Trump Desires to be Sued Over Birthright Citizenship, Does Anyone Understand Why?

[Physics Guy]

Fentanyl consists of 22 Carbon atoms, 28 Hydrogen atoms, 2 Nitrogen atoms, and one Oxygen atom. So you don't need to start with any particular fancy chemicals. Dirt, water, and air will do fine.

Those atoms do all have to be put together in a particular way, but the arrangement isn't anything crazy. A few rings and strings. You'll certainly be able to shorten and simplify the synthesis process a lot if you can start with some pre-made component molecules instead of working from scratch with pure elements. And purification is indeed then an important final step. There is already a big chemical industry in the US, though, even a pharmaceutical industry. The knowledge and the tools are definitely out there. And there's a lot of money at stake.

[Doctor Steuss]

Fentanyl consists of 22 Carbon atoms, 28 Hydrogen atoms, 2 Nitrogen atoms, and one Oxygen atom. So you don't need to start with any particular fancy chemicals. Dirt, water, and air will do fine.

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

[canpakes]

The opioid crisis under the Biden administration cost the U.S. $2.7 trillion in 2023 alone, a new study exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital shows.
…
The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the executive office that advises the president on economic policy, on Friday released a study detailing that the opioid epidemic cost the U.S. $2.7 trillion in 2023

I'm not going to waste my time untangling this because it doesn't really matter, liars (such as the one who recently tried to sneak this number into this thread in a way to avoid suspicion) will just move on to the next thing. The study was "released" yet at the same time was "exclusively obtained by Fox". I'll let the morally broken poster who made the claim untangle this and show us where the numbers come from that add up to 2.7 trillion.

Weirdly, no reference to this report exists outside of Fox News websites, which in turn provide no link to any source. It’s not even present on the CEA website. This does not inspire confidence in the numbers not possibly being somewhat manipulated for a particular audience.

To that point, this much more can be found from a rando on X, who also links back to an archived Fox page lacking references:

https://x.com/OwenGregorian/status/1888 ... 53548?mx=2

The Council of Economic Advisers study used a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that researchers adjusted to account for inflation trends, and opioid deaths and dependency, since its release.

The loss of life in 2023, for example, cost the U.S. $1.11 trillion, with the study explaining that researchers multiplied the 74,702 opioid deaths that year "by value of statistical life in the United States and then adding productivity and healthcare costs that arise due to opioid fatalities."

"We inflation-adjusted the $10.1 million value of a statistical life number provided by NIH (2017) to 2025 dollars ($13.0 million per life)," the study explained.

Another $1.34 trillion of the $2.7 trillion total accounts for loss of quality of life for those in the midst of opioid addiction compared to Americans who are healthy and not addicted.

"The measure shows that life with OUD [opioid use disorder] has about 60 percent (0.626) of the quality of life of those in full health," the study found. "Second is a measure of how much Americans value a year of life in full health. Adjusted for inflation, this value is estimated at $624,410 per person per year. Together these values imply that the lost quality of life costs $234,478 per year for each person living with OUD. We then multiply this value by the prevalence of OUD, estimated to be 5.7 million in 2023."

Much of the calculation does not reflect actual costs.

“How much Americans value a year of life in full health” doesn’t appear to have any financial explanation, either.

[Morley]

Fentanyl consists of 22 Carbon atoms, 28 Hydrogen atoms, 2 Nitrogen atoms, and one Oxygen atom. So you don't need to start with any particular fancy chemicals. Dirt, water, and air will do fine.

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

Ha! I've only had a couple of years of chemistry, but your reaction was the same as mine. However, you said it so much better than I could have.

[canpakes]

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

Ha! I've only had a couple of years of chemistry, but your reaction was the same as mine. However, you said it so much better than I could have.

My crack team of scientists is on it right now.

[Gadianton]

It was in 2017 just over 1 trillion, in 2020 1.5, and now a 2.7 number.....I believe that is very consistent and compliments the overdose death rate rise, not to mention inflation

those numbers are also not demonstrated. But to nearly double that based on back-of-the-napkin guessing is pitiful.

We aren't talking about the Mormon church justifying fake numbers for members to believe in something which they more or less get something out of, whether it's true or not. Your number apologetics are targeted to stoke outrage and justify human right violations. Send them all to Guantanamo Bay! It's an emergency, the cost is 2.7 trillion; next year it will be 5 trillion! We don't have a choice!

that's what you're trying to do. Make the situation appear so dire that any and all actions to combat it, no matter how extreme and no matter how tangent are justified and necessary. Trump is a low life, but he's not Hitler, he's an opportunist pretending to be Hitler because he has 10s of millions of of people like you spinning each other up and demanding him to be as extreme as possible. That's what you folks want. The more unhinged, the more you folks cheer. There are real lives behind this and you're eating chips and enjoying the super bowl with your family while you push a button to send other families who have nothing to do with the Fentanyl problem to their doom.

Of course you don't care, if your life is good, then life is good. typical Christian and simplistic, and pathetic.

[Physics Guy]

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

I guess it's harder than I thought! I do not claim to be a chemistry guy. These drugs have all been made, though, on industrial scale, by American pharmaceutical companies. Do they really have to harvest rare seeds from the Amazon, or something, to get naturally occurring precursor compounds?

[Markk]

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

I guess it's harder than I thought! I do not claim to be a chemistry guy. These drugs have all been made, though, on industrial scale, by American pharmaceutical companies. Do they really have to harvest rare seeds from the Amazon, or something, to get naturally occurring precursor compounds?

Keep in mind also the cartels have over 150k "employees." If this was produced 100% in the US, who would distribute it to meet demand?

[Physics Guy]

The United States has been maintaining a prison population of nearly two million for several years, so I figure there must be at least several hundred thousand American criminals still out there on the streets, or those prison numbers would have fallen by now. So there must be enough workers there to distribute fentanyl. If it fails to reach its consumers for lack of a distribution workforce, wages will just rise until enough American criminals start distributing fentanyl instead of whatever else they are currently doing.

[Doctor Steuss]

If someone is able to synthesize any type of monocarboxyolic acid amide from dirt, water, and air, they deserve to be worshiped as a deity.

I guess it's harder than I thought! I do not claim to be a chemistry guy. These drugs have all been made, though, on industrial scale, by American pharmaceutical companies. Do they really have to harvest rare seeds from the Amazon, or something, to get naturally occurring precursor compounds?

First and foremost, I owe you an apology for my flippant response. You are always so incredibly generous with your knowledge. I should have taken the time to reciprocate (although my chem knowledge is nowhere near your physics knowledge… like nowhere near).

It’s been a little over a decade since I’ve done anything with chemistry, and even then it wasn’t in a lab. With that disclaimer firmly in place…

They definitely don’t need to harvest anything rare for natural precursors. Most of it (again, from my very limited and long-shelved knowledge) looks to be something that can either be synthesized in a well-equipped lab, or bought from one of the big chem suppliers.

Chemical reactions, can require very specific conditions. Same thing applies to a lot of the precursors. Each one, requiring a totally different starting point, and other requirements. You can do a lot of stuff with just specialized glassware and a heatplate or burner -- like using a reflux condenser if your given reaction required a constant boiling and re-condensation to be taking place. Or there’s a Schlenk flask if the reaction is really sensitive to air. But when it comes to a lot of the more complex precursor molecules, you are going to need larger more specialized equipment that is much easier to maintain specific parameters for prolonged periods of time with. For some stuff (particularly when it comes to the purification side of getting a high concentration of your target compound) you might need something like a high-performance liquid chromatography system. Some things require a vacuum. Some things require a given concentration of certain molecules in the air. Some things require specific humidity levels, or removing any water that's bound up in the compound first (by heating it and placing in a vacuum to cool).

While the building blocks of most compounds are pretty simple and common, getting them to bond exactly where and how you want them to can require a long series of intermediary steps, with each step resulting in unwanted compounds that you then have to incorporate new steps to remove (or they can mess up the following steps).

This is one of the reasons why reference samples (samples with a known purity for calibrating equipment) can often be pretty expensive. The steps and equipment necessary can be incredibly expensive and labor intensive for high purity compounds (or even exact known purity).

All of that being said, I think it would definitely be well within the capabilities of a modestly funded lab here in the US to produce fentanyl at quantity. Probably wouldn’t take much to start producing various salts and esters too, in an attempt to circumvent US illegal drug scheduling listings. How long such an operation could run without catching the attention of some enforcement agency is another matter.