New street drug is 10,000 times more potent than morphine, and now it’s showing up in Canada and the U.S.
Submitted by IWB, on May 6th, 2016
It’s time for all governments to end the myopic, ineffective, hypocritical, counter-productive and failed “War On Drugs.” Billions of dollars have been wasted and countless, innocent lives have been lost and ruined because of politicians’ misguided desire to be our mother. Drug laws have the opposite effect of their intent and create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens (as well as using prison space that, instead, could be used for violent people).
Alcohol is a horrible drug because it wreaks havoc on people’s lives. But it’s legal because politicians like to drink. (Notice that pot is becoming legal because the 1960’s generation is now in charge of making laws.) Alcohol-related deaths number in the millions (ncadd.org). Yet alcohol is legal.
Because of the powerful tobacco lobby, the US Government allows a poison (nicotine) to be sold directly to citizens causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (cdc.gov). Yet nicotine is legal.
By criminalizing recreational drugs, governments create a profit motive. (It’s well documented that the United States Government sold heroin and cocaine to finance wars in other countries.) Remove the profit-motive and watch crime drop through the floor (just as it did when alcohol prohibition was repealed).
The fact is that drug prohibition laws don’t work. Hundreds of millions of people use recreational drugs (wikipedia.org). Recreational drugs are cheap and plentiful. We need to change our way of thinking, stop putting people in jail for an addiction, stop putting non-violent, disadvantaged people in jail for taking drugs.
And if it’s “cost to society” that you’re worried about, then we should outlaw alcohol, tobacco, red meat, cheese, and ice cream, too.
Alcohol is a horrible drug because it wreaks havoc on people’s lives. But it’s legal because politicians like to drink. (Notice that pot is becoming legal because the 1960’s generation is now in charge of making laws.) Alcohol-related deaths number in the millions (ncadd.org). Yet alcohol is legal.
Because of the powerful tobacco lobby, the US Government allows a poison (nicotine) to be sold directly to citizens causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (cdc.gov). Yet nicotine is legal.
By criminalizing recreational drugs, governments create a profit motive. (It’s well documented that the United States Government sold heroin and cocaine to finance wars in other countries.) Remove the profit-motive and watch crime drop through the floor (just as it did when alcohol prohibition was repealed).
The fact is that drug prohibition laws don’t work. Hundreds of millions of people use recreational drugs (wikipedia.org). Recreational drugs are cheap and plentiful. We need to change our way of thinking, stop putting people in jail for an addiction, stop putting non-violent, disadvantaged people in jail for taking drugs.
And if it’s “cost to society” that you’re worried about, then we should outlaw alcohol, tobacco, red meat, cheese, and ice cream, too.
It was first developed in a Canadian lab more than three decades ago, promising and potent — and intended to relieve pain in a less addictive way.Labeled W-18, the synthetic opioid was the most powerful in a series of about 30 compounds concocted at the University of Alberta and patented in the U.S. and Canada in 1984.
But no pharmaceutical company would pick it up, so on a shelf the recipe sat, the research chronicled in medical journals but never put to use. The compound was largely forgotten.Then a Chinese chemist found it, and in labs halfway around the world started developing the drug for consumers in search of a cheap and legal high — one experts say is 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 stronger than morphine.
And now it has come to North America. The substance first surfaced in Canada last fall, when Calgary police seized pills containing traces of the drug, according to the Calgary Herald. Then more than 2.5 pounds of W-18 was discovered in the home of a Florida man, who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to smuggling fentanyl from China, reported the Sun Sentinel. He faced no charges for possessing the W-18, however, because it’s not yet illegal in the U.S.
When nine pounds of an ultra-powerful painkiller called W-18 was seized by Canadian authorities last month, an Edmonton doctor tweeted that “this is enough to kill every man, woman and child in Alberta about 45 times over.”Now, police departments in the Philadelphia region are on high alert for the drug after the Drug Enforcement Administration told them that W-18 may have entered into the area’s heroin market.The chemical, which can be mixed with heroin, has been described as “10,000 times stronger than morphine.” Because of that potency, a tiny dose would be fatal. W-18 is likely manufactured in underground Chinese laboratories, the Drug Enforcement Administration is telling local police departments, and the drug remains unregulated.Narcotics officers in Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs like Camden, N.J., and Bensalem said in interviews this week they are well aware of W-18, but detectives haven’t found any hard evidence of its existence in the local black market yet.That hasn’t stopped drug dealers from rebranding their heroin packets as containing W-18 in an effort to raise the appeal among drug users.