The Lost Fentanyl Generation

Young healthy people are dying mysteriously. Is deadly Fentanyl to blame?

Photo by Goashape on Unsplash.

As the economist Thomas Sowell once remarked: “There are no solutions- only trade-offs.”

Other great luminaries have put the same sentiment somewhat differently: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

They are all right: No good deed goes unpunished and no solution is complete because everything has consequences.

All our actions, good and bad; including the times we choose inaction, everything has an equal and opposite reaction. All our myriad daily decisions, right and wrong, big and small; all of our carefully laid plans and game time decisions: Everything we do and don’t do causes a ripple effect of outcomes and influences.

It is also often impossible to predict all the consequences of our actions. The Law of Unintended Consequences is as immutable as the other physical laws governing the universe.

As sure as gravity, some of the outcomes from our various deeds and misdeeds are inevitably bound to surprise us, collectively and individually.

In February of 2020, when the words “Coronavirus” and “Covid19” and “pandemic” were first starting to seep into our vocabularies and lives, there would have been no way to predict the trajectory we were, even then, already on.

The United States, like all the other countries of the world, was about to experience a global pandemic. Unlike all the pandemics and epidemics of the past, however- including more recent, modern brushes with deadly foes like AIDS, Swine Flu, Ebola, H1N1 or SARS- Covid19 produced a pandemic response unlike anything world governments had ever really tried before in modern history.

Just how well all the quarantines, closures, mandates, restrictions and shut-downs worked to stop the spread of COVID19, we may never really know. It may be decades before all the numbers are finally in and even then the findings are apt to be inconclusive at best.

The problem with pandemic mitigation measures is that if they work, it may make it seem like they weren’t necessary in the first place.

Since we can’t exactly run the vast social, medical, and psychological experiment that was and is COVID19 over again to…