What year was this? I know for a fact that in KY and OH since 2016, police actively avoid making arrests when OD's are called in.
I guess the state matters to.
There are a few towns in OH and KY that have more ambulances than cars on the road at any given time. The people you see on the sidewalks are emaciated, pushing babies and bags of clothes and recyclables in stolen Kroger shopping carts, stopping only to speak with those that have hooked them up with either cash or dope.
Fent really is a whole new demon. It has it's legitimate medical uses, and it has far greater massive abuse potential when synthed in clandestine Chinese labs and exported to the US via express mail.
Not even shitting you, there. If you know the right vendors. you can get 1g of fentanyl in powder form shipped to your doorstep from China faster than you could obtain a 3rd gen iPod charger from an eBay seller; even now that the US customs dpt. can analyze chemical contents of packages through spectroscopy without breaking so much as seal on the packaging.
There's simply too much mail to sort through on any particular day. For every 50kg seizure of fentanyl customs pulls from JFK and poses next to for an Instagram pic bragging about the victory of the war on drugs, thousands of smaller parcels shipped more discretely make it into our country and onto the streets to be mixed with heroin.
The end user is not a chemist, by any means. The guy receiving the shipment? Sure, he may be able to make a nasal spray administrator that disperses .5mg/2ml of saline solution, but the itchy guy clutching a teenth bag in a diner bathroom? He thinks he has heroin. 15 or so mg dissolved in a benign solvent, mixed with his own blood and shot into his arm.
Jokes on him, he just put 1.5mg of heroin into his arm and 13.5mg of fentanyl, enough to kill someone who's been busting their veins since 1989 three times over.
Not to mention, it's got about a third the half life of actual heroin . Meaning that heroin will keep withdrawals off for 6-8 hours, but fentanyl with have you itching and screaming inside for a redose the second that the most active effects wear off.
Fentantly does have many practical uses. There around thousands that can't get out of a wheelchair even with 15mg of oxycodone a day. 1mg of fent has them up, walking and talking, living a semblance of a normal life.
This fent does not come from Pfizer or another Pharma conglomerate, it's synthesized in tremendously expensive Chinese labs and exported without a single care of what happens to the aforementioned end user.
And because of a poor reputation between the US and China for extradition (because we didn't want defectors sent to death in their homelands) There's little to no hope of ever prosecuting those chiefly responsible for the massive boom in fentanyl production and exportation for the past few years.
There's quite literally no way to solve the fentanyl problem. It's the Great Opium Wars, but the other way around.