John Carter
Story time, regarding the Canadian fentanyl industry. Several years ago, I attended a family gathering at a cousin's house. It was a very nice country home - tasteful, modern, huge property, we're talking the kind of forest you can go hunting in. Only thing was, she was a stay at home mom, and her baby daddy was a landscaper. Not like an "owns a large company with fifty employees" landscaper, but like a "mows people's lawns himself" landscaper. So we were all a bit confused as to how they could afford this beautiful property. Oh, she tells us, his parents helped. Well that's nice of them, we thought, and thought no further. A few years later the truth comes out when he gets caught smuggling fentanyl. Now here's the fun part. Despite being caught red-handed with a large quantity of the most lethal drug known to man, he was not - as any reasonable and just man would expect - immediately treated with a 9 mm trepanation and strung up from the nearest highway overpass for the crows to eat. He did go to jail, for a year less a day - that way he didn't have to go to a federal penitentiary - and was then paroled. They even got to keep their property, when his baby momma perjured herself by insisting that it totally wasn't drug money. At the time I was rather surprised by the leniency. Pot, molly, coke, I mean whatever, who really cares, but fent? This shit is a chemical weapon, why are the authorities just shrugging this off? Since then, the fent epidemic has exploded across Canada. We have fucking tent cities now. Zombies in the streets. Nothing residents of Philadelphia haven't seen before ofc, but this is a novelty in Canuckistan. But still, I am thinking to myself, why does no one in authority seem to care about this? Why do the police do nothing? Why is this not page one fucking news and a top national political priority? We've also found out that these gangs have laundered so much money through Canadian real estate that they've distorted the entire market to comical proportions. Which our politicians refuse to do anything about. And we've discovered that our banks are apparently making bank on money laundering, which ... our politicians refuse to do anything about. And now we've got potential tariffs of apocalyptically ruinous proportions coming from our largest trading partner, which are explicitly justified on the basis of the fent flooding across the border, and our politicians ... refuse to do anything about this. They refuse to even acknowledge the problem. They'd rather start a trade war than do something about the problem. And I think back to my cousin's baby daddy, and the remarkably, obscenely lenient treatment he was given, and wonder if this is all starting to make sense in the absolute worst possible fucking way.