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Comment by saul_goodman | Hacker News Reader

Let's see, so they didn't nab any of the big players in the operation. So effectively they helped the biggest players by making it harder for the small to mid-tier drug cartels do conduct business. Sure, way to put the squeeze on the cartels there...

A tangent to this is the way we conduct drug enforcement in the US. It's much better for police departments to wait until after the dealers make money to catch them so they can seize the cash as part of the crime. This dis-incentivises the actual prevention of the spread of illegal drugs. The entire system is corrupt and there's little to no incentive for the authority to behave in the spirit of the laws they enforce - to raise public health by eliminating the personal health and social problems that drug addition creates.

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You nailed it. You have to let the fruit ripen before you pick it. Also if you don’t go after the suppliers, you will have more distributors to harvest later. It’s literally a cash crop for the DEA/police

I recall there testimony around Operation Fast And Furious where the DEA basically said that they chose a cartel to dominate the trade and busted them once a decade or so.

They justified this on the ground that otherwise, the various factions would be fighting things out. But yeah, this make the DEA effectively the ultimate Mafia boss.

And yet, each vicious step in this vicious game can be justified by a logic that seems reasonable on it's own ("Drugs" should be illegal 'cause of harm of drug use to society, drug dealing should be actually organized by the police 'cause of harm of unfettered drug dealing, the truth should be covered 'cause of harm of not trusting authorities...).

Feature or bug? Cui bono?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

I think it’s bold to assume the government even wants to nab the big guys.

One example is fentanyl is killing us by the thousands every year. We know who the guy is who owns the factor that’s providing most of the fentanyl and precursors to the cartels. He lives in China and runs an also legit chemical factory. He commits the crime right in the main factory in the open. We politely asked China to arrest him, but they said no. No real political pressure to do anything, no assassinations, nothing. Thousands dead every year.

In response to the Fentanyl/heroin issue, State govs clamp down on legit opioid Rx, leaving Dr's too wary to Rx any effective pain meds at all.

People in chronic pain now get to live their lives without any relief at all. They get ignored my news orgs who are obsessed with amplifying an opioid hysteria narrative.

Go Gov.

Agree. The opiod epidemic is just the latest moral panic used to justify limitng people's rights.if you want to o.d., that's your right and your fault. OTC pain medication useless for serious chronic pain and a bigger ripoff than prescription drug companies. Opiods are safe when taken under doc guidelines. This notion that otc drugs are safe is wrong too: Otc drugs are known to cause liver and kidney problems too.

I agree with a bunch of your point, but I want to contest one thing - opioids are not necessarily safe by following your doctor's guidelines.

There's not (as far as I've found) currently any consistent threshold for how much of a given opioid you have to take for how long to develop an addiction. Some people might be able to take a high dose for an extended interval and not blink. Some people might take a much lower dose and have a very bad time indeed. (For that matter, I've known some people who got IV opioids with no effect. Biochemistry is wild.)

So I don't think it's reasonable to argue "opioids are safe if you follow the guidelines" and "OTC pain meds are unsafe [if you ignore the guidelines]" - both have risks that you can try to mitigate by following the guidelines given, but unknown factors can result in it still having negative outcomes.

I think it depends on your location and situation.

A couple months ago, I had minor (in absolute terms) surgery which resulted in a good deal of pain; the doctor asked if I wanted a prescription for opioids, I said yes, it was sent in, no further questions.

Am I saying people in chronic pain don't now have issues? No, I have no direct experience with that situation.

But it's still quite possible for people to get opioids sometimes.

> No real political pressure to do anything, no assassinations, nothing. Thousands dead every year.

Assassinating a Chinese citizen in China would be a huge overreach and a major violation of sovereignty. Not to mention it wouldn't stop the drug trade.

Instead of looking at the Liberal Hegemony playbook for a solution, they should de-criminalize and regulate. During prohibition many people were dying from additives/impurities in bootleg alcohol, now we don't have that problem.

I think it's important to help people understand that the stated goals of the government are completely out of alignment with their behavior. The state pretends that it wants to stop the drug trade, but its behavior is the opposite. I have no reason to believe that the CIA and other three letter agencies care one iota about sovereignty.

What the actual policy should be towards drugs is downstream of helping the public understand they are being misled systematically, and have been being misled since school.

On average, approximately 7x more people die in the US each day from use of tobacco use than do from use of opiates.

One of the largest causes of death is car accidents, and there's approximately no support for policies that would reduce driving.

The US govt didnt give any meaningful punishment to the Sackler family who live in the US for OxyContin, why should they go after someone in China?

> to raise public health by eliminating the personal health and social problems that drug addition creates.

If that had ever been the aim of any drug policy, drugs - including hard drugs - would be legally accessible at licensed stores, mental health care and social services would be accessible for everyone, and fact-based drug education in school be the norm, not the exception.

The reality is that drug policy has direct roots in racism - marijuana and crack prosecution intended to specifically target hippies and people of color.

> So effectively they helped the biggest players by making it harder for the small to mid-tier [insert entity here] do conduct business

Well, at least the government is consistent. When all you have is a hammer...

Right, like in Oregon they recently decriminalized "personal amounts" of all drugs. Crack, heroin, meth, fentanyl, etc. Whatever you want...it's now just a misdemeanor offense like a parking ticket as long as you're under some limit. So personal amounts are "ok," but how does one obtain a "personal" amount from someone else unless they have more than a personal amount? In other words, on one hand it's illegal to deal the drugs, but after you've obtained them illegally it's ok. That logic doesn't square.

> Just because small amounts are decriminalized, it doesn't apply when a person has more than is specified under the law.

> "Possession of larger amounts of drugs, manufacturing and distribution are still crimes," Fox said.

https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2021/01/31/what-...

The point of decriminalizing personal amounts of drugs is to change police behavior because they are doing more harm than good in this area.

You want to arrest the people who are dealing drugs or causing other crimes, not permanently ruining the lives of people who are doing no harm to society.

It's not strictly true that they do no harm to society. A lot of deeply addicted people are still objectively a blight on their surroundings, even if you view it as a health issue that calls for help rather than a moral issue that calls for punishment.

Let's not underplay that damage drugs and addicts do. They're not the source of the problem, they shouldn't be the focus of the solution but let's be honest.

Drugs aren't magical life-ruiners, that suddenly descend on unsuspecting healthy people and destroy them. The people you're describing are mostly already damaged by their own lives, hurting badly, and unable to emotionally function on their own. If you removed heroin or meth from the equation, they'd get drunk, instead... And they'd be roughly the same blight on their surroundings, regardless of their choice of substance.

Our drug problems are, at root, a mental health issue. And neither will ever be resolved in a society that doesn't understand that both problems are one.

Just to add - much of the damage of Heroin, and other drugs cut with fentanyl is precisely BECAUSE it is illegal.

Heroin is smuggled in from Colombia in some mule's intestines and then injected DIRECTLY into the user's bloodstream. This causes many different kinds of fatal blood clots and bacterial infections.

When Heroin was legal in this country (given as a cough medicine to young kids in the 1920s) it didn't lead to a reduction in the life expectancy of the users.

If you are saying addicts commit crimes e.g. burglary well then prosecute them for those crimes, that’s the only way I can take the “blight on their surroundings. Taken a different way, there are a lot of humans in the us who use other drugs, alcohol e.g. who are not considered a blight on their surroundings. Street drugs could be like those drug, and in fact during prohibition alcohol was an illegal “street” drug.

Prosecute the addicts for the crimes they commit instead of criminalizing addiction.

Why not just legalize them completely?

That makes sense to me. Chasing consumers is a waste of time and money. The arrest itself might cause more societal damage than the drugs if it ruins people's lives or is used to target minorities.

Some people argue that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement is the main purpose of laws against drug consumers.

Smell marijuana > Search vehicle

I didn't know there was a term for that. It's exactly what I was thinking about.

At the very least, it makes it hard to prosecute low level drug offenders, which is where the most abuse (originating from the government) is in the system.

In a perfect world, I would like to see all drugs decriminalized. I would like to see drugs given to people by the government free of charge. Of course they would have to sit through a common sense education movies, titled "Ok you want to ruin your life with hard drugs--fine, but sit through this educational film."

Until we get there; I am fine with small amounts of illegial drugs being an infraction.

I like decriminalization, but don't like government production.

The film idea is funny, but I still disagree with that too. As anyone can tell from my commentary, I'm a crazy no government guy, so that's just my bias.

The enforcement objectives are like a horseshoe.

The police have an incentive to get collars for petty possession, mostly to bank warrants for future trouble, and to go after big or brazen networks.

The people in the middle are mostly free of interference. I used to work in a building that was about a block away from the county court, 4 blocks from a police precinct hq. Yet I watched three guys sell drugs across the street for the two years that I worked there.

It has its ups and downs. In my state, with bail reform, woke stuff, and marijuana possession decriminalization, there has been a wave of shootings and murders as the gangs reorg and the cops are caught with their pants down.

Well the reason for that is that the large cartels are already part of the game.

SOCOM needs a place to get the money for their off the books operations, and if you start looking into special operations units it turns out there are a lot of those guys pretty heavily involved in drug trafficking.

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