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Comment by xkcd-sucks | Hacker News Reader

> 'During their time as black market administrators, the Dutch police only banned one product on Hansa: the highly dangerous opioid Fentanyl. All other drugs on the site continued to flow freely, a circumstance over which Ras and Boekelo seem surprisingly unconflicted. "They would have taken place anyway," says Ras without hesitation, "but on a different market."'

So, the goal is probably aligned more with career progression than stopping drug trade as such

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Or you are looking at this from an american perspective? Just guessing here. Everybody else on the planet figured out that prohibition doesn't work

That's wrong, Asia (and large parts of Africa and Latin-America) are treating drugs more harshly than the US nowadays.

Yea the poster was being hyperbolic, but the Netherlands is pretty fine with drugs for personal use. Their problems seems to be the tools the site is selling for committing other crimes (forgeries) and the larger sellers (who often have ties to other more heinous crimes).

I'd be very careful reading about how laws in asian countries work in theory (on paper) without experience of what real life enforcement looks like.

Yeah right.

"Chinese Drug Dealers Are Being Sentenced to Death in Sports Stadiums and Public Squares"

http://www.newsweek.com/china-criminals-sentenced-death-spor...

[2015] "On Wednesday, China’s Supreme People’s Court argued that serious drug crimes merit the death penalty. Serious cases involving “drug lords, professional drug dealers or re-offenders” as well as “drug smuggling, organized transnational drug crime and armed or violent drug crime” should all receive capital sentences, according to a circular released by the SPC."

https://thediplomat.com/2015/05/chinas-growing-drug-problem/

The reality of the situation is if you are connected, privileged, and drop some gifts or hush money, you won’t face a thing.

They've a lot of catching up to do, per web-search [asia opium export]

Yet, people are still using them. Otherwise we wouldn't still hear stories about people being executed for smoking pot.

Fentanyl is extremely potent - its clinically relevant doses are measured in micrograms. Appears they were concerned with reducing mortality first.

What? Public health-oriented drug enforcement? Who would do such a thing? \s

Surprisingly common in the Netherlands.

But surely the market for Fentanyl "[took] place anyway but on a different market"? It's such a short sighted move in an otherwise well played plan.

Maybe not. No one wants fentanyl: they want diacetylmorphine, and will take fentanyl if they can't find morphine. Opiates are all the same.

Did you meant _aren't _ all the same? They're certainly similar, and fentanyl will satisfy the cravings of those addicted to other opiates, but compared to heroin/diacetylmorphine has a shorter duration of action and reportedly less euphoric/more sedative effects.

I'm asking half-seriously here: assuming the fentanyl pill guy could demonstrate Good Manufacturing Practice, i.e. dose constant and as advertised and equally distributed throughout the pill, would he be sentenced more leniently?

I think it's commonly used to cut other drugs (coke), so I don't think that argument would go far.

I'd be very surprised if the fentanyl (or its analogues) in cocaine is deliberate (unless the goal is to harm users, which seems unlikely) - they are very different drugs. It's used more to be passed off as other opiates, because it's much cheaper and its potency makes it much easier to smuggle (carfentanyl being approximate 5000 times more potent than heroin). I'd suspect that the fentanyl in cocaine is coming from cross-contamination - lethal doses of carfentanyl are measured in micrograms, so anything less than perfect cleaning of equipment used to process both drugs could result in a fatality.

Mixing cocaine and heroin is not all that uncommon. Sounds like a variant of a speedball:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_(drug)

Sure, there are certainly users who will mix the drugs, but mixing the two and then selling it as just cocaine seems strange. Supplying strong opiates to the (potentially) opiate-naive without their knowledge seems to be an unnecessary risk, and it is probably bad for business as you aren't supplying the experience that a cocaine user may be looking for.

It is very uncommon.

There's press reports about the DEA warning about it. E.g.: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/florida/fl-reg-cocaine-cut-...

That's what I remembered.

I'm sure it has happened at least once, but I suspect that the DEA gives it press coverage way out of proportion to its incidence.

As an adolescent of 12 or so, I remember watching a D.A.R.E. video in school where the fictional character tried marijuana for the first time, but it was secretly laced with cocaine and the fictional character had some kind of unspecified heart condition and hyper-sensitivity to cocaine that caused his first puff of pot to kill him. Remember kids, your first puff of pot can kill you!

They also told us that sometimes PCP is laced with rat poison.

Even as a 12 year-old, the implied frequency of such craziness beggared belief. It would have been more believable if they would have warned us that we shouldn't try hard liquor because it might be tainted with methanol. That at least happens with some frequency back in the Old Country, according to a Bulgarian friend.

At least in the US, it's almost certainly not written into the law or sentencing guidelines, so any leniency based on improved safety would have to be at the sole discretion of the judge.

The goal is likely aligned more with a different approach to management of drug use. Jumping to stopping drug trade as an immediate goal hits a lot of assumptions on what an effective policy can be.

It's also a lot easier to track down the whole network, and importantly, the bigger players, if you're tracking them.

Shut down the site, people move to another one, and you've got to start all over again.

Shutting it down is aligned with career progression (gets the big news). Leaving it running gives you some chance of affecting the actual drug trade

Or they have a similar problem that CT is facing and were focused on the human cost:

https://ctmirror-org.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/ctmirror.org/fil...

Non-broken URL (thanks, AMP): https://ctmirror.org/files/2018/03/Overdose-chart-lead.jpg

I agree with you that this sounds like a sensible strategy, and I don't understand the complaint above about career progression - to the extent that their careers were benefited by focusing on the most serious problems instead of a performative war on drugs, props to the system for enabling them to do this. People always make decisions based on career progressions, the best thing to do is set up incentives so those decisions are also good for society.

Jesus! What a bizarre statement. Didn't he just say that regardless of what the police do, drug transactions will continue? Why they hell do you both going after them then?

>So, the goal is probably aligned more with career progression than stopping drug trade as such

No, you should read the article rather than automatically assuming bad faith.

"Since the takedown, Ras says, they've arrested a dozen of Hansa's top vendors, with more arrests planned for coming weeks"

"While most drug vendors who fled AlphaBay showed up soon after on other dark web drug sites, those who fled Hansa didn't—or if they did, they recreated their online identities thoroughly enough to escape recognition"

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