‘Mike’s Candyshop’: Behind the Overdose Death of Colin Kroll | Hacker News Reader

‘Mike’s Candyshop’: Behind the Overdose Death of Colin Kroll

nytimes.com

35 pointsdanso31 comments

The narrative being pushed here is "its bad that techbros can order drugs with the same convenience as they order pizza".

I say narrative being pushed because this is taken as a given. Would it have been better if Mr. Kroll was doing things the old fashion way, face to face in a back alley with potentially violent rabble? Would it make the news? Would the DA be bragging about it? I think not.

The bigger thing I’m annoyed at here is that “Mike’s Candyshop” isn’t anything new. It’s how the drug industry is run in basically every place that doesn’t have “open air” drug markets. Yes, even the level of organisation that they’re talking about. A decade ago when I was still a heroin addict, I’d have it delivered to my house within a few hours of a single text message, any day of the week, from the afternoon through til early morning.

In every market in human history, increased convenience has led to increased transaction volumes.

I think you are wrong. But an all encompassing statement like that is probably easy to disprove. However I will limit my response to drug use specifically.

https://www.rand.org/news/press/2018/12/21.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

And fewer fatal transactions.

Test your drugs folks!

This service seemed to be missing the rating system that is default behavior on darknet drug bazaars. Operating instead under the lure of exclusivity. The ratings systems tend to call out impure or mis-advertised substances.

Consumers have to keep testing kits in this unregulated environment, and especially decriminalized environments where the state is totally hands off. Consumers can mistake this as tacit consent where peddlers can distribute their snake oil with no regard for their supply chain or their customers.

Testing only tells you whether a certain drug is in something. It doesn’t tell you if it contains something else as well.

Also testing a powder / pill shaving doesn't necessarily mean that a speck sized grain of fent didn't make it into the bag somewhere. But hey at least there's mushies still. Stay safe kids.

Some testing services exist in some countries that can do better than just a reagent test.

yes, but fentanyl is usually unwanted and is much more dangerous than the others (due to wildly varying potencies). Some shelters have been handing out fentanyl test strips - fentanyl contamination has dramatically increased the number of fatalities among opioid users

Whatever drug you are taking, you would test for fentanyl (usually 5 or so reagents are used). This would have saved this guys life.

According to the article he died from a lethal combination of heroin, cocaine and fentanyl. Did you read something in the article that lead you to believe that he would be alive if he was testing?

Probably.

“In early February, the New York City medical examiner’s office found Mr. Kroll’s cause of death was an accidental overdose by fentanyl-laced heroin”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tech-whiz-behind-vine-and-h...

Yep.

The important thing to keep in mind when you read these toxicology reports is that it tells you what drugs the person took, but it doesn't tell you what they intended to take.

I hope people don't think that the epidemic of fentanyl deaths is due to fentanyl increasing in popularity among drug users... what increased in popularity was the tendency of immoral drug dealers to lace their heroin with fentanyl in order to increase the strength of it. When you see heroin and fentanyl in a toxicology report, there's a very good chance that the drug user didn't realize they were consuming the latter.

Yes. Test. There are fentanyl test kits.

And bioassay. Whenever you're using a new batch, test with a few percent of the recommended dose. Then adjust accordingly. Even if your test kit reports that it's OK.

Also, it's the damn drug war that's arguably responsible for the fentanyl problem. Fentanyl is about 50 times as potent as heroin. So if you want a kilogram of "heroin", you can mix 20 gm fentanyl with 980 gm lactose. And it's lots easier to smuggle 20 gm than 1000 gm.

The problem, though, is that uniformly mixing 20 gm into a kilogram is much harder than you might think. Just one little bit of clumping, and you have a lethal dose.

They use lactose? Do people with lactose intolerance react to it?

That was a classic bulking agent. You want something that's non-toxic, and not hygroscopic. To avoid clumping.

But I think that mannitol is more common now.

Problem is testing won’t always catch hot shots. You gonna test all 25 of them Molly pills to make sure they all good? No.

Thank you for this information. When I read that I assumed that he intentional took fentanyl-laced heroin, but took too much.

Not sure why you are getting all of the downvotes. I think you have a pretty interesting point. If drug users were educated on how to test the purity and had better information on dosing maybe it would prevent overdoses. Then again, maybe it would give them a false sense of security and be more reckless. I wonder if this has been studied.

Because admitting the normalization of drug use across all socioeconomic classes is a taboo topic.

Also because apparently consumer level tests have limitations.

It also helps when the marketplace takes this seriously as well. A regular user can be expected to, at most, use a ready made test from the internet. A marketplace quality control can use a spectrometer and identify the exact purity, as well as the exact contents.

If a group of regular users band together it's pretty easy to crowdfund detailed testing. Take a look at sites like DNStars.

https://dnstars.vip/results/

And what was his 100 hour work weeks fueling a drug addiction leading to an early death all for? A flash in the pan Trivia fad which is all but completely forgotten.

This culture of drugs being cool and acceptable needs to stop. We don't need drug testing. We need education that taking drugs is wrong. The drug taker is as much as a criminal as the drug provider. I work around these tech-bros who talk about equality and solving world problems but then would go and do drugs. I feel it's a bit hypocritical. No?

Taking drugs isn't wrong, any more than drinking coffee or beer is wrong, or going rock-climbing or any other leisure activity. What's wrong is the 'war on drugs' which kills people by forcing drug sales underground, so that people have no idea what they're getting.

We should be allowing our scientific companies to research safer compounds, rather than just moralistically banning the whole area - and condemning people to death, black markets, gangs and cartels.

Not at all. It's very simple.

It's my body, so it's my choice.

Sry what?

You should not even have such a strong opinion on this topic as long as it doesn't affect you.

If I like to drink alcohol without hurting others or smoke weed or do amphetamines, who gives you the right to judge this?

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