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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> Trump's tariffs.

Republican tariffs, they're complicit. Literally every single Republican in the House voted to shield Trump's "national emergency" [0] from being challenged as invalid.

[0] The National Emergency of... a relatively small amount of fentanyl seized at the Canadian border.

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The amount of fentanyl (just fent) siezed through April of this year since January was enough to kill 700,000 people. I guess you can disbelieve the story that car part vsndors were trafficking fentanyl, but it is a problem.

Yeah the much higher volume of fentanyl going FROM the US TO Canada is a huge issue. Other way around? Not so much in comparison.

when you say "from the US" can you explain exactly what you mean? and what sources you're drawing from to show that the fentanyl is coming "from the US" into Canada? I realize it sounds like i'm incredulous, but it's only because the US doesn't manufacture fentanyl. Canada does. Mexico does.

But alright, i guess people import it to the US to illegally traffic it back north. and somehow that makes a majority of the traffic! never stop learning, that's what i always say.

Between 2022 and 2024, 0.1% of all fentanyl seizures were at the northern border with Canada, vs ~99% at the border with Mexico. There’s also an (equally small, relatively speaking) reverse flow of fentanyl into Canada from the US. Not to mention that fentanyl trafficking is completely orthogonal to tariffs, except that the former is used as an excuse to utilize the latter to bully an ally.

Enough to kill is a meaningless metric.

Yeah: By my napkin-math, the average person has enough blood in them to kill ~20 other people by bad blood transfusions.

Yet it would be beyond stupid to claim that each person stopped at the border "saved" 20 Americans.

It's millions of "doses." Fentanyl is a scourge, and all manner of language decorations are okay to use in my book. "little blue pills" certainly doesn't match the description of any common medications, like Sildenafil or Naproxen, so approximately zero people would have overdosed and died.

The political machine learns quickly, the previous administration used the Covid emergency declaration as a pretext to cancel student debt. Both sides have turned to extend the reaches of the checks and balances instead of reining them in. This is the root cause.

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