But going beyond opioid deaths, Europe in general has a) decent medical coverage b) meaningful employment protections and c) better overall social safety net
Apparently the poor are most at-risk from this crisis according to a large study [1] - so maybe the fix isn't just harm reduction, but alleviating the existential crisis we put people of lower income in the US - making them more susceptible to drug addiction & death
Also, Europe doesn't have a fentanyl crisis because we have cheap, pure heroin. The Afghani-Europe heroin pipeline is so old, tightly organized, and efficient that there is little need for an alternative.
By comparison, shipping heroin across the Pacific is costly risky business, because it's easier to detect and seize. Hence the need for fentanyl which is orders of magnitude stronger and can be created in impromptu labs.
This gets particularly dicey for every "party drug" users in the states, because a white powder that would be relatively harmless is subject to accidental cross-contamination. [edit based upon reading comments below: Yeah, if you live in the US and your friends take coke or ketamine, you should have Narcan.]
Opiate users are addicts but they're not stupid. Nearly all greatly prefer reliable heroin to the risk of OD'ing. Hence why fentanyl hasn't become a thing in Europe. A reputation for killing your customers is bad for business.
Bonus question: Why does Europe not have a methaphetamine crisis?
I'm completely talking out of my ass here but I feel like how relatively uncommon meth is in EU compared to US has to do with ingredients being a lot harder to get in the EU area. Crystal is common in the US while in EU that is extremely rare, the meth on eu market is usually powder or rock.
I'm assuming most of crystal meth in the US comes from mexico and they don't bother to ship that much of it overseas as stuff like cocaine has higher profits and a bigger market.
> Bonus question: Why does Europe not have a methaphetamine crisis?
I've always thought that it was because all the precursors for meth get used to make MDMA.Though it's probably more of a culture/economic thing. Europe definitely has some meth in it.
As far as I understood it so far, it was actually companies that pushed (legal) opioid consumption in the US? They influenced doctors to prescribe lots of opioids, and then people get addicted and start buying it off the streets.
Years ago (2017 ish) I remember reading an article where they interviewed some French public health or law enforcement people about whether they were concerned about the opioid problem coming there, and they basically said no, we have lots of treatment options here (which I understood to mean more legal access to opiates) so it's not a problem. The drug way is entirely the cause of all of this. I'm generally right wing but when I see the nonsense about the illegal immigration / border crossing being in any way related to the overdose problem, I find it idiotic. Its squarely a problem with how we've handled drug prohibition
Several societies (incl France) offer codeine over the counter and have much lower opioid usage rates.
I think there would be a lot of benefit to legalizing at least one molecule in each drug class for OTC recreational use, chosen based on harm reduction standards like toxicity, therapeutic index, and duration. I think so much of the drug war's ills could be headed off by making codeine and vyvanse OTC - destroying demand for dirtier more dangerous drugs would do enough good to offset the increased abuse rate for these particular chemicals.
France has plenty of other drug problems, the most obvious being crack cocaine. You can walk around the parts of Paris to most obviously see this yourself, if you're curious. In fact a huge amount of violence in the banlieues relates to drugs.
