The Fix is In

We begin today with a visit to America’s largest drug lab. This isn’t a lab where drugs are manufactured, instead, it’s a petri dish where the state of Oregon is studying whether one of America’s most intractable problems—compounded by decades of one of its most ineffective policies—can even begin to find a fix. The fix will not come easily nor quickly. And, sadly, the already complex mix of contents in this toxic petri dish has a relatively new and particularly deadly element, one that is roughly fifty times more powerful than heroin. “Every state in America has a fentanyl problem, but only Oregon has decriminalized drugs and sent hundreds of millions in legal-weed tax dollars to organizations that are trying to heal people. In Portland and a rural county nearby, there is both chaos and hope.” In Esquire, Jack Holmes takes you to The Land Beyond the Drug War. It could just as easily be called the land of the lost. “It’s more than fifty years on from our declaration of a war on narcotics, and people are getting higher on more destructive sh-t than ever.”