I'm not saying Amazon should be selling these things, but that choice makes me distrust this whole article.
Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings.
Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.
I personally enjoy being able to obtain "weird shit" of all varieties. I don't know what's involved in a pill press per se, but I can't imagine it's particularly complex or tough to improvise. Distributed 3d printing/milling culture can't come quick enough, and get us some refuge from this clueless fear of tools.
It really is absurd how so many people want to continue with this ridiculous war on inanimate objects, when the problem is almost always people.
Sleazy doesn't imply deceitful. Black markets set a tone of little enforcement and no recourse, since participants are already criminals. This encourages negative-sum games.
As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain:
She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses.
> She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!
I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.
Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all.
In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.
I'm not saying that Amazon wasn't at fault here, but if you just read the headline and looked at the picture you might think Amazon was the one selling the counterfeit pills.