Opioid Dealers Embrace the Dark Web To Send Deadly Drugs by Mail (nytimes.com) 175
Anonymous online sales are surging, and people are dying. Despite dozens of arrests, new merchants -- many based in Asia -- quickly pop up. From a report on the New York Times: In a growing number of arrests and overdoses, law enforcement officials say, the drugs are being bought online. Internet sales have allowed powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl -- the fastest-growing cause of overdoses nationwide -- to reach living rooms in nearly every region of the country, as they arrive in small packages in the mail (syndicated source). The authorities have been frustrated in their efforts to crack down on the trade because these sites generally exist on the so-called dark web, where buyers can visit anonymously using special browsers and make purchases with virtual currencies like Bitcoin. The problem of dark web sales appeared to have been stamped out in 2013, when the authorities took down the most famous online marketplace for drugs, known as Silk Road. But since then, countless successors have popped up, making the drugs readily available to tens of thousands of customers who would not otherwise have had access to them. Among the dead are two 13-year-olds, Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth, who died last fall in the wealthy resort town of Park City, Utah, after taking a synthetic opioid known as U-47700 or Pinky. The boys had received the powder from another local teenager, who bought the drugs on the dark web using Bitcoin, according to the Park City police chief.
The dark web is ...dark! (Score:2)
Who knew?
Declare victory in the war on drugs and end it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Declare victory in the war on drugs and end it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand your reasoning. How does that strategy enrich the police union, the prison guard union, the owners of private prisons, fund black-ops programs [youtube.com] or impose arbitrary authority on people to make sure they know who their masters are?
That sounds more like the Portugal [youtube.com] solution and they saw a 95% drop in drug crime, so this plan of yours sounds really bad for a lot of people. Are you against good American jobs?
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>Offer people safe places to take the drugs
This may work for a few addicts, but many addicts are not just addicted to the drug, they are addicted to the lifestyle.
Now, decriminalizing the drugs may take away much of the lifestyle's appeal, so it's still probably a good idea.
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Now, decriminalizing the drugs may take away much of the lifestyle's appeal, so it's still probably a good idea.
There was the guy - one of the Beats, I think? - who said that being gay was a lot more fun when it was illegal. Same idea: raw hedonism appeals to some people.
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drug addiction should be stigmatized and recognized as the disease it is.
Stigmatizing people for having diseases is a bad idea. But I think you meant the opposite. Anyway, drug addiction is one of those marvelous diseases where the victim is almost always self-created. Not getting an addiction to crack is quite easy: don't take it to start with. Decriminalizing it will lead to more people taking it (because they can get it) and thus increasing the demand for addiction services.
You could point to Prohibition as a failure and argue that "drug prohibition" would be as huge a failu
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So, we should legalize pot?
I mean, how much easier does it get to manufacture?
Just simply plant a seed with the rest of the veggies in y
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dollars to doughnuts those kid referenced in the summary would be alive today if they would have had easy access to pot.
Teenage kids are going to experiment with drugs -- full stop. When they aren't able to get their mitts on pot, they'll do insane things like inhale glue, aerosols, or in this case, chinese made bath-tub chemicals of dubious providence.
In Oregon: basically... a gram of pot costs about $5-10 dollars. I'd feel much more comfortable with kids going for *that* than resorting to less safe metho
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dollars to doughnuts those kid referenced in the summary would be alive today if they would have had easy access to pot.
It's easy to bet with other people's lives.
The kids were 13 years old. I have a feeling that even people who advocate legal pot put an age limit on it, just like there is for both tobacco and alcohol. They wouldn't have "easy access" to pot even were it legal in their state.
When they aren't able to get their mitts on pot, they'll do insane things like inhale glue, aerosols, or in this case, chinese made bath-tub chemicals of dubious providence.
The word is "provenance." But I believe you are wrong. They got this drug from a friend, so of course it was safe. Of course. And they knew the right amount to take because, well, because it was obvious. And you want to make it legal a
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Well, I don't think anyone is promoting the idea for pot or beer, etc...at a young age, but then again, let's also be realistic.
When did you and most people start experimenting with alcohol and pot for instance?
Me? I was about 16yrs old....and I was a bit of a late bloomer in
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So, we should legalize pot?
I don't care what you do.
Just simply plant a seed with the rest of the veggies in your garden, and voila!!
The discussion is about legalizing all drugs, not just pot. Implying that all drugs are as safe to use as pot is is, well, not worth continuing the discussion.
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The discussion is about legalizing all drugs, not just pot. Implying that all drugs are as safe to use as pot is is, well, not worth continuing the discussion.
Who implied that? You're making a straw man argument. Any currently illegal drug would be safer if they were legalized, but that doesn't mean all drugs are equally safe.
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Any currently illegal drug would be safer if they were legalized,
Don't be silly. Legalizing a drug doesn't make the drug safer. It only makes it a non-criminal act to possess it. That baggie of PW9352 or whatever it was that killed the kids doesn't magically change into something safer just because it isn't illegal. There is no magic "if only" that would bring MJ back to life "if only" fentanyl was legal for recreational use.
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Don't be silly. Legalizing a drug doesn't make the drug safer.
Oh really? During alcohol prohibition, people dying from tainted alcohol was a common occurrence. Having alcohol become legal almost instantly improved the quality of the product, making it safer. Also, if you had kids and discovered that they had drugs, would you rather deal with a drug dealer or a convenience store clerk.
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Gary Johnson might not have been a very good candidate, but one good point he made was the U.S. has the best policies in place to cause drug users to die. Trillions of dollars spent, and they can't even keep the drugs out of prisons.
To be fair few institutions are as poorly run as prisons. Prison gangs are literally formed and run in the prison system. So many rapes happen in prison that when you factor those in more men are raped than women (citation below). Prisons should be rethought from the ground up as they aren't working. Unfortunately any helpful proposal is likely to suffer from the ever present "disparate impact" which makes the ridiculous assumption that anything that might impact different groups unequally must be a ban
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>Failure is rewarded with yet even more money and power -- the exact opposite of what happens in the private sector.
Maybe true in some subsectors of the private sector, but I see lots of well-rewarded private sector failures reported in the news. Something about a golden parachute.
Also, there's plenty of well-punished successes in the private sector.
Relatedly, there's also plenty of things the private sector leaves undone altogether.
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"virtual currencies" like Bitcoin. virtual? (Score:2)
Modern media must need to sensationalize everything. Just because something is on the Internet doesn't make it "virtual". Did I make a "virtual" purchase on Amazon? Or send a "virtual" message to my boss via email? I think they mean "currency like Bitcoin."
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Maybe you'd prefer "digital" currency?
TLDR (Score:2)
Hegel was right. (Score:2)
"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."
The War on Drugs was and is nothing more than Prohibition 2. And like most Hollywood sequels, everything involved, bootlegging, corruption, and violence, are simply done over on a more massive scale to impress the audience.
Legalization (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the big three (alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana) they ought to be available only from stores licensed by either the state or the Feds (like liquor stores in some states) but you should be able to get whatever drugs you want from those stores. But those drugs should be regulated for quality and they should be heavily taxed, with the proceeds used for education, health care, and detox centers. (Even with taxes the price will probably remain comparable to current values once the overhead of having to circumvent the police/military is taken into account.)
Yes, some people will become addicted and their lives will be ruined, and some people will die. But we have proven over and over again that you can't _force_ people to live responsibly if they don't want to. We can try to educate people when they're young, and the detox centers will be there for people who've gotten into trouble and want to get their lives straightened out. Even so, there will still be those who are unable or unwilling to control their impulses, and that's sad. But criminalization has ruined far too many lives, too often those who aren't even involved, and wasted way too much government money while putting way too much money in the pockets of those benefiting from the illegal drug trade.
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So, I don't think anyone who makes decisions on a cost/benefit basis really disagrees.
The problem is, most of the people making the decisions these days--counting voters--are basing their decisions on morals. To them, drug use is immoral, and society can only be set right (balanced with justice) by punishing those who make immoral decisions. This what people mean when they say folks must "pay" for their crime. Reformation, in their view, comes from God, if at all.
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If they are heavily taxed, and addicts can no longer afford them because they've lost their job from the side effects, they would still have to resort to crime to buy them.
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Yes, some people will still be unable to afford them, and they may still turn to crime as a result, but the operative word is "still". I don't expect this solution to fix everything for everyone, it will just make things better overall.
Hopefully the elimination of possible criminal penalties and (ideally) the reduction of the stigmatization would make it easier for people in that situati
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Just another sign that we ought to legalize _all_ drugs, not just marijuana. Aside from the big three (alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana) they ought to be available only from stores licensed by either the state or the Feds (like liquor stores in some states) but you should be able to get whatever drugs you want from those stores.
A lot of hard drugs, even when controlled for quality, are just too damaging to the body to be allowed to consume. Also, by heavily taxing and controlling them, you will still have people purchasing drugs illegally because it's cheaper. Better to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs, but still criminalize the production and distribution of them.
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Oh wait, it went down. Because it turns out there's very little overlap between people who want cocaine and heroin but are deterred by prohibition.
Also isn't 'ever tried' up for put, but 'regular user' down? Especially among teens?
Prohibition is not, has never been, nor ever will be, a significant impediment to anyone who wants drugs, even less so for the people likely to fall into abuse and addiction.
Your heart is in th
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Oh wait, it went down. Because it turns out there's very little overlap between people who want cocaine and heroin but are deterred by prohibition.
I have no idea what the official numbers say, or if they are correct to start with. Your explanation does not tell us why the numbers went down, at best it explains why it wouldn't go up very much. ("Very little overlap" is not zero.) And, of course, this is limited to "cocaine and heroin", two drugs with unpleasant delivery systems. The claim is that legalizing ALL drugs will not cause in increase in use, but taking a pill is very different than injection or inhalation. If the use mode is the prime impedim
Doesn't surprise me... (Score:2)
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When he got his first package, it was the same drugs that he got at the local pharmacy.
Did you do a chemical analysis on both so you know this for a fact, or are you basing your claim of "same" on the fact they looked the same?
There are many cases of counterfeit sources of drugs from foreign countries that are "the same drugs", just they are made in unsanitary conditions, use inferior fillers and stabilizers, or don't contain the drug they claim to have or the amount. You can't just look at a pill and know it is the same as another. It is trivial to use the same colors and print the same id
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Did you do a chemical analysis on both so you know this for a fact, or are you basing your claim of "same" on the fact they looked the same?
Packaging looked identical. Whether real or counterfeit, the drugs did what they were supposed to do.
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Which gets down to the bottom line: even if you legalize drugs, you are still going to have people buying illegally to save a buck. You can hurt their margins, but if the taxes are meaningful the criminal dealers will still be around. Same goes for convenience and privacy.
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When you live in a country with no health care system, sometimes people do desperate things.
Perhaps it is more of a statement on the state of healthcare than the war on drugs.
Risks (Score:2)
He found a pharmacy in India that would sell him a six-month supply for the same price. When he got his first package, it was the same drugs that he got at the local pharmacy.
Maybe he got lucky and got indeed a real pharmacy in India, that simply sells the same drugs, only produced locally (usually also in India) for the Asian market and thus have their sell prices adapted to what that market will bear.
Maybe he could instead have got what was actually a small scam ran out of china, selling drugs in counterfeit packages, and produced by much less well controlled means. Meaning that not only the concentration of the active component might be off, but there might be other unwanted
Dangerous tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Chainsaws are extremely dangerous if mishandled.
Drugs are tools. Amphetamines, opiates, and paracetamol are dangerous. People overuse caffeine; it's less-dangerous than amphetamine, and provides a sort of illustration about why we don't just give you a stock of 2.5mg d-AMP capsules instead of morning coffee.
The kind of pain for which you need opiates will fuck you up. Pain does extreme psychological damage, and chronic pain is debilitating. Opiates provide an important component of a barely-adequate essential medical system.
Opiates will also fuck you up if misused.
Deal with it. There's a reason we have Codeine and Morphine, but don't use Diamorphine: it's ridiculously-addictive, physically harmful, and generally just no good for pain management. Diamorphine will work, but damn.
I'd be okay with more latitude for self-care. Allow pharmacy technicians to prescribe more drugs after brief counseling; give patients with physician-approval a limited allowance to self-prescribe or to have a pharmacy tech prescribe. My doctor knows I'm not trying to get high and would have little problem just writing up sleeping med prescriptions--which has been done now and then, and I've found I really don't work well with GABA drugs; I don't have a standing Rx for Suvorexant or any Rx ever for Ramelteon, and I can't just walk into a pharmacy and get myself 10 of those to have on-hand or to test how they affect me. It would not be unreasonable for my doctor to have sent a class-based approval that allows me to say "I have X and want to try fixing it with Y" and get the pharmacist's opinion on that, followed by a pharmacy-tech prescription, no doctor's visit.
There is, however, a reason we don't just let you walk into Rite-Aid and pick up a bottle of Adderall off the shelf. That doesn't mean Amphetamine is bad; it's just a very dangerous tool. Same with opiates.
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Nice clear post, well reasoned argument.
Indeed.
So how did something like that get onto Slashdot?
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Opium remained popular even when heroin was legal (Score:2)
I read a fascinating history of opium use in the United States and one of the most surprising thing was that opium smoking remained the primary means of recreational opiate use into the 1920s, which is strange because heroin and morphine were trivially available and outright legal up until 1914.
What I find interesting about this is that it seems like there was kind of a deference to the least possibly risky means of opiate use -- opium smoking. Heroin didn't become the predominant illicit form until the 19
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Do you see anyone injecting purified ethanol into their veins?
People get the reward from smoking opium, sure. They'll avoid the high-test stuff because it's more-dangerous and too much. As you pointed out, when you tighten down on it, you get people who go away and people who seek a replacement. Some people are going for the hard shit regardless; others dilute the population if they can get the light stuff.
That doesn't mean opiates aren't a dangerous tool. Some people take Tylenol 2-3 days per week;
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I think the critical thing is the way potency and time-to-trouble interact.
An addictive drug that's low potency still has long-term addiction risks, but it takes a much longer time for it to develop into a serious problem. In this time window, people may quit, lose interest or have some other thing happen that causes them to not use the substance anymore.
It may be low enough potency that even though they are habitual users, they don't really develop any structural deficiencies in their life. Functional ad
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That's true, and it makes a lot of sense regarding today's medical addicts who weren't properly evaluated, identified, and tapered after medical treatment with opiates.
My problem is with drugs which are sufficiently dangerous with overuse. As I said: caffeine overuse is common today. Look as well at people who go to parties and pound loads of alcohol (or alcohol with red bull). Those are your uninformed victims of circumstance--people who weren't properly looked-after and told they can have a thing, b
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The problem is the masses will never be "well appraised" of the dangers, and the people who want to decide what "dangers" they should be appraised of will always show bias (too much or not enough danger).
I'm inclined to believe that if people had access to weaker drug formulations, they would generally sort themselves out. Given how objectively dangerous, addictive and widespread alcohol is, it's almost surprising that fewer than 8% of Americans are alcoholics.
I think a world where nobody has problems with
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You don't say (Score:2, Funny)
"Thieves use roads to travel and money launders use cash to transfer funds, news at 11"
I'm continually amazed at the propensity of news agencies/government officials to vilify niche parts of society (3d printing, internet, drones, bitcoin, etc) in their quest to catch the "bad guys". Often these areas make up the tiniest fraction if illegal activities yet they become the primary/sole focus.
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I am also amazed that so few seem to connect the dots and seen the futility of it all.
An effective firearm silencer can be made from a scrap piece of metal on a common lathe in very little time. Just thread the inside of the piece to match the gun and the outside to match an off the shelf oil filter. Bigger guns need a bigger oil filter, and these things aren't exactly optimal, but they are cheap and easy to make. If anyone tries this without government permission first (and paying a tax, of course) then
gullible fools (Score:2, Offtopic)
Translation: "Police want the power to intrude on your privacy on the Internet even further and to treat Bitcoin like child pornography." And the reason government hates Bitcoin and other new currencies has little to do with drugs, and a lot with power,
Only unacceptable because the drugs were illegal? (Score:3)
Is this the new "Evolution in action"? (Score:3)
It's becoming clear that we can't protect people from using deadly drugs stupidly.
Is this going to be the way that humanity self-selects to live or to die from the gene pool? Being so lousy at self control that we kill ourselves with deadly drugs of uncertain origin and potency?
--PM
Just say NO! (Score:2)
It's a good thing that Nancy Reagan told us to just say no to drugs in the 1980s, otherwise we'd still have a drug problem.
It was last summer I think when a local state prison guard got sent to federal prison for selling illegal drugs to inmates. At the same time they caught another guard for bringing in cell phones and cigarettes, I'm not sure this guy went to prison but he certainly had to find a new job. Point is that if we cannot keep drugs out of prison then we are doing a very bad job on this war on
The main reason these are "deadly" is illegality (Score:2)
Basically, with regards to overdoses these are less dangerous than Paracetamol, if medical-grade. But since the anti-fun fascists have decided that people have no right to medical-grade clean and affordable drugs, the illegal market did arise. And that one does kill people by impurities, varying substance contents, new replacement drugs that are much more dangerous than necessary, etc.
By now, anybody rational can see that this is just another utterly failed prohibition and just another attempt to tell peopl
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Above the board access to Opiates (Score:2)
I'm in no way advocating this. The article I read explaining it all ended with his life becoming a nightmare that took much effort to escape.
So reference only.
Dried poppy heads with seeds can be purchased for floral arrangements. Made into a tea and total bliss till it bites you.
Google: dried poppy head for floral arrangements - Floral changed to flower for another batch of results
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I see a lot of comments like this but I don't think that people are really all that different from each other, and that it's only small things that lead to the outcomes we see.
Some kind of bigotry exists in everyone. Everyone. Most people do not act overtly on their biases except when those biases are tolerated.
The thought exercise on The Ring of Gyges [wikipedia.org] explores the nature of what people would do if there were no consequences for their actions. Lately we've had numerous examples of the behavior that peo
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Is this a long winded way of saying that drugs should remain illegal because every single person alive is at significant risk of becoming addicted to them, because there is no apparent consequence to abusing them?
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Some kind of bigotry exists in everyone. Everyone.
What does that even mean?
Re: They Should Be Lauded (Score:2)
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To be fair, opiod epidemics are primarily caused by legal opiods which leads to opiod/heroin addiction.
This of course is done because pharmaceutical companies push doctors to sell as many of them as possible, and lie through their teeth that their drug really isn't that addictive. So the pharma companies are to blame for creating and marketing the drugs that put us in this mess, doctors are to blame for being idiots in prescribing medication that they should know is harmful and addictive, and patients shoul
Re:They Should Be Lauded (Score:5, Informative)
The marketing shift that DID make the difference, was increasing access to pain relief for those suffering chronic pain that wasn't from a terminal condition or cancer. And that was a good thing in principle. People shouldn't be forced to live in pain because of someone else's moral opinion on physical dependence, nor because someone else is abusing pharmaceuticals instead of street drugs. There were some critical errors, like not preventing multiple doctors from prescribing to the same patient, doctors not being allowed to discuss harm reduction strategies or treat instead of discharge people with abuse issues (not to mention the whole drug war- addicts scamming pain practices is a consequence of prohibition), and although made into a much bigger issue than it was, prescriptions for people with minor pain from small injuries (APAP combo products that couldn't be snorted or injected).
You're looking for the easy scapegoat, and ignoring the very real issue of under-treated pain and its consequences. And now the pendulum has swung back the other way, and more pain patients live in agony and more drug users get their drugs on the street instead of from a pharmacist. I hope that you or someone you love never finally ends their own life after suffering from preventable pain that relief from became unavailable because of people like you. But I fear that much like drug prohibition in general, that's the only way people will take a deeper look at the pros and cons of trying to enforce sobriety at the end of a gun.
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Drug warriors DO NOT CARE. They would rather you suffer in pain than use opoids regularly. The more hardcore of them would prefer you suffer in pain rather than use opoids _at all_. To them, taking drugs is a moral failing, whatever the reason.
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And while, as we agree, it's harder for the people who NEED the pain meds to get them, you know who it's NOT harder for? People who want to get high, who don't mind switching to heroin or Fentanyl.Analogs(Rand());
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Opoid "epidemics" are primarily caused by people wanting to get away from this reality. I don't know about you, but is there any reason why you would consider shooting heroin into your veins a good idea? If not, why do you think that any other person would consider it a good idea if their life wasn't SO miserable that they would even accept a slow, painful death an acceptable alternative if it comes with at least a few minutes of bliss?
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I bet the leakers are selling these drugs on the dark web to make Trump look bad.
You appear to be operating under the assumption that he needs help in that regard.
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Remember back in the 80's when the FBI sold cocaine to black people in order to make Reagan look bad?
No, no, actually I don't remember that.
Re:silk road did this too (Score:5, Interesting)
therefore, not newsworthy
It is not only not newsworthy, it is garbage journalism designed to twist the facts and manufacture outrage. The reason these drugs are "deadly" is specifically because of their illegality. A legal market with enforced medical regulation can solve the problem, and has done so in many jurisdictions, fixing both the overdoses and much of the collateral harm. In the meantime, these online markets are a safer source of opiates than buying them on street corners, so they are a net benefit to society.
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What?
These are new legal (for a while) analogs. Anybody fool enough to use them, is playing guinea pig.
They might just do enough damage that good old fashioned, wholesome, Heroin, Cocaine, Speed, LSD and MDMA are made legal.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath ether.
Re:silk road did this too (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:silk road did this too (Score:5, Informative)
If we're going to ban any drugs at all, those should be at the top of the list.
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The therapeutic index is useful in a medical setting when drugs are actually what they say they are. But when you're dealing with street drugs, do you trust your dealer to get doses measured in micrograms right?
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I didn't think they were used _at_all_ on humans, with the possible exception of by the Spetznaz.
The problem is the shear number of analogs left to be made illegal. The DEA will be playing whack-a-mole, forever. Junkies will continue to be ghenea pigs.
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And....natural selection will continue to clean the gene pool.
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And....natural selection will continue to clean the gene pool.
Cute. Clever. Until it's your daughter, baby sister, cousin or best friend who was just out with friends one night and took a dose of something 'cause people she trusted were giving it a try and the dose looked small and it didn't seem to be doing any harm and she didn't want to be the one pissing on the fun. Yep, it's sure easy to feel superior by requiring everyone else in the world to be perfect at all times and then there wouldn't be any problems anymore anywhere ever.
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There are 'smart junkies', William Burroughs lived to be an old man. Today, much less likely.
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Look, I grew up with plenty of tha
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Ya know, I'm cool with what you say. Just don't be cruel with that "natural selection" bit, because mistakes happen, particularly with kids. And these days, drugs are a lot more about powders and pills than natural-looking sticky green leafy stuff, buttons of sticky putty stuff, or funny-looking brown foul-smelling fungal stuff picked off cow-shit. Today's reality is you can't eyeball a potency of a powder or pill. That's why fentanyl is killing people. It's ten fucking times more potent than heroin, bu
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Also consider derms.
Fentanyl patches can kill a junkie that puts a little too much DMSO on the pad (to mobilize the drug, make it like a shot).
We're going to be looking at a William Gibson style 'derm' drug problem very soon.
The junkies will figure out how to safely dose any consistent drug, a few will OD on the learning curve. But lack of consistency is the problem.
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Fentanyl analogs != Fentanyl
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Could we not legalize weaker opiates (perhaps up to and including heroin), while keeping fentanyl and its analogs illegal?
Fentanyl, given the LD50, probably ought not to be in widespread circulation anyway because of its suitability as a poison. Carfentanil certainly shouldn't; I'm surprised it's not been used as an assassination tool yet.
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I'm surprised it's not been used as an assassination tool yet.
How do you know that it hasn't?
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The legal market (prescriptions) while not the creator of the problem is definitely a huge contributor.
I'm not a fan of prohibition myself but opioids are really, really dangerous and really should only be given under direct supervision of a medical professional until the use has stopped and any withdrawal period is ended. They shouldn't be sitting in medicine cabinets across the country looking to make the next full blown heroin junkie. Opioid prescriptions, and yup deaths, are up something like 400% in
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Opiod Deaths are up so significantly precisely because of the DEA. Prior to this rise in death rates people got their illegal narcotic doses as pharmacological certified doses in the form of pills with highly regulated dose amounts so no one was accidentally overdosing. No one in the political right could let people have fun with chemicals so the government cracked down, removed the supply of hillbilly heroin and all those users switched to real heroin with all it's bad side effects like unregulated doses t
Angst intended to drive the drug war (Score:5, Interesting)
In the US, about 16 deaths a month (~200/year) occur because the roads are built such that wildlife can get on them. A collision with some form of wildlife occurs, on average, every 39 minutes. Is the government panicking about this? Are they doing anything significant about it? No (notable exception, Indiana... they have IR wildlife detection on some highways, or at least they did at one point, it's been a few years since I drove through there.) And generally speaking, they won't. Because they don't care about you, or risks to you, or your children. Also because doing so wouldn't pump enough money into enough people's pockets, unlike the drug war, which is a nearly bottomless moneypot for all manner of interests. Also because its a lot harder to scare moms with as compared to OMG DRUGZ.
Q: How do you protect yourself against a drug overdose or addiction?
A: Don't take them, or, stop taking them.
Correcting the highways - protecting us - from our becoming victims of wildlife incursions, we need big money and big government. Because it's naturally pretty expensive, effort-intensive, and it's a serious problem.
Protecting ourself from drugs: We can do that ourselves, if we want to. If we don't want to, then we aren't being "protected" when we are interfered with... we're just being interfered with.
Liberty is, essentially as its fundamental character, that thing that that says we can do things that we are are informed about and which we personally, or consensually, choose to do; and that we are protected from others by the agreement that things we don't consent to, or are lacking understanding of, are not foisted off upon us against our will or by our lack of understanding.
Government's role is such protection is exemplified as education: striving to make the citizens reach an informed state about the world. It can also have a valid role in preventing non-consensual action, which ranges from being forced to do something, to running into an animal because they are not kept from the roadways as they should obviously be.
Please vote for people who will end the "war on drugs." It is the very antithesis of liberty. While you're at it, learn about drugs, and convey that information downstream to your kids and students and via any mentor relationships you may enjoy.
And throw some money at a low-IR camera for your vehicle. It could save your life. Because the government doesn't care to.
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Please vote for people who will end the "war on drugs." It is the very antithesis of liberty
The problem with this liberty is that people who abuse the drugs and damage their health, or their ability to hold a job, or become a burden in some other way, reduce the liberties of the rest of society.
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The problem with your idea is that most of the burdens are actually consequent to the drug war itself, not drugs.
The drug war created, and exacerbates, the black market and the violence that pervades it at every level. The drug war created, and exacerbates, the unknown dose problem. The drug war created, and exacerbates, the pricing problems. The drug war created, and exacerbates, the toxic mix problem. The drug war created, and exacerbates, a whole raft of horrible and grotesquely extended consequences to
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A supporting bit of evidence for your argument is that there's a large population of nurses who are regular recreational users of opiates. They don't tend to OD (because they have a reliable supply), they still keep their jobs, and the biggest issue comes from the occasional cases where they screw something up and intoxication gets blamed. (I have no idea whether they screw things up more often than nurses who aren't addicted.)
IMO the blood from every one of those carfentanil OD's is on the DEA's hands.
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People continue to sell contraband tobacco and moonshine
While that is true, it's at a completely different scale. If I wanted I could talk to a couple friends and probably get my hands on just about any illegal drug, but I would have no idea where to start if I wanted to get some bootleg moonshine.
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The problem with this liberty is that people who abuse the drugs and damage their health, or their ability to hold a job, or become a burden in some other way,
I remember a story I read in the paper once, about a married father of 3 who was killed in an avalanche while skiing. Unfortunately, this was not an accident: he was skiing in an off-limits avalanche zone, when there was a high chance of an avalanche occurring. He had been hit by an avalanche the previous year, but survived and was mostly unharmed. His wife begged him to stop skiing in dangerous areas, right up until he died. IIRC, the life insurance was also refusing to pay out due to the circumstances, le
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Well, to be fair...they *are* having to do something to clean up the now failing mess the previous administration left them with their shot at "healthcare".
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The difference today, though, is the sheer potency of the synthetic opiods that are being mailed across. You can ship enough Fentanyl or worse Carfentanyl (or its analogues) in an envelope designed for a greeting card to supply a reasonably sized town for a few weeks. We're talking drugs where the LD50 is on the order of micrograms. In theory of course, they could be diluted down to a safe dosage (we're talking almost Homeopathic type levels of dilution), but the reality is that most of the dealers and gang
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100 years ago it was much cheaper to handle and import Opium and Heroin that was derived from the opium poppy. This drug has a certain strength, known effects, and isn't hugely dense. Yes, there were already synthetic opiods at that point, but they were mostly a laboratory curiosity than anything else. There wasn't a reason for those in the drug trade to introduce them, as opium derived drugs were cheap enough. Due to the "war on drugs" and the current prohibitionist climate, we're now reaping what we sowed
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You're both right and wrong.
Most people taking legally prescribed opioids according to their prescription don't die.
Trouble is, the legally prescribed dosage rate is generally a longer period than the active time of a particular dose, leading patients to take the drug more frequently than prescribed, leading them to run out, and then turn the nefarious dark web for relief . . .
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I don't think anybody thinks Bitcoin is evil, except maybe those who thrive for more government control, like hardcore Democrats and Republicans.