tramadol is OTC in most free countries. Man the west is so cucked
Completely agree.
And some one on here got into it with me because I called America "gross". lol Yeah it is pretty fucking "gross" that most other countries that people call "shit" at least give their citizens over the counter opioids. It might not be heroin or anything, but it still means they give their citizens more trust & "freedom" than the land that claims to be "the land of the free". Ironically a land built on genocide & slavery. lol
I actually found a headline claiming 800,000 - shouldn't the fact that the numbers vary so wildly suggest that the metrics were arbritaty and chosen by the journalist?
Possibly. But the fact that it's variation is even in the hundreds of thousands is still ridiculous.
They claim 70,000+ people die a year from opioids. And I'm sure a big chunk of these are accidents & poly-drug deaths. Usually with alcohol involved. So the actual number of people who die strictly from opioids annually is probably severely lower than that actual 70,000 number. Most of these deaths are preventable too. Hell I lost several friends back in 2018, who had been heroin users since the 80's & were alive & well. And then fentanyl started popping up in our area & it took one bag of fent for them to die. They thought it was "heroin", took their usual dose & it killed them. Totally preventable if they had just been able to get legal heroin from somewhere.
It almost happened to me once, but I was more knowledgeable & lucky. Got a bag one day, it wasn't the tan/brown rocks with an acidic smell that I was use to, it was just a plain white powder with no smell, so obviously I tried a tiny tester bump first. And that tiny tester bump had me nodding so hard, I had to break out the naloxone "just in case". It was horrible nod too, like you're about to just fall out of consciousness & die. Not the "wow, I feel perfect right now" kind of nod (that you can snap out of if you really want to). So if I had been an idiot & dug into that bag like it was "heroin", I probably would've had my first OD ever. But I played it smart & it saved my ass.
So my actual point is just that, the US is totally cool with people dying in the hundreds of thousands due to smoking, alcohol & "medical error", but a few thousand actual opioid deaths is all they scream about when it comes to the drug war. Which should tell anyone that the drug war doesn't have anything to do with "keeping you safe", but from letting you access a class a meds that helps improves people's live substantially. Opioids have numerous benefits (for me they always have anyway). They help my severe depression, anxiety, they're anti-addictive drugs (for me, when I have a good opioid, I don't care for alcohol or doing any other drugs really, except some cannabis, but when I have no opioids, I'm literally chugging robitussin & taking whatever drug I can get my hand on), they help pain, etc...
The US could easily stop those 70,000 deaths by giving their citizens a little more freedom & educating people better on the dangers of poly-drug use.
Those friends of mine might have still been here if it weren't for prohibition & stigmatization in the first place.
It's insane that we continue to stigmatize & criminalize them.