I only see two practical answers to the fentanyl crisis. Legalize it, or total war against the suppliers.
Which one you pick will largely come down to personal morals or ethics.
The addictive properties of the drug and profits seem to make the responses of more mellow legal incentives -- inelastic. The addict does not give a shit he may go to jail. The high-level supplier does not care he might be risking life, when he is making a gazillion dollars and plans to go out shooting anyway. The low level suppliers, well they fall under the same problem as the 'addict' bucket because you can get as many as you need from that one, no matter the consequences.
A 100% on the total war must also go after users not just suppliers. Otherwise you’re just making the market more profitable for the remaining suppliers. It’s really hard to stop things that are immensely profitable.
If the rate of murder exceeds the rate of entrants for any meaningful number of suppliers, that might not be the case for the purposes of mitigation (which to be clear, is all you're going to get, never eradication). However, what you say may be true, I only cannot say it with certainty.
You would probably kill more people that way rather than making it a death penalty for use. The other problem is enterprises that make money like this can easily corrupt the police and politicians. Since users don’t make money from using they’re not able to pay off the police.
Any solution that is predicated on uncorruptable police and politicians is not going to work. I wish we didn’t have such corrupted police and politicians so we could have nicer policies but we don’t so we can’t.
Legalizing it is also a total war against the suppliers in most cases (just economically instead of with guns). By legalizing, you usually replace the current suppliers with ones you like.
Which one you pick will largely come down to personal morals or ethics.
The addictive properties of the drug and profits seem to make the responses of more mellow legal incentives -- inelastic. The addict does not give a shit he may go to jail. The high-level supplier does not care he might be risking life, when he is making a gazillion dollars and plans to go out shooting anyway. The low level suppliers, well they fall under the same problem as the 'addict' bucket because you can get as many as you need from that one, no matter the consequences.