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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.
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 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.
"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.
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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 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...
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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"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...