Free Republic

In a recent interview on Fox News, former President Donald Trump warned, "Our country is being poisoned from within by the drugs and by all of the other crime that's taking place." According to the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between November 2019 and October 2023, there have been a shocking 270,000 overdose deaths from synthetic opioids - or about 80,000 overdose deaths per year - across the nation. Under the Biden administration's first term, Americans have been increasingly traumatized by the tsunami of overdose deaths as disastrous open southern border policies flood the...

Reflections on medical policy, DEA permits, and the fentanyl crisisEdwin Leap is a board-certified emergency physician who has been practicing for 30 years since finishing residency. He currently works as an emergency physician for WVU Hospitals in Princeton, West Virginia. Follow When I was in my residency training, from 1990 to 1993, we were in the nascent phase of the "pain is a vital sign" madness. We were told, over and over, that we should treat pain aggressively and should not be afraid to give narcotics to patients in pain. Who were we to judge someone's pain, after all? The...

In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy. Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that once supported the area had closed over the past few decades. Many brick buildings from Hazard’s heyday were gone, bequeathing a gap-toothed look to Main Street. The rest were empty or occupied by attorneys and bail bondsmen. What’s more, Fugate Sheffel couldn’t afford a website or employees. She had never run a business before. And she had a...

Two deaths in Boulder County, Colorado, in 2023 are the latest in the U.S. to be blamed on the powerful class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes. Most health systems cannot detect nitazenes, so the exact number of overdoses is unknown, but they’re implicated in more than 200 deaths in Europe and North America since 2019, including 11 in Colorado since 2021. One of the two Boulder County deaths is linked to a new formulation called N-Desethyl etonitazene, which was identified by a national laboratory, and is thought to be the first related death. The Conversation interviewed Dr. Christopher Holstege, professor...

When Capitol building cleaning crews were removing feces from the hallowed halls of Congress after the riot of Jan. 6, 2021, no one imagined that Donald Trump would be leading the 2024 Republican presidential primary field by a 48-point margin just three years later. Two overarching reasons help explain this unusual circumstance. First, his “Make America Great Again” base is immovable. Trump knew that already on Jan. 23, 2016, when at a rally in Iowa, he famously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. Okay?” This is, for...

The Supreme Court seemed concerned Monday that blowing up Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement — a plan the Biden administration challenged based on the immunity it granted the company’s owners from facing future lawsuits — could mean victims of the opioid crisis never see a cent in compensation. The settlement requires the Sackler family to provide up to $6 billion to address the opioid crisis in exchange for immunity from future lawsuits. While skeptical of the arrangement, multiple justices voiced concerns during oral arguments Monday in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma that changing it would put victims, who overwhelmingly support the settlement...

Three years after Oregon voted to de-criminalize drug offences - residents are now begging to reverse their decision after seeing an astonishing number of deaths from opioid overdoses. In 2020 - Oregon voters approved a measure to decriminalize the possession of all drugs including heroin and cocaine. The proposal, known as Oregon Ballot Measure 110, passed with 58.8 percent support. Now residents of the liberal state are crying out to their politicians to do something about the open-air drug markets that their cities have turned into. Opioid deaths in Oregon have gone up from 280, before the de-criminalization was voted...

Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children. “The inability for people to live their day-to-day life without encountering open-air drug use is so pressing on urban folks’ minds,” said John Horvick, vice president of polling firm DHM Research. “That has very much changed people’s perspective about what they think Measure...

The most circulated newspaper in Europe killed a major corruption story to please Joe Biden. A new report details how editors at Bild, the outlet in question, canned an extensive investigative piece on Albanian PM Edi Rama because he and the US president are friends and political allies.Per The Washington Examiner, Albania has become a narco-state over the last decade under Rama, and Bild was getting ready to expose him further.So, who is Rama? He’s the far-left leader of Albania’s Socialist Party. Accusations against him range from drug trafficking to money laundering, to extortion and vote buying.A few days ago,...

A group of novel synthetic opioids emerging in illicit drugs in the United States may be more powerful than fentanyl, 1,000 times more potent than morphine, and may even require more doses of the medication naloxone to reverse an overdose, a new study suggests. Nitazenes are a synthetic opioid, like fentanyl, although the two drugs are not structurally related. In the small study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open most of the patients who overdosed on nitazenes received two or more doses of the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone, whereas most patients who overdosed on fentanyl received only...

Overdose deaths in Charlotte rose over 20% from a year ago and fentanyl is the main culprit, according to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Already this year CMPD has reported as many as 137 fatal overdoses and responded to 1,000 calls to aid overdose victims. Most of these involved fentanyl. One of these calls came late Sunday night, when a 32-year-old in Charlotte became the 137th victim, officials said at a press conference Monday. Dr. Jon Studnek, Medic’s deputy director, who joined CMPD Monday, said the agency treats about seven patients a day with suspected opioid overdoses. Medic does what it...

Opioid pain-relieving medicines are not more effective than a placebo in relieving acute back and neck pain and may even cause harm, according to a world-first trial. Over 577 million people worldwide experience low back and neck pain at any one time. The OPAL trial recruited close to 350 participants from 157 primary care and emergency department sites. Participants with acute-meaning sudden and generally short-term-back or neck pain were randomly allocated to a six-week course of a commonly prescribed opioid or a placebo. Both groups also received standard care including advice to avoid bed rest and stay active. Participants were...

The widely available drug fentanyl, already the number one killer of Americans under 50, could be weaponized and used for terroristic mass poisoning, according to health experts at Rutgers and other institutions. “Before fentanyl, the only viable mass poisons were rare and difficult-to-access agents such as cyanide or nerve agents,” said Lewis Nelson, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and senior author of the new Frontiers in Public Health paper. “Fentanyl can be just as deadly if properly disseminated, and it’s ubiquitous. A motivated person could readily obtain enough to potentially poison hundreds...

Americans suffering from anxiety and sleep disorders have been unable to get their prescriptions filled at pharmacies due to secret provisions in a recently settled lawsuit over the proliferation of opioids, according to a report. Pharmacists say that they are being prevented from fulfilling orders on key medications such as Xanax and Adderall due to a 2021 settlement with three of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers — AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson. Pharmacists say that they are being prevented from fulfilling orders on key medications such as Xanax and Adderall due to a 2021 settlement with three of the nation’s...

A study led by Vinod Dasa, MD reports that a novel surgical pain management strategy following total knee arthroplasty (TKA), or total knee replacement, provided pain relief without opioids. The researchers also found that changing prescriptions for opioids at discharge from automatic to upon request dramatically decreased opioid use. "About 70% of opioid-naïve patients needed only Tylenol and anti-inflammatory medications to manage their pain," notes Dr. Dasa. "Opioid use in health care is improving but remains difficult to manage. Surgical pain was long thought to be unavoidable, requiring a large amount of pain medications. Creating innovative strategies to enhance surgical...

In the first six weeks of 2023 alone, they have found the Frankenstein opioid 34 times in the Sunshine State. They are often, as their name suggests, used in combination with fentanyl, cocaine and heroin. ......The drugs have reportedly been found everywhere from San Francisco to areas of the mid-Atlantic, as Virginia Att. Gen. Jason Miyares confirmed finding them in his state.

Anyone who takes even a cursory look at the news – regardless the source – has to be aware of fentanyl – the latest of the killer drugs assaulting our society. It wasn't too long ago that virtually no one had ever heard of it. Now, it seems to be everywhere, and from what we are told, it is a killer of staggering proportions. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is said to be 50 times more potent than heroin. While the drug is found in all states, California is particularly hard hit, and the source, it appears, is movement...

Drug enforcement officials are now warning about a new group of opioids, ten times stronger than fentanyl, which has been linked to a recent surge in overdoses. “Laboratory test results indicate that the potency of certain nitazene analogs [e.g., isotonitazene, protonitazene, and etonitazene] greatly exceeds that of fentanyl, whereas the potency of the analog metonitazene is similar to fentanyl,” explained a team of researchers from the Tennessee Department of Health. Deaths linked to drugs are on the rise. In their report issued Friday, Jessica Korona-Bailey and colleagues said that “four times as many nitazene-involved overdoses were identified in Tennessee in...

One of the deadliest street drugs, illicit fentanyl, has transitioned from a hidden killer that people often hope to avoid to one that many drug users now seek out on its own. The shift to intentional use of fentanyl underscores a worrying trend in the country's ongoing opioid epidemic, experts say: That a growing number of people have become so tolerant to opioids like heroin, that they're turning to the synthetic compound, which is up to 50 times stronger. Until recently, intentional use of fentanyl was mostly limited to the West Coast, but in the past few years, addiction specialists...

Aromatherapy reduces post-surgical opioid use by half in hip replacement patients anxious before their operation, according to a new study. Previous research has shown that anxiety, depression and catastrophising (patients who believe they are going to die during surgery) increase post-operative pain and opioid use by up to 50%. Aromatherapy, the use of essential oils to enhance well-being, has been used for thousands of years and a number of recent studies have found that lavender and peppermint aromatherapy, in particular, can reduce anxiety. This study is one of the first to employ a randomized, placebo-controlled design to look at whether...