If you think that people use drugs like fentanyl because they are unhappy, rather than because they are not working, then this would fix it: https://pastebin.com/4ukwRxDG
It's unlikely you read the first line of that document and no further.
As for whether they knew of it, it's impossible to prove without asking them, or maybe talking to their attorneys. There is only circumstantial evidence, some of it having to do with timing of events that there is no point in getting in to, since I know it won't make you share that idea. But consider these questions, which you probably have not asked or did not learn enough about those events to ask:
Why did Adam Lanza completely destroy his hard drive? He had a printed poster that had his "body counts and weapons used by mass shooting perpetrators" stuff, so it wasn't to hide that. I think he also had or used another computer, that he didn't bother to destroy. What would someone who expected to kill a bunch of children want to hide? And why did he kill himself despite having plenty of ammunition left?
Think of what you know of James Holmes. He shot up a movie theater, right? Why didn't he shoot some people he encountered as he was walking out (he answered this to a psychologist: it would be kind of personal to shoot someone you could see). How do any theories about why he shot up the theater fit with him rigging his apartment with various explosive and inflammatory substances, set to go off if someone opened the door in response to loud music, but not set to go off from a timer despite he reportedly even had a remote-control trigger as well and obviously was competent enough to be able to set a timer-based initiation?
At the start of the trial for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his most famous lawyer, a female, said that, not exact quote, "We know he did it. So why the trial? Because we want to know why." Did we learn why? If so, what was the reason? Does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter account provide any reasons why?
Just like superstring theory offers many possible solutions to any theoretical question?
If you think whether certain people knew of the linked idea is relevant or important, then you should focus on the most likely answer, not enumerate all possible ones.
Why is this the most likely answer? Or even an answer you think there is a non-zero percent likelihood of? I don't see any evidence of that. I would think it's relevant and important if I knew of any such evidence, but I don't know of any, and also would probably bet there isn't any.
I don't even know if Hacker News provides a way to see people who reply to you or the chances of this conversation continuing. I'm a little confused. I can see two main claims in the argument:
1) If people did a certain thing, it would fix most problems.
2) Certain people knew of this solution but did not share it.
Which of these is the "very big claim"?
I may also be misinterpreting this:
>clear causal connection
Are you saying that if there was evidence that the listed individuals did know of it, that you would share it?
If one of them that's still alive told everyone about that idea, then you would see it as a reason to use that idea?
As for the "doing this would fix most problems", how much explanation would convince you to fix it? If it was (arbitrary units) 3 pages of text, that all made sense, would you share it? What if it was 15 pages of text, that you found to be consistent and logical after reading through it? Would you share it, and expect other people to share it?
As the original link is no longer visible, I’m not going to go into specific details. I advise against reposting something that got flagged in order to try to continue this thread.
However I will say this as a general piece of advice on communication. You seem to presume:
> that all made sense
The problem is that it didn’t make sense to most of the people on here. Communication is not a place of maths-like absolute truth where convincing yourself is sufficient, rather it’s impedance matching of your mind to other people’s minds where the arbiter of success is the people you’re trying to share an idea with. For example, if you’re not familiar with impedance matching, that previous analogy would be a mistake on my part.
>If you turn it on, you'll see all the stories and comments that have been killed by software, moderators, or user flags.
Responding to you,
>The problem is that it didn’t make sense to most of the people on here.
>For example, if you’re not familiar with impedance matching, that previous analogy would be a mistake on my part.
I can think of vague things about reflection of signals and gold-plated electrical connectors.
That particular argument deliberately gave only the barest minimum of explanation. To quote it,
The reason this works is that some people want to work more than 24 hours per week, so people would not be able to agree on how much a normal person should work.
Most people would not understand how this lack of agreement would be beneficial. In short, it was an argument where people could say that if they shared it, this action was implying that they were smart. An argument that includes many pages of explanation does not imply that someone who shared it was smart, only that they don't give up easily.
It's the style, especially in social media, to share something that implies you understand something complex. Just look at 'memes' or even 'hashtags'.
Could someone explain what is incorrect about parent's statement for it to deserve downvotes? It seems to be in line with the prevailing narrative of the past decade or so.
Maybe starting out a comment with "um..." as though everyone else is stupid, and then following up by merely restating the prevailing narrative, which has little to do with the assertions made in the article. Maybe that's a reason for some of the disagreement.
So, do you have anything substantive to say about the article? Do you disagree with anything in it? Did you notice that the article actually agrees with you?:
> And so, when we're talking about who's to blame for the fentanyl crisis, we've got to start at home. Why is the demand so high? But in terms of China, and that's what I really focused on in my book in large part, China is not only doing a poor job stopping fentanyl from getting exported to the US, they are even encouraging it in a lot of ways, through the tax code and all these complicated ways that add up to a really troubling situation.
Do you disagree with any of that? Do you believe that China's massive and uncontrolled supply had no effect on the opioid epidemic?
> Do you believe that China's massive and uncontrolled supply had no effect on the opioid epidemic?
That's not a bizarre position to take when most addicts started on prescribed meds, whether those meds were prescribed for them or diverted from friends and family members. People move onto fentanyl when they've developed a tolerance for prescription meds and can no longer get higher doses.
Why don't other places have such a big problem with fentanyl?
I don't have a strong argument against that. And I've never seen convincing evidence that a drug-war-type focus on restricting supply is worth the cost.
> Do you disagree with any of that? Do you believe that China's massive and uncontrolled supply had no effect on the opioid epidemic?
There isn't a fentanyl epidemic in japan, sweden, etc. So can't blame the "supply" here. "China" isn't making and sending these drugs for the hell of it. Somebody is ordering it and someone is distributing it. And it ain't the chinese.
The author left out the necessary first step, which is the local government preventing Americans from straightforwardly buying opiates in stores, where incentives are aligned for utility and purity. The grey/black market only exists as a direct result of criminalization, rather than treating addiction as a personal health problem.
Huh. I always read it as aguemonkey, with the 'e' but not the 'r'. That would be a monkey with a biological sickness. (No insult intended... I just misread.)
linking this to the Opium Wars might lead people to make incorrect links between cause and effect. This isn't some pay-back for the crimes the East-Indian Company and the West committed against China back then.
It's simply a few bad apples in an illegal market responding to the demand of the West and seriously why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China. It is bad-apples who want to get rich quickly but from a suppliers perspective it's short sighted because a dead addict isn't going to come back for more.
The real criminals to blame here are those that get people hooked on pharmaceuticals and then stop giving them the prescription for what they got them hooked on. No wonder they move from pain killers to heroin (or its substitutes).
edit: I highly recommend the excellent "Louis Theroux: Dark States" (episode Heroin Town). He gives a very empathic non-judgemental look into the tragedy of addiction in the US.
the crucial difference here is the East India Company & friends systematically used opium to weaken their enemy (not just in China but also Singapore where they kept their coolies on drugs). This wasn't even kept secret in the UK but was an actual part of their strategy against China.
We don't have any facts linking the CCP or any other institutions or legally run Chinese companies to do what has been done by the West back in these days.
> linking this to the Opium Wars smells like a conspiracy theoroy. This isn't some pay-back for the crimes the East-Indian Company and the West committed against China back then.
Sorry! I just wanted to point out some of the historical context. I don't have a particular fish to fry here.
> why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China.
That's a bit uncharitable, eh? There are a billion and a half people people in China, they can't all be moral cretins, can they?
not suggesting nor calling anyone a moral cretin. My point is that if you don't have an extradition agreement in place then what are you gonna do? (-> e.g. "why would anyone in China care").
edit: @carapace fwiw, I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories. what I meant here is that it could be construed as an incorrect cause->effect relation between opium wars and the crimes of US BigPharma. If you follow what is happening right now with the US in Munich at the security conference, then China isn't the evil that the US paints them as. China is a threat to the West for sure but the real terrorist really is the US (who are preparing for war): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRoY2PQsGg -> When I posted my reply my emotions were running a bit high on the hypocrisy that the US is pushing again in Munich. So I want to apologize for that. I also edited my above comment.
> not suggesting nor calling anyone a moral cretin. My point is that if you don't have an extradition agreement in place then what are you gonna do? (-> e.g. "why would anyone in China care").
Cheers, that makes more sense. Sorry.
> I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories.
Oh but I do.
Robert Anton Wilson pointed out that in the last century, of regime changes, more than half came about as the result of a coup, conspiracy.
Or, as Colonel Hunter Gathers said so memorably, "The moment God crapped out the third cave man a conspiracy was hatched against one of them."
The ability to hatch conspiracy is the evolutionary driver of intelligence. What differentiates us from the animals is not language, but rather the ability to lie.
Anyhoo, that's a big ol' tangent. You didn't offend me, FWIW. We're cool.
The ones truly at fault are the doctors. They follow “procedure”, which says that a patient under pain is treated with opiates. And so, to avoid any mal practice, they prescribe. And the patient has been told that doctors are the smartest, most prestigious individuals in our society. What’s not to trust? What do we do when societal structures built upon reputation and legitimacy fall victim to profit taking and legal threats? There’s no failure mechanism when a reputed institution fails from the inside.
A "little" temporary pain is not a problem. A lot of temporary pain is a problem though, and it is even worse when doctors do not believe the patient and think that the patient is just looking for drugs, or when the doctors do not understand how big the pain is (after all, only the person who suffers can judge it).
This is why I believe it should be up to the patient to select whether to take opiates.
Blaming China for our failed drug war and idiotic drug policies is like blaming gun companies for WWII. The only way to help opioid addicts is to help them improve their lives while providing low cost, safe opioids to them until they are ready to quit. If doctors in the US could prescribe appropriate opioids for addiction, if we had safe use sites, and if we helped people find jobs, community, and purpose, we wouldn't have this epidemic. Until we're ready to accept that and while this idiotic drug war continues, thinking that drugs can be stopped despite over a hundred years of evidence to the contrary, people will continue to die in masses. And the only people that deserve the blame are the police, DEA, and lawmakers who are murdering addicts in their crusade against something they are too stupid to understand. The drug war is a crime against humanity, one that will likely go unpunished like so many others.
I strongly agree with everything you just said, but is there possibly some benefit in also trying to control the huge flow of fentanyl from China? That's really all TFA is saying.
I think this is literally impossible because of costs to produce / distribute fentanyl compared to opioids. There will always be people who are skint enough to buy the cheapest thing they can find and there will always be bad apples greedy enough to stretch their produce with Fentanyl.
Then there are those that mean well and spike their produce successfully for a few runs, ... forgetting that it takes only 1 mistake and many will be dead as a result.
Yes, totally, but the only way to do that successfully is to regulate supply at home: legalization. Anything short of that will not control fentanyl from China or anywhere else, not even decriminalization. Black markets or even gray markets cannot be controlled. I think the last hundred years or so of prohibition has proven that over and over again. This applies to drugs, guns, etc.
from you link, the key stand out paragraph for me was...
> Because many doctors are in private practice, they can benefit financially by increasing the volume of patients that they see, as well as by ensuring patient satisfaction, which can incentivize the overprescription of pain medication.
What I think is odd is that it is so outrageous and conspiratorial sounding to even consider malicious intent on the part of the Chinese government.
I’m not saying I have any idea what the real impactful decisions that fuel this problem even are, much less who is making them, triple much less what their intention is.
I’m not sure it is clear what is really fueling the opioid epidemic, many theories of causation are plausible.
But it seems hopelessly naive to discard outright the possibility that aggressive intention by the Chinese Government is a factor here.
Countries have done much, much, worse to each other (and their own people) in pursuit of various strategic objectives throughout all of recorded history. Why should we flat out assume that has somehow fundamentally changed?
The parallel would be US = Britain and China = China. US is running a trade deficit with china like britain was running a trade deficit with china in the 1800s.
If the US invaded china and forced china to buy opium to offset the trade imbalance, then the parallel would apply.
I don't remember china invading the US. And china isn't forcing drugs on the US, no more than mexico or south america is forcing drugs on the US. There is demand for drugs in the US. That is the problem.
And the slow but recent drug legalization around the country and the glamorization of drugs in the media isn't going to help.
Do you feel you have a good sense of what things “help” the Chinese government?
Do you feel clear on what their short, medium, and long term objectives are?
I’m sure I don’t.
It seems obvious there is at least some potential benefit to causing your biggest competitor for military and economic influence a bunch of costly problems ... but I truly have no idea what any of these leaders are thinking about.
It's pretty serious to accuse a foreign government of intentionally helping in the poisoning/killing of your citizens. Especially in the current atmosphere of growing anti-Chinese paranoia in the US (which predates the Coronavirus outbreak), people shouldn't be throwing around such accusations without solid evidence.
In the article, Ben Westhoff gives a much less conspiratorial explanation of why China was slow to crack down on fentanyl:
> China does not have a fentanyl crisis nearly the scope that the US does, or Canada, also has a really big problem. And so to a lot of people, this is why China hasn't really cracked down on its fentanyl industry, because its own people aren't dying from it. And so the way the Chinese government works is, fentanyl is illegal there, but it's not so much just the laws on the books, it's what resources the government dedicates to cracking down on different problems. And so when it comes to meth, which is a huge problem among Chinese citizens, the government has really focused on trying to stamp it out, take drug dealers down, disrupt operations. But when it comes to fentanyl being made there, that's just not the case.
I am not a medical or public health professional, but my understanding from various medical podcasts [1] and reporting is, the source of the epidemic is over-prescription of opioids as a cure-all, even for non-physical pain and psychological maladies like anxiety. Similar to over prescription of antibiotics, except that opioids are addictive.
China didn’t cause this, we did, but there are suppliers in China cashing in on it. But so are other suppliers in the US and elsewhere.
Not really that simple, medicine supply can change doctors' behavior. And massive amount of fentanyl are illegally smuggled into the US. You can't simply pick a middle point in the chain of events and claim that point is the cause.
There was (is?) a substantial online trade in psychoactive "research chemicals" starting in the early 2000s -- stimulants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, and anything else you can imagine. They were recreational drugs that were not yet formally scheduled in many countries [1], often resembling existing molecules, sometimes mined from academic literature or from enthusiasts experimenting with unpublished analogues based on intuition or SAR predictions. This started out in the US and Europe. Operation Web Tryp [2] is the first major action I recall against these vendors. European countries without the equivalent of the Analogue Act continued to play whack-a-mole against new substances, which meant that vendors could keep going as long as they didn't foul afoul of scheduling updates or of the much-blunter American Drug Enforcement Agency.
Around 10 years ago, maybe a bit earlier, risk-averse European psychonauts started outsourcing the synthesis of novel molecules to labs in China, much like larger pharma research organizations were doing for basic synthetic work. Mine the literature, come up with some targets and proposed synthesis outline, outsource to Chinese vendors. The only work necessary on the buyer's end was to run analytical chemistry to ensure they were getting what was planned, then consume the drug to see how it behaves in vivo. Some of the more successful drugs that were sampled this way escaped the tight knit psychonaut groups and started popping up as items of commerce; does anyone remember the explosion of JWH series synthetic cannabinoids? (Fortunately, those strange brews seem less popular in the US since states started legalizing ordinary cannabis.)
The first really alarming substance I saw coming from these small custom synthesis vendors just has the code name U-47700 [3]; it's an opioid with a weird structure, never tested in humans until gray and dark market vendors put it on the map. I also saw opioid dependent chemists researching modifications of the OTC drug Loperamide [4] so that it could cross the blood brain barrier and satisfy their craving.
This is all a long winded way of saying that Chinese vendors were deliberately sought out by self-experimenting psychonauts and people with drug dependencies years before news reports of Chinese fentanyl in the US. It didn't start with opioids, but it eventually ended there. The drug flow from Chinese laboratories started as a Western "pull" rather than a Chinese "push." Opioids were also among the last drugs to start flowing in volume. That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.
I had access to invite-only psychonaut/chemist forums for years. I tried visiting one of them just now and it's now just a domain landing page. So no citations for the chronology of my story, sorry, but major parts of it should be corroborated by what you can find on more open forums like Bluelight.
[1] Though the Federal Analogue Act in the US meant that novel "fun" compounds being sold for human consumption were illegal without any new legislation being needed.
Right, "bath salts" contained cathinone drugs that were initially obscure and unregulated in many countries, so they served as temporarily legal substitutes for amphetamine type stimulants.
> That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.
But that conclusion doesn't even approximately follow from the preceding narrative, which just as easily could be seen as lending credence to the hypothesis you use it to reject, since it provides a very clear explanation as to how both the ground was laid off such an effort to be successful and how the Chinese government would become aware of that opportunity.
(The “Opium War” revenge is probably needlessly romanticized, even if the Chinese government did deliberately act on the opportunity, the motivation (even if the Opium War was part of the inspiration) was probably more prosaic geopolitical advantage by weakening rivals with costly internal problems, not revenge.
I was lucky enough to be around for the MXE days, and I'd like to say you're absolutely correct.
The only thing that is odd to me is what is legal and illegal to manufacture in China. The common "reason" for MXE being unavailable is that it is no longer legal in China, yet, fentanyl is?
Our backwards restrictions on what chemicals adults can and can't consume are to blame for this. When the US changes it's laws so that adults can legally buy opiates if they want to take opiates no one outside of medical professionals will have any interest in fentanyl.
I recommend this podcast if your interested in learning more:
"Puzzled by rising drug deaths at raves in the United States, author and investigative journalist Ben Westhoff set out to find answers. A Google search for “Buy fentanyl in China” took him down a rabbit hole that led to a face-to-face meeting with the CEO of a company selling fentanyl on Skype “all day long” and a drug lab in Shanghai. Ben tells Jordan the remarkable story."
Repression only made it worse and I can only imagine how much worse it would have been with the possibility that every shot may have something far more potent.
Maybe the important bit is also how it was resolved:
In short, save injection sites, controlled diaphin or other opioid replacement therapies made the life of addicts livable and reduced the harm that happened.
Yep. China makes all that but they dont have an opioid crisis. USA doesn't make the stuff yet has an opioid crisis. Naturally we don't ask why the USA cannot police opioid use like the chinese...
Why doesnt say, singapore have an opiod crisis? China won't export to singapore?
A Friend got a swathe of opioids for a cut in her thumb (in a US hospital), "Why?" she asked, turns out the hospital is sponsored by the producers. Buy hey! Nothing to see here! It's them Chiners!!
What I find interesting is that there is so little discussion of the demand for fentanyl. I know it's convenient to blame doctors and drug companies, but why is there such a high demand for fentanyl as a drug of abuse/intoxication in the USA compared to other countries?
By the way, I have fentanyl patch prescriptions, and have done for years, due to medical issues. I use maybe 7-10 doses per year, with no real urge to take more. I can see how it can be appealing to people, but there has to be something in US society that makes fentanyl and other synthetic opioids so enticing.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadAs for whether they knew of it, it's impossible to prove without asking them, or maybe talking to their attorneys. There is only circumstantial evidence, some of it having to do with timing of events that there is no point in getting in to, since I know it won't make you share that idea. But consider these questions, which you probably have not asked or did not learn enough about those events to ask:
Why did Adam Lanza completely destroy his hard drive? He had a printed poster that had his "body counts and weapons used by mass shooting perpetrators" stuff, so it wasn't to hide that. I think he also had or used another computer, that he didn't bother to destroy. What would someone who expected to kill a bunch of children want to hide? And why did he kill himself despite having plenty of ammunition left?
Think of what you know of James Holmes. He shot up a movie theater, right? Why didn't he shoot some people he encountered as he was walking out (he answered this to a psychologist: it would be kind of personal to shoot someone you could see). How do any theories about why he shot up the theater fit with him rigging his apartment with various explosive and inflammatory substances, set to go off if someone opened the door in response to loud music, but not set to go off from a timer despite he reportedly even had a remote-control trigger as well and obviously was competent enough to be able to set a timer-based initiation?
At the start of the trial for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his most famous lawyer, a female, said that, not exact quote, "We know he did it. So why the trial? Because we want to know why." Did we learn why? If so, what was the reason? Does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter account provide any reasons why?
If you think whether certain people knew of the linked idea is relevant or important, then you should focus on the most likely answer, not enumerate all possible ones.
1) If people did a certain thing, it would fix most problems.
2) Certain people knew of this solution but did not share it.
Which of these is the "very big claim"?
I may also be misinterpreting this:
>clear causal connection
Are you saying that if there was evidence that the listed individuals did know of it, that you would share it?
If one of them that's still alive told everyone about that idea, then you would see it as a reason to use that idea?
As for the "doing this would fix most problems", how much explanation would convince you to fix it? If it was (arbitrary units) 3 pages of text, that all made sense, would you share it? What if it was 15 pages of text, that you found to be consistent and logical after reading through it? Would you share it, and expect other people to share it?
As the original link is no longer visible, I’m not going to go into specific details. I advise against reposting something that got flagged in order to try to continue this thread.
However I will say this as a general piece of advice on communication. You seem to presume:
> that all made sense
The problem is that it didn’t make sense to most of the people on here. Communication is not a place of maths-like absolute truth where convincing yourself is sufficient, rather it’s impedance matching of your mind to other people’s minds where the arbiter of success is the people you’re trying to share an idea with. For example, if you’re not familiar with impedance matching, that previous analogy would be a mistake on my part.
> In my profile, what does showdead do?
>If you turn it on, you'll see all the stories and comments that have been killed by software, moderators, or user flags.
Responding to you,
>The problem is that it didn’t make sense to most of the people on here.
>For example, if you’re not familiar with impedance matching, that previous analogy would be a mistake on my part.
I can think of vague things about reflection of signals and gold-plated electrical connectors.
That particular argument deliberately gave only the barest minimum of explanation. To quote it,
The reason this works is that some people want to work more than 24 hours per week, so people would not be able to agree on how much a normal person should work.
Most people would not understand how this lack of agreement would be beneficial. In short, it was an argument where people could say that if they shared it, this action was implying that they were smart. An argument that includes many pages of explanation does not imply that someone who shared it was smart, only that they don't give up easily.
It's the style, especially in social media, to share something that implies you understand something complex. Just look at 'memes' or even 'hashtags'.
Fentanyl is a relatively recent addition to a crisis those companies started in the early 90s.
what a crap article.
> And so, when we're talking about who's to blame for the fentanyl crisis, we've got to start at home. Why is the demand so high? But in terms of China, and that's what I really focused on in my book in large part, China is not only doing a poor job stopping fentanyl from getting exported to the US, they are even encouraging it in a lot of ways, through the tax code and all these complicated ways that add up to a really troubling situation.
Do you disagree with any of that? Do you believe that China's massive and uncontrolled supply had no effect on the opioid epidemic?
That's not a bizarre position to take when most addicts started on prescribed meds, whether those meds were prescribed for them or diverted from friends and family members. People move onto fentanyl when they've developed a tolerance for prescription meds and can no longer get higher doses.
Why don't other places have such a big problem with fentanyl?
There isn't a fentanyl epidemic in japan, sweden, etc. So can't blame the "supply" here. "China" isn't making and sending these drugs for the hell of it. Somebody is ordering it and someone is distributing it. And it ain't the chinese.
Sure, how will you be paying for it sir? https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/fentanyl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Don't do drugs.
Don't get prescribed drugs
-- 2000s variant
That's an insidious aspect here: people trust doctors, the drug dealers found an angle that blindsided the system.
I even thought what an edgy name every time I came across a comment - not once bothering to re-read ... human brains are terrible :D
It's simply a few bad apples in an illegal market responding to the demand of the West and seriously why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China. It is bad-apples who want to get rich quickly but from a suppliers perspective it's short sighted because a dead addict isn't going to come back for more.
The real criminals to blame here are those that get people hooked on pharmaceuticals and then stop giving them the prescription for what they got them hooked on. No wonder they move from pain killers to heroin (or its substitutes).
edit: I highly recommend the excellent "Louis Theroux: Dark States" (episode Heroin Town). He gives a very empathic non-judgemental look into the tragedy of addiction in the US.
Certainly, but with fentanyl specifically it would not surprise me if some of the Chinese smugglers thought that they do a heroic patriotic act.
We don't have any facts linking the CCP or any other institutions or legally run Chinese companies to do what has been done by the West back in these days.
Sorry! I just wanted to point out some of the historical context. I don't have a particular fish to fry here.
> why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China.
That's a bit uncharitable, eh? There are a billion and a half people people in China, they can't all be moral cretins, can they?
edit: @carapace fwiw, I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories. what I meant here is that it could be construed as an incorrect cause->effect relation between opium wars and the crimes of US BigPharma. If you follow what is happening right now with the US in Munich at the security conference, then China isn't the evil that the US paints them as. China is a threat to the West for sure but the real terrorist really is the US (who are preparing for war): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRoY2PQsGg -> When I posted my reply my emotions were running a bit high on the hypocrisy that the US is pushing again in Munich. So I want to apologize for that. I also edited my above comment.
Cheers, that makes more sense. Sorry.
> I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories.
Oh but I do.
Robert Anton Wilson pointed out that in the last century, of regime changes, more than half came about as the result of a coup, conspiracy.
Or, as Colonel Hunter Gathers said so memorably, "The moment God crapped out the third cave man a conspiracy was hatched against one of them."
The ability to hatch conspiracy is the evolutionary driver of intelligence. What differentiates us from the animals is not language, but rather the ability to lie.
Anyhoo, that's a big ol' tangent. You didn't offend me, FWIW. We're cool.
Do you have a better solution? For some people the pain can be unbearable.
Fair point, but the same (edit: “unbearable” cost) applies to wasted lives.
I don’t claim to have a general answer, but it’s important to keep the pros and cons in context.
Unfortunately one half of the balance sheet is an externality, and our incentive system is set to exploit those ruthlessly.
There are some questions to which I’m in no position to give an answer:
- is a little temporary pain really problem?
- are there less invasive measures?
- what preventative measures do we have?
- are opiates just an easy way to cover up symptoms that could/should be treated properly?
This is why I believe it should be up to the patient to select whether to take opiates.
Then there are those that mean well and spike their produce successfully for a few runs, ... forgetting that it takes only 1 mistake and many will be dead as a result.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02686-2
> Because many doctors are in private practice, they can benefit financially by increasing the volume of patients that they see, as well as by ensuring patient satisfaction, which can incentivize the overprescription of pain medication.
I’m not saying I have any idea what the real impactful decisions that fuel this problem even are, much less who is making them, triple much less what their intention is.
I’m not sure it is clear what is really fueling the opioid epidemic, many theories of causation are plausible.
But it seems hopelessly naive to discard outright the possibility that aggressive intention by the Chinese Government is a factor here.
Countries have done much, much, worse to each other (and their own people) in pursuit of various strategic objectives throughout all of recorded history. Why should we flat out assume that has somehow fundamentally changed?
If the US invaded china and forced china to buy opium to offset the trade imbalance, then the parallel would apply.
I don't remember china invading the US. And china isn't forcing drugs on the US, no more than mexico or south america is forcing drugs on the US. There is demand for drugs in the US. That is the problem.
And the slow but recent drug legalization around the country and the glamorization of drugs in the media isn't going to help.
Do you feel clear on what their short, medium, and long term objectives are?
I’m sure I don’t.
It seems obvious there is at least some potential benefit to causing your biggest competitor for military and economic influence a bunch of costly problems ... but I truly have no idea what any of these leaders are thinking about.
In the article, Ben Westhoff gives a much less conspiratorial explanation of why China was slow to crack down on fentanyl:
> China does not have a fentanyl crisis nearly the scope that the US does, or Canada, also has a really big problem. And so to a lot of people, this is why China hasn't really cracked down on its fentanyl industry, because its own people aren't dying from it. And so the way the Chinese government works is, fentanyl is illegal there, but it's not so much just the laws on the books, it's what resources the government dedicates to cracking down on different problems. And so when it comes to meth, which is a huge problem among Chinese citizens, the government has really focused on trying to stamp it out, take drug dealers down, disrupt operations. But when it comes to fentanyl being made there, that's just not the case.
Even the Islamic State (Isis) was mostly using US-produced bullets.
China didn’t cause this, we did, but there are suppliers in China cashing in on it. But so are other suppliers in the US and elsewhere.
[1]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/opioids-part-1/
[1]:https://sph.umich.edu/podcast/season1/opioids.html
Around 10 years ago, maybe a bit earlier, risk-averse European psychonauts started outsourcing the synthesis of novel molecules to labs in China, much like larger pharma research organizations were doing for basic synthetic work. Mine the literature, come up with some targets and proposed synthesis outline, outsource to Chinese vendors. The only work necessary on the buyer's end was to run analytical chemistry to ensure they were getting what was planned, then consume the drug to see how it behaves in vivo. Some of the more successful drugs that were sampled this way escaped the tight knit psychonaut groups and started popping up as items of commerce; does anyone remember the explosion of JWH series synthetic cannabinoids? (Fortunately, those strange brews seem less popular in the US since states started legalizing ordinary cannabis.)
The first really alarming substance I saw coming from these small custom synthesis vendors just has the code name U-47700 [3]; it's an opioid with a weird structure, never tested in humans until gray and dark market vendors put it on the map. I also saw opioid dependent chemists researching modifications of the OTC drug Loperamide [4] so that it could cross the blood brain barrier and satisfy their craving.
This is all a long winded way of saying that Chinese vendors were deliberately sought out by self-experimenting psychonauts and people with drug dependencies years before news reports of Chinese fentanyl in the US. It didn't start with opioids, but it eventually ended there. The drug flow from Chinese laboratories started as a Western "pull" rather than a Chinese "push." Opioids were also among the last drugs to start flowing in volume. That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.
I had access to invite-only psychonaut/chemist forums for years. I tried visiting one of them just now and it's now just a domain landing page. So no citations for the chronology of my story, sorry, but major parts of it should be corroborated by what you can find on more open forums like Bluelight.
[1] Though the Federal Analogue Act in the US meant that novel "fun" compounds being sold for human consumption were illegal without any new legislation being needed.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-47700
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loperamide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_cathinone
But that conclusion doesn't even approximately follow from the preceding narrative, which just as easily could be seen as lending credence to the hypothesis you use it to reject, since it provides a very clear explanation as to how both the ground was laid off such an effort to be successful and how the Chinese government would become aware of that opportunity.
(The “Opium War” revenge is probably needlessly romanticized, even if the Chinese government did deliberately act on the opportunity, the motivation (even if the Opium War was part of the inspiration) was probably more prosaic geopolitical advantage by weakening rivals with costly internal problems, not revenge.
The only thing that is odd to me is what is legal and illegal to manufacture in China. The common "reason" for MXE being unavailable is that it is no longer legal in China, yet, fentanyl is?
"Puzzled by rising drug deaths at raves in the United States, author and investigative journalist Ben Westhoff set out to find answers. A Google search for “Buy fentanyl in China” took him down a rabbit hole that led to a face-to-face meeting with the CEO of a company selling fentanyl on Skype “all day long” and a drug lab in Shanghai. Ben tells Jordan the remarkable story."
https://supchina.com/podcast/chasing-the-dragon-fentanyl-chi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UYmaalotK0
Repression only made it worse and I can only imagine how much worse it would have been with the possibility that every shot may have something far more potent.
Maybe the important bit is also how it was resolved:
https://www.thelocal.ch/20120531/3427
In short, save injection sites, controlled diaphin or other opioid replacement therapies made the life of addicts livable and reduced the harm that happened.
Why doesnt say, singapore have an opiod crisis? China won't export to singapore?
Hmmmmmmmm
By the way, I have fentanyl patch prescriptions, and have done for years, due to medical issues. I use maybe 7-10 doses per year, with no real urge to take more. I can see how it can be appealing to people, but there has to be something in US society that makes fentanyl and other synthetic opioids so enticing.