Fentanyl and Opioid Epidemic

Fentanyl and Opioid Epidemic
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Fentanyl and Opioid Epidemic
A society's virtues and vices are often evident through some minor incidents that may be ignored as inconsequential, and yet they carry immense weight. The drug abuse problem in the country is thus a sign of a greater societal problem than most people presume. The problem has been extremely prevalent that in 2017, the US Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis to be a public health emergency. Reports on the illegally manufactured fentanyl getting into the drug market in the form of both powder and pills resulted in an increase in opioid overdose. While the authorities may perceive it as an isolated social problem, the opioid crisis must be seen as a manifestation of a greater cultural transformation, which contours the millennial generation, that of instant gratification, in order to create viable solutions to this plague that our country faces.
The number of deaths resulting from drug overdose increased by approximately 5% between 2018 and 2019. This number is almost four times that number it was in 1991. In 2019 alone, there were 70,630 deaths, and 70% of these deaths are attributed to opioids. Between 1999 and 2019, there were almost 500,000 deaths resulting from opioid overdose, which included both prescription and illicit opioids (CDC, 2021). These deaths can be classified into three major waves, with the first one beginning with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, which resulted in overdose deaths from prescription opioids. The second wave commenced in 2010 following a significant increase in overdose deaths involving heroin. The first wave started in 2013, with a notable increase in overdose deaths that involved synthetic opioids, especially those that involved illicitly manufactured fentanyl. The market for illegally manufactured fentanyl continues to change and has been found to exist together with heroin, counterfeit pills, and cocaine.
The problem facing the management of opioid usage among people is that the interventions focus on the signs rather than the root cause. According to Criswell (1970), most people are only treated for the symptoms rather than the cause of the illness. Criswell (1970) further notes that American society is characterized by a high level of capitalism that pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of the situation to generate more profits. Physicians and pharmaceutical companies are collaborating to ensure that users continue relying on their products so that they can earn as many profits as possible (Criswell, 1970). The people no longer have the power to manage their health and have instead abdicated it to the physicians and the pharmaceutical companies. The US society is no longer characterized by kind-hearted individuals who engage in business to help others. Instead, capitalism has penetrated to all other sectors, and so in every decision that one makes, they have to focus on the amount of money they will earn.
The strategies that the US government has developed in collaboration with the transnational pharmaceutical companies to help resolve the insecurity by capitalist accumulation is what is known as pacification. According to McMichael (2017), this concept is equivalent to the Foucauldian notion of "peace as coded war" and entails the establishment of a liberal social order. Consequently, handling this question requires one to assess the way that opioids, capitalist interests, and state violence interact. Understanding this interaction requires one to assess the connection between drugs, pacification, and capitalism. The relationship among these variables emanated from the desire for the control of the drugs and the global economy, which resulted in the development and subsequent expansion of both legal and illegal drug markets around the world (Pereira, 2021). The operators of these drugs are mainly transnational pharmaceutical corporations and organized criminal groups that pause as groups that provide solutions to the problem but in the actual sense are the perpetrators.
This drug problem further took another vector besides control and marketing, which is the relationship between the violent drug control mechanisms that the state security forces use to reduce the spread and the private interests that are based on the pursuit for profit in the capitalistic society. This relationship explains the currently evident punitive measures in certain states against drug traffickers and the private interest groups that form an extensive global network that supplies these drugs to the different corners of the world. These private interest groups seek various channels to market their products. For example, the opioid medications that have entered the health care system have been presented as an effective means of handling certain types of health conditions. However, as Dasgupta, Beletsky, and Ciccarone (2021) note, society's over-reliance on these opioid...