Prince : A Casualty of the War on Drugs

As Nancy Reagan was saying "Just say No ", Regan's advice to Reagan to infiltrate the Black Community with cocaine was in effect overseen by Oliver North. The same thing has always been true for Heroin since the Harrison Drug Act of the early 20th century. They use the old bait and switch routine As the US breaks the backs of physicians with threats and actualities of incarceration we have less of an attempt to treat those with pain. Incarceration for any accumulation of cash is usually not an option for the professional and even less so now. As more MD's stop prescribing there are more people willing to try other things for pain. Such is the case with Prince. He was a casualty. The DEA has had a secret alliance with anyone who would import drugs on the down-low and these funds have financed illegal wars and crocked politicians. Read the book "The Strength of the Wolf" by Douglas Valentine. This is what is Really GOING ON From the NYT It is still unclear how Prince, who the authorities say died of an overdose of fentanyl in April, obtained the drug. Doctors can prescribe fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, for cancer patients and for palliative care, including end of life treatment. But the presence of illicit fentanyl is surging to levels not seen since 2006, when a similar streak of overdose deaths in the United States was connected to a single laboratory in Mexico. Officials say the popularity of fentanyl among the cartels hews to a familiar narrative: changes in the illegal drug market and basic opportunism. As a crackdown on prescription drugs drove the cost of pills like oxycodone higher, the cartels began banking on users opting for heroin instead. It was cheaper, more readily available and relatively easy to procure. Now, fentanyl, which can be made in a laboratory without the hassle of growing poppy, is a more lucrative — and deadly — iteration. Hundreds of Americans have died in fentanyl-related overdoses in recent years. Yet it offers tremendous profits for criminal networks in places like in Massachusetts, where the fentanyl epidemic has arguably hit hardest. A kilogram of heroin purchased from Colombia for roughly $6,000 can be sold wholesale for $80,000, according to D.E.A. data. But a kilogram of pure fentanyl, purchased from China for less than $5,000, is so potent that it can be stretched into 16 to 24 kilograms when using cutting agents like talcum powder or caffeine. Each kilogram can then be sold wholesale for $80,000 — for a total profit in the neighborhood of $1.6 million. “Cartels and drug traffickers are not stupid,” said Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo, a professor at CIDE, a Mexico City university. “They are rational economic actors, whose actions and decisions are directly related to demand.” Mexican officials are wary of the American warnings that the cartels are responsible for widespread production or distribution of fentanyl, worried that their counterparts in the United States are instinctively blaming Mexico even though the public data on fentanyl traffic from Mexico is still limited. There have been notable seizures of the drug south of the border, however. Last fall, federal agents in Mexico discovered 27 kilograms of fentanyl — the dosage equivalent of almost one ton of heroin — on a remote landing strip in the state of Sinaloa. The raid also uncovered about 19,000 tablets of fentanyl, marked by traffickers to look like oxycodone. Two men detained in the raid were high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, led by the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as El Chapo. Now it is possible that Prince took what appeared to be an oxycodone and actually took Fentanyl