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Portland is not quite progressive enough. Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts? Now that's a compassionate way to handle social issues.
Don't worry, there is still time for even more deaths for your buck.
This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.
Yet fentanyl is a notoriously lethal drug. It appears hard to argue that somebody voluntarily taking fentanyl or products routinely laced with fentanyl is not somewhere, seeking death.
Perhaps I just have a tendency to find slopes slippery, but a community that chooses to turn a blind eye to this type of practice seems to be practicing some form of soft MAID. If supporters of 'soft-MAID' are uncomfortable with calling it MAID, why is that? Is there something wrong with helping people end their suffering?
Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough. In terms of therapeutic index, it's safer than other opiates -- that is, the ratio of a lethal dose to an effective dose is high. The problem is that the absolute amounts of both are low.
I imagine it stems more from a lack of trying than an absolute technical problem, a certain carelessness perhaps, or an outright malevolence.
Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.
The problem with fentanyl is that the lethal dose is so small (LD50 is like 1-3 mg) that "a grain was passed through whole rather than dissolved" or "a grain stuck to the apparatus instead of being cleaned off" can be all it takes (note that LSD does not have this problem, as while active doses are tiny it has a fuckhuge dose ratio and as such lethal is still ~1 gram).
It's not impossible to counteract this, but you need big batches, high-quality equipment with fine tolerances, and nobody messing with the product between the fine-tolerance dilution and the end-user - which works fine in the hospital system, but which is very difficult for illegal supply chains to do, as the people further up the distribution chain can't dilute it without increasing the volume and ruining fentanyl's notorious ease of smuggling, and the people at street level don't have the scale to do big batches or afford high-quality equipment (not to mention that the people at street level don't always follow "manufacturer recommendations").
And sure, they could maybe do it anyway and jack up their prices to account for the much-greater risk and expense, but the safety of illegal drugs is quite illegible to the end-user, so there's a collective-action problem there.
No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.
Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.
Sure, I’ll believe they cut corners and accept that drug users have a high mortality rate. But even quite dumb people with undiagnosed mental illnesses generally understand that repeat business is good for them, personally, and want to maximize their cash flow that way.
I believe you're substantially overestimating how smart street dealers are. They might want repeat business but they probably don't understand how to get it and also give up immediately if posed with even a slight challenge because they run out of brain juice. Measuring and mixing a potent drug like fentanyl into your supply of meth (or whatever) seems easy to manage to us, but given people with (e.g.) 80 IQ can't even microwave food I wouldn't trust street dealers to do this well at all.
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