I’m sure there is still a lot of crack use, but in the 80s crack was the drug epidemic. How did opioids and fentanyl take over as the seeming mainstream drug?
I’m sure there is still a lot of crack use, but in the 80s crack was the drug epidemic. How did opioids and fentanyl take over as the seeming mainstream drug?
Comments
Overprescribing Oxy Contin (sp?) that the Sacklers claimed was not as addictive as other opioids, then a cheap alternative flooded the market
Gross oversimplification, but I am tired.
Short story – Overprescribing of prescription opioids.
Cost. 1g of fentanyl can get more people high than a hundred pounds of cocaine. It’s short and sweet but that’s the just of it. There’s still a market for crack cocaine, but people are going to do whatever makes them the most money and the profit margin on fentanyl is abysmally higher than anything else.
Not sure about meth but fentanyl is definitely cheaper and easier to create and it’s more potent so when trying to smuggle/transport it, you need less mass.
In addition to what others have said. Meth can be made from easily available ingredients, without major equipment(though there is some risk).
Pharmaceutical drugs dealt as “medicine” by corporations in the name of profits
Coca has to be grown in fields before it can be processed into cocaine and then crack. Fields which must be guarded, and are vulnerable to discovery.
Fentanyl and Meth can both be made in mass quantities in easy-to-set-up chemical factories.
(Fentanyl took over from Heroin, which requires opium poppies as starting material.)
Easy access.
To start doing crack you have to want to try hard drugs, know where to get hard drugs, and then go do the special dance in a dangerous area to get the hard drugs.
Opioids were heavily advertised by doctors in exchange for bigger pay checks. Everyone that stubbed their toe was given a prescription for OxyContin. Got a sore lower back? How would you like some Hydros?
Then places like Florida had their own special epidemic where quasi-legit doctors ran Sham Clinics that were called Pill Mills. Where those snide euphemisms I just used were legit excuses you just had to mention to get prescriptions for these drugs. Everyone could get it, in a pretty safe environment, and it was Doctor Tested, Doctor Approved.
Now we come to Fentanyl. In my anecdotal experience (which is not all encompassing, but I am a 10 years clean former addict of primarily cocaine and ecstasy) Fentanyl has never actually been big or prevalent. Yes you can get it, and I’ve know a few to play with it over the years, but it was always pretty rare. To my understanding most people’s illicit encounter with it is in the former of lacing by bad actors, or incompetent dealers that are cross contaminating their drugs on accident. It’s very dangerous in very very small quantities.
You can’t sell drugs to dead people, so most Fentanyl exposures are not intentional. I don’t even thank it’s truly prevalent as the media makes it seem. It’s just the Chemical Boogeyman of this era. Put it this way, I know a hundred different people that did meth while in a living room with kids present. I’ve only known 6 people to ever touch a fentanyl patch and abuse it. And all of those lads only did it a handful of times.
Couple of things, though this is not an exhaustive list.
Crack and powder cocaine have to be made from coca leaves. There’s a long, restricted supply chain, and the products are illegal the entire way. USCG and other law enforcement agencies have gotten better at intercepting them on the way in. Technically, cocaine is legal, but it’s clinical uses are pretty limited.
Methamphetamine and opioids are basically the inverse. Methamphetamine can be readily synthesized from commonly available legal precursors. And frankly, any idiot with the supplies can do it successfully enough to get high (though there can be substantial hazards). Certain Opioids are legal, so many people get their start on them from stolen/purchased prescriptions, and prescription pills still form a decent part of the supply chain. Fentanyl specifically is incredibly potent, so it doesn’t take much to get someone high. This small volume makes smuggling easier (and, again, it’s widely distributed).
There’s probably elements of trends and stigma involved, too (like the term “crackhead”)
Just wait ~35yrs for the whistleblower to disclose the financials and paperwork.
Cheaper to produce, Cheaper to obtain, plenty of availability.
Meth was ease of access. Allegan Michigan used to be the meth manufacturing Capitol of the world beck in the 90s and early 2000s. There is a drug manufacture there named Perrigo who manufactures Sudafed. Well, before it was regulated by the FDA, there was a Janitor there who would wheel literal barrels of raw ingredients out of the facility to his truck. He then sold that product to the meth manufactures. Story goes he was present during a lab bust but they couldn’t do anything because it wasn’t a controlled substance at that time.
Now, Allegan is a rural community with lots of farms. Another ingredients prominent in Meth is anhydrous ammonia, which is used by farmers. So, between those not being controlled substances and both being readily available, cooks had easy access to make incredibly high grade product.
I’m working on meeting the Janitor, I know someone whe just built a deck for and I think it would be an amazing interview.
It was a secret invasion. Big Pharma marketed prescription opioid painkillers as non-addictive to doctors. They gave doctors big perks to over prescribe. People got addicted because Big Pharma lied. Congress got involved and stopped over prescription.
The addicted turned to heroin and other counterfit prescription drugs when opioids became unavailable.
Drug traffickers began mixing fentanyl into heroin, cocaine, counterfeit pills, and other drugs, often without users’ knowledge, leading to a massive spike in addiction and overdose deaths.
Fentanyl is a result of the Opioid epidemic. Doctors over prescribed opioids and got a lot of people addicted, and the availability of prescription meds increased the available supply on the black market.
For Fentanyl specifically, it’s an extremely strong drug and tiny amounts can make a large number of people high. That makes it a lot easier to smuggle compared to the likes of Cocaine.
It’s also made in a lab vs grown in fields (like cocaine or cannabis) so it’s easier to hide.
Meth by comparison is very easy to make (cook). Its ingredients are relatively easy to get on the open market and the recipe can be found online and made in your bathtub.
This is to a drug dealers advantage because there is a domestic supply, so you don’t have to spend so much effort smuggling in product like Cocaine.
harder, better, faster, stronger
meth is longer lasting crack
fentanyl is more potent than heroin
Meth is crazy addictive. It used to be made in small rust belt towns, but now there are actual factories making it, so production is way up and it’s cheap! I cannot overstate how addictive it is. It’s so addictive harm reduction is really the only hope for users to prolong their life in hopes that something clicks and they stop. Contingency management also has some success as well. The dopamine rush from meth is like 10-20x greater than alcohol. The meds don’t really help with cravings the same way they do for opioids and alcohol. Fentanyl is added to meth sometimes. It’s generally added to something. It is also being manufactured and cheaply. But it’s so dangerous because it’s so potent. A visually small amount will kill. I think just being cheaper than crack. Opioids took over because there were some lies put out by some “researchers”. They said opioids weren’t addictive, and that’s just not the case. So people started getting hooked. I think meth just got popular because it’s cheap and used a lot in chem sex (basically having sex while high). Meth is also really popular in men who have sex with men. And as I said, crazy addictive. People just die from it. That’s the general trend. In our drug counseling sessions, we tell people, the only reason I’m where I am and you are where you are is because I didn’t try meth.
OP you should check out “Dopesick” on Hulu. Yes it’s a television show, yes im sure there are parts that are dramatized for TV’s sake. It’s pretty eye opening though. Great tv show though
The NYT has a great article on this. Basically, for a time, opiates were being over-prescribed for chronic pain despite the addictive risk. This wasn’t any sort of sudden change in policy or anything, just something that slowly became the culture of prescriptions around the early 2000s. Then we realized this was a problem and dramatically decreased how much we describe opiates, but we still have all these people who are either a.) addicted to opiates no longer getting them, or b.) in chronic pain but don’t have access to them. There simply was/is not a non-addictive alternative. This led to a much larger demand for drugs like heroin, which is why that became the big drug people were cracking down on around 2015. By 2020 though, drug cartels realized that heroin is really hard to make because it requires growing opium. Fentanyl on the other hand is synthetic, making it significantly easier, cheaper, and faster to make and transport, not to mention that people can get high on much smaller doses of fentanyl compared to heroin, so you get more bang for your buck too! Will people who use your product probably OD from it? Sure! But fentanyl is just that much cheaper than heroin. It’s still cost-efficient to choose fentanyl. This is why around 2020, we saw a huge wave of ODs as fentanyl spread across the US. The article does a good job at breaking down the deeper details of the transportation systems for fentanyl and how we’re collaborating with other governments to help crack down on it.
It’s also important to emphasize that cocaine has not actually really gone down in use, it’s just that opiates and fentanyl are much more of a problem, particularly fentanyl rn since it’s so deadly.
I think certain sectors of the federal government stopped flooding the streets with it, for one, while still policing it.
Most of the crackheads that I met in rehab were actually just upper heads, non specific to crack. Honestly, a lot of people told me breaking bad made tweakers just haul ass to meth since it’s more “glamorous”, lasts longer, etc. I was also told that a certain community uses meth to fuel all night orgies.
Rehab is wild.
Cocaine is relatively easy to make, but expensive and dangerous to source, transport and distribute. Synthetics are just the next natural step. But if you were 5, I’d say “Crack Cocaine was like when we go to grandmas house and she only has 5 movies on DVD that you need a different remote to watch. Meth is like a streaming service on your home TV. Fentanyl is your iPad set to autoplay kids YouTube. However, the battery is going to die and there’s no charger.”
I just figured it was because Reagan quit supplying it…
Purity lowered so addictiveness also decreased when the government stopped importing it?
Synthetic drugs can be produced more cheaply & reliably.
To be fair, the only thing that really compares to the crack boom of the 1980s is the modern fentanyl problem (maybe you could say this applies to the heroin boom that preceded fentanyl).
Crack was an epidemic because turned a somewhat clumsy process of chemically converting cocaine power to freebase into something that anyone can do at their home in a few minutes. No one was buying $5-10 hits bags of coke to turn into freebase. So it was mostly only people who could afford it doing it—whether it was a lawyer or celebrity or the coke dealer themselves, etc. Freebase coke isn’t really stable the way powder coke is, it’s hard to store. Smoking it requires technique and unwieldy apparatus.. you can’t just sit in a car or in a bathroom with a crack pipe and a lighter.
Crack on the other hand essentially solves these problems. Stable, portable, discrete, accessible, etc. Identical high. Now you can take a $100 worth of coke, convert it to crack, break it into $10 rocks and show them how to do it on the spot. After it wears off they’ll want more. So you can get a whole neighborhood strung out in a weekend. That’s what the crack epidemic was. A normal neighborhood being introduced to the high of freebase cocaine.
Let’s say you want to read an email. Freebase was like a needing to use an expensive desktop computer, crack was like a having smartphone or tablet. The email is the actual high you experience, pretty much indistinguishable. It’s much easier to get your hands on a smartphone than it is to get a top of the line Mac Pro or high end gaming rig.
Fentanyl is kind of different insofar that a whole neighborhood didn’t get turned out in a weekend. It was more of a slow burn, because people who end up strung out on fentanyl usually are at the end of a progression that began with pharmaceuticals, led to heroin addiction and then the heroin supply was replaced by almost entirely for fentanyl. This takes time.
These drugs have a longer high than ends in a gently nodding off. Crack on the other hand comes on strong but then the high falls off a cliff in like 15 minutes. You’re now wide awake and the only thing you want is more crack. So you can go from having your whole paycheck on Friday to robbing a liquor store Saturday afternoon for cash to buy crack.
What fentanyl does is kill people left and right, since the margin of error is pretty slim when it’s comes to dosage and purity. Heroin didn’t have that problem to that degree. By comparison, meth and powder cocaine almost never kill people.
Fent is synthetic, meaning unlike heroin it doesn’t require poppy flowers. Which means anybody with a lab can make it.
Same with meth, as cocaine requires coca leaves – but as seen in Breaking Bad, everyone with Kids First Chemistry Set and some pseudoephedrine you can buy in a pharmacy can make meth.
It’s the cheapest and most transportable street drug ever.
Cocaine was a tool the CIA used to fund black ops destabilizing unfriendly regimes at the expense of African Americans and Latinos that bled into upper-class white society. It’s still around, but really peaked in the 70s and 80s. It has to be imported, and it is expensive.
Crack was used by the FBI with the intent to undermine African American communities in urban centers, but took off into a full-blown epidemic. It’s also still around, but probably peaked in the 90s. Crack is made by adulterating cocaine, so the price per dose may be cheap, but the precursor is still a costly import.
Meth has a history going back to the Nazis, which kind of explains why redneck white trash started cooking it. It’s so easy to make that the most inbred unschooled Cletus in any immobilized trailer can supply his entire clan. Meth is a growing problem, and we may not yet have seen the peak of this epidemic. This can be made locally just about anywhere.
Fentanyl is a direct result of the opioid epidemic, in which the Sackler family reaped the benefits of co-opting the healthcare system of the United States to get people who couldn’t afford actual treatment addicted to drugs like Oxycontin. The rumor is that fentanyl’s precursors are supplied to Mexico by China, which could be a sort of revenge for the Opium Wars. Like meth, this is a growing problem. This can be made locally as well, but most of it is imported; nonetheless it is extremely cheap to produce and it has been laced into a number of other black market drugs in order to spread addiction.
Supply is the biggest factor. There’s been a flood of cheap, super potent meth and fentanyl. The meth you see today is a lot different than the meth 20 years ago. It’s a lot more destructive so it’s a lot more noticeable.
Like others have said, the Sackler family and the employees of Purdue Pharma got a lot of people hooked on opioids. Purdue had really aggressive sales teams that would put a lot of pressure on doctors to prescribe opioids that the company claimed were not additive.
Another factor is that a lot of the crack pandemic went hand in hand with racist hysteria about inner city black drug users. Crack just got a lot more attention than other drugs. Meth and fentanyl affect a lot of white communities. Historically drug use in white communities wasn’t talked about as much as those in black communities. The new drugs are so destructive, it is no longer possible to pretend these drug epidemics do not exist in white communities.
So you have an increase in supply. You have a shift in the potency and destructive nature of the drugs. You also have a lot more white people using meth and fentanyl.
Just an observation I’ve had.
In the 80s tje American military was doing all sorts of stuff in central and south America. The main drug export? Cocaine.
In the 2000s the crack epidemic slowed but the opioid crisis ramped up. The American military was in Afganistan. Their major drug export? Opium.
Meth is a lot easier to manufacturer than cocaine and it’s more potent. Cocaine is very labor intensive to make and you need a lot of the primary ingredient (cocoa leaf) which is not exactly a readily available. Then you have to cook the coke to get crack and that’s a whole process in itself.
Complete opposite of meth. all the ingredients required for meth are chemicals and the cartel has an endless supply chain for that (china).
Cocaine is still more popular than meth and more socially acceptable (not as much as weed tho).
If meth didn’t have the stigma it did and was as socially acceptable as coke there would be a lot more users that’s for sure.
As a former long time user of cocaine and a current chronic user of methamphetamine you couldn’t pay me to go back to coke. It’s inferior in every way to meth. Unfortunately that comes at a heavy price and is never worth it in the end.
The Iron Law of Prohibition – All banned substances trend towards more concentrated (and therefore dangerous) versions
By the way, I asked this question because I was watching that old Wesley Snipes movie “New Jack City”.
I just read that Opioids are physically addictive, but cocaine is more of a psychological addiction (like gambling).
So heroin and alcohol make you physically addicted and withdrawal has real physiological effects. But Cocaine (and gambling) don’t have physical withdrawal symptoms, but psychologically, you crave it.
I don’t know which is worse.
Because they are cheap (for the distributors), easy to obtain (for the distributors), and most importantly, incredibly addictive (for everyone)
fent is cheap and an easy “same” drug for heroin. you get it mixed in and people say it’s great shit
I work with drug users in a harm reduction capacity. I can’t speak to history but I can speak to current use trends. Meth and fentanyl are survival drugs for a lot of people from labor workers down to homeless folks.
Meth: A lot of workers use meth to stay awake. A lot of homeless people start using meth to stay awake at night so they don’t get attacked or get their stuff stolen. It’s cheap and easy to make. Coke is neither of those things.
Fetty: It started getting used to cut H back in the day but because it’s so much more powerful and H was so hard to get ahold of it’s now the preferred opioid. People became addicted to it. A lot of people use Fentanyl to treat pain, to sleep, or to feel okay. Once someone is physically addicted they use to avoid getting sick from withdrawal. Homelessness and longterm outdoor exposure in general will cause so many physical ailments that people start using to try to get by with their pain. Labor workers also get on the job injuries that go untreated and they find ways to self medicate.
I am just speaking from my experience of talking to drug users, so this is all anecdotal. But it’s a perspective that’s always missing from these conversations and I think is valuable.