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The drug was first detected in illegally manufactured opioids in North America in 2022The animal sedative medetomidine is increasingly showing up in the U.S. illegal drug supply, according to three reports released Thursday. Medetomidineopens in a new tab or window, which is used to sedate pets and is somewhat similar to xylazineopens in a new tab or window, was first detected in illegally manufactured opioids in North America in 2022. Investigators say the drug is being mixed in with other illicit drugs, mainly fentanylopens in a new tab or window, the synthetic opioid behind most overdose deaths. On Thursday, the...

A new deadly drug called carfentanil is in Santa Clara County, medical experts say. It's a synthetic opioid like fentanyl, but much stronger. On Wednesday, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michelle Jordan announced that the county's first overdose death due to carfentanil was reported last week. "Carfentanil is 100 times more potent than fentanyl," Dr. Jordan said. National Fentanyl Awareness Day highlights the dangers of the drug causing a crisis in San Francisco and killing thousands across the country. Last week, a 39-year-old man was found dead with M30 pills, counterfeit pills made to look like prescription oxycodone. "What I'm really...

Walgreens has agreed to pay up to $350 million in a settlement with the DOJ, which accused the pharmacy giant of knowingly filling millions of invalid prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances, and submitting false claims to the federal government.

Opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. rose dramatically after 1999, but also exhibited substantial geographic variation. Job loss due to international trade is positively associated with opioid overdose mortality at the county-level. This association is significantly stronger in areas in which fentanyl is present in the heroin supply. In general, the loss of 1,000 trade-related jobs was associated with a 2.7 percent increase in opioid-related deaths. When fentanyl was present, the same number of job losses was associated with a 11.3 percent increase in such deaths. The positive relationship between trade-related job loss and opioid-related overdose death is well illustrated...

The 25-year-old mayor of Bogalusa, Louisiana, on Tuesday was arrested and accused of involvement in a drug-trafficking operation and the soliciting of prostitution. Louisiana State Police arrested Mayor Tyrin Truong and six others after investigating an alleged drug trafficking organization operating in the Bogalusa area in April. The criminal organization is accused of distributing opioids, ecstasy, THC products and high-grade marijuana via social media and other channels, then using proceeds to buy guns, some of which were then used in other crimes, police said in a release. All seven suspects, including the mayor, are from Bogalusa and have been charged...

A new class of potentially deadly synthetic opioids is suddenly appearing around the globe, including in the US, and scientists are rushing to figure out how to detect it in the drug supply. Within the last month, nitazenes were implicated in four overdose deaths in Manchester, England; they were detected in over 2,500 counterfeit oxycodone pills in Hamilton, Canada; and they were found for the first time in the Netherlands. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has warned about their appearance in Washington DC.

In 2019, Brandon McDowell was contacted by a sophomore in college who asked to buy Percocet, a prescription painkiller. What the 20-year-old sold her instead were counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid that can be lethal in a dose as small as 2 milligrams. Hours later, Alexandra Capelouto, also 20, was dead in her Temecula, California, home. It is an increasingly common scenario as fentanyl overdoses have become a leading cause of death for minors in the last five years, with more than 74,000 people dying in the U.S. from a synthetic opioid in 2023, according to...

Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy ===================================================================== Perhaps because gastroenterology, immunology, toxicology, and the nutrition and agricultural sciences are outside of their competence and responsibility, psychologists and psychiatrists typically fail to appreciate the impact that food can have on their patients’ condition. Here we attempt to help correct this situation by reviewing, in non-technical, plain English, how cereal grains—the world’s most abundant food source—can affect human behavior and mental health. We present the implications for the psychological sciences of the findings that, in all of us, bread (1) makes the gut more permeable and can thus encourage...

Opioids, like morphine, are effective painkillers but have led to widespread addiction and serious side effects like respiratory depression, notably seen in the U.S. opioid crisis that claimed nearly 645,000 lives from 1999 to 2021. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have identified a potential alternative, aniquinazolin B, from the marine fungus Aspergillus nidulans, which binds to opioid receptors and could replace opioids with fewer undesirable effects, after rigorous testing including over 750,000 calculations per substance using the MOGON supercomputer. Researchers at Mainz University have discovered a natural compound that could potentially serve as a long-term alternative to opioids and...

War and conflict can take many forms. It’s not necessarily dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters pummeling Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor. That’s visual, tangible, and an undeniable manifestation of intent, but the struggle for dominance between nations can take many forms. The Wuhan virus was not the Pearl Harbor moment for America. The Pearl Harbor moment for America in China’s unrestricted warfare to erase the U.S. was one word: Fentanyl. In a war by any means, first articulated in the ‘90s, the CCP put their Prussian “General Staff” on a war footing, under the aegis of “Unrestricted Warfare”—U.S. Air...

In a recent interview on Fox News, former President Donald Trump warned, "Our country is being poisoned from within by the drugs and by all of the other crime that's taking place." According to the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between November 2019 and October 2023, there have been a shocking 270,000 overdose deaths from synthetic opioids - or about 80,000 overdose deaths per year - across the nation. Under the Biden administration's first term, Americans have been increasingly traumatized by the tsunami of overdose deaths as disastrous open southern border policies flood the...

Reflections on medical policy, DEA permits, and the fentanyl crisisEdwin Leap is a board-certified emergency physician who has been practicing for 30 years since finishing residency. He currently works as an emergency physician for WVU Hospitals in Princeton, West Virginia. Follow When I was in my residency training, from 1990 to 1993, we were in the nascent phase of the "pain is a vital sign" madness. We were told, over and over, that we should treat pain aggressively and should not be afraid to give narcotics to patients in pain. Who were we to judge someone's pain, after all? The...

In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy. Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that once supported the area had closed over the past few decades. Many brick buildings from Hazard’s heyday were gone, bequeathing a gap-toothed look to Main Street. The rest were empty or occupied by attorneys and bail bondsmen. What’s more, Fugate Sheffel couldn’t afford a website or employees. She had never run a business before. And she had a...

Two deaths in Boulder County, Colorado, in 2023 are the latest in the U.S. to be blamed on the powerful class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes. Most health systems cannot detect nitazenes, so the exact number of overdoses is unknown, but they’re implicated in more than 200 deaths in Europe and North America since 2019, including 11 in Colorado since 2021. One of the two Boulder County deaths is linked to a new formulation called N-Desethyl etonitazene, which was identified by a national laboratory, and is thought to be the first related death. The Conversation interviewed Dr. Christopher Holstege, professor...

When Capitol building cleaning crews were removing feces from the hallowed halls of Congress after the riot of Jan. 6, 2021, no one imagined that Donald Trump would be leading the 2024 Republican presidential primary field by a 48-point margin just three years later. Two overarching reasons help explain this unusual circumstance. First, his “Make America Great Again” base is immovable. Trump knew that already on Jan. 23, 2016, when at a rally in Iowa, he famously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. Okay?” This is, for...

The Supreme Court seemed concerned Monday that blowing up Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement — a plan the Biden administration challenged based on the immunity it granted the company’s owners from facing future lawsuits — could mean victims of the opioid crisis never see a cent in compensation. The settlement requires the Sackler family to provide up to $6 billion to address the opioid crisis in exchange for immunity from future lawsuits. While skeptical of the arrangement, multiple justices voiced concerns during oral arguments Monday in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma that changing it would put victims, who overwhelmingly support the settlement...

Three years after Oregon voted to de-criminalize drug offences - residents are now begging to reverse their decision after seeing an astonishing number of deaths from opioid overdoses. In 2020 - Oregon voters approved a measure to decriminalize the possession of all drugs including heroin and cocaine. The proposal, known as Oregon Ballot Measure 110, passed with 58.8 percent support. Now residents of the liberal state are crying out to their politicians to do something about the open-air drug markets that their cities have turned into. Opioid deaths in Oregon have gone up from 280, before the de-criminalization was voted...

Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children. “The inability for people to live their day-to-day life without encountering open-air drug use is so pressing on urban folks’ minds,” said John Horvick, vice president of polling firm DHM Research. “That has very much changed people’s perspective about what they think Measure...

The most circulated newspaper in Europe killed a major corruption story to please Joe Biden. A new report details how editors at Bild, the outlet in question, canned an extensive investigative piece on Albanian PM Edi Rama because he and the US president are friends and political allies.Per The Washington Examiner, Albania has become a narco-state over the last decade under Rama, and Bild was getting ready to expose him further.So, who is Rama? He’s the far-left leader of Albania’s Socialist Party. Accusations against him range from drug trafficking to money laundering, to extortion and vote buying.A few days ago,...

A group of novel synthetic opioids emerging in illicit drugs in the United States may be more powerful than fentanyl, 1,000 times more potent than morphine, and may even require more doses of the medication naloxone to reverse an overdose, a new study suggests. Nitazenes are a synthetic opioid, like fentanyl, although the two drugs are not structurally related. In the small study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open most of the patients who overdosed on nitazenes received two or more doses of the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone, whereas most patients who overdosed on fentanyl received only...