Makes sense. Can't make money when customers are ending up dead. Selling pot is one thing, can't die from an overdose, but if I were a drug dealer I'd leave my paws off of heroin, fenta and friends.
According the article, it has little to do with intrinsic concern over the well-being of customers, and more to do with the sellers getting caught up in legal reprisals.
"There are also drug users on the dark web who say on forums that they don’t think it’s right that people are selling fentanyl because it is dangerous and kills a lot of people.”
Yes. When someone dies of fyntanyl (especially if they have relatives in law enforcement) there is a good chance they open the victims laptop. The tor session might still be sitting there. There could be notes in text files on the desktop.
This is where it gets bad for a dealer. Because now law enforcement can pretend to be victim and trick dealers into unveiling their id. [drop site setups etc]
It always confuses me when I hear of kids dying to OD'ing on this stuff; why cut your product with so much of something that would kill your customers?
It's accidental. The problem with fentanyl is that it's so ridiculously strong.
So you're selling heroin and figure "hey, I'll cut it and make more money". You add something inert and then add a tiny bit of a fentanyl and oops you added too much, now it's poisonous for users to take a "normal" dose.
It's much stronger than meth. Current meth users try fentanyl without knowing what they're getting themselves into and they can easily take too much and OD. It has been a huge problem in the region I grew up in (rural midwest US).
As a general rule, it's relatively unusual for methamphetamine users to get into fentanyl/heroin and vice versa. Two different scenes.
Now, there are always a few "garbagehead" addicts that'll use whatever you got, but that's not common in my experience, since opiate addicts chase calm, sleepy euphoria and meth/cocaine addicts chase stimulating, energetic euphoria. Different scenes, different personality types. Probably different genetics as well.
It's accidental - fentanyl is active in the microgram range, so the tiniest mistake can be fatal. Common warning about fentanyl:
> This substance is extraordinarily potent (i.e. active in the microgram range), to the point that the pure powder can result in a fatal overdose if spilled on one's skin. [...] It is strongly encouraged to wear gloves while handling, use volumetric dosing combined with a milligram scale
The impression I'm starting to get is that the dealers sometimes fail to mix properly when cutting the product. This means that one batch can create doses with widely varying concentrations.
Then you get cases where one distributor dilutes their product so much that their customers get used to taking very large amounts to get a high. Then one of those customers switches to another supplier with a "more normal" concentration and unwittingly overdoses.
Then there's the people that develop a tolerance to the drug over time, and keep trying higher and higher doses to get the same high.
And all of that is before you get into measuring errors and other mistakes caused by people doing complex chemistry without any formal training.
I thought the same, since dealers probably want repeat customers. Apparently since fentanyl is so concentrated the profit margins compared to heroin are orders of magnitude greater
Why would an addict use heroin over fentanyl if they both produce the same euphoric effects but fentanyl is cheaper / stronger?
I almost always hear about fentanyl in the context of "...the heroin was cut with with fentanyl". I read that statement like "...the heroin was cut with ultra-pure-super-heroin". Why wouldn't the addict cut out the "middle-man" and just use fentanyl? Legitimately trying to understand.
Possibly: it's extremely strong, which means physical dependency kicks in extremely fast and hard. Just because you're addicted to opioids doesn't mean you don't care about modulating your intake.
According to the current top comment fentanyl has a higher safety range LD50 is 400 times more than the therapeutic dose (whereas this ratio is 50 for heroin), but since it's many times more potent than heroin, it's a lot easier to screw up the dilution.
It would be very hard for a junky to dose in most environments. Like you could do volumetric dosing but just isn't practical for those in too deep and especially if in the daily struggle just to get well grind. I also think it has shorter 'legs' that is kind of like crack vs coke you have to re-dose the fent more often than heroin
Fentanyl doses in micrograms I believe. A lot of addicts are addicted to the feeling of the injection and the ritual of it as well.
Heroin I believe doses in the tens of mgs, which is hard to measure precisely but can be weighed on a twenty dollar scale. You could distribute fent in the same way Lsd is on blotter paper. The big difference is you accidently get a hot spot of Lsd it's not fatal.
Many addicts aren't buying massive quantities at once either nor are they getting it from the internet.
From the addict's perspective, it's because it's better to use something that's cheap and only might kill you, versus something that is only slightly cheaper and probably will kill you due to difficulty in dosing.
The only reason fent exists on the black market is it's stupidly easy to smuggle compared to heroin, a tiny thimbleful of it could be cut into something like a thousand doses. This works out for dealer economics, it's not to benefit the addict.
Illegality also encroaches users to use drugs in a way that maximizes their effect, such as injection, insufflation or smoking. Cocaine is, for instance, active orally, but few people take it that way these days.
>Ocfentanil shows typical opiate-like effects like euphoria and relaxation. Users reported that it is less “cool” and euphoric than heroin, but it is more stimulant and has a very quick onset, after 3 min. The users also reported that it has shorter duration of action (3 h) than heroin
A lot of heroin users developed an opiate dependency using prescription painkillers, but once their doctor stopped giving them the prescription they looked for something else. Once upon a time heroin was the cheaper drug because fentanyl was only available by prescription; people with opiate dependencies wanted fentanyl not because it was stronger but because it was manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, which means specified and reliable doses and a very pure product.
Today the problem is that fentanyl is produced by underground labs using questionable processes, so it is basically no different than "heroin" as far as the danger goes. The reason I put "heroin" in quotes is that in reality people cannot know what they are buying on the black market; maybe it is heroin, maybe it is fentanyl, maybe it is a mixture, or maybe they are about to become a case study like this group:
Heroin with a small amount of fentanyl gives an extra kick to the heroin. Heroin dealers who don't include fentanyl are regarded to have an inferior product. If the heroin is cut with too much fentanyl, your customers die.
As mentioned in other replies, the problem with doing fentanyl directly is that it only takes a minute amount to kill, amounts that are difficult to measure.
The dealers buy a kilo of heroin, or fentanyl, and dilute it. They can dilute the fentanyl much more, which means they can sell very many more doses. This means they have huge profits from fentanyl.
Fentanyl only exists on the dark web because of the Chinese labs pumping it out. Wake up! The Chinese government policy is to look the other way if you aren't selling the drugs inside China. They see this as just revenge for the British selling opium in China. This is directly responsible for thousands of deaths in the US. Execute the scum bringing this into our countries!
What can we do about this? Direct trade punishments for allowing this to happen. Hit them the only place they care, in the bank account and this would stop Quickly!
> Who is “we?” People who look like me, a white person, who did mean things two centuries before I was born?
"We" as in the nation or government? And it wasn't 2 centuries ago. We were colonizing china up until 1949.
People truly do not understand how much "we" ( as in the US and imperial europe ) screwed over china. I bet not 1 in a 1000 americans knows that the US were imperial colonizers in china even after ww2.
China (to be clear, we are talking about the PRC/Jinping regime, not the Chinese people) is a menace to freedom and stability in the free world. They steal our IP, infiltrate our companies, and place their population in concentration camps in the world's largest police state--meanwhile, our companies like Google and Microsoft continue to work hand in hand with the CCP regime to develop products customized to suit regime needs and rules.
America (to be clear, we are talking about the US Trump/Bush/Clinton/Obama regime, not the American people) is a menace to freedom and stability in the whole world. They steal our oil, infiltrate our companies, and place children in cages, and their minority and poor population incarcerated. Suspects are held without being charged indefinitely at black prison sites and tortured. They are the world's largest police state--meanwhile, our companies continue to work hand in hand with the US/Trump regime to develop products customized to suit regime needs and rules.
He is actually saying same things that were said about China, in the same words, but about US. It's a rhetorical move to force the interlocutors to change their perspective and examine their own prejudices. To me, both comments read like hateful propaganda rooted in prejudice.
You can't do this kind of flamewar on HN, and we ban accounts that won't stop, so please stop.
Your account seems to have taken a heavy turn into using HN for political battle. That's not ok, and we ban accounts that do it. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended.
The rest of the world may be radicalizing and polarizing, but HN's mandate hasn't changed and isn't going to, therefore we have to ban accounts that are destructive of it. First among those are the accounts seeking to use HN as a battlefield, which (if allowed to) would turn this place into scorched earth.
alright Daniel. No problem. My point was to mirror the comment from OP and make him/her see how ridiculous and one-sided it sounds. But I agree it isn't constructive and I do understand your points. I'll promise to stop all comments that might be considered offensive or political (off-topic) regardless of how I might feel about it. And I'm sincerely sorry if I've hurt or upset anyone.
I have witnessed the killing and burning of bodies from 120 Tamils in Sri Lanka, which went unreported in Western media. I have witnessed a guy stabbing another guy in the neck within a parang (coconut knife) as my first experience when globe-trotting (I just turned 19) during a religious dispute in Banda Aceh. I have seen dead bodies of Burmese fishermen while teaching an Open Water Scuba class in Thailand (they are used as slaves by the Thai and then thrown overboard). All this happened a long time ago but it has shaped me in a way that made me more angry. I'm not an academic and I'm not a native English speaker but nor am I an arm-chair philosopher. I do still suffer from PTSD of my experiences, but it's no excuse to make political comments here probably.
Again this isn't an excuse for myself, but I hope it gives context on why I feel more strongly and said the things I did. I'm happy to continue lurking and promise to cut political motivated arguments out in future.
Sorry I didn't see this earlier. I am touched by your description of your experiences and glad that you felt able and willing to share them here, given how difficult they were. Issues of moderation don't exist on that level—the only thing that matters is contact. But I'm grateful for your receptivity to what I posted, even though it's trivial by comparison.
China being China will almost certainly come back to haunt them without significant political reform (within China itself). It's great that someone is building infrastructure in these countries, but the cost is a totalitarian state with a few freedoms, enslaved by debt to their new colonial masters.
This can easily be exploited by the West, similar to how the Soviet Union used US hegemony to start (and win) numerous cold war conflicts.
China may never see any returns on that infrastructure when these countries inevitably switch sides in the new cold war.
Please don't thought police. Extremely important and relevant points are being made. If this information/opinion can't be shared here where will this discussion happen?
On a different forum with a different mandate. HN's is the gratification of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and flamewars are poison to that purpose.
> Fentanyl only exists on the dark web because of the Chinese labs pumping it out. Wake up!
The chinese labs wouldn't be pumping out fentanyl if people weren't demanding it. If it isn't china producing it, it would be produce elsewhere ( even in the US ). Stop with your scapegoating rhetoric.
> They see this as just revenge for the British selling opium in China.
It wasn't just the british. A huge part of the US industrial and political power derived from colonizing china.
Though I disagree with your fearmongering and your erroneous equating of the US with britain, I do agree that we have to come to terms with china one day over our historical transgressions and their future ambitions. It's inevitable at the very least that china will want the US our of east asia and possibly want retribution for a century of brutal colonization/humiliation/rape of china. How these issues get resolved will determine the future of the US, China and the world in the 21st century.
> The chinese labs wouldn't be pumping out fentanyl if people weren't demanding it.
Unsuspecting people are becoming addicted to Fentanyl because it is being cut into other drugs they are taking without their knowledge. It started with Heroin and has now moved into other drugs. Even Xanax has been found to have Fentanyl in it. So if you think this came about via supply & demand you should do some more research on the topic.
A lot of fearmongering here, drug manufacturing & trafficking in small amounts is punishable by death in China, if you are making narcotics in China, you don't fear the Chinese govt or the Chinese army and you basically have nothing to lose.
and I quote: "China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other NPS because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical
industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored...Chinese law enforcement and drug investigators are unable to effectively regulate the high volume of drugs and
chemicals the country produces.In many cases, the chemicals used to produce fentanyl and fentanyl-like products
are illegally diverted from legitimate pharmaceutical uses, with criminals taking advantage of inadequate
enforcement protocols to produce unregulated chemicals and NPS.
Until 2014, a regulatory loophole allowed
Chinese chemical companies to operate in a gray area of oversight, freeing them from inspection requirements and
other certification systems. That loophole was closed in 2014 when China’s State Administration of Work Safety
implemented new regulations on chemical production to improve management of nonpharmaceutical businesses,
including enforcing stricter licensing requirements.
Even under the new regulations, Chinese pharmaceutical and chemical companies continue to divert chemicals from
legitimate pharmaceutical uses and adulterate legitimate pharmaceuticals during production.This makes drug
enforcement within China difficult, as many manufacturers of fentanyl and other NPS are legitimate companies
legally producing chemicals. Although some of these chemical manufacturers knowingly ship their products to
the United States for illicit purposes, Chinese chemical and pharmaceutical exporters continue to operate with little
oversight"
Do not get me wrong, I've seen the impact of Fentanyl and I want China to step up on crushing its production.
It's closer to outright jingoistic hatred than fearmongering. People have managed to convince themselves that it's a Chinese government plot with conspiracy theories being upvoted left and right.
It's actually a pretty good example of situations where the fringe right and fringe left come together and hold hands.
However, the fact that fentanyl wasn’t illegal in China until recently and mail shipped from China is cheap, really opened up the flood gates until the authorities cracked down.
>>if you are making narcotics in China, you don't fear the Chinese govt or the Chinese army and you basically have nothing to lose.
In the west you need legally accepted proofs, lawyers and all. See El Chapo, no matter what he is, his trial will last for MONTHS and appeals for years. All to prove that he did deal drugs to USA.
Now China skips a few things in the legal process and if they want they can assign 100,000-150,000 police officers to do a blitz and do serious damage to drug dealers.
To add an anecdote about Chinese chemical industry. When I was working in a lab, wed often purchase chemicals from China as their prices were quite good, if less reliable quality or delivery timing. Many times we’d order something that was very hard to make only to have the company come back two months later with “sorry we can’t make it”. They never actually had it on their shelves.
Anyways, I ordered a small quantity of a chemical and normally they are shipped as hazardous materials, specially packed with all the necessary forms filled out.
Well this order arrived in my mail box (?!) as an unmarked package. I opened it and there was a small vial wrapped in what looked like old clothing. No customs declarations or anything!
The Fentanyl epidemic is a deliberate attack on North America from the Chinese Government. You don't fear the Chinese Government when you ARE the Chinese Government.
I'm seeing a lot of nonsense in this thread and I'd just like to point out a few things that seem to be commonly misunderstood and misrepresented by the media:
- Fentanyl is only more dangerous than heroin because it is not properly prepared. This means the dilution is not homogeneous, and users unexpectedly come across a stronger dose or batch.
- If properly prepared, fentanyl is safer than heroin. Its therapeutic index is 400 vs 70 for heroin (this measures the ratio between active dose and toxic dose). Proper preparation means diluting it so that users can take a dose similar to heroin for the same effects. With correctly diluted fentanyl, users have a wider margin of error before an overdose. Dilution is never done as a last step by the user, it's done in labs that prepare large amounts of the drug.
- For addicts, the ritual is the same for both drugs. The feeling is mostly the same, but lasts a little shorter for fentanyl. The addiction potential being higher for one or the other is disputable.
- Once again, it having a lower active dose ("stronger") does not make it inherently more dangerous. It just makes dilution more technical, and this is where the problem comes from.
Edit: Of course, I am in no way defending recreational use of the drug. Like all opioids, it's very addictive and can easily lead to a self-destructive habit. And with recreational users, overdoses will probably happen even with a perfectly diluted batch.
Indeed. Fentanyl is used thousands of times per day in the medical setting because it is a safe drug.
I do agree that the potency makes preparation difficult. Few dealers have the equipment to either accurately weigh it out or dilute it such that the product is homogenous. When you move up to even more potent opioids like carfentanyl or sufentanyl, the risk is even higher. Who has the ability to accurately weigh out 0.030 mg?
That said, dying of a “hot dose” of heroin is not exactly uncommon either.
Interestingly, opioids are toxic at high doses as they depress the breathing response to blood CO2 levels. If someone overdosed and you breath for them (CPR or ventilator), you can just wait for the effects to wear off and they’ll be none the worse for wear. I’ve read case reports where a users friends maintain CPR for an hour plus until they started breathing on their own.
> Indeed. Fentanyl is used thousands of times per day in the medical setting because it is a safe drug.
It's the painkiller I was given in the recovery room after a shoulder surgery and let me tell you, I can see why folks would grow fond of that feeling. There followed possibly the best nap of my life.
Off topic, but it's insane to me, people in the US get opioids for small surgeries. Here in Germany I had a motorcycle accident resulting in multiple (around 12) face fractures and later I had to get an incredibly painful eye surgery and both times I was given large doses of ibuprofen for the pain (which didn't do much).
At the time I wished for better painkillers, but maybe it's actually better that way...
Opioids are probably ok for short term pain like surgery, where they're given by healthcare professionals in a medical setting.
A lot of the US problem is that those patients will then be given a big box of opioids to take home for the next week. They then have some opioids spare which they keep insecurely in a cupboard. A relative or neighbour gains access to these and starts their addiction.
I agree. I think lowering the cost of inpatient care will lead to more liberal drug policies in hospital and managing recovery until ibuprofen is sufficient for after hospital care.
> A lot of the US problem is that those patients will then be given a big box of opioids to take home for the next week.
Even the week isn't really a problem, in fact that's become one of the restrictions here in Ohio because the normal practice was to prescribe entire months at a time. People were ending up with 30-60+ day supplies of extended release medications like oxycontin for recovery from procedures that shouldn't have been all that painful for more than 10-12 days.
Now if a doctor wants to prescribe opiates for acute pain after a surgery or something, it can't be more than a 7 day supply, any longer and the pharmacist can't fill it. A completely new prescription is required for every additional 7 day supply.
In contrast to what was going on before, that means there are now on average 7-8 opportunities for a doctor to re-evaluate whether opiates are still appropriate over a 60 day period, rather than just 1 (the prescription for the 2nd 30 day supply).
No, that is crazy. Opioids and opiates certainly have their place in e.g. post-recovery for various types of surgeries. That's just proper and humane pain management.
But I recognize the attitude. I live in a Nordic country, and I think they're still pretty conservative with pain management on the public side especially. Although that used to be way worse. I don't think what you described could happen here normally. Availability of stronger opioids like oxycodone and fentanyl are more strictly controlled, and they try to keep them confined to hospital use and only for severe pain, cancer patients etc., at home. But stuff like codeine is prescribed much more and could be the stuff you get to take home after even a smaller surgery.
Dispensation of opiates varies wildly, like all health care in the US. I went to an ER barely walking with a large visible abscess and received no drugs for pain the entire time, since they clearly had decided I was out for drugs despite no history of any sort of that activity.
Getting the balance here is difficult. Pain inhibits recovery, and badly managed acute pain can precipitate chronic pain. However, strong pain killers are addictive.
That said, even the simple analgesics (paracetamol, ibuprofen) have their dangers and we have maximum dosing that should not be exceeded. Paracetamol overdose causes horrible liver damage (up to and including lethal damage), and NSAIDs can cause clotting issues post-surgery, gastrointestinal issues, etc.
I assume your suggesting that analgesia prevents the detection of wound infection? Pain is hardly the only sign: redness, swelling, heat, discharge, tachycardia, fever, etc.
> I assume your suggesting that analgesia prevents the detection of wound infection?
You misread what I said. Pain is part of the feedback loop that keeps you from straining your skin, muscle and bones past their tearing/breaking point.
People who don't feel pain are many times more likely to injure themselves, especially when they already have wounds that might re-open through the wrong movement.
Pain is likely to stop wrong movements long before you can make your condition worse.
Mostly pain is a "desirable" sensory input. But it's understandable that people don't like it.
There's obviously cases where you want to prescribe strong painkillers - but if you're taking those you shouldn't be out and about anyways and have people watching over you.
For most post-op pain you shouldn't be on strong painkillers for long though, lest you undo the work your doctors put into you.
In the US, an orthodontist removed my impacted tooth (whole visit took less than 5 minutes) prescribed hydrocodone or oxycodone and some other pain killer. I didn't choose to pick up the prescription, but it was way overkill for the extremely mild discomfort I felt for the next 16 hours or so. I didn't take a single medicine other than the antibiotics prescribed, but I would have had access to tons of pain killers for no reason.
NSAIDs were counterindicated for my surgery, as they'd increase the risk of internal bleeding. I had to avoid them for 10 days before I went in and come off paracetamol/acetaminophen 3 days prior. An uncomfortable few nights.
I think the US is much more liberal in terms of regulation, so it's very much up to the doctor. Mine is an expensive orthopaedic surgeon in NYC, he wouldn't have seen me as an addict with drug-seeking behaviour. Afterwards he gave me a prescription for the lowest-dose hydrocodone; I think I wound up taking it for about 3 days and then I didn't need it any more.
I was in pain, so I appreciated having the painkillers there to help. But I also appreciated that I don't want to form a habit, so I came off as quickly as I felt I could.
> Fentanyl is used thousands of times per day in the medical setting because it is a safe drug.
Fentanyl is not a safe drug. Period. It is a powerful and dangerous drug with dangerous and potentially lethal side effects and classified as such. It's also and incredibly useful drug, potentially of great benefit to people in severe pain - benefit that must be balanced against the danger and risk.
In controlled settings (e.g. in a hospital bed with physiological monitoring) many dangerous drugs can be used in a safe way, Fentanyl included. But that doesn't make Fentanyl a safe drug, just a drug that can be used safely.
In the same way TNT and rockets can both be used safely - neither are sensibly intrinsically safe.
> If someone overdosed and you breath for them (CPR or ventilator), you can just wait for the effects to wear off and they’ll be none the worse for wear.
I think this is too complacent. Aspiration is a real risk, they could choke, pneumonia can be life threatening. If somebody has overdosed, get professional medical care - management of the compromised airway is no DIY project.
Not to mention that if someone had several hours of CPR done to them they are almost certainly going to need to go to the hospital anyways. Not to mention the average person can only sustain effective CPR for a few minutes.
I can't help but feel that writing "because it is a safe drug" implies that the supposed safeness has something to do with the properties of fentanyl, rather than the manner in which it is used.
It’s implied for an drug that safety means specific uses within strict guidelines. Only specific dosages and usages are approved. If using the drug couldn’t go wrong it would be called harmless. Like every commercial says, ‘Use as directed’.
I have no idea why we're talking about it in a medical setting when this is clearly meant to show how dangerous it is in the hands of the public. Fentanyl is dangerous on the streets and safer in the hospital sheets, of course, but that basically has no bearing on how it's used by addicts and cartels.
CPR with chest compressions? Because that’s what CPR is. If you mean breathing by itself, that isn’t CPR. Doing CPR for someone with a pulse is incredibly dangerous and if you are doing it correctly, there will most likely be cracked ribs assuming you don’t induce cardiac arrest first. CPR for an hour with someone who’s heart is beating is a ultra-dangerous idea. You could cause severe heart damage. Perhaps you mean rescue breathing?
Why the hell would “friends” do CPR for an hour and presumably not call an ambulance? Some friends. Good Samaritan laws wouldn’t protect you because a reasonable person might do rescue breathing but a reasonable person would also call an ambulance. Unless you are in a very rural area, a first-responder response to CPR in progress would never be an hour.
Lots of people have the ability to accurately weigh out 0.030 mg, but a mistake only requires one idiot with cross-contamination of bad math. If you can pass a proper high school lab class, you can do this. What makes it easy is that these substances are soluable.
Water probably isn't the best choice, but it is cheap. You can dissolve at least 4.21 mg/L of carfentanyl in water. Call it 3 to be conservative.
Put 30 mg in 10 L of water. Each cL of water will contain the desired 0.030 mg.
Another way is to put half a pound in a 20,000 gallon swimming pool. That would get you 7.5 million of the above.
I think this stuff would be more soluble in ethanol. With that, you can solve the problem with multiple dilutions. It's like making homeopathic medicine but stopping before you run out of molecules.
That's the problem of black markets after all. So safe to assume it's 100% active, and if the effects are not there, take a 1.25 times larger dose from the same dilution batch, and so on. The important thing is always start with assuming that the powder is pure, because the powder can be inhomogeneous.
That’s the issue. Unless you’re selling it as a solution, you need to dispense it in some inert powder which is hard! There are PhD scientists who work on how best to do that.
This would never happen in America, but I wonder if deaths would go down if dealers were offered free measurement equipment, like how we offer needle exchanges and supervised injection sites.
The first 3 points you make are technically correct, but I think the point is that fentanyl is so potent that it's difficult to correctly prepare (dilute) safely. Of course, it can be done in a professional pharmaceutical setting, but that's not necessarily where the fentanyl bound for the darknet is prepared.
Facts and Truth are not entirely the same thing. To property discuss the dangers of Fentanyl we must first agree on what "safe" means.
Even though Fentanyl is unlikely to kill you, in terms of living a meaningful and fulfilling life an addition to fentanyl is effectively a death sentence and it is highly addictive, affordable, and readily available. Fentanyl is destroying families and crippling our social services.
Your comment is a bit hard to interpret, but maybe you're saying that compared to other opioids, fentanyl could be more damaging to society because it's cheaper. Which might be a good point. In my original comment, I only focused on the pharmacology because that's what I know, but approaching the topic with a broader perspective is important.
How does a reader know that these statements are accurate and others are the misunderstandings or misrepresentations? Are you a pharmacologist? A fentanyl user?
So would it be fair to make the analogy that fentanyl is to heroin as vodka is to wine?
Vodka is much stronger, and you can accidentally make a mixed drink that will knock your socks off. Wine has a large range of potency amounts, but is generally less potent.
The answer for alcohol is that, in most countries, every dose of it has the exact active ingredient ratio listed, accurately.
No. Fentanyl is 25-50 times stronger than Heroin, where Vodka is 3-4 times stronger than wine.
If you drank a glass of wine and discovered it was 3-4 times stronger than you expected, that would suck. If you drank a bottle of wine, and it was 3-4 times stronger, you’d be in a lot of trouble, but you’d probably live. 25 to 50 times stronger? You’re fucked.
The closest you could get would be something like Everclear (which is more like 8x - swig that like wine you're in a LOT of hurt, and maybe in hospital, but not fucked)
Everclear is around 95%, so it would be more like drinking Everclear when you were expecting a 4% beer. And given the difference between medical and recreational doses, it would be like having 5-6 beers, all at 95%. That would probably leave you pretty fucked.
> Dilution is never done as a last step by the user, it's done in labs that prepare large amounts of the drug.
People with substance misuse disorders aren't using medical grade fentanyl that is pre-diluted, they're using illicit fentanyl made in mexico. People are smuggling fentanyl in because it's easily available, and because it's so small it's easier to smuggle, and because it's much more profitable than heroin. The product entering the US is undiluted, and it's the dark web dealers or their customers who are doing the dilution.
I had thumb surgery earlier this year, and just after I came to, the nurse told me they were giving me fentanyl. I recall being a little worried based on all the press I heard. Miraculously, that one dose didn't cause me to go into cardiac arrest, and I'm proud to say I'm not an opioid junky today.
> Vince O’Brien, one of the NCA’s leads on drugs, told the Observer that dark web marketplace operators appeared to have made a commercial decision, because selling a drug that could lead to fatalities was more likely to prompt attention from police.
Way to save face Vince, so the good old police still works to the benefit of society, but in a convoluted fashion where the underworld avoids making the public too angry and force the police to do it's job.
How about the idea that, like high explosives, nukes and child porn, the people involved recolonize them as inherently immoral and refuse to partake? Unlike, say, the ban on recreational drugs itself - which is the whole reason poisons like fentanyl became available.
Both you and the journalist are just speculating. Who knows their real reasons? Many darknet markets do allow listings for firearms and explosives, and a few even allow child porn. Ross Ulbricht had no issue with murdering people, and attempted to do so.
The idea that Ross Ulbricht attempted to kill anyone is entirely based on the word of an agent who was charged with embezzling money, and never entered into his trial.
The prosecution decided to hide the fact that the agent was on the take during the investigation until Ulbricht’s trial was over. It helped them to have a cloud of shaky and unprovable allegations of murder floating around.
It would have been too risky to their case to put the accusations of murder under the scrutiny of a trial.
Based on the word of the agent? There are messages back and forth from Ross where he asks that someone is roughed up and it eventually come to “eliminating” them.
It’s far more than just the word of a corrupt agent.
Oh absolutely, but it's still pretty chilling that the prosecution effectively levied those allegations against him yet never charged him with them and gave him no possibility of defending himself. He might not have been convicted on it but I think you'd be hard pressed to conclude that that didn't impact the jury and the judge outright used that to substantially extend his prison sentence.
It's a shame the Supreme Court didn't hear that appeal based on the judge sentencing him largely based on something that he did not receive due process for.
The authenticity of those messages is not a given. Keep in mind, that's the task force that had multiple agents independently of one another steal thousands of BTC and launder the cash.
That whole investigation was shady as hell even outside of the agents who were corrupt and got caught. Keep in mind, those agents were the professionals looking for criminals doing that kind of thing. They of all people should have been good at stealing those coins and not getting caught. How many of them succeeded and weren't caught?
Also if the murder for hire allegations were legitimate, why was the task force even attempting that sting in the first place? The corrupt agent was the one who allegedly persuaded Ross to order the hit in the first place while he was simultaneously the guy who had stolen the BTC to begin with. That's textbook entrapment and I can't imagine that a DEA agent of all people would believe for a second that that would ever have a chance at standing up to scrutiny in a court.
The prosecution also knew about the corrupt agent who was behind much of the work on the case before the trial but at the time that wasn't public knowledge. They illegally withheld that information from the defense. Not to mention that the prosecution lied about how they identified the IP address of the Silk Road servers in the first place.
Looking at that traffic log, I'd wager that half of the people on this site are knowledgeable enough to realize that the prosecution committed perjury. Parallel construction is unethical enough as it is, this isn't that. They flat out lied about how they identified the server.
I think Ross certainly deserves a great deal of jail time for his crimes but that trial was a travesty of justice.
For the alleged murder for hire plot that absolutely meets the definition of entrapment. In a court of law in the United States there needs to be two elements of an entrapment defense.
1. The police have to have induced the crime.
2. The defendant's lack of predisposition for the crime.
As to 1., the agent was the one that stole the money in the first place. The agent was the one that approached him telling him that he needed to have him killed. The agent was also the supposed hitman. No rational person would conclude that the agent didn't induce him to commit that specific crime.
As to 2., DPR initially only wanted his location in order to scare him. The agent was the one that convinced him that he would just hide and he'd never get a chance to find him again. He had to convince him to order the hit, Ross Ulbricht was certainly predisposed to commit crimes, but not attempted murder specifically.
Dunno - I kind of buy the idea of the drug dealers being profit motivated and dropping fentanyl because they think they'll get banged up. The police have limited resources and so will go after the worst stuff like fentynal rather than people smoking joints which they don't bother with at all these days in the UK.
See! Whatever is actually deadly (even if it's not by its nature but because of too people doing it wrong like in this particular case) people will stop it themselves. People buy and sell psychedelics because these are, unlike strong opioids, not deadly and there is little if any reason to ban them yet governments all over the world do and insist it is more important than education, violent crime prevention and everything (in many countries possession of some doses of LSD is enough to put you in prison for much longer than a murder).
1000s of people dying every year from drug overdoses in the US would disagree with you. In fact heroin and meth, both deadly and dangerous drugs, are used far more often than psychedelics I would bet.
I have tried taking meth for about a couple of weeks a couple of times in my life and had no problems with it, I didn't even have to "quit" as the "addiction" is purely psychological (so it totally depends on a person if they are going to be affected by it or not, I wasn't, but perhaps it could be harder for me if I had no love in my life and didn't do meth solely for working efficiency so I could write code much faster and better than I usually can being handicapped by ADHD so severe that ordinary aphetamine won't help much (and you can't get either legally at my location)) if you do it right (take a really lot of piracetam, antioxidants, vitamins, eat fruits and drink a huge lot of water with electrolytes all the way, try to relax regularly, don't drink any alcohol, don't (!) take dopa/tyrosine supplements while on meth etc.) and it itself can hardly kill you. Heroin can indeed kill (unless you really know how exactly pure it is and control the dosage very seriously) but it's usually a risk the people choose to take (and you can even eliminate both the risk and the addictivity if you get substance of precisely known purity and take it in sufficiently small doses) while with poorly diluted fentanyl the risk is like a "russian roulette".
Also note that what I've meant was essentially about treating psychedelics the same way as opiates, not much about meth (which can be deadly in an indirect way (it doesn't kill by itself but given some time can easily screw a weak mind to the point of madness) for many people) nor about heroin (which can kill you quite literally). Nevertheless in both cases there always is a choice people are given many chances to make and in case of black market fentanyl there almost isn't.
"I didn't even have to "quit" as the "addiction" is purely psychological (so it totally depends on a person if they are going to be affected by it or not, I wasn't)"
I don't think "purely psychological" is implied by different people having different susceptibility to addiction. If it were purely psychological, wouldn't that imply a person could become addicted independently of ever taking the drug?
Because people who didn't ever taken a drug have never felt nearly this bright and this happy and such intensity of pleasant feelings and mental capacity is far outside of boundaries of their imagination. Once an addiction-prone person experiences that it's possible they will never want to feel ordinary again. Also, if they do it wrong (and they usually do, unfortunately so many people choosing to try drugs don't care to do research nor to spare money on supplements that are going to protect their health during the experience and help to recover after it) they are going to experience hangover caused by their body resources depletion and receptors disregulation, feel particularly bad and hurry to fix this with just another dose of the same substance taken the same (or even worse) way that caused that. I took the way depicted in the "limitless" movie (not to the point of becoming a politician :-) though) and given it up completely shortly after (as I prefer the normal state and don't really like to stress myself and undermine my health that way) but many people who are less rationally-minded, less psychologically-developed and have less-satisfying lives just go junky and I believe many of them could be saved by just being educated (not scared) better. I really don't recommend anybody to try drugs but whoever already takes them or is going to do anyway - search trough and read the darn Reddit, Quora etc thoroughly!
It is also important to emphasize that that's about just a single class of drugs you've mentioned. Popular psychedelics, although able to induce even stronger sensations usually don't cause even psychological addiction (although there are some rare people who start taking them every weekend, a normal person will hardly feel like repeating the experience soon and any kind of regular - it's just too intense psychologically and there also is tolerance, the acid wears off in some hours and won't really work until the next week) and (except some of them) hardly cause any harm (unless you're a psycho already - then you may happen to go nuts completely) or hangover. Opiates, at the same time, don't make you bright but just give a strong sense of relief kind of "I just feel good and uck everything absolutely" yet cause powerful physiological addiction, severe hangovers and serious risk of lethal overdose.
Psychedelics (particularly tabs) are not as safe anymore because of increased availability of cheap designer drugs that have similar effects to LSD, but are much less safe. The NBOMEs and bromo dragonfly are two examples of such drugs that have been implicated in accidental deaths. I was reminded of this recently when an old acquaintance of mine who was a heroin addict died. I assumed it must have been the usual H + fentanyl OD, but he actually had a heart attack after taking some psychedelic tabs
Nice point. Nevertheless there is much less sense in taking these if better options are available (opiate addicts are usually forced to take whatever they can find by their urge) and the information is well-available (e.g. the second link on Google to bromo dragonfly leads to PsychonautWiki wich immediately shows you an honest warning banner: "Bromo-DragonFLY is linked to an unusually large number of hospitalizations and deaths", it also says "it produces unusually long effects which reportedly can last up to several days" - I doubt many people are brave enough to go this deep, even and especially if I were an opiate addict I wouldn't dare), people have all it takes to make up their minds so the mere fact of availability is not a death sentence.
There indeed is, however, a problem of dishonest or ignorant dealers selling really dangerous substances like that to ignorant or naïve people telling them just that's acid or kind of but I believe this problem would be much less widespread if people could get safe psychedelics legally or even if the black market itself was allowed to develop healthier so dealers had to establish reputation and care about the customers experience. Also, as far as I understand, the major reason for this kind of drugs to be developed and marketed is because classic psychedelics are too hard to produce for underground labs so they have to consider cheaper and easier alternatives.
Did anyone read the article where the cops were contacting the customers to make alleged welfare checks and to tell them it was dangerous.
If you are using the dark web you are pwned .
Use the clear web instead or voluntarily visit your local methadone clinic. It will save you from a lot of legal issues
Around the time of your comment China announced a massive crackdown on fentynal production as a gesture of good will towards the US. I suspect that has something to do with this
The US-China trade deal has 100% to do with this. It's too big of a coincidence that just as China agrees to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance, the dealers voluntarily (as a whole) decide it's too risky to trade.
2. Crackdown on drug producers in China (which furthers the objective of having strict control on drugs with steep penalties, and making examples out of drugs dealers for CCTV).
The timing of this is interesting, particularly that minutes ago China announced, as a gesture of good will towards the US, illegal fentanyl production/ distribution would carry the highest punishment (death)
If dealers pull drugs that cause deaths, could we make progress in the War on Drugs by having government agents sneak poison into the illegal drug supply?
The idea here is that dealers would stop selling drug after drug as the death toll mounts. If they chose to keep selling, the deaths would presumably make the drugs easier to trace.
I'm not sure if it would be legal or ethical for the government to do this. But they did it to alcohol during Prohibition.
The point of making opiods illegal in the first place was to protect drug users from themselves. From that perspective, it seems counter-productive to murder them.
In general, you can write off pretty much any idea that involves poisoning children as unethical. That death tolls from the [opioid crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic) have been rising is a problem that people've been trying to mitigate, not further.
> Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirit (in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom) or denatured rectified spirit, is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption.
Unfortunately, despite a widespread cultural understanding that it's dangerous to consume denatured alcohols like mouthwash, some folks still do (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_alcohol):
> Surrogate alcohol is a term for any substance containing ethanol that is intentionally consumed by humans but is not meant for human consumption. [...] Most people turn to these as a last resort either out of desperation, being underaged or being unable to afford consumable alcoholic beverages (with homeless alcoholics) or due to lack of access to drinking ethanol (for example with prison inmates and individuals in psychiatric wards).
If people move to end-to-end encrypted communication, how would third parties know what to ban? Wouldn’t any kind of information be possible - including marketplaces?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThis is where it gets bad for a dealer. Because now law enforcement can pretend to be victim and trick dealers into unveiling their id. [drop site setups etc]
So you're selling heroin and figure "hey, I'll cut it and make more money". You add something inert and then add a tiny bit of a fentanyl and oops you added too much, now it's poisonous for users to take a "normal" dose.
It is ridiculously potent. We’re talking a normal dose of 10’s of micrograms.
However. I would argue diversion of Dsuvia will likely reduce overdoses as the quality control means you know exactly how much you’re taking.
Now, there are always a few "garbagehead" addicts that'll use whatever you got, but that's not common in my experience, since opiate addicts chase calm, sleepy euphoria and meth/cocaine addicts chase stimulating, energetic euphoria. Different scenes, different personality types. Probably different genetics as well.
> This substance is extraordinarily potent (i.e. active in the microgram range), to the point that the pure powder can result in a fatal overdose if spilled on one's skin. [...] It is strongly encouraged to wear gloves while handling, use volumetric dosing combined with a milligram scale
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Fentanyl (notably heroin doesn't have the same warning)
Then you get cases where one distributor dilutes their product so much that their customers get used to taking very large amounts to get a high. Then one of those customers switches to another supplier with a "more normal" concentration and unwittingly overdoses.
Then there's the people that develop a tolerance to the drug over time, and keep trying higher and higher doses to get the same high.
And all of that is before you get into measuring errors and other mistakes caused by people doing complex chemistry without any formal training.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2018/05/true...
Imagine you have 100g of this stuff, and you have to dilute it with sugars. You need a ratio of something like 50ug fentanyl per 300mg of sugar.
Your 100g contains 2,000,000 doses of fentanyl. 2m * 300mg = 600kg.
So you need 600kg of sugar to correctly dilute your 100g of fentanyl.
Dilution is hard.
I almost always hear about fentanyl in the context of "...the heroin was cut with with fentanyl". I read that statement like "...the heroin was cut with ultra-pure-super-heroin". Why wouldn't the addict cut out the "middle-man" and just use fentanyl? Legitimately trying to understand.
Being strong (potent) doesn’t mean dependency kicks in any faster.
Heroin I believe doses in the tens of mgs, which is hard to measure precisely but can be weighed on a twenty dollar scale. You could distribute fent in the same way Lsd is on blotter paper. The big difference is you accidently get a hot spot of Lsd it's not fatal.
Many addicts aren't buying massive quantities at once either nor are they getting it from the internet.
The only reason fent exists on the black market is it's stupidly easy to smuggle compared to heroin, a tiny thimbleful of it could be cut into something like a thousand doses. This works out for dealer economics, it's not to benefit the addict.
there were some articles/research that the harsher the Prohibition enforcement the more trafficking shifts into the higher potent stuff.
> The subjective effects of fentanyl are similar to those of heroin, with the exception that many users report a noticeably less euphoric "high"
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Fentanyl (also of note is that heroin fentanyl has a shorter duration of action)
>Ocfentanil shows typical opiate-like effects like euphoria and relaxation. Users reported that it is less “cool” and euphoric than heroin, but it is more stimulant and has a very quick onset, after 3 min. The users also reported that it has shorter duration of action (3 h) than heroin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5754389/
Whether or not that it is true, it may contribute to users not using it (obvious safety issues aside).
Today the problem is that fentanyl is produced by underground labs using questionable processes, so it is basically no different than "heroin" as far as the danger goes. The reason I put "heroin" in quotes is that in reality people cannot know what they are buying on the black market; maybe it is heroin, maybe it is fentanyl, maybe it is a mixture, or maybe they are about to become a case study like this group:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/medical-mystery-how-...
As mentioned in other replies, the problem with doing fentanyl directly is that it only takes a minute amount to kill, amounts that are difficult to measure.
Fentanyl is the kind of strength where a difference in dose the size of a grain of salt could be the difference between life and death.
https://www.wired.com/story/hansa-dutch-police-sting-operati...
What can we do about this? Direct trade punishments for allowing this to happen. Hit them the only place they care, in the bank account and this would stop Quickly!
Speak for yourself.
"We" landed on the moon too, but I had no part in it and you likely did not either.
The people dying of opioid crisis are of all ethnicities.
If you think the opioid epidemic is happening everywhere you have more research to do. This problem is targeted and deliberate.
"We" as in the nation or government? And it wasn't 2 centuries ago. We were colonizing china up until 1949.
People truly do not understand how much "we" ( as in the US and imperial europe ) screwed over china. I bet not 1 in a 1000 americans knows that the US were imperial colonizers in china even after ww2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
The map in this article should scare anyone who cares about a Soviet-style dictatorship taking over nearly every continent: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/wo...
Your account seems to have taken a heavy turn into using HN for political battle. That's not ok, and we ban accounts that do it. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended.
The rest of the world may be radicalizing and polarizing, but HN's mandate hasn't changed and isn't going to, therefore we have to ban accounts that are destructive of it. First among those are the accounts seeking to use HN as a battlefield, which (if allowed to) would turn this place into scorched earth.
I have witnessed the killing and burning of bodies from 120 Tamils in Sri Lanka, which went unreported in Western media. I have witnessed a guy stabbing another guy in the neck within a parang (coconut knife) as my first experience when globe-trotting (I just turned 19) during a religious dispute in Banda Aceh. I have seen dead bodies of Burmese fishermen while teaching an Open Water Scuba class in Thailand (they are used as slaves by the Thai and then thrown overboard). All this happened a long time ago but it has shaped me in a way that made me more angry. I'm not an academic and I'm not a native English speaker but nor am I an arm-chair philosopher. I do still suffer from PTSD of my experiences, but it's no excuse to make political comments here probably.
Again this isn't an excuse for myself, but I hope it gives context on why I feel more strongly and said the things I did. I'm happy to continue lurking and promise to cut political motivated arguments out in future.
This can easily be exploited by the West, similar to how the Soviet Union used US hegemony to start (and win) numerous cold war conflicts.
China may never see any returns on that infrastructure when these countries inevitably switch sides in the new cold war.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The chinese labs wouldn't be pumping out fentanyl if people weren't demanding it. If it isn't china producing it, it would be produce elsewhere ( even in the US ). Stop with your scapegoating rhetoric.
> They see this as just revenge for the British selling opium in China.
It wasn't just the british. A huge part of the US industrial and political power derived from colonizing china.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/28/opinion/the-opium-war-s-s...
And we were a colonial power in china until 1949. Well after ww2 ended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
Though I disagree with your fearmongering and your erroneous equating of the US with britain, I do agree that we have to come to terms with china one day over our historical transgressions and their future ambitions. It's inevitable at the very least that china will want the US our of east asia and possibly want retribution for a century of brutal colonization/humiliation/rape of china. How these issues get resolved will determine the future of the US, China and the world in the 21st century.
Unsuspecting people are becoming addicted to Fentanyl because it is being cut into other drugs they are taking without their knowledge. It started with Heroin and has now moved into other drugs. Even Xanax has been found to have Fentanyl in it. So if you think this came about via supply & demand you should do some more research on the topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_China
It's like saying you're gonna stop all the drug dealers in US to stop selling drugs, its very hard for China to stop all narcotics.
Heres an official report by the US-China Economic & Security Review Commission on Chinese Fentanyl Production: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/USCC%20Sta...
and I quote: "China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other NPS because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored...Chinese law enforcement and drug investigators are unable to effectively regulate the high volume of drugs and chemicals the country produces.In many cases, the chemicals used to produce fentanyl and fentanyl-like products are illegally diverted from legitimate pharmaceutical uses, with criminals taking advantage of inadequate enforcement protocols to produce unregulated chemicals and NPS. Until 2014, a regulatory loophole allowed Chinese chemical companies to operate in a gray area of oversight, freeing them from inspection requirements and other certification systems. That loophole was closed in 2014 when China’s State Administration of Work Safety implemented new regulations on chemical production to improve management of nonpharmaceutical businesses, including enforcing stricter licensing requirements. Even under the new regulations, Chinese pharmaceutical and chemical companies continue to divert chemicals from legitimate pharmaceutical uses and adulterate legitimate pharmaceuticals during production.This makes drug enforcement within China difficult, as many manufacturers of fentanyl and other NPS are legitimate companies legally producing chemicals. Although some of these chemical manufacturers knowingly ship their products to the United States for illicit purposes, Chinese chemical and pharmaceutical exporters continue to operate with little oversight"
Do not get me wrong, I've seen the impact of Fentanyl and I want China to step up on crushing its production.
It's actually a pretty good example of situations where the fringe right and fringe left come together and hold hands.
However, the fact that fentanyl wasn’t illegal in China until recently and mail shipped from China is cheap, really opened up the flood gates until the authorities cracked down.
In the west you need legally accepted proofs, lawyers and all. See El Chapo, no matter what he is, his trial will last for MONTHS and appeals for years. All to prove that he did deal drugs to USA.
Now China skips a few things in the legal process and if they want they can assign 100,000-150,000 police officers to do a blitz and do serious damage to drug dealers.
Anyways, I ordered a small quantity of a chemical and normally they are shipped as hazardous materials, specially packed with all the necessary forms filled out.
Well this order arrived in my mail box (?!) as an unmarked package. I opened it and there was a small vial wrapped in what looked like old clothing. No customs declarations or anything!
- Fentanyl is only more dangerous than heroin because it is not properly prepared. This means the dilution is not homogeneous, and users unexpectedly come across a stronger dose or batch.
- If properly prepared, fentanyl is safer than heroin. Its therapeutic index is 400 vs 70 for heroin (this measures the ratio between active dose and toxic dose). Proper preparation means diluting it so that users can take a dose similar to heroin for the same effects. With correctly diluted fentanyl, users have a wider margin of error before an overdose. Dilution is never done as a last step by the user, it's done in labs that prepare large amounts of the drug.
- For addicts, the ritual is the same for both drugs. The feeling is mostly the same, but lasts a little shorter for fentanyl. The addiction potential being higher for one or the other is disputable.
- Once again, it having a lower active dose ("stronger") does not make it inherently more dangerous. It just makes dilution more technical, and this is where the problem comes from.
Edit: Of course, I am in no way defending recreational use of the drug. Like all opioids, it's very addictive and can easily lead to a self-destructive habit. And with recreational users, overdoses will probably happen even with a perfectly diluted batch.
I do agree that the potency makes preparation difficult. Few dealers have the equipment to either accurately weigh it out or dilute it such that the product is homogenous. When you move up to even more potent opioids like carfentanyl or sufentanyl, the risk is even higher. Who has the ability to accurately weigh out 0.030 mg?
That said, dying of a “hot dose” of heroin is not exactly uncommon either.
Interestingly, opioids are toxic at high doses as they depress the breathing response to blood CO2 levels. If someone overdosed and you breath for them (CPR or ventilator), you can just wait for the effects to wear off and they’ll be none the worse for wear. I’ve read case reports where a users friends maintain CPR for an hour plus until they started breathing on their own.
Were they doing CPR or Rescue Breathing or both?
I'm not a doctor but an hour of chest compressions to someone with a functioning heart seems bad.
It's the painkiller I was given in the recovery room after a shoulder surgery and let me tell you, I can see why folks would grow fond of that feeling. There followed possibly the best nap of my life.
At the time I wished for better painkillers, but maybe it's actually better that way...
A lot of the US problem is that those patients will then be given a big box of opioids to take home for the next week. They then have some opioids spare which they keep insecurely in a cupboard. A relative or neighbour gains access to these and starts their addiction.
Even the week isn't really a problem, in fact that's become one of the restrictions here in Ohio because the normal practice was to prescribe entire months at a time. People were ending up with 30-60+ day supplies of extended release medications like oxycontin for recovery from procedures that shouldn't have been all that painful for more than 10-12 days.
Now if a doctor wants to prescribe opiates for acute pain after a surgery or something, it can't be more than a 7 day supply, any longer and the pharmacist can't fill it. A completely new prescription is required for every additional 7 day supply.
In contrast to what was going on before, that means there are now on average 7-8 opportunities for a doctor to re-evaluate whether opiates are still appropriate over a 60 day period, rather than just 1 (the prescription for the 2nd 30 day supply).
But I recognize the attitude. I live in a Nordic country, and I think they're still pretty conservative with pain management on the public side especially. Although that used to be way worse. I don't think what you described could happen here normally. Availability of stronger opioids like oxycodone and fentanyl are more strictly controlled, and they try to keep them confined to hospital use and only for severe pain, cancer patients etc., at home. But stuff like codeine is prescribed much more and could be the stuff you get to take home after even a smaller surgery.
That said, even the simple analgesics (paracetamol, ibuprofen) have their dangers and we have maximum dosing that should not be exceeded. Paracetamol overdose causes horrible liver damage (up to and including lethal damage), and NSAIDs can cause clotting issues post-surgery, gastrointestinal issues, etc.
Not as much as you tearing your wounds open again because your body wasn't able to warn you.
You misread what I said. Pain is part of the feedback loop that keeps you from straining your skin, muscle and bones past their tearing/breaking point.
People who don't feel pain are many times more likely to injure themselves, especially when they already have wounds that might re-open through the wrong movement.
Pain is likely to stop wrong movements long before you can make your condition worse.
Mostly pain is a "desirable" sensory input. But it's understandable that people don't like it.
There's obviously cases where you want to prescribe strong painkillers - but if you're taking those you shouldn't be out and about anyways and have people watching over you.
For most post-op pain you shouldn't be on strong painkillers for long though, lest you undo the work your doctors put into you.
I think the US is much more liberal in terms of regulation, so it's very much up to the doctor. Mine is an expensive orthopaedic surgeon in NYC, he wouldn't have seen me as an addict with drug-seeking behaviour. Afterwards he gave me a prescription for the lowest-dose hydrocodone; I think I wound up taking it for about 3 days and then I didn't need it any more.
I was in pain, so I appreciated having the painkillers there to help. But I also appreciated that I don't want to form a habit, so I came off as quickly as I felt I could.
Fentanyl is not a safe drug. Period. It is a powerful and dangerous drug with dangerous and potentially lethal side effects and classified as such. It's also and incredibly useful drug, potentially of great benefit to people in severe pain - benefit that must be balanced against the danger and risk.
In controlled settings (e.g. in a hospital bed with physiological monitoring) many dangerous drugs can be used in a safe way, Fentanyl included. But that doesn't make Fentanyl a safe drug, just a drug that can be used safely.
In the same way TNT and rockets can both be used safely - neither are sensibly intrinsically safe.
> If someone overdosed and you breath for them (CPR or ventilator), you can just wait for the effects to wear off and they’ll be none the worse for wear.
I think this is too complacent. Aspiration is a real risk, they could choke, pneumonia can be life threatening. If somebody has overdosed, get professional medical care - management of the compromised airway is no DIY project.
Why the hell would “friends” do CPR for an hour and presumably not call an ambulance? Some friends. Good Samaritan laws wouldn’t protect you because a reasonable person might do rescue breathing but a reasonable person would also call an ambulance. Unless you are in a very rural area, a first-responder response to CPR in progress would never be an hour.
Water probably isn't the best choice, but it is cheap. You can dissolve at least 4.21 mg/L of carfentanyl in water. Call it 3 to be conservative.
Put 30 mg in 10 L of water. Each cL of water will contain the desired 0.030 mg.
Another way is to put half a pound in a 20,000 gallon swimming pool. That would get you 7.5 million of the above.
I think this stuff would be more soluble in ethanol. With that, you can solve the problem with multiple dilutions. It's like making homeopathic medicine but stopping before you run out of molecules.
You weigh out 3g and dilute them afterwards
Even though Fentanyl is unlikely to kill you, in terms of living a meaningful and fulfilling life an addition to fentanyl is effectively a death sentence and it is highly addictive, affordable, and readily available. Fentanyl is destroying families and crippling our social services.
Vodka is much stronger, and you can accidentally make a mixed drink that will knock your socks off. Wine has a large range of potency amounts, but is generally less potent.
The answer for alcohol is that, in most countries, every dose of it has the exact active ingredient ratio listed, accurately.
If you drank a glass of wine and discovered it was 3-4 times stronger than you expected, that would suck. If you drank a bottle of wine, and it was 3-4 times stronger, you’d be in a lot of trouble, but you’d probably live. 25 to 50 times stronger? You’re fucked.
People with substance misuse disorders aren't using medical grade fentanyl that is pre-diluted, they're using illicit fentanyl made in mexico. People are smuggling fentanyl in because it's easily available, and because it's so small it's easier to smuggle, and because it's much more profitable than heroin. The product entering the US is undiluted, and it's the dark web dealers or their customers who are doing the dilution.
Way to save face Vince, so the good old police still works to the benefit of society, but in a convoluted fashion where the underworld avoids making the public too angry and force the police to do it's job.
How about the idea that, like high explosives, nukes and child porn, the people involved recolonize them as inherently immoral and refuse to partake? Unlike, say, the ban on recreational drugs itself - which is the whole reason poisons like fentanyl became available.
The prosecution decided to hide the fact that the agent was on the take during the investigation until Ulbricht’s trial was over. It helped them to have a cloud of shaky and unprovable allegations of murder floating around.
It would have been too risky to their case to put the accusations of murder under the scrutiny of a trial.
It’s far more than just the word of a corrupt agent.
It's a shame the Supreme Court didn't hear that appeal based on the judge sentencing him largely based on something that he did not receive due process for.
That whole investigation was shady as hell even outside of the agents who were corrupt and got caught. Keep in mind, those agents were the professionals looking for criminals doing that kind of thing. They of all people should have been good at stealing those coins and not getting caught. How many of them succeeded and weren't caught?
Also if the murder for hire allegations were legitimate, why was the task force even attempting that sting in the first place? The corrupt agent was the one who allegedly persuaded Ross to order the hit in the first place while he was simultaneously the guy who had stolen the BTC to begin with. That's textbook entrapment and I can't imagine that a DEA agent of all people would believe for a second that that would ever have a chance at standing up to scrutiny in a court.
The prosecution also knew about the corrupt agent who was behind much of the work on the case before the trial but at the time that wasn't public knowledge. They illegally withheld that information from the defense. Not to mention that the prosecution lied about how they identified the IP address of the Silk Road servers in the first place.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/10/how_did_the_f...
Looking at that traffic log, I'd wager that half of the people on this site are knowledgeable enough to realize that the prosecution committed perjury. Parallel construction is unethical enough as it is, this isn't that. They flat out lied about how they identified the server.
I think Ross certainly deserves a great deal of jail time for his crimes but that trial was a travesty of justice.
1. The police have to have induced the crime. 2. The defendant's lack of predisposition for the crime.
As to 1., the agent was the one that stole the money in the first place. The agent was the one that approached him telling him that he needed to have him killed. The agent was also the supposed hitman. No rational person would conclude that the agent didn't induce him to commit that specific crime.
As to 2., DPR initially only wanted his location in order to scare him. The agent was the one that convinced him that he would just hide and he'd never get a chance to find him again. He had to convince him to order the hit, Ross Ulbricht was certainly predisposed to commit crimes, but not attempted murder specifically.
Police regularly arrest people with small amounts of cannabis, and the range of options they have include criminal prosecution which still happens.
Also note that what I've meant was essentially about treating psychedelics the same way as opiates, not much about meth (which can be deadly in an indirect way (it doesn't kill by itself but given some time can easily screw a weak mind to the point of madness) for many people) nor about heroin (which can kill you quite literally). Nevertheless in both cases there always is a choice people are given many chances to make and in case of black market fentanyl there almost isn't.
I don't think "purely psychological" is implied by different people having different susceptibility to addiction. If it were purely psychological, wouldn't that imply a person could become addicted independently of ever taking the drug?
It is also important to emphasize that that's about just a single class of drugs you've mentioned. Popular psychedelics, although able to induce even stronger sensations usually don't cause even psychological addiction (although there are some rare people who start taking them every weekend, a normal person will hardly feel like repeating the experience soon and any kind of regular - it's just too intense psychologically and there also is tolerance, the acid wears off in some hours and won't really work until the next week) and (except some of them) hardly cause any harm (unless you're a psycho already - then you may happen to go nuts completely) or hangover. Opiates, at the same time, don't make you bright but just give a strong sense of relief kind of "I just feel good and uck everything absolutely" yet cause powerful physiological addiction, severe hangovers and serious risk of lethal overdose.
There indeed is, however, a problem of dishonest or ignorant dealers selling really dangerous substances like that to ignorant or naïve people telling them just that's acid or kind of but I believe this problem would be much less widespread if people could get safe psychedelics legally or even if the black market itself was allowed to develop healthier so dealers had to establish reputation and care about the customers experience. Also, as far as I understand, the major reason for this kind of drugs to be developed and marketed is because classic psychedelics are too hard to produce for underground labs so they have to consider cheaper and easier alternatives.
No evidence is offered to support this byline -- no interviews with suppliers, no surveys, no web forum transcripts.
China gets:
1. Positive sentiment from US.
2. Crackdown on drug producers in China (which furthers the objective of having strict control on drugs with steep penalties, and making examples out of drugs dealers for CCTV).
3. To hand a blow to Chinese Triads exporting drugs and laundering money outside of China (e.g. bringing cash out of China): https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale...
4. Tighter government oversight/control on the prescription pharmaceuticals market.
"Let me remove this gun from your temple. Thank me, now."
The idea here is that dealers would stop selling drug after drug as the death toll mounts. If they chose to keep selling, the deaths would presumably make the drugs easier to trace.
I'm not sure if it would be legal or ethical for the government to do this. But they did it to alcohol during Prohibition.
No, that would not be progress
It is a bit strange to consider that we still do poison alcohol to prevent, say, people from drinking mouthwash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol):
> Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirit (in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom) or denatured rectified spirit, is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption.
Unfortunately, despite a widespread cultural understanding that it's dangerous to consume denatured alcohols like mouthwash, some folks still do (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_alcohol):
> Surrogate alcohol is a term for any substance containing ethanol that is intentionally consumed by humans but is not meant for human consumption. [...] Most people turn to these as a last resort either out of desperation, being underaged or being unable to afford consumable alcoholic beverages (with homeless alcoholics) or due to lack of access to drinking ethanol (for example with prison inmates and individuals in psychiatric wards).