The FT has an article with the next headline and subhead:
Fentanyl deaths are falling. What’s behind the decline?
The proof factors to modifications within the drug provide
It’s a superb article, however there’s actually no proof to help the subhead (which is often written by the editor, not the journalist.)
The article does present proof that there was a current decline within the amount of medication seized, however that might mirror both decrease provide or decrease demand. To keep away from “reasoning from a amount change”, it is advisable to take a look at contemporaneous modifications in each value and amount. Is a rising value of fentanyl deterring customers, or is much less fentanyl demand leading to decrease costs?
One other article means that not less than in Minnesota it is likely to be the latter:
In current months, the value of shopping for fentanyl on the road within the Twin Cities metro fell to $1-$2 a capsule, a longtime narcotics investigator for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Workplace confirmed.
That’s down from a roughly $20 value level a few years in the past, Hennepin County Sheriff’s Main Rick Palaia mentioned, including that’s nonetheless about the fee far outdoors the metro. . . .
“Whether or not provide goes down or not, not less than the deaths are happening,” Palaia concluded. “And we’ll proceed to teach, and we’ll proceed to try to take as a lot fentanyl off the road as we are able to.”
The FT article suggests what appears to me to be probably the most believable clarification for the current decline in fentanyl deaths, which started on the East Coast:
A 3rd chance is the concept put ahead by Nabarun Dasgupta and colleagues on the US tutorial collective Opioid Information Lab, that very similar to an infectious illness epidemic, fentanyl has now labored its method by means of its prone inhabitants. Some died, others found out methods to make use of with out overdosing, so the remaining fentanyl-naive drug-using inhabitants has shrunk. The wave-style dynamics at work right here imply it could additionally theoretically match the east-west sample.
