It was never tested on humans but is now being manufactured and sold by clandestine labs in Asia.
“These synthetic opioids are so potent you essentially have to dilute it by mixing it in with heroin or something else because it’s too powerful,” he said.
Thirty-one states have reported overdose deaths from U-47700. That includes Colorado, where two people were killed in Boulder County in January.
But it was a case in Utah that thrust the drug into the national spotlight. Two 13-year-olds overdosed and died after buying the drug from a classmate who purchased it online…
Some synthetic opioids are so potent that first responders have been killed just touching them.
The drug issue is a complicated one from an r/K perspective, with two options that serve either long term or short term interests.
The short term solution is winning the drug war, if that is possible. If Trump began winning the drug war tomorrow, he would be pulling a highly dopaminergic stimulus from the population. This would have a potent K-ifying effect that would immediately begin acting on the populace and it’s epigenetic markers. It would however protect long-form DRD4 genes that would otherwise be removed by addiction and overdose, so it would push the society’s genes toward being predisposed to r-selection, even as the nation proper went K.
The long term solution would be legalization. With legalization you would, in the short term, flood the population with a very strong dopaminergic stimulus. That would advance the r-psychology’s hold on the body politic in the short term. But over time, between individuals forgoing sex for drug highs, failing in society, and overdosing, you would be culling the long-form DRD4 alleles from the population. That would create a population which would go K and stay K with much less environmental impetus.
With r/K it is very hard to see a clear path forward that advances one or the other in any sustainable way that would cement the desired effect in more permanent form. Short term gains will give way to long term losses, just as short term losses will yield long term gains. Misery will yield bliss, just as bliss will bring you to misery.
In the end, until a society officially recognizes the K-selected psychology as superior, and decides to undertake a systematic effort to try and foster it specifically, I am not sure there is anything you can do to produce any lasting shift to r or K-selected psychologies in the populace.
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There may be other alleles at play besides just DRD4. OPRM1 is the primary opioid receptor gene that heroin acts on, and the allele (G) on snp rs1799971 seems to increase the risk of alcoholism. These are clearly ‘r’ traits. (G) variants of that snp on OPRM1 would increase Alcoholism/Heroin addiction. Interestingly the (G) allele is only present in about 30% of Europeans (CEU) according to https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs1799971. In fact it seems many receptors act on the DRD2 dopamine pathway was well that seem to cause ‘r’ type behavior/addiction problems. https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/DRD2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine#Cellular_effects describes all of the dopamine receptor genes, I think they may all play a role in ‘r’ type or ‘K’ type amygdalas which are probably on a scale much like other psychologies (psychopathology and narcissism are clearly on a scale).
Agreed. My guess is it goes beyond dopamine into serotonin and perhaps other neurotransmitters. I mainly use DRD4 because it is so well characterized.
I would guess that the opiate receptive DRD2 allele would have arisen in humanity’s hominid past. Some fruits/flowers have opiates in them, and females likely being gatherers would have eaten them in times of plenty. Females with the DRD2 allele would be more likely to be intoxicated and thus, breed. There also would have been impetus for males that were not hunting to collect these opiate fruits to induce female breeding. This is clearly an ‘r’ selected strategy. This gene also would have expanded with the development of alcoholic beverages thousands of years ago. In the absence of birth control female drunkenness frequently leads to pregnancy. This also explains why so many drug pushers target women, it’s pure r.
Hmmn. Very interesting.
Also flowers and fruits would time mating for mid to late summer, producing babies in early spring of the next year.
In fact here is a good article that I just saw, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18063800?dopt=Abstract. I suspect DRD2 and DRD4 are complementary, likely with others. Also, anecdotally if there is anything I know about liberals its that they don’t seem to learn from their errors, which are enormous.