notes from nowhere, full speed into vaster nowhere

  according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, 43.6 percent of fatally injured drivers in 2016 tested positive for drugs and over half of those drivers were positive for two or more drugs.13    https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/drugged-driving#ref
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     High-potency opioids are some of the most, if not the most, addictive drugs in the world. 
  The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 made heroin a Schedule I drug, but lawmakers classified fentanyl, morphine, oxycodone, and methadone as Schedule II narcotics, meaning they are supposedly less addictive than heroin....
  In 1995, Purdue Pharma began an aggressive marketing campaign asserting that Oxycontin, a brand of oxycodone painkiller, was not addictive. ...
  Between 1992 and 2012 the number of US opioid prescriptions increased from 112 million to 282 million....
  Prescriptions were the gateway for around 80 percent of new heroin users....When prescriptions ran out, users began turning to heroin, which can be laced with deadly fentanyl.     https://online.maryville.edu/online-masters-degrees/health-administration/understanding-the-opioid-epidemic-opioid-abuse-in-america/
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10-17-19  According to an analysis by the Society of Actuaries released this week, the opioid epidemic cost the US economy at least $631 billion from 2015 to 2018.
  Liability settlement offer (nationally conolidated into a Cleveland Federal Court):  drug distributors McKesson Corp, AmerisourceBergen Corp, and Cardinal Health offered $18 billion in cash. Drug maker Johnson & Johnson offered another $4 billion.
  Collectively, the plaintiffs allege that opioid makers egregiously misrepresented their drugs’ risks and that distributors failed to prevent massive and obviously suspicious orders of opioids from flooding states and towns.
  According to The New York Times, the cash is intended to go to healthcare, law enforcement, and other public costs of the opioid epidemic     https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/after-flooding-us-with-opioids-industry-giants-offer-50-billion-settlement/
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12-1-18  Senator Vern White, a former Ottawa police chief, said Canada should take punitive trade actions if China will not act to stem fentanyl arriving in North America from state-regulated factories in China.

It is not just China’s lack of action on fentanyl imports that is hindering Canadian efforts to crack down on illicit opioid supply.  Police experts interviewed by Global News say that Canada doesn’t have the human resources or aggressive policing strategies needed to mount complicated transnational organized crime investigations.

Veterans in drug-trafficking investigations say that Canadian privacy and court procedure time limits also tend to severely limit pursuit of international criminals in Canada, in comparison to investigations by United States and Australian federal police.

Sources have said that Canadian police must file hundreds of pages of evidence in order to get phone intercepts for suspected drug kingpins approved by judges. But in the U.S., they say, such processes require much less paperwork and a more practical standard of evidence....

Christine Duhaime, an anti-money laundering lawyer in Vancouver:  “The fact that Vancouver has emerged as a safe haven for proceeds of crime is even more concerning.”   https://globalnews.ca/news/4658188/fentanyl-china-canada-diplomatic-tensions/ 

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“Sending through Canada Post can never be a 100 percent sure-fire way to beat the cops, but it works 99.9+ percent of the time,” one anonymous London, Ontario drug user explained to Macleans. This preference for Canada Post is due to the restrictions on mail searching imposed on the crown corporation. A 1981 law concerning mail tampering has enshrined mail tampering as an almost unthinkable violation of personal privacy. ...

Even with reasonable cause, police cannot receive a warrant to seize mail when it is in transit, which includes when it is in mailboxes or at Canada Post offices. Bizarrely, these restrictions only apply to Canada Post, as police have the power to search packages shipped by private companies such as FedEx and UPS, hence the preference among drug dealers for the services of Canada Post. ...

The UK saw a potential gold mine in selling drugs to densely populated China and fought wars which forced China to allow opium into the country, eventually turning millions of Chinese into drug addicts, destroying social cohesion and families alike.

Both conflicts left deep scars in the Chinese psyche, with 1839 seen as the beginning of China’s ‘Century of Humiliation’ (1839-1949), which saw China at the mercy of foreign colonial powers. https://truenorthfareast.com/news/fentanyl-china-canada-imports
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3-7-19    Canada Post declined an interview request for interim CEO Jessica McDonald, but spokesperson Jon Hamilton described the chance of dangerous goods being shipped through the mail as “small.”   https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/fentanyl-mail/
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