Slashdot Mirror
Opioid Dealers Embrace the Dark Web To Send Deadly Drugs by Mail (nytimes.com)
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.
I love oh bitcoin is "Evil"; but the amount of crime in which dollars are used is ok.
Who knew?
Dialectician. Archology.
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. Everyone would be better off if you could just buy crack, meth & heroin at your local party store, and rededicate the money being spent on imprisoning people to treatment programs. I just saw an article that said it now costs more to keep someone in prison than it does to send them to Harvard for a year.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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 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 people at the top of the social order engage-in when consequences for their actions don't seem to exist or to come to mind; people restrain themselves becasuse they fear the consequences for actions they want to take.
In a nutshell, restraint is usually based on a reaction to the judgement of others, and thus behavior is molded based on the judgement of others. Little things in the nature of that judgement can have far reaching implications on a person's behavior. This does not mean that we should excuse someone's bad behavior or choices that lead to their downfall, but in most cases we probably shouldn't celebrate it either, as what happened to them could have just as easily happened to us if a few conditions were only a little different.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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."
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
You MUST shut down the Interwebs because think of the CHILDREN!
No, they're doing to make the internet look bad, so people will demand more control and censorship.
Of course that's not true either. They're doing it to make money, plain and simple.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"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.
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. 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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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 gangs running this stuff certainly aren't compounding pharmacists or even real chemists.
They're also extremely cheap as they're synthesized in labs, rather than requiring all the processing to be derived from opium poppies, paying off the cartels and corrupt government officials, and so forth. This is basically Economics 101 going on in the drug trade. The dealers have found a new source of product that is (much) cheaper and easier to obtain, and done right, meets the inelastic need of the addicts.
Anyhow, the real lesson here is that the "war on drugs" has failed, and failed miserably. It has hugely increased the cost of simple Heroin and other opiods, and pushed people to using these much cheaper (and far more dangerous) analogues. The only reason why they are cheaper, is because policy has made the traditional drugs so expensive and criminally dangerous to get.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
When my late father required maintenance drugs to keep living, a one-month supply of the drugs cost $120 per month. 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.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
"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.
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 should be educated that what they're being prescribed isn't something they should be taking.
In fact Ohio is suing pharma companies for this very purpose.
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, control, and the financial interests of crony capitalists.
The reason this keeps happening has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Chinese dealers or the "dark web", it has to do with the fact that our insane drug policy creates a demand for designer drugs with highly variable properties.
If you want to reduce harm and drug deaths, stop this cat-and-mouse game with designer drugs and just legalize the traditional, plant-derived drugs (and the plants themselves, of course).
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than bleeding away our civil liberties for a pointless and ineffective war on drugs.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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?
It's the New York Times.... their tech editors are crap. Last week they ran an alarmist article about a ransomware strain from August 2016 that was never distributed in the wild. They made it look like it was the second coming of WannaCry.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You mean like destroying our civil liberties with a murderous war on drugs and war on poverty, the favorite pastimes of our frustrated Vagina Overlords?
If they were deatha from legally prescribed pills, of which there are thousands in this country every year, would anyone care? The problem isn't that people die, it's that pharma isn't the one making money in this case.
Maybe you'd prefer "digital" currency?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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 . . .
Some kind of bigotry exists in everyone. Everyone.
What does that even mean?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People buy illegal drugs - of unknown potency/adulteration - because they can't buy the drugs they want legally. Legal drugs are quality controlled and known potency. If you care about your kids' survival, support drug legalization. Sure, there will be addicts. Just as there are alcoholics. But prohibition of alcohol made things worse, not better. Same here.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
This is pretty much just propaganda. Do you seriously think that any doctor, having passed the MCAT, been accepted to medical school, passed medical school, then passed the USMLE, thought for a second a full agonist opioid (that had existed for decades, by the way, oxycodone was not invented in the 90s or 2000s) was not just as addictive as every other full agonist opioid? Not a chance. And the stronger formulation, OxyContin, being appropriate for those without tolerance? Nope, not a chance. Not even pill mills gave out OC40's or OC80's to people who hadn't already been building tolerance for years.
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.
In the case of fentanyl analogues, it's not just the illegality or the corresponding imprecision in dose. They're dangerous drugs when used in the hospital. I'm an anesthesiologist, and I barely use the stuff because of this. The line between "effectively treats pain" and "makes them stop breathing" is very, very small. When I give it, I have a breathing tube in place - I don't have to worry if someone stops breathing, because I can do it for them. I still don't often do it.
If we're going to ban any drugs at all, those should be at the top of the list.
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you're an anesthesiologist you should know better than to be deliberately misleading. Many fentanyl analogs have a therapeutic index better than traditional opiates and other classes of medications. The one everyone is really worked up about, carfentanil, has an extremely large one in particular. Let's not conflate absolute amount with this, ok? I know that's not one you'd use, but my comment applies to sufenta, ultiva, et al. too. Wide safety margin in TI.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 the last 20 years. They are starting to get a handle on it but not before the damage has been done.
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
And....natural selection will continue to clean the gene pool.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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 1920s when raw opium bans and tariffs made it difficult to come by, and the more potent and easily trafficked heroin took its place.
In many ways, the current (over say 10 years) "crisis" in opiate use seems to be fairly similar.
First you had relatively easy to obtain opiate tablets -- oxycodone and hydrocodone, most of which were probably low dosage variants (5-10 mg). Then you had the scare stories, and states began keeping lists to limit doctor shopping, the Feds reviewed prescribing to crack down on pill mills, etc.
Almost like it was predictable, when the pill supply slowed down demand shifted to heroin, and the suppliers responded with more heroin, lowering its price to cheaper than now hard to obtain pills. I'd wager a whole class of recreational pill users who normally wouldn't have moved to heroin based on price and availability.
Then between the Feds cracking down on heroin and market demand, you get a shift to synthetics like Fentanyl. IIRC, Fentanyl is a pure synthetic, not a byproduct of opium, so its made in any old lab and doesn't have the geographic types of supply chain from poppy fields to sellers. The same potency of heroin that would require a truck can now be carried in an envelope in a suit pocket, making it much easier to traffic.
In both the move from smoking opium to heroin and pills to Fentanyl, you have a population that was mostly satisfied with what they had, and what they had was weaker and less dangerous than what replaced it. While still addictive, I'd wager that building a serious addiction is more difficult with a weaker variant that would require frequent dosing. It's also less likely to kill people, especially novices. I don't think anybody who experiments with opium smoking is at risk of overdosing, nor is someone who takes a couple of 5 mg oxy tablets.
Each time the legal pressure is tightened, the supply side seems to have a newer, harder to eradicate, more dangerous and stronger alternative. We'd have been better off leaving it fairly easy to buy a few 5 mg oxy tablets. It still can create a mess, but much less mess than a blast of Fentanyl in the local opiate market.
That's wonderful that marijuana is so effective for him. It should absolutely be tried first, and if it works fantastic, no need for opiates or as high a dose of opiates. But that's not always going to be the case.
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());
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 some drugs.
We've seen drug dealers builtd semi-submersible watercraft that can sail from Colombia to California non-stop. They have a diesel-battery-electric drive like World War II era submarines so that they can run quiet when close to the Coast Guard. They have a non-metallic hull so they cannot be picked up by sonar or radar unless they are right on top of each other. These things can cost over $2,000,000 to build but they can carry 100 times that value in drugs. They usually take a year to build but I'm not sure they even bother to try to re-use them, it's just cheaper/easier to scuttle it and build another than risk getting caught trying to sail it back.
Now law enforcement is finding evidence that the drug smugglers have been building true submersibles. These have steel hulls, which might be picked up by sonar if someone knew where to look but can go deep enough that surface radar won't find them. They cannot be seen from the air either like the semi-submersibles. We don't know for sure that they've been used since no one caught one in the water yet, they've only been found during construction. This could mean that none have sailed successfully, or that they've been so successful none have been caught.
We've tried addressing the demand through propaganda and education. We've tried limiting supply with catching these submarines. We have nothing to show for it.
Another thing about education... I remember getting this slide show in grade school about the dangers of using illegal drugs and they made a point between legal drugs, which are made in clean laboratories, and illegal drugs, which are made in a dirty shed. What came to my mind then, as a stupid little kid, was why would the drug dealers poison their customers? Would that not mean the users would die or find someone with "clean" drugs to sell them? Also, if the drugs from the "clean" place are the same as the drugs from the "dirty" shed are the same drugs then would not the users try to get the "clean" drugs?
I figured this out in minutes as a stupid little kid and it seems that the drug dealers figured this out too. As it is right now we've got some of the most potent, purest, and CHEAPEST drugs on the illegal market right now. If anyone is dying from drug use today then it's likely from getting an inconsistent dose, the illegal dealers don't want to kill their customers but if they screw up on keeping the dosage consistent there's no government or private oversight committee to double check their work.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
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. The criminal element has now moved to substitutes which are orders of magnitude more potent than what was present before, and thus cheaper.
The only real solution, imho, is to stop treating drug addiction as a criminal offense, and move to the medical model. The only time addicts will give up their addiction successfully is when they're ready to do so. Until then, we need to support them to keep them from killing themselves, and hopefully keep them as functioning members of our society.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.
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?
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 people by application of force how they have to live. The whole thing originally comes from religious extremism, where nothing except prayer is allowed to be fun. The damage to society from this continued stupidity is extreme and far worse than drugs could ever be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There are 'smart junkies', William Burroughs lived to be an old man. Today, much less likely.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
There were half a dozen replacements for the Silk Road within weeks, for fuck's sake.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Look, I grew up with plenty of that same culture, we had tons of nifty drugs to try, and many if not most of my friends and group tried them out.
But we were smart enough...that's the key. You can still be a kid and be smart about things you do when it comes down to it....at least if you have parents that raise you right.
Sure, there were some people that took it too far, but for 99% of the large group I ran with and grew up with, we all survived, have kids, good jobs, etc.
One easy rule of thumb...if you have to use a needle (or commonly use one with a certain drug), don't fuck with it.
I'd add one more thing for today, as that it is more prevalent than when I grew up (although we had some back then)....if it is synthetic, don't do it.
Stick with the basics....and as all natural as you can.
I have a hard time believing kids today would be that much more stupid than the kids in my day.
And yes, if you're stupid...perhaps not reproducing isn't the worst thing in the world....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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 active components or the desired component might be entirely missing.
The problem with product sold over internet is that it's harder to correctly guess in which of the above situations you are.
Unless you go for a very well know and well tested reputable source. At which point it will end up not being so cheap (or outright banned).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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; and we have many addicted to diphenhydramine from using OTC sleeping pills all the time. Likewise, people take Dextromethorphan in high doses to hallucinate; people pound over a gram of caffeine a day; and some folks chain smoke while using several nicotine patches because why the hell not?
That people are a touch better at self-regulating than most people think doesn't mean we aren't playing with dangerous tools here. Even if you ignore the mindshare issue (how many people really considered they even could get a harder version of opium back then, without having to inject heroin? Who injects shit into their body?), some people will overuse a good, workable drug without intent of getting super-high or harming themselves; they just don't realize a certain behavioral pattern will take them into a dangerous behavior. This is why we banned food products containing a combination of alcohol and stimulants. You at least need to counsel people before they can have access to such things.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yes, who are we to stand in the way of the Darwin effect? If they want it and are idiots, let them have it and decrease the surplus population starting with said idiots.
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
I'm surprised it's not been used as an assassination tool yet.
How do you know that it hasn't?
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 addicts, but isn't the functional part what's important?
In the book I read, the description of most opium and morphine addicts of the late 19th/early 20th century seemed to be functional addicts. Some had started taking medicinal opiates for legitimate reasons and became addicted, but most didn't seem to spiral out of control. Opium users tended to be fringe members of society with a whole host of other life risks (exposure to violence, maybe heavy drinking, lack of any medical care, etc) so that opium smoking wasn't really their downfall, it was running with a rough crowd.
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, but in its way, more easily available than heroin, so it makes sense to senseless dealers to mix in with heroin and pass on as heroin, and a kid hitting a little bit won't know the difference before she's collapsed after one snort and can't get back up, all while her friends bolt the hell out of there because they don't wanna go to jail.
I had a healthy fear of hard drugs growing up. The story of Janis Joplin going down because her last hit had way more potency than she expected struck me hard. SRV fell off the stage spitting blood because cocaine and bourbon had crystalized in his stomach and cut him the hell up. That was enough for me. But kids today wanna go to raves, not acid tests, and by that age they (or someone they know) have already been sharing ritalin and other study drugs, in pill form, every cram season. Crush it and snort it to get it going faster. Is the needle so out of the question, particularly when you're girlfriend is Type-I diabetic and hits insulin several times a day? Welcome to 2017: overdosing is not just for "junkies" anymore.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
>But when you're dealing with street drugs, do you trust your dealer to get doses measured in micrograms right?
We shouldn't have to trust a street dealer - that's the whole point. We should be trusting well regulated businesses in an open market.
Maybe in a textbook, or orally, or transdermally, they have good TI's. In IV push, not so much. My experience, though, not a clinical trial. My nickname for fentanyl is "apnea in a vial".
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, but first we must explain to you the things about that thing so anything you do to yourself is your own fault.
With opiates, amphetamines, and the like, such casual usage patterns are much more deleterious to health. In short: opium is a worse chronic poison than caffeine, and a weekend binge on amphetamines is going to hurt you more than a weekend binge on vodka (usually). As you said: most didn't spiral out of control.
As well, some people just want to abuse the drug. Again, their fault; however, at least if you gate it, you can counsel them, detect them, and maybe provide some additional medical services to protect people against those secondary risks. For some people, it's not that their life is driving them to drink so much as they just want to party (genetic addicts typically dislike their own behavior and become seriously-averse to addictive stimuli as a defense), and you can't do anything about them really.
Culture changes. Caffeine+Alcohol is a recent cultural phenomena, as is butt-chugging. As well, today we recognize addiction as a health problem, whereas long ago we didn't. The risks move around, and sometimes people go unappraised; we should at least make sure people are sufficiently warned in some clear way. "Drugs r bad, man" doesn't cut it; drugs aren't all the same thing, and have vastly-different risks. People are all about informed consent when we get into date-rape drugs, but then seem to believe we should just regulate all the drugs so they're safe and unadulterated and let people go wild--forgetting that you can reliably assume most people aren't informed just because there's a prescription packet or OTC drug facts label on the bottle.
The first several comments included a bunch of stuff about how this will just let the stupid people sort themselves out of our society, or how we should just end the war on drugs because it tramples on some essential liberties. I get that most people don't care to abuse drugs, and that an iron fist does more harm than good; and I still maintain that people are at-risk so long as we don't ensure they've got a reasonable understanding of what they're handling before we hand it over to them. Put a little more trust in people and control into their own hands? Sure. Just don't pretend they're all well-appraised of the dangers, or that they won't naturally dig themselves a nice, deep hole. We've all now and then learned the hard way that we knew less about a thing than we thought; when that's a dangerous thing, we have a duty to ensure others don't walk into the same situation.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Fentanyl analogs != Fentanyl
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 substance use is a world that doesn't and won't ever exist. Some people will be harmed, the best you can do is figure out how to reduce harm.
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 that kill people.
The crackdown on prescription abuse led directly to the rise in heroin abuse. As always, prohibition doesn't work, it only makes things worse.
It means that inside everyone exists bigotry. Bigotry.
Do you really think that? Maybe I'm a bigot against dumb people who think that inside everyone is bigotry.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, yeah, it's not a perfect system. Reduction requires some sort of attempt; the choice is restriction or education. We currently lean more toward restriction, limiting education to "drugs r bad, man". This is actually sad, because we expend an enormous amount of classroom time discussing drugs, and drugs are fascinating.
Amphetamine.
Amphetamine is an NDRI. Amphetamine is a type of substituted phenethylamine, which is built from a phenyl ring, an ethyl group, and an amonia ion (NH3). PHENyl-ETHYL-AMINE. Phenethylamine. Attach a methyl group to the alpha bond point and you get Alpha-Methyl-PHenyl-EThyl-AMINE, Amphetamine. Yes, the name physically describes the chemical.
Amphetamine is shaped similarly to a catecholamine--a type of substituted phenethylamine. It can enter a neuron that releases and re-uptakes Dopamine, enter the vacuole that stores dopamine, and displace it into the cell. This blocks dopamine reuptake at the transporter, and forces excess dopamine into the cell such that it begins to spill out of the transporter and into the brain. It also blocks norepinephrine reuptake.
Methamphetamine does this in the nucleus accumbens. It's also a 5HT transport inhibitor, and so floods the brain with serotonin, which essentially causes serious cardiovascular issues, makes you kind of crazy, and does all this while you feel awesome thanks to tons of dopamine.
Besides the blunt toxicity risks, amphetamine abuse causes down-regulation of the dopaminergic rewards system. The practical consequences of this is you eventually reach a point where you're never going to feel good again--many people take several years to begin feeling any form of pleasure after adderall abuse, and some people simply never recover.
Drugs r bad, mmkay?
In school, we got entire weeks with 2 hours each day devoted to explaining that there's heroin, it will give you HIV, and it's addictive, and bad; there's speed, and speed is a drug, and drugs r bad; there's cocaine, and cocaine is snorted, and anything snorted is bad for you, and cocaine is bad. They didn't bestow knowledge; they tried to drill in an ideal through repetition.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Exactly.
I should feel sorry for those two 13-year-old retards .. why?