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.

Comments

Declare victory in the war on drugs and end it.

[XxtraLarGe]

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.

Re:Declare victory in the war on drugs and end it.

[bill_mcgonigle]

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 or impose arbitrary authority on people to make sure they know who their masters are?

That sounds more like the Portugal 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?

Legalization

[Daetrin]

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.

Re:silk road did this too

[demonlapin]

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.