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150 People Arrested in International Darknet Opioid Probe (axios.com) 30

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Some 150 people were arrested worldwide and more than $31.6 million in cash and virtual currencies were seized during a 10-month international investigation into opioid trafficking through darknet marketplaces, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. From a report: The massive probe, called "Operation Dark HunTor," spanned three continents and led to the recovery of about 234 kilograms (over 500 pounds) of illegal drugs, including enough fentanyl to cause more than 4 million lethal doses, according to deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco. A darknet is encrypted online content that can only be accessed with specific browsers and is primarily used to purchase or sell illegal goods or services, especially illegal drugs. 65 people were arrested in the United States, one in Bulgaria, three in France, 47 in Germany, four in the Netherlands, 24 in the United Kingdom, four in Italy and two in Switzerland. Prosecutors allege the suspects were responsible for tens of thousands of illegal sales across the U.S., Europe and Australia.
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150 People Arrested in International Darknet Opioid Probe More

150 People Arrested in International Darknet Opioid Probe

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  • "A darknet is encrypted online content that can only be accessed with specific browsers and is primarily used to purchase or sell illegal goods or services."
    • I heard you can buy and sell actual Filipino slaves here: https://www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion/ [www.facebo...tfyd.onion]

    • Yes, we have to outlaw the "darknet" to make sure that all your communications are authorized.

      At the same time, it's really dumb to do this stuff on a regular 9 to 5 schedule, even dumber to keep books and contacts.

    • Your comment is as vacuous as your FP Subject. Do you agree? Disagree? Or you're going for Funny? Really?

      Charitable guess is that you think there are other uses. But "primarily" is not an exclusive claim. And yet I suspect the claim is valid. Follow the money.

      In the early days of the Web I worked for one of the first ISPs in town. Later I moved to a more successful competitor, where the president told me porn was paying for the Internet. He sold out and retired before the first bubble burst. (Not sure if he

  • Congress approved (Score:4, Funny)

    by jwymanm ( 627857 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @04:19PM (#61929649) Homepage
    It wasn't a congressional approved drug running operation with proper level of kickbacks so they had to stop it since it was hurting regular business.

    • The government needs to shut down consensual nonviolent online markets so we can keep drug sales on street corners and schoolyards where they belong.

      It is good to see that our tax dollars are spent wisely.

  • And a nod to Hunter Biden. Nice.
  • It's a bit annoying that fentanyl is mostly reported as how many lethal doses it was. How many actual cut doses that only get people high, would this bust have been? I'm far more interested in what the end goal of the criminals was and not the scare figures released, which mean nothing on their own. Hell, I was given fentanyl for a procedure in the hospital. It's not just a deadly substance, but is commonly used in medicine as a pain reliever and knock out drug, when used in the right hands of course.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: How many non-lethal doses? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @05:20PM (#61929885)
          Your first post was weird but this is just batshit insane. You can't die weeks after taking fentanyl from any reason related to it. Nothing we eat is going to react with metabolites to turn it back into fentanyl again.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Your first post was weird but this is just batshit insane. You can't die weeks after taking fentanyl from any reason related to it. Nothing we eat is going to react with metabolites to turn it back into fentanyl again.

            Are you sure? Or maybe this is just the drugs talking again.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        Really? I'm reading the opposite: the metabolites aren't active or clinically relevant:

        Fentanyl, oxymorphone, and methadone do not produce metabolites that are likely to complicate treatment. Fentanyl is predominantly converted by CYP3A4-mediated N-dealkylation to norfentanyl, a nontoxic and inactive metabolite; less than 1% is metabolized to despropionylfentanyl, hydroxyfentanyl, and hydroxynorfentanyl, which also lack clinically relevant activity.

        Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

        Plus, I've read about the dangers of fentanyl, and short term body-accumulation has come up. The main issue is that because a fatal dose is so small, it's hard to cut and mix properly. And that narcan is less effective with fentanyl than with most opiates.

      • Re: How many non-lethal doses? (Score:4, Informative)

        by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @05:18PM (#61929881)
        Fentanyl actually has a much shorter half-life than the traditional drugs it's replacing such as oxycodone and heroin (an hour and a half compared to 4 hours). Overdoses are nearly always acute, and in fact, tolerance to the respiratory depression rises faster than tolerance to the psychological effects, so the more one uses, the larger the excess dose needs to be to trigger an OD. There's no long term toxicity issues, and the longer lived metabolites are inactive. Where did you get this conspiracy from? It's wrong on every point. That's not how fentanyl overdoses work at all.

        I will note however, that issue *does* exist for another opioid: loperamide. The OTC anti-diarrhea drug. It's an opiate that doesn't cross the BBB, but is increasingly used because it can terminate physical withdrawal, and in crazy high doses, break through into the brain (technically, exceed the capacity of the P480 enzyme that transports it immediately back out). But, it has an 11h half life with normal use, and some data suggests the half life increases substantially with massive doses. People who take those breakthrough doses (100-400 pills at once) experience cardiotoxicity sometimes resulting in death from the ever higher accumulation since they rarely wait long enough.

  • Caught me at a bad time? I'm at risk of FPing? I hit an interesting new story on Slashdot, but I don't really have enough time to compose a complete thought...

    Okay, how about a joke? Can I blame all of the "tradition" of Internet crime on the scamming spammers and Al Gore?

    You see, Al told the nascent Internet researchers not to worry about the money. He'd take care of the money and all they had to do was focus on making the Internet work. So the smart guys did that, but they made a number of mistakes along

  • It doesn't act so much like an illegal opioid like hydro/oxycodone, as it does a lethal *contaminant* [youtu.be] where it might be introduced when processing/cutting other street drugs (or anything, really) -- probably even just in the same room -- if these amounts are accurate.
    • Accidental contamination doesn't even remotely account for the amounts found in other drugs. Cutting small amounts of other drugs in something that exclusively contained pure fentanyl just isn't a common enough scenario to explain it. The far more likely explanation is it's dirt cheap and ups the high and addiction so is deliberately introduced. There's a lot of bad information and myths going around about this drug, especially by law enforcement. It's absolutely a dangerous drug, but myths like widescale a
      • I was more considering the impedance mismatch between fentanyl's lethal dosage amount (~2 milligrams, about 30 seconds into the video link I posted) and the substance processing accuracy/reproducibility in the supply chain from source to end-user. I suspect that controlling contamination is just out of the question [wired.com], even for something this dangerous.
        • When oxycodone first came out, my ex-brother-in-law was given too much for too long by the inexperienced doctors after a motorcycle accident. When they realized they had addicted him and it was their fault, they filled out paperwork, and voila; he had a permanent prescription for opioids. That was in the 1970s. When fentanyl came along he tried some, mostly in skin patch form. The quality control was terrible. Some patches he couldn't feel even after waiting 2 hours, other times he'd be stumbling and slurri

  • Pissing into a hurricane (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is pretty much pissing into a hurricane. Until you can get Americans to stop filling themselves with massive amounts of opioids, this will just continue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      FTFA:

      Prosecutors allege the suspects were responsible for tens of thousands of illegal sales across the U.S., Europe and Australia.

      Definitely a problem here, but not exclusively an American problem.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ,if law enforcement does manage to sneak in, by exploit, moles or whatever technique, they use they can do a LOT of data collection.

    back in the good old days, you sold drugs to people you knew, and it was much harder to roll up the big fish without getting someone inside the organization which is both difficult and dangerous.

    anonymity makes it easier (?) for law enforcement to hang out for a while collecting intelligence on the whole operation. also it seems like they can run exploits against connected net

  • What's that, .000000001% of what's available?

  • On a Federal level in the US that could mean 499.9 lbs of cannabis and .1 of other.

    Funny how they don't specifically disclose exactly what they seized? Standard fluff at a federal level.

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