The prescription pills epidemic was largely over by 2018. And yes, then fentanyl started picking up speed.
> suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
It has not happened evenly across the country, but it happened on the Pacific coast. Drug use stopped being punished, with people openly consuming drugs in front of the police. Oregon even made that official.
This is an important point. Drug enforcement operations did not stop, because no large-scale bureaucratic system can stop at once. But they became a futile theater.
Curtailing cocaine/opium traffic was hard, but not impossible. Cocaine had to flow from growers high up in the mountains, through multiple countries and transportation modes. Each step increased the price for the end-consumers. And cocaine/opiates are relatively bulky, so smugglers couldn't just do one high-risk operation, they had to build a robust supply chain.
Fentanyl upended that. It can be cooked in a lab in Mexico just outside of the US border. The precursors aren't particularly expensive either. It's also highly potent, so that one milk jug of pure fentanyl powder can supply a large-ish state in the US for a year. So high-risk high-reward one-off smuggling operations are much more feasible.
