Concepts

The fentanyl reversal

24AI analysisDocumented

An idea drawn from this archive’s research and journal, either the author’s own speculation or generated by AI, and labelled as such.

American overdose deaths went from 16,849 in 1999 to 107,941 in 2022 — more than six times as many in twenty-three years, with the steepest acceleration after illicit fentanyl entered the supply in 2013, and the single largest one-year rise in 2020. Then it turned: down 26.2% in 2024, the largest one-year fall on record, and lower again in 2025. Both directions belong in the record, and the reversal is the more unusual event — this is a curve that had only ever gone one way. But it runs down from a peak that did not exist a generation ago. Provisional 2025 is still roughly four times the 1999 count. A chart that began at the peak would show only the good news; a chart that stopped at the peak would show only the bad.

  • CDC/NCHS 1999–2024 final, 2025 provisional: 16,849 → 107,941 (2022 peak) → 69,973
  • 2020: +30.0% on 2019, the largest single-year rise in the series
  • 2024: −26.2%, the largest percentage fall across 2014–2024
  • CDC attributes the decline to naloxone distribution, treatment access, supply shifts and renewed prevention — recorded as an attribution, not adopted as a finding

Open questions

  • The 2025 figure is provisional and will revise upward. Measured against CDC's provisional 2024 estimate the fall is almost 14%; against the final 2024 count, about 11.9%. Both are published; they compare different vintages of the same year.

References

The chart draws the full 1999–2025 record, rise and fall together.

Topics: Proposed solutions · Health & physical effects

Keep reading

28Author's observationDocumented

Are Denver citizens subject to acoustic weapons?

Acoustic weapons are real, commercially sold, and owned by American police departments. Genasys, formerly LRAD Corporation, markets long-range acoustic devices to law enforcement, and what they do to people has been litigated. In Edrei v. Bratton the Second Circuit held that using one against non-violent, non-resisting protesters can violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The device in that case, a Model 100X, produces up to 136 decibels at one metre; the NYPD's own testing recorded 110 decibels at 320 feet in area-denial mode, and hearing loss can follow short exposure at 110 to 120 decibels. Plaintiffs reported tinnitus, vertigo, migraines, and in one case nerve damage requiring steroid treatment. The court's reasoning was that novel technology does not escape proportionality review. So the general question is settled: the devices exist, police own them, and a federal appeals court has held their use can be excessive force. The Denver question is answered differently by the public record. The largest adjudicated case of Denver police force against citizens is Epps v. City and County of Denver, where a federal jury awarded $14 million in March 2022, upheld by the Tenth Circuit in April 2026 at $14.75 million. The force documented there was shotgun rounds, flash-bang grenades and chemical agents. Acoustic devices are not part of that record. One property matters for anyone trying to

Proposed solutionsTechnologyViolenceRead →
42AI analysisDocumented

Are children harmed by wireless exposure?

The question has been asked seriously and tested at scale, and the answer is not the one either side tends to expect. In 2011 the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as Group 2B, possibly carcinogenic to humans. That classification is real and is widely cited. It is worth knowing what the tier means: 2B is the agency's weakest positive category, used where evidence is limited and a link cannot be excluded, and it holds several hundred agents. Since then the question has been examined far harder. A systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization, published in Environment International in September 2024, screened more than five thousand studies from 1994 to 2022 and included sixty-three. It found no association between mobile phone use and cancers of the head, including among long-term and heavy users. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date. A group of researchers has published a methodological critique of it, and that dispute belongs in the record alongside the finding. Precaution for children persists in policy anyway. France banned mobile phones in schools in 2018, and several national authorities advise limiting children's exposure — on the reasoning that a child's exposure starts earlier and continues longer, not on a demonstrated harm. The documented risks of the devices children actually wear

Proposed solutionsTechnologySurveillance & memory accessRead →
01Author's observationPattern

What Does a Future with Consent Look Like?

In the author's speculation, the world's population could be experiencing telepathic communication that no one has consented to. It is not limited to words. It can reach any of the physical senses. - Verbal communication. It can be heard aloud on the neurotech bullhorn. - Inside the skull. With the ears held shut, it can still be experienced internally, through voice-to-skull (V2K) technology. - Phantom sensations. Something felt on or in the body that has no visible cause. - Augmented reality visuals. Images added to what a person sees (see The Diving Ecosystem, Capability 9). None of it has been consented to. Statements suggest that most of it is weapons development, carried out by certain organizations within a union of approximately 200 organizations that has been sold access to the population of the United States, and of other countries. That rests on statements alone and is unverified. On the record: the microwave auditory effect is documented in laboratory research: pulsed microwaves can be heard as clicks or buzzes that seem to come from inside the head. No published research shows it delivering speech to a person at a distance. The feeling of something crawling on the skin, and brief glimpses of things that are not there, have many known medical causes and are worth a doctor's assessment (see The Diving Ecosystem, Capability 9). From the author: "Wouldn't a mobile

Proposed solutionsSpeculationTechnologyRead →