Heard of The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth by

[mahina]

Sam Quinones? It explores why our headlines across the country include spikes in homelessness, deaths by overdose and schizophrenic behavior.
Or more likely, sadly, no headlines but rising bodycounts. Sam is an investigative journalist, that rare treasure, and a great writer.

It is brilliantly told by the author of Dreamland, his book on the opioid crisis that cracked open the Sackler’s illegal racket which eventually contributed to the homelessness and overdose epidemic we are now seeing nation-wide.

From as far as I've gotten in Sam's new book, to summarize, Fentanyl is much more profitable than meth, stepped into the existing funnel to humans created by the Sackler family’s opioid epidemic (with some docs),

costs a tiny fraction of what the last generation meth made from ephedrine by small operations,

Has scaled to immense scale with many huge warehouses in production,

Is being seen in across the socioeconomic spectrum,

Causes people to act in ways that are indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenics including wild hallucinations which make holding a job impossible,

Kills people in very small amounts, is unpredictably in other drugs now including cocaine and heroin to there degree of lethality than decades- long heroin addicts are dying within days or weeks of fentanyl use,

And the root cause is loss of community. We must rebuild community as we can if we want to heal. I can’t wait to read the rest and I think there are important ideas here for us. Aloha.

[BeckyDem]

1. This is who we have become.

K&R Sadly