"I'm deeply concerned about what this threat means for the nation," Dr. Rahul Gupta, the White House director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in May when he warned that xylazine is a major emerging health threat.
According to Gupta's office, xylazine-positive overdose deaths increased tenfold in the southern U.S. from 2020-2021, sevenfold in the western U.S. and fivefold in the Midwest. Most of those drug deaths also involved fentanyl.
Over the years, xylazine has occasionally turned up in street drugs, but over the past 12 months, it suddenly went viral. Overdose deaths and severe medical complications — including terrible flesh wounds caused by the chemical — have soared in the South and West, where xylazine had been almost unknown.
Xylazine also makes it much harder to revive people after fentanyl overdoses, and the chemical adds another layer of intense addiction and cravings.
"People who are in this are getting sucked further and further and further in," said KC, who uses street fentanyl in Dover, Delaware. She said xylazine is making addiction deadlier and harder to escape. "It just feels kind of hopeless right now."
Drug experts say they only have theories about who's adding xylazine into street drug cocktails — and why.
There's no question in my mind that the oligarchs in the U.S. want to encourage racism and culture wars, in order to keep lower-class Americans at each others' throats rather than united against the bourgeoisie. It's also true that populist dictators have leveraged, and continue to leverage, anti-immigrant and other racist viewpoints in order win support and push their twisted ideologies on their entire country. Trump is, without question, an example of a would-be dictator who's in the pocket of billionaires and is appealing to Christofascists in hopes of going back to the White House in lieu of jail.
That being said, articles like these which insinuate that Trump's campaign is primarily about racism is a repetition one of the key, fatal mistakes that Hillary Clinton's campaign made in 2016. It's also not a good way of fixing the "us vs. them" environment that allows the oligarchs to keep thriving.
While it's hard for us to understand their motivations for doing so, some voters in the black, Latino and Asian communities still support him. It's irresponsible and short-sighted to pretend these voters don't exist, so it becomes necessary to concede that while many of Trump's supporters are indeed racist, there are still some legitimate ideological reasons why certain people continue to embrace conservatism. And if you actually want long-lasting change in this country, you have to engage with those people and not dismiss them as being just as deplorable as the rabid Trump cultists.
Granted, it's getting harder with each passing week to justify supporting Trump for non-racist reasons, as seen by the fact that some conservative influencers have started walking back support for him. That being said, there remains a perception (no matter how invalid) that Kamala Harris is an insider, a cog in an inherently corrupt political machine, while Trump is the guy who's going to drain the swamp. I know perfectly well that Trump is way more corrupt than Harris, but the 'drain the swamp' narrative sticks because some Democrats have been just as subservient to the oligarchs as Republicans. Even when they controlled the White House and Congress, they didn't undo the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, or cut the billions of dollars in spending on defense contractors, or pass any reforms that would make our government more accessible to non-elites (like term limits or ranked choice voting).
The status quo isn't working out too well for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats represent a continuation of that status quo. A lot of these disaffected Americans just want to see the system "shaken up" in hopes of seeing an improvement. The "vote them all out" sentiment is popular for a reason. Hopefully, those people realize we already gave Trump a chance in 2016, he didn't fix a damned thing, and it's not going to be any better for them if he gets a second term. However, Democrats in the U.S. (just like Labour in the U.K.) are going to have to deliver some significant improvements in the quality of life for the common folk instead of serving the oligarchs first and foremost. Otherwise, we're just going back to conservative leadership in a few years, and the next would-be dictator might be less incompetent than Trump was in staging a coup.