Deadly Chinese Fentanyl Is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins

The Opium Wars began when the Chinese confiscated the British drug contraband (but property to the British) and lit a bonfire with them, as the opium trade was illegal. There is no comparison.

That was certainly how the British saw it: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lord_Palmerston_to_the_Minist...

I think there is an important difference between trade being forced open at gunpoint, vs. trade deals peacefully negotiated.

What's more interesting though is the inherent impedance mismatch between money and goods (which are highly mobile and flow everywhere) and people and laws (which are much less so).

The crux of the problem is Americans are negatively affected by things that China sells. But what is the remedy?

Should China's government take American citizens' interests directly into account when making its laws? Is that a reciprocal obligation? How far does it extend?

How is it different from the current scenario, where presumably the US State Department identifies the harm, brings it up with China, and negotiates a change to Chinese laws? Should there be a bureaucratic mechanism with quicker feedback? Would that lead to an inevitable loss of effective sovereignty for nations?

I'm not sure what you're angling at with this weird historical whataboutism.

Are you saying that it's acceptable for Chinese companies and gangs to manufacture opiates and ship them off to the USA because Britain and the USA went to war with China 150 years ago to enforce the opium trade?

Ketamine has potential as a novel treatment for depression.

It's not as addictive as some people would suggest. I have a prescription and it makes me sweat profusely and puke. Hardly enjoyable and I have no interest in dissociation because I want to live in the present.

Making Ketamine harder for patients to access is going to destroy a lot of lives. People with depression like myself are already being taken advantage of by Ketamine infusion clinics that charge exorbitant rates. These doctors, often not psychiatrists, could prescribe a lozenge for their patients to take at home if they were serious about helping depressed patients and not lining their pockets.

The tobacco industry and car industry are both counter examples to this.

There are real use cases for fentanyl (there's a report here locally of ambulance crews misappropriating fentanyl from the pain medication supplies.) I know there's media reports of "an opioid epidemic", but I'm suspicious about how much that's "real" and how much of it is "war on drugs" reporting pushed by law enforcement PR for the purposes of propping up the prison-industrial complex...

30,000 deaths per year in the US seems to be considered "acceptable" in the face of the benefits of 200-ish million people owning/driving cars. I wonder what the ratio of "people benefiting" vs "people dying" from opiates and fentanyl in particular is?

> Any supplier thinking long-term I'm sure will recognize the economic downside of killing off their clientele

maybe, maybe not. often when someone overdoses, the dealer has customers lined up around the block the next day. addicts don't know whether that particular stuff was cut with fent or just stronger than usual, and they don't particularly care.

even if enough people were dying that it made a significant dent in sales, i doubt it would change anything for the suppliers. selling fentanyl as heroin is massively more profitable than just selling heroin, and there's no way to do it safely. low doses of heroin are in the tens of milligrams, while fentanyl can have a potent effect at doses less than one milligram. this makes it really hard to achieve a homogenous mixture; there's basically always going to be some potentially lethal hotspots.

Well shit. Time to update our relations. O_O

When you return the chips it is called "cashing out". The casino doesn't let you buy in with a duffle bag of $250,000 and cash out for a cheque from the casino for $250,000 in the same transaction. You have to go play a low variance game like Baccarat and play your money through like 200%. Then you cash out $240,000 and get a cheque from the casino that you can easily deposit into a Canadian bank. Gambling winnings in Canada are also tax free.

Have you ever thought about writing headlines for Buzzfeed?

Edit: I meant that as a compliment.

Twas tongue in cheek. No harm intended, I love my estranged moose cousins

> The numbers have only continued to grow since then. In January, Xinhua reported that China handled 52,800 drug cases from late September to December 2014 alone

This is probably including Marijuana uses as well, which is already legalized in much part of West. It is the not on the same ground sadly, so I don't think it is nonsense.

Using it for (other people's) pain management, I don't really care about how "nice" the high is (and I don't have any experience with it personally).

The main reason I like fentanyl is that it peaks much earlier than morphine. The most common reason I administer opioids is due to a musculoskeletal injury of some sort. Often those patients would experience a significant amount of pain while being moved and loaded into the ambulance. Fentanyl acts quickly enough that it's worth it to administer it before starting to move them. With morphine that's just a waste of time. Better to get them moved and then medicate them on the way to the hospital.

I took Hydrocodone recreationally once, as I had some leftovers from my ribcage injury. Aside from enhanced dreams and occasional hypnogogia, I still didn’t really see the appeal. You can achieve the same euphoria with THC (IIRC, OPRM1 gene expression is altered upon consumption of THC).

OPRM1 is an interesting gene, though. Habitual use of morphine (and other substances like alcohol, OPRM1 expression is implicated in risk-taking behavior) would create reinforcement effects and increased gene expression of OPRM1. That would lead you down the dark path of addiction.

It's a function of your rate of posting and your total karma and your recent average post karma.

It's not true. Research companies aren't going to risk the wrath of the FDA by selling to the public.

Not enough karma probably.

> Any ideas why I get "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."?

You're probably posting too fast.

(Sorry, i had to...) ;-)

It is very much a European thing, not as popular in the US due to easier access to cannabis and it was synthetic Cannabis (Spice) that started the whole craze a couple of years ago, followed by "bath salts" which then extended to the whole RC line of drugs.

Tbh the government reactions to this, banning specific substances cannabinoids in particular, have made this situation just that much worse.

This stuff booming like that should have told them the whole story: That there's a very real demand for legalization. Instead, they continue prohibition practices even further, forcing manufacturers to use other (much more dangerous) substances, a game they've now played so long that by now most of these synthetic Cannabis variants have nothing at all do anymore with the "natural stuff" and instead have become extremely destructive and addictive substances [0]

By insisting on the prohibition stance the regulators literally made "weed" lethal.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-43600584

You can't legislate a state of mind, and people have different reactions to different substances, so I'm a little confused as to what form this "broad ban" would take.

Execution for dealers plus the ability of police to test you for drugs without probable cause.

You're right, it may not have been proven but based on the amount of coverage and writing on it, there must be some truth behind it. Do you really think these people decided to make it up? And regardless of whether they smuggled the drugs, they knowingly supported the people doing it.

Also, I haven't downvoted you and I'm quite confused by the votes on my original comment. Went straight into the negatives and now it's back up.

If you read further, it also says that by CIA guidelines at the time, you were not required to report on CIA assets smuggling drugs. It's hard to find any evidence when you don't need to keep a record, and any payments made can be written off as part of Iran-Contra.

Federal investigations aren't the only sources of proof when investigating the Federal government.

Where do you think the CIA fucking learned it from? MI6 (who learned it in opium wars 1&2) taught to OSS (CIA) how to get funding off books so congress couldn't pull the purse strings and they could do whatever they wanted... and this has indeed been proven multiple times...

You are the same kind of person who called us talking about NSA pre-Snowden "tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists" and then post-Snowden came out with all kinds of variations of "why are you surprised" and "we all already knew this whats the big deal", and "if you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" type of bullshit.

In the conspiracy theory arena, the main sticking point is that people far too often fail to understand the difference between inductive and deductive logic. In many cases we have very little evidence to go on, so we are forced to transition to inductive logic from deductive... but inevitably those decrying the lack of evidence the loudest tend to ignore the very real legitimacy of inductive logic and it's process when one is presented with a lack of hard evidence.

  Many of the great old East Coast fortunes were built 
  on opium smuggling.

Very interesting indeed. Could you please list a few or point to a link that does?

Everyone in the “West” or just some? Are native Americans also included in this reckoning? What about Russians and Bulgarians?

But the political winds are blowing toward drug liberalization on the basis of libertarianism. That's what I am referring to.

> The US is subject to endless bashing, scrutiny, paranoia, unfair reporting, you name it. If the US does a thing, it's evil or wrong policy

I'm Chinese, and I just want to say in my experience this isn't true of Chinese media coverage of the US.

For the most part the US (and other western countries) are covered in positive, admiring terms. "This is how American educate their kids. We should emulate that" "How to make XXX-food the American way" "i was shocked how clean US cities are as" "ten most beautiful US destinations" etc etc.

American media and politicians often use the phrase "the Chinese" (also think: "the Russians"; you don't often hear "the British" "the French"). Chuck Schumer says just the other day something to the effect that we must be united in our "fight against the Chinese". It's hard for a Chinese person to read that kind of language without ... feeling a bit disheartened inside. Say what you will about Chinese media, when there is anything critical about the US the target is never "the Americans".

When you use language like "the Xs" you are speaking in tribal-war terms. Good for selling newspapers maybe. But we all know what tribalism can easily snowball into ...

It was frankly a surprise for me to find out just how much hostility there exists on the other side. I'm not necessarily talking about hostility in the sense of outright lying/fabrication in stories about China. A newspaper can choose to print all the true negative stories about blacks that come its way, and skip half of the true negative stories about whites, and still be able to claim they haven't printed a single false article about blacks. Doesn't mean it's not biased against black people. The hostility often resides at the level of what's implied rather than what's said.

But there is doe.

For a while China refused to prosecute these manufacturers unless they sold to Chinese citizens.

Thus China is DIRECTLY trying to get revenge from the 100 years of shame

It's because users of opiates can build up a really high tolerance. Like an order of magnitude more than would knock a non-user off his rocker will be barely enough to feel anything.

And heroin is really expensive. So imagine someone who is extremely frugal buying expired food. Only cranked up to 10.

Yes. One of my best friends was an addict and died by Fentanyl OD. That is exactly how she thought.

Yes, and this is commonly documented and reported behavior from many first-person accounts of inner-city drug dealers.

The people that manufacture are several levels away, so they aren't as affected as, say someone who sells it to the same 50 or so people every week/day or whatever.

The point of my post was to let you know how easy it would be to accidentally kill someone due to mismeasuring the dose. Calibrating a scale before and after measuring a dose then verifying with a second method is something dealers aren't used to doing.

The dealers' intended approach is likely not to kill off their customers. I'm willing to bet they simply don't realize what to look out for.

I would think they treat it like other businesses treat churn. As long as you have more new subscribers than cancelling subscribers, you're still growing.