The FT has articles with the following headings and subheadings:
Deaths from fentanyl are decreasing. What’s behind the decline?
Evidence points to changes in drug supply
This is a great article, but there is no evidence to support the subheading (usually written by editors, not journalists).
This article provides evidence that the amount of drugs seized has decreased recently, which may reflect either a decrease in supply or a decrease in demand. To avoid “reasoning from changes in quantity,” we need to focus on simultaneous changes in both price and quantity. Are the rising prices of fentanyl preventing users from using it, or is the demand for fentanyl decreasing, driving the price down?
Another article suggests it may be the latter, at least in Minnesota.
In recent months, the price to buy fentanyl on the streets of the Twin Cities metro has fallen to $1 to $2 per pill, acknowledged a longtime narcotics detective with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.
Hennepin County Sheriff’s Maj. Rick Palaia said this is down from the roughly $20 price range a few years ago, but added that it’s still the same price as in places far from the metro. . . .
“Regardless of whether the supply is decreasing, at least the number of deaths is decreasing,” Palaia concluded. “And we will continue to educate and work to remove as much fentanyl from our streets as possible.”
The FT article suggests what seems to me to be the most plausible explanation for the recent decline in fentanyl deaths that started on the East Coast.
A third possibility, proposed by Navalne Dasgupta and colleagues at the Opioid Data Lab in the US, is that fentanyl could percolate through susceptible populations, much like an infectious disease epidemic. There is. As some people died and others found ways to use it without overdosing, the remaining fentanyl-naive drug-using population dwindled. The wave dynamics at play here means that it could theoretically also fit into an east-west pattern.
