Wanna sell a little pot and get caught? As Cheech and Chong said...."Bailiff, wack his pee pee." Get caught selling Heroin or any big time hard drug and get convicted? Death penalty after the gavel comes down. Not long ago we hung horse thieves. Sell *expletive deleted*it that kills people, you need to go.
We already did so. Prohibition. US government directly murdered at least ten thousand people intentionally by poisoning industrial alcohol supplies while not telling anyone about it. We are doing so already. We're killing folks in drug organizations all day long. Sometimes users are well. We just aren't dumb enough to put it in writing. It didn't work. It's not working. It's hideously expensive.
So, it's an idea that has a very long established track record of failure with high expense. Oh, and gutting the fourth amendment like a fish in the process.
The process of "ignore demand, attack suppliers" ignores the fact that people are willing to make a gamble for vast sums of money.
All things I know but now it makes sense. If an addict isn't sure of what they're getting they're possibly going to OD so they put themselves in a safe place (hospital) before they go through with it hoping to get revived.
A point that slipped my mind that BBC reminded me. The various formulations of fentanyl, carfentanil, etc WILDLY vary. The lowest end is 50x strength of morphine. Apparently 'average' is 600x strength of morphine. Some of the formulations of the stuff is up to 10,000x the strength of morphine and was generally used for incapacitating elephants for surgery.
Why carry 10,000 kilos of heroin that can easily be tested with a cheap field kit by any cop when you can carry one kilo of stuff that may not even be illegal and would take a very experienced lab to figure out?
Apparently same issue has occurred for prescription->heroin->fentanyl has occurred with synthetic cannabinoids. Head shops started selling synthetic cannabinoids because of weed being illegal. People flocked to it, because hey, stores are safer, cheaper and more reliable than drug dealers. Amounts were generally even and made by people with some clue what they were doing. "Spice" is the term used for a while before the government cracked down on it. So now you have all kinds of synthetic cannabinoids.
It's nearly impossible to OD on weed because your body will let you know unless you've rigged up some automated delivery system Basically, you'll start puking too much to consume more. The new synthetic cannabinoids generally avoid that. By accident or intention, not sure. Maybe "happy accident". Like fentanyl, they can change around some of the composition to avoid drug laws and are harder to identify in the field. The strength and effects are wildly variable between batches. Hence, more people die.
Hospitals and rehab places are finding it VERY hard to keep up with the changing drug formulations.