one survey found that the states with the biggest problems with painkiller addiction are actually in the West…

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey of approximately 67,500 people across the United States, found that the states with the highest rates of narcotic painkiller abuse were in the West – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.

Unless you are about to die, I would very strongly recommend that you resist any attempt by your doctor to put you on these “medications”.  Just consider what happened to one stay-at-home mother named Norah Mangan…

I am an educated, suburban wife and stay-at-home mother of four. Life had been good to me until a fateful visit with an orthopedic physician, my chief complaint being mild arthritic pain in my toes. My physician handed me the first of many monthly prescriptions for Oxycodone and what followed that appointment was a rapid descent into hell. Within six months, I had become a raving drug addict.

Before too long, Norah had to turn to means that were less than legal in order to keep fueling her addiction.  Her life was turned into a complete and utter disaster by drugs that were legally prescribed to her…

It wasn’t long before my legal monthly prescription fell woefully short in terms of keeping my life altering pain at bay. In the interest of not incriminating myself, I’ll simply share that when procured through other means, Oxycodone generally sells for one dollar per milligram. I was draining our savings and was out of my mind. I was so tortured that I didn’t care about the deterioration of my moral values, in fact, I didn’t even notice. It’s hard to imagine that in such a short period of time I had morphed from a Mrs. Cleaver, baking hot cinnamon buns in anticipation of my children’s arrival home from school, to Scarface crushing pills on the glass top of the executive desk in our home office while thinking to myself as I heard them arrive from school…why oh why are they home already?

You can read the rest of her amazing story right here…

The truth is that we are the most drugged people on the face of the planet.  It has been estimated that 52 million Americans over the age of 12 have used prescription drugs in non-medical ways, and this problem gets worse with each passing year.

According to research that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are currently on at least one prescription drug, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs.  And the numbers are far worse for older Americans.  The following statistics come from one of my previous articles…

–According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.

–There is an unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes.

–In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.

–According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.

–The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

–Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.

–A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug.

–A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs.

We are a deeply unhappy nation that has been trained to turn to pills as a “quick fix” for our hurt and our pain.

Yes, there are medical situations that call for prescription pain relievers.  But what we are seeing in America today goes far, far beyond that.  We are a nation of addicts that is always in search of a way to fill the gaping holes that we feel deep in our hearts.  This prescription pain killer crisis is just another symptom of a much deeper problem.

So what is the solution?

Please feel free to tell us what you think by posting a comment below…