2020-03-18, 03:14 AM
(2020-03-17, 06:10 PM)Stamper Wrote: Last night, a group of guys broke in at night in a grocery store.
They had guns. They were beginning to loot it, stealing all the food, when the police showed up.
They began firing at the police, who fired back. It turned into a western, so they had to use grenades to make them disperse. I'm not kidding! The looters escaped.
http://www.leparisien.fr/yvelines-78/cor...281767.php
Does it actually say they had guns? When I put that article into Google Translate it just says they "throw various projectiles".
Does France have food security? By that I mean does France produce enough food domestically to feed itself if it were cut off from all global trade? I thought France does have food security, but many European countries including the UK do not and are dependent on imported food to feed themselves, and it's those countries that don't have sufficient domestic food production where I'd expect the panic and rioting to be the worst - heck some of them may have to resort to rationing if there is a disruption in the global supply of food. There can also be a shortage on opioids (like morphine) because most countries do not produce enough poppies domestically to fulfil their own healthcare needs - and there's not enough legal opium in the world as it is to meet medicinal demand. Only a few countries are actually allowed under the UN treaties to grow and produce medicinal opium for export (for example India, Australia, Turkey, France, Spain, UK) most countries produce at least some opium for their domestic needs (China, Germany, etc) and some countries produce very little or none at all (USA). If you want me to scare you - in 2017 Australia was the only major producer of codeine-rich poppies, which means from the global supply you couldn't get it anywhere else - not from France, not from India, not from Turkey. In 2018 Spain started cultivating that variety, thus in 2018 the only major producers of codeine-rich poppies were Australia and Spain (figures here). Imagine the panic that would happen if you run out of opioid medications! And remember there's not enough globally as it is, particularly in developing countries like in Africa/Asia/South America.
A lot of countries are really ill-prepared for such global supply disruptions. It's not like you can just send the military to Afghanistan and harvest their illegal heroin crops, you can't make morphine or codeine from those poppies, those are heroin-rich poppies and completely useless medicinally unless you want to resort to prescribing heroin instead of morphine! If you look at a map of the world, all the major producers are located: here (Australia) in Asia, and in Europe. There's no major supplier in Africa, or North/Central/South America. That's what seems really odd to me - the US for example has literally no reason why they can't set themselves up as a major producer. Or at least produce enough domestically for their own needs like China. But as it is they're dependent on India and Turkey for morphine, and Australia for codeine... seems silly to me.
![[Image: sNn6jyF.png]](https://i.imgur.com/sNn6jyF.png)
![[Image: 0sPZMBH.png]](https://i.imgur.com/0sPZMBH.png)
(yeah, I know you are calm. 
