Suspected head of $21B crime syndicate may be world’s most innovative drug lord
torontolife.com
torontolife.com
That's a lot of taxation money lost, a lot of policing wasted, and a lot of lives lost needlessly.
We could, and should tax them more on earnings too, despite loop holes and tax heavens.
But even if you could just get VAT on drugs and prostitution, that would be HUGE. Not to mention profits would go to legal businesses, which would stimulate the economy, instead of going into criminals pockets, which hurts society.
I was shocked to read in the article that one in seven Australians have tried it. Is that true? That’s a real crisis if so.
>These radical criminal businessmen began as Communist partisans and Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and were sent to Guangdong province in southeast China for re-education in the 1960s and ’70s.
Must be something in the communist Kool aid. Disproportionate share of the Russian businessmen of 199x with all it's ruthlessness, illegallity and violent crimes, raiding and takeovers came straight from the Young Communist organization bureaucracy.
https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...
As an Aussie that number doesn't seem big at all and is probably an underestimation.
1. Recreational, like marijuana and alcohol and many hallucinogens, where regulating and taxing is the best solution, to deter organized crime and make sure people are getting the product they want to get
2. Harmful (and the definition is tough here) like meth and heroin, where the goal is something closer to medically supervised use, and breaking the habit where appropriate, but also making sure people are getting real drugs and not resorting to more dangerous alternatives or those of unknown origin.
The point isn't that drugs are good, it's that people will do them anyway, so how do you remove the criminal element and keep people safer under the circumstances. I agree that they shouldn't sell meth at convenience stores, but someone addicted should be able to talk to a doctor and get it, and not have to buy some dangerous unknown thing off the street.
I imagine if this happened, the next fight would be social control advocate groups pushing for currently legal drugs (alcohol) to me moved to my category 2. People's own puritan values and a hatred of the idea that someone else may be enjoying themselves in a way they don't endorse are a (the) main root cause of all the societal problems with drugs imo
Also there's no reason to not regulate some stuff like sportcars. Go to a speedway go fast there, not where kids play on the street.
The important question is about harm reduction. People trying drugs without support. The current system already produces addicts.
Can a different system lead to better results, plus as a side-quest defunds the cartels?
Addicts are where the money is. If you want to make bank on drugs, it's all about speeding up the downward spiral of addiction and extracting maximum value from addicts while they're spiraling.
I don't think that people hate seeing others having fun, but rather its the demonization of drugs in the post war era to quell social movements that has now entrenched a deep hatered to substances not blessed back then that is the bigger issue.
Consider dextrometorphan. This is a common over the counter cough medication. It can also be used recreationally - but the recreational dose is 30 times the therapeutic dose. Amphetamine is similar: methheads are not swallowing a single pill of Adderall, like medical users are.
There is a real problem with some drugs that become physically addictive. A person can fairly easily drink alcohol or take adderall regularly without suffering physical withdrawals. I'm not so sure this would be the case with heroin, for instance. I don't think in those instances the drugs were demonized to quell social movements, but because they were substances that too easily consumed people's lives.
GoodRx hilariously has great meth coupons:
In case you're not familiar with the details of psychopharmacology, or are lucky enough to have a more "normal" brain, it's quite common for one to spend a long time with their doctor, doing trial and error with different compounds that are variants on the same structure, even different isomers can have a noticeable effect for the patient.
At one stop on my journey, I was prescribed dexedrine, which I previously had only heard of in the context of the great Paul Erdos.
Sadly, despite my hopes and dreams, there was no noticeable increase in the proliferation of my math output.
Completely tangential, but regarding Paul Erdos, I recall hearing about a story where a colleague of his was concerned about his amphetamine use and offered to pay him a sum of money to go cold turkey for a month. Erdos was pretty adamant that amphetamines were a boon to his math research, so he went cold turkey for a month to prove he could, took the money, and then promptly resumed his usage.
Not sure if it's true or what lessons are to be learned there, but it's a fun story :)
Same!! (Ritalin doesn't work on me either).
On my "journey to what works" the least pleasant, and most amusing in retrospect, was Strattera. Somehow, that medicine cranked up the "impatient asshole" knob in my brain to 11. I was cursing out people on the street for no rational reason, and carrying myself with more confidence than I've ever felt in my life. Things where I would normally have a patience of minutes became seconds. I found myself getting pissed off at dear friends for talking too slowly, interrupting them "can you fucking speed up please?". I quit after 5 days. :)
At the time, my doctor seemed skeptical of the side effect, but a decade later I found documented evidence of it in others. Curiously, the medicine works quite effectively, no side effects, for someone who shares half my DNA. Brains are weird!
Tangentially, I've heard a variant of that Erdos story too! Clearly it must be true. ;-)
Case in point - L-methamphetamine is or was used in Vicks inhalers in some countries, notably the US, as it has none of the euphoriant effects of D-methamphetamine but it does still cause vasoconstriction, which can help with a blocked nose!
I also think you're conflating addiction to dependency or withdrawal symptoms. Physical withdrawal symptoms are extremely common with stimulants - then again, they're common for basically all other drugs too. Adderall, caffeine, hell, even Tylenol all have withdrawal symptoms. If you're a daily coffee drinker, going a day without will likely cause a splitting migraine and some personality changes for a day or two! Many OTC nasal sprays for hayfever are known for having ferocious withdrawal symptoms, but they aren't addictive or abusable.
People who abuse stimulants take a dose vastly higher than any therapeutic dose. The effects end up being very different. You mention heroin, but heroin itself was originally marketed - for years! - as a non-addictive alternative to morphine, and was sold as a cough suppressant. Many people used it; most didn't get addicted. Cocaine was a fairly common additive to drinks for years; Thomas Edison was famously a fan of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani (as were two popes and numerous other famous figures).
There's nothing magical about heroin. Prescribe a therapeutic dose of a strong opioid, and maybe 1% (the data here is bad, but most studies cluster around this point) of your patients will get addicted and start abusing it (by taking a vastly higher dose); the other 99% will not. We keep demonising drugs, seemingly almost at random, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with the nature of the drugs.
Well, I won't say "just try and compare" because recommending to try that would be a devil's advice but the difference is huge and I don't need any scientific paper to confirm that. For a person having actual ADHD amphetamine can be a reasonable tool to manage it sustainably, at the same time meth would at least cause rapid tolerance build-up leading them to increase dosage very fast and face all sorts of health issues. You also won't be able to return to amphetamine soon after having tried meth, the former is going to have almost no effect until your brain chemistry actually recovers.
Start reading from "There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine."
Most relevant quote: "Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the [supposedly] greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH."
Regarding withdrawal symptoms, it's again anecdotal on my end. I have been taking prescribed adderall for ADD since I was a teen. When I do go off it for a prolonged period of time, I don't notice withdrawal so much as a mood shift and a decline in productivity. I'm more or less comfortable being lethargic and lazy when I'm off it, but I take it because I think it makes me better at being a person (ability to focus for one, but also just taking the time to do menial but important every-day tasks I might otherwise let go by the wayside, for example).
I think this speaks to your point though, that in correct dosages the withdrawal in (pharmaceutical grade) drugs can be safely mitigated.
On a slight tangent, I'd like to point to the ongoing opioid crisis. I wonder if the reason it occurred was not only because doctors made the drug readily available, but because so many people were told by their doctor--a generally trusted authority--to take larger doses? If it were only accessibility that led to the crisis, there may be some truth to the idea that some drugs are true public health hazards.
Apologies for rambling a bit, I'm somewhat on the fence about this topic, and I know this is a complicated issue to unravel.
Note that the rate of opioid prescription in the US had dropped by nearly 50% since 2012 [1], while the overdose rate has more than doubled [2]][3]. Meanwhile the same crackdown that has led to a huge decline in prescriptions has also led to a decrease in the amount prescribed, to the extent that there is strong evidence it is harming patients because doctors are so afraid of losing their license they are unwilling to prescribe the correct therapeutic dose to patients.
A study in JAMA recently found that when doctors reduce the dosage of pain medication prescribed to long term opioid therapy, it leads to a threefold increase in suicide attempts and a 69% increase in overdoses[4]. In other words, the federal guidelines adopted to try and ensure that the drug was less readily available from doctors and prescribed in smaller doses seems likely to have cost a significant number of lives.
There don't seem to be easy answers, and the driving forces behind (and possible solutions to) the massive increase in overdose deaths in the US remain elusive. But at a minimum a simple model of "it's caused by doctors giving people prescriptions for painkillers" seems to not be supported by evidence at this time.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html
[2]: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over...
[3]: https://apnews.com/article/overdose-deaths-record-covid-pand...
[4]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782643?gu...
No, it really isn't. US doctors were massively over-prescribing very strong opioids and telling patients that these were not addictive.
This meant that communities were flooded with clean, pure, strong, opioids. This supply was legal. The fact that it subsequently got diverted into the misuse supply chain doesn't alter the known facts of the opioid crisis - that there was massive over-supply of legal meds.
though alcohol is notably one of the few common drugs (along with benzos) where withdrawal can actually kill you.
[0] https://montarebehavioralhealth.com/why-is-desoxyn-on-the-do...
Alcohol already kills more people than heroin. Sure you could argue maybe perhaps more people will do heroin if it's legal, but I highly doubt that.
I 100% agree on the puritan social preaching being a hinderance to support. People don't want to "support someones addiction" which means basically no resources.
I'm for full legalization personally.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
I don't disagree that there are vary bad sides to drug use, same as for driving, soda pop, cheese, whatever. But we shouldn't pretend in a vacuum that there are not also positives, and short of severe societal consequences (like with some hard drugs, perhaps) people should generally be able to choose for themselves
Granted, the world may fall in on itself and there's a small risk time will stop.
It’s a gastronomic loss that people don’t experience this.
To non-drinkers who have never drunk alcohol or have not for a long time, it seems these flavours don't work so well, and all wine is quite nasty (this is anecdotal data from observing such folk).
So yes, subjectively I love the taste of a good red, or a well made cocktail, or a fine rum. But the effect of the drug is bound up in my neurological response to it as well as just the flavour.
https://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/News%20stories/dnutt-lanc...
I would encourage you to read it before marking it as a “narrow view”. It is literally taking a broad view factoring in societal impacts. It is written by highly respected experts.
Alcohol absolutely has severe societal impacts: violence rates are positively correlated to rate of alcohol consumption; clogging up hospitals with self inflicted injuries, driving under the influence, health issues (liver damage), clogging up emergency departments on the weekend etc.
I mean I could literally go on. Of all the drugs alcohol really shouldn’t be as easily available as it is.
Personally I find the argument that it does “good” pretty wishy washy and more driven by societal bias toward it as an accepted medium for socialistion. Alternatives do exist.
My brother died of a heroin overdose many years ago. If it had been legal, pure, and known quality that likely wouldn't have happened (he could still have been affected by addiction like our mother with alcohol, but he wouldn't be dead).
It so easily could be changed, but we are collectively trapped by the delusion that the only route to safety is to make drugs illegal. You'll see it here on HN, in this thread, about how the "dangerous" drugs should not be readily available because people will get hurt if society lets them have legal access.
It's such an easily solvable problem and we collectively support the worst possible way to deal with it -- it's crazy making.
Overdoses on opiates happen even with legal opiates [1] and it's related to tolerance mechanisms. You become tolerant to euphoric effects much faster than you become tolerant to respiratory depression and nausea.
This basically makes opiates much more dangerous than any other drug class.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/featured-topics/overdose-de... - prescription opioids alone contribute to 9.2% of overdose deaths excluding alcohol.
I like how you phrased this as if it were a meaningful metric. Is "safe for women" more useful than safe for everybody including children?
Do you have perhaps things relating to brawls, muggings, drunk driving arrests and accidents, drunk pedestrian road fatalities, suicide rates as determinants for a safe city? I'd think they're more reasonable than a vague metric as "safest for women"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_incid...
> This is a list of states and union territories of India ranked by incidents of human trafficking as of 2016, and is based on the number of convicted cases. The list is compiled from the '2016 Crime in India Report' published by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Government of India.[1]
Of course this kind of data has its own issues (e.g. incidents that don't end in a conviction because of bribery or police/judicial misconduct or that don't get caught by police at all don't end up in it), but it's probably the qualitatively best data you can get.
If we sold Opiates/Fentanyl to anyone who wanted it it, in whatever quantities, and there were no social stigma, with 80% of teens doing it 'at least a little bit' before age 21, and 97% of the adult population consuming opiates at least on some occasion again with 'easy access' ... the harm would be orders of magnitude greater than alcohol.
Ignoring that most people wouldn't try hard drugs even if they were more readily available, the current opiate problem is more like if alcohol was unregulated and made in bathtubs everywhere, and every few beers had methanol in it instead of ethanol.
While I am generally all for harm reduction and even legalization, 19th century history shows what happens when opium becomes readily available to a country with no limitations.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
It doesn't.
Something that is illegal, is by definition a social taboo. The removal of that taboo implies more acceptance. The fact that more people use it will only increase acceptance by word of mouth etc. and that's at minimum.
The only question is by how much will usage increase?
Already, with severe legal restrictions and controls, opioid use is rapidly increasing the US, which is what we call 'extreme product market fit' (i.e. the drugs 'fits' our dopamine pathways) see [1]
The other major factors are 1) addiction / tolerance and 2) self-medication 3) money, i.e. capitalism.
As for 1)
"Roughly 21 to 29 percent of patients prescribed Opioids for chronic pain misuse them"
"An estimated 4 to 6 percent who misuse prescription Opioids transition to heroin." [2]
Those are just simple, top line numbers, and very potent at that.
Even with limited marketing and 'soft non-acceptance / promotion' - I believe it's something that vast numbers of people will seek it out 'just to party' or for 'the Vegas' trip etc. and especially for 2) i.e. as an easy painkiller/mood moderator which will leave a lot of people addicted.
As for 3)
If it's legal and profits can be made, they will be made. Investors at large may be 'moral' but there is always plenty of 'highly amoral' capital to do whatever, and in this case, it'd be producing the product with the most 'product market fit' in existence.
Increased use of opiods etc. will have no upside, only downside. It has to be regulated and controlled, it's best to keep it at a minimum.
In Canada they prescribe them by the pill, not the 1/2 bottle, i.e. you get a single pill for toot surgery because its just so addictive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
[2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...
They're correlated, but it's not a causative relationship. It's not illegal for a dominatrix to step on your genitals and make you call her mommy. That's taboo, and legal. On the other hand, jaywalking is illegal - and not a taboo.
> The only question is by how much will usage increase?
That is the question, but I think we should be open to the answer being zero or even negative - just as we are open to the answer being positive. How much drug addiction and usage is furthered by throwing addicts into prison where the only escape is more drugs?
How about the folks who make it out of prison but cannot get jobs because of their felony possession charges, who then lose their friends and family, and once again escape into drugs?
This is a multifaceted challenge.
Not really, and this is the problem with this thread and issue in general.
Sure, we should be open to the possibility of certain things, but that doesn't mean they are reasonable or even likely, and it distracts from more obvious and likely scenarios.
When debating issues, people have a tendency to be rhetorical and not pragmatic.
Opiods are not like meth or coke: there is a big, legal market for them (!) so we have lots of exposure to what happens when we prescribe 1/2 a bottle for patients, vs only the 1 or 2 pills for post-surgery.
In those 'mini cases' of increased access i.e. where you have a leftover bottle of Oxycodone, problems are much more likely than otherwise.
It's ridiculous to suggest that someone having a bottle of Oxycodone available (i.e. greater access) is somehow going to be 'less likely' to develop problems than someone who does.
We already have a lot of behavioural science, and the laws of supply and demand to help us out, but even that is pedantic in the face of anyone with exposure to this issue.
To imply that legalization and widespread availability of a highly addictive substance would 'reduce' usage would be to deny everything we understand.
If you lower the cost of something, consumption increases.
There isn't even a decent rhetorical argument for why 'consumption would decrease' in the face of easy access. I suppose that some behaviours that are 'social taboos' make them more attractive, but that's not a strong argument.
Ask a regular doctor or pharmacist who has to prescribe Opioids what they think would happen if we just made them 'over the counter' like Tylenol.
The only group of people who would condone expansion of access, are some healthcare professionals who support harm reduction policies, and even then, that would be very limited access.
We are where we are for the next few decades at least until either powerful new technologies change the game, we develop much more powerful social abilities, or for some reason the substances are just eradicated from common awareness.
They found that most patients did not want to increase their dose of the opioid. They just didn't want to be cut off the meds they were given. It makes so much sence.
I'm to lazy to look it up.
I don't understand this all, or nothing mentality when it comes to drugs.
I truly feel the American Opioid crisis could have been less devastating if government provided patients/addicts with with access to the medication with limits.
Actually, bupenorpine would probally be the better drug to make available to anyone that wanted it.
Pot isn't all that taboo, yet it is very illegal in some states and illegal at the federal level.
And fwiw: I don't have the article now, but perhaps part of the reason you don't get a bottle for tooth surgery is because a combination of ibuprofen and paracet (tylenol) is generally enough especially if you have time off work to rest.
Norway gives a pre-counted package of 20 that are in blister packs, even though it is addictive.
Even with limited marketing and 'soft non-acceptance / promotion' - I believe it's something that vast numbers of people will seek it out 'just to party' or for 'the Vegas' trip etc. and especially for 2) i.e. as an easy painkiller/mood moderator which will leave a lot of people addicted.
If you say so. I mean, you are acting like we are just going to give folks as many drugs as they want, in an uncontrolled fashion - and it doesn't have to be like that at all. You don't need investors to be 'moral' - because obviously, they probably aren't going to be considering how businesses treat folks now - you just need laws and enforcement to look out for people.
By the way: Upsides are things like being able to have a professional give you a single, proper dose for partying and give folks information - actual, truthful information that isn't a DARE-esque scare tactic ("Its just so addictive..."). A professional does screening. ID required. If we log prescriptions and sudafed, we can do this. We can give information. Folks that are addicted can get maintenance doses and get actual help.
Edit: FWIW: The crisis in the US is more than just drug availability. Being able to get help if you find yourself addicted would help lots. At the same time, things like paid time off to rest after surgeries would help as well.
Heroin doesn't make folks immediately addicted, neither do pills. And with things being illegal, we realistically have no clue how many people take them as a party drug occasionally without ever getting addicted.
>It doesn't.
Absolutely correct. cf. Tobacco smoking.
A reasonable point.
However, smoking indoors is illegal because smoking is less 'socially acceptable', not the other way around.
There has been, over the last 30 years or so, a concerted effort (with warnings on US cigarette packs, more dire ones on UK packs, and disgusting photos on packs elsewhere in Europe), as well as marketing/advertising pushes to make smoking less acceptable.
And (in the US, at least, not sure about elsewhere), many fewer people smoke and those who do are often harassed/berated even when they smoke where it's legal to do so.
As such, I'd expect similar results (given similar efforts) for other drugs.
Before/after photos of meth heads/heroin addicts on packaging, marketing/advertising efforts, etc. would likely have a similar effect.
What's more (again, at least in the US, although I'd expect it'd be true wherever such drugs are criminalized), the costs associated with such efforts, as well as treatment programs for those who need them, would be significantly less costly than the monies spent on interdiction, enforcement and incarceration.
Perhaps I'm missing something important here?
No - this is false.
It's illegal because it's harmful to others - and - it's generally a nuisance i.e. it really smells quite a lot.
Chewing tobacco is completely legal 'indoors' and it has many of the same negative effects. It's not even up for consideration in terms of banning. You can chew it on the Subway, at the Office.
"Perhaps I'm missing something important here?"
Yes, you're missing the fact that we already do heavy suppression of Meth/Heroin i.e. teaching kids how terrible it is, featuring it in films as extremely negative, positioning it as 'totally socially taboo and unacceptable behaviour'.
Selling it in stores legally is both an increase in availability, and a significant reduction in social taboo.
This is not even an argument.
Widespread availability and lessening of social taboos of an extremely addictive substance, which addicts develop a tolerance for and quickly move onto more powerful substances (Fentanyl) would yield a major public health crisis. We already have on on our hands.
70 000 dead from OD in the USA in 2019 - and rising 32 000 car accident deaths in the USA 2019 - and going down
It's growing quite a lot in the Midwest.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2013-2017-increase.h...
>No - this is false.
>It's illegal because it's harmful to others - and - it's generally a nuisance i.e. it really smells quite a lot.
And it was less harmful or a nuisance before it became illegal? And it smelled less too? Please.
Smoking indoors was banned because of the effort to make it less socially acceptable.
If it were otherwise, those bans would have been in place 40 years ago. We knew it was harmful in the 1960s (actually, even before that, but various societies didn't start trying to make it less socially acceptable until the 1970s).
It wasn't until the 1990s/2000s when such bans went into effect. Why? Because smoking had become less socially acceptable -- through conscious efforts[0][1] over decades to make it so.
>Chewing tobacco is completely legal 'indoors' and it has many of the same negative effects. It's not even up for consideration in terms of banning. You can chew it on the Subway, at the Office.
So what? I was (and explicitly said so) talking about smoking, not chew.
You are apparently ignorant of history. Which makes it hard to have a conversation that, for obvious reasons, needs to take that history into account. So let's not.
[0] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_nicotine_marketi...
>Selling it in stores legally is both an increase in availability, and a significant reduction in social taboo.
Who, exactly are you responding to here? Because it isn't me.
I never even implied that such drugs should be fully legalized/commercialized.
Go and build, then knock down your straw man somewhere else. I'm not interested.
It polled at 54% in favour of the ban in 2004 (and I was slightly off on the date, enacted 2006 taking effect 2007):
https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/smoking-ban...
It's only anecdotal, but my point is that I think it's considerably less socially acceptable (indoors or out) now than it was when it came in. And I think as a result. I think a lot of people smoked less and less and many gave up altogether, and the fewer people do something the less acceptable it seems.
???
Tobacco indicates to us that the answer is 'absolutely false', not 'absolutely correct'
Smoking is absolutely a socially accepted behaviour.
We ban it in certain areas largely because it's intrusive to others.
It's not fully condoned obviously we don't put it in film or advertise it - but it is a widely consumed product.
If Opiates ever reached the penetration of smoking, we'd have a situation as bad as COVID.
We already have a public health crisis with Opiods, and they are very aggressively suppressed and controlled.
True legalization (i.e. more than decriminalization) would wield some pretty scary problems.
I don't even understand how this is not just a rhetorical argument.
This is something of an assertion. We can certainly anticipate some effects, by looking at countries that have had opium problems in the past. But that would have to be countered by looking at the deaths, physical and mental health consequences, violence and all sorts of other problems caused by alcohol, and doing so honestly.
There is a huge tendency to write it off as "just a beer" and think "I can handle it" and then compare your relationship with alcohol to the worst addicts of another drug, neatly ignoring the many millions who end up on a dark path through booze.
And needles are not even required
Wikipedia is surprisingly thorough on most drug articles. But you may even have seen such pipes for sale in stores... it can be smoked. Smoking various substances is pretty well accepted by society, even.
I personally know 3 people that have tried heroin. It quickly has destroyed two of their lives. 0 ability to hold a job, maintain relationships, if not for family they would be homeless. My other friend was able to use it in moderation for a decade but recently going down the same path.
The idea that heroin is less harmful then alcohol is absolutely ludicrous. The reason it has done less economic harm is because it's less accessable, extremely taboo, illegal, etc.
I am not saying that’s the only difference. I agree heroin is obviously far more powerful a drug, and far more addictive. So I don’t think it should be fully legalised and sold in shops. But making it legal for addicts to use under medical supervision in special licensed places seems a sensible compromise. It would probably scale down the black market (which reduces drug pushing on new users), it would reduce immediate dangers (heroin is pretty safe when administered properly in a clean environment), and it would probably help addicts get off it and build a new life (it would remove a lot of the chaos from their lives and would expose them to drug counsellors).
If we don’t let people have access to pure drugs under conditions that limit the risk of harm, then we should also provide them with the mental health supports they need. People will go to great lengths to kill their pain, including risking death and imprisonment. They shouldn’t be forced into choices like that.
this is so dumb, I have no words
Because "full legalization" means bringing the full firepower of commercial enterprise to bear in order to create addicts, and then profit from the "personal choices" the addicts were statistically guaranteed to make.
If I advocate for decriminalization and limited sale exclusively through state-run shops forbidden from marketing their products... does that make me a "puritan"?
Besides, we already have the capitalist exploitation of addicts in the form of rehab.
Having alcohol illegal - or even just simply decriminalized - doesn't stop that. In fact, we were worse off since it allowed violent crime to rise instead of doing stuff like solving domestic abuse (this was one of the arguments for prohibition). Folks died since strength and purity wasn't regulated.
Which realistically hits at the point of the exchange - effects of legalisation.
Though simply having government inspected pure drugs in set pre-sized doses + no ads would be huge for ODs and communicable diseases ('kit' included).
Speaking of religion dominating this debate, lots of southern states and utah have state run or heavily regulated alcohol laws. Maybe similar to that model in that there is still a 'free market' but the middle man is the gov.
On the last. No.
I'm talking about how the base of a lot of addiction services is founded by or based in religion.
How lots of homeless shelters - in some cities the only spaces - are run by religious orgs with mandates to receive services.
When I talk with people who are not in the recovery community I often hear things like, 'i'm not going to give money to that homeless person because they'll just spend it on drugs.'
Or why should they get free housing. They're just going to get high in it. They don't deserve what I consider basic human necessities.
That whole construct - which sounds like maybe you and I have some similar views - drives an us against them frame, instead of looking wider at the commercial 'who' interests.
When housing is a profit driver and artificially limited, it's better for the capital that we fight amongst ourselves instead of pushing that we should all have affordable (in many cases that means free) access to housing.
I also hear similar puritan - in the sense these opinion holders think they are saving, purifying, rebirthing, baptizing to reform whatever.
Like jails & criminalizing behavior & poverty as a vehicle for what they consider fixing peoples lives.
'they are their own maker,' 'god is guiding everything is a lesson tough love,' as addicts are forcefully detoxed in solitary or dangerous jails without medical supervision (which is torture for this convo on opiates. and can be very dangerous for other kinds of gaba drugs).
Elected sheriffs are the worst... Often preaching their own religious beliefs to win elections because that's what their county constituents believe. Arpaio as an example of inhumane and illegal treatment.
Yeah and it kills more people than nuclear bombs and pet tigers combined. But unlike nuclear gonna, pet tigers and heroin, alcohol is used by perhaps a majority of adults, so the numbers need to be adjusted accordingly.
I'm curious, is there an equivalent with heroin? Can you sustain at casual usage for years without succumbing to addiction?
Which is to say, your idea only makes sense as long as everyone agrees with your classification, which has generally not been the case.
Do I think making those drugs legal and purchasable over the counter would make the situation better or worse? Worse, much worse.
From where I'm sitting, the major negative externalities are overdose deaths' (which are mostly for spiked doses/things not not being what they claimed) and gang activity.
Legalization makes both of those go away.
But it's true, there are some people who think that having an addict cause $5000 worth of damage to steal a $500 item that they'll pawn for $50 is preferable to just giving him a goddamn prescription. [1] At least with the status quo, nobody's conscience is troubled...
If your goal is to stop people from being high, criminalization isn't doing it. If your goal is to stop people from taking more and more drugs until they eventually overdose, it's not doing that either. If your goal is to stop functional addicts from going down the drain into non-functional addiction, you're not even hitting the same ball park.
[1] With an optional bonus level of spending $50,000 to prosecute and incarcerate and dump right back onto the street, if your town is into that sort of thing.
You think we should just give them free drugs in addition to the housing and food we already give them? Because the drugs are cheaper than the robberies?
Look, the simple fact is many people are not entrepreneurial. They work instead of doing drugs because they know they have to in order to have a decent go at life. If you just make being high all day and acceptable and low cost life decision, you could easily see 90% of people in some communities choose that option.
We do actually exist on earth in the pitiful condition that if we all just sit on our asses and do nothing, we'll die.
Does that not seem pragmatic to you?
While we give them those drugs we can make sure they're not getting anything nasty or weird in there so they don't just up and die, and we can help them recover when the opportunity presents.
But if you'd rather live with more petty crime, and more expensive policing, more or less for the sake of being spiteful... well you get where we are today.
> If you just make being high all day and acceptable and low cost life decision, you could easily see 90% of people in some communities choose that option.
I think that would be a damning verdict on how unfulfilling and hopeless those communities have become regardless of drugs.
> Unfulfilling and hopeless
It's the human condition.
Yeah, and that would surely cause most humans to empathise with other humans suffering from addiction, and help those others the best way they can, by a) reducing harm to the addicts and b) helping them overcome their addiction. The fact that this c) also reduces incident crime levels and reduces suffering for yet another group of humans is surely a bonus.
'Pragmatic' in this case is referring to taking actions you consider morally questionable, but with the aim of reduction of harm all around.
I don't see how this is robotic or lacking in empathy. Quite the opposite.
> It's the human condition.
It's really not, not for 90% of a given community unless there is something else seriously wrong with that community.
In what US state do the homeless get housing? Or do you mean prison?
>Look, the simple fact is many people are not entrepreneurial. They work instead of doing drugs because they know they have to in order to have a decent go at life.
Is this from a study you've read or are you just making shit up? Isn't "Rat Park" psychology 101? This is an incredibly jarring point of view when you also consider many of the heroin addicts where onramped by doctors getting kickbacks from Purdue Pharma.
You should really research Purdue Pharma litigation if you don't know. Making sweeping general statements without even being aware of one of the biggest pharmaceutical settlements in recent history is surprising. In short, Purdue Pharma was bribing doctors to get patients hooked on Oxycontin.
>Your solution is to let people get them more freely.
My solution has more to do with housing than free drugs. Legalized, controlled, distribution would allow hospitals to more accurately keep track of who is dependent on these drugs, and having stable housing is shown to be a requirement for rehab.
Ultimately, when you look at the homeless problem you have 4 choices: you can kill them, imprison them, house them, or leave them alone. Choices (1) and (2) should never be considered in a free society; leaving choice (3) and (4). Choice (3) would mean some kind of socialized housing (a là Vienna), which is obviously a no-go in America so you find that (4) is the best option that you see implemented in America.
It's possible that you may think that being a homeless addict with a drug prescription is an 'acceptable low cost life decision'.
I personally don't see how adding 'with a drug prescription' suddenly makes it particularly attractive and low cost. From all I can observe, living in that sort of situation is still utter misery and shit. Can't say I feel one bit of envy for it, when I drive past the onramp tents - even if the drugs were free.
Do you?
My preference to ban drugs mainly comes from the harm and way they hack the brain to lower the barrier of that harm. And because they are so powerful, not only do I think it’s immoral to have that harm done to another person, I also think it makes society worse when significant chunks of the population are incapacitated (and hampered from a better life) due to an addictive substance.
Another example of this is gambling, or social media to a lesser degree. We all agree they have harmful effects to the individual, and have strong capacity to make society worse for everyone - even if you don’t participate. So we’re better off in the long term if we contain their addictive powers.
As far as I can tell that’s a pretty progressive and empathetic opinion.
And i do all kind of hard drugs
I'm not a fan of meth, but I recognize propaganda when I see it. Meth has gotten (and still gets) the Reefer Madness treatment. From what I've observed, this narrative is so exaggerated as to be more or less false.
https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/resource/estimating-number-reg...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
[0] https://nadk.flinders.edu.au/kb/methamphetamines/use-pattern...
Legal meth
All drugs were decriminalized in Portugal in 2001 and saw Portugal saw their usage remain roughly constant. Their negative health and societal effects, however, plummeted - from among the worst in the EU to among the best in the EU. [2]
I think legalization is a pretty obvious next step. Anybody who wants smack now can get smack, right now. Being illegal isn't making it any less accessible. I strongly believe that if it were legal, there wouldn't exactly be a flood of new drug users lining up at the dispensary to give crystal meth and black tar heroin a go. However not making them available is causing crime, sickness, violence and fueling a drug war that's hurting everyone.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/why-do-states-tax-ill...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
Interestingly, China appears to have more meth users per capita than Western countries like the US, with 0.5% or 13 million total Chinese users.
Those of us who are in favor of legalizing drugs on the principle of cognitive liberty -- that every adult should be free to do what they will with their own minds -- should support the legalization of all drugs, not just their favored drugs.
We should also move away from blaming substances or their users for addiction, and look at what's missing in people's lives, at how the world is broken and lacking and how this dysfunction is leading people to seek solace in doing things that make them feel good, even to their own detriment.
The war on drugs has plainly failed to solve addiction, and will continue to fail, because it does not get at the root of the problem, which lies not in the substances, nor in their users, nor their suppliers.
I think this is the right spirit, yet inconsistent with humanity. People are silly. They won't always (or even most of the time) do the rational thing for themselves, even when they know what it is. Some people start using drugs to fill a void, while others do it simply because they met the wrong person, or they wanted to see what it was like, or they wanted to impress their peer group, or any other silly reason. For examples of this, look no further than the rampant use of drugs in the entertainment industry. These actresses and rock stars can afford anything they want in life (especially counseling), yet so many still chase highs.
They can afford things that money can buy, but they may be missing much of what money can't buy.
A lot of cocaine is meth, which maybe is used across more socioeconomic classes (all) than intentional meth
there is probably a population that has only had meth but thought it was coke
Even adding lidocaine to meth is insufficient to disguise it as cocaine. The bite when tasting or snorting meth is immediate and distinct.
but even there I’m sure there is a lot of misinformation
I wish the state would just control the supply chain and be done with it
We're as methed up as Germany in the 30's and 40's.
That's not very shocking when you consider how many children are exposed to ADHD medication. Adderall is indistinguishable from methamphetamine, Ritalin is a mirror image molecule of methamphetamine, and sometimes methamphetamine is prescribed for ADHD.
Some times doctors will test a child for ADHD by prescribing medication and seeing if it improves or harms their behavior.
Is it a crisis? Or does it show things in a different light - if 1 in 7 Australians has tried it, and the sky hasn't fallen in yet, maybe that means it's not quite as awful as we've been led to believe by the tone of reportage around this drug?
That's not to say it's good, and clearly there are massive negative consequences, but I see meth painted as a boogie-man, where the reality is likely more nuanced. This is an addictive, destructive drug, but there's more to a life spiraling out of control than just the substance at hand.
Why should the government be allowed to tell me what I can and can't do with my body? If you want to meth yourself to death that's not hurting anyone else.
Desperate addicted people do desperate things that often do hurt others.
That includes acoholics.
The dosage and means of administration make all the difference.
Meth/desoxyn is the best rated drug for ADHD and I can see why.
Sell the hard stuff in apothecaries or specialized drug treatment centers at a price point competitive to street dealers and offer people a safe space to consume said drugs. That should at least get fatal overdoses and contamination issues under control, and the consumers are in a place where they can be reached out to by social services (housing assistance, mental health).
Even if drugs can be made in home lab, almost no one is willing to do this. Even for metamphetamine (it's very easy to produce in home), 80% of meth in USA is imported from Mexico.
Producing alcohol is so easy that you can do it accidentally - yet, majority of alcohol abusers just buy it.
Pot was part of this story too. As some American states legalized marijuana, Mexican pot revenue faltered. Many producers switched to making meth and found it liberating. Marijuana took months to grow, was bulky, and could rot. “But with crystal meth,” the member of the Sinaloan drug world told me, “in 10 days you’ve made it. It’s not as bulky as pot, so in two weeks you’re crossing the border with it. Within two or three months, you’re big.”
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
The cartels are not making money off of weed, or even relatively non-addictive psychedelics for which there is limited demand.
The kinds of drugs they distribute, especially since the boom in synthetics are very harmful.
We have an opioid epidemic that is growing rapidly, not unrelated to basic prescription use. This is happening even in places like Canada, where prescriptions are more tightly controlled.
While some highly conscientious slice of the population can handle some recreational use (i.e. a few burning man friends), even among them there are those that will fall (a highly-paid, professional colleague died of an OD), and among the general population large swaths will be immediately consumed by addiction were drugs to be easily available.
Decriminalization may have some positive effect, but if there are any restrictions at all, the Black market will still be enormous, with the 'legal' activity driving demeand for the illegal - probably the worst outcome.
The amount gained in 'taxes' would be a pittance next to the massive public health crisis, or even the lost wages and productivity. I suggest some material % of the population, say 4-10% would be tied up in this activity at least to some extent, with a large cohort of that group being very adversely effected, and many simply deal.
The social costs of widespread opioids/fentanyl, crack and meth would be disastrous. In the long run I think it would be worse than COVID, while it might entail fewer acute casualties, it would be a severe plague on civility that would be very difficult to unroot. If we increased addiction 20x via legalization, and then had to roll back legalization in order to deal with the crises, the 'cartels' that would appear would have 20x the market.
Especially since the advent of much more powerful synthetics which addicts seem to prefer and demand, there's little doubt we have no choice but to keep these things out of the hands of people. It's a game of Supply and Demand and controlling access points, if we really wanted to do it, I think we could.
Do we know this? Certainly the driver for the ever more powerful opiods seems to be the ease of smuggling smaller amounts, with users preferring the 'safer' opiates.
(FWIW I don't think full, unrestricted legalisation of all drugs is a great plan, but there are various kinds of middle ground which may be better than either the status quo or a free for all)
This tolerance escalation is just a deadly concept, because it increases risk by that much more.
Dealers pass it off because it's easier and cheaper to get, because suppliers find it easier to move. I've never heard of users deliberately going after it.
Nobody wants to get fentanyl-spiked heroin, dangerous synthetic cannabinoids, or random phenylethylamines with no history of human use when instead they could be respectively smoking opium, growing their own marijuana, and taking mushrooms as has been done for thousands of years.
> While some highly conscientious slice of the population can handle some recreational use (i.e. a few burning man friends)
So your asshole Burning Man tech-bro friends can get a pass, but the lower classes must pay for the same transgressions.
> If we increased addiction 20x via legalization, and then had to roll back legalization in order to deal with the crises, the 'cartels' that would appear would have 20x the market.
It's absolutely absurd to think that addiction would rise 20x. For a lot of drugs and their current rates of usage that's probably not even possible! Actually think about it, if heroin suddenly became legal would you personally just go out and buy it? Because of where I have lived for the last decade it would be easy to get high-quality heroin within 30 minutes, with no risk other than a $5 bribe, but I have never had any urge to go out and buy heroin. Why would I? I have even tried heroin once in the distant past and used other drugs frequently like cocaine, mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, opium, etc... I could still get most of these but have no interest.
This comment and the other you've made on this article are so filled with contorted arguments that it's difficult to even start.
Also, only so much good can come from "sin taxes". Take lotto (another "sin tax" of sorts). On paper it seems really good for society because all that money can be used for schools and all sorts of social good. But it also has the negative consequence of putting additional financial strain on the people who already have the most financial strain and it's hard to tell if the added funding to schools cancels out the additional financial strain placed on the lower classes.
This reads as patronizing. Somebody wants to buy a lotto ticket, that's their business. The alternative to lotto are the numbers games they replaced which were backed by violence.
Maximum employment and productivity are the highest economic policy goals.
Cannabis and recreational drugs reduce time, energy, and interest available towards employment.
Prostitution lowers the price of sex with women. One of the biggest motivators of employment and productivity among men is the high price of marriage, monogamous sex with women.
I am so sick of this simplistic MBA style of thought. It ignores literally, figuratively, and morally the needs of humans who are under the rule of politicians, managers, and investors that simplify things into statments like this.
Most people are so detatched from the actual needs. Do you think if people that drink could socially use meth would be better off while they have paid sex with a legal prostitute high on meth and go back to with the next day to pay their morgage ?
Maybe if we were noy over taxes and living in precarious times .. People would beli3ve they have a future from their effort.
A lawmaker is not looking at prostitution from an economic lens, they are looking at how their constituents will react with horror at how the representative is enabling what they perceive as vice
No they're not. Or at least they shouldn't be.
High employment is good because it means that everyone's getting some money to spend on things they want, productivity is good because it means we're making lots of things people want. At the end of the day, the entire economy is about making people's lives better, and things like "inefficiency" are referring to things that make us worse at making stuff people want.
If people want recreational drugs, and restricting access to them makes their lives worse, then restricting access to them is bad (ceteris paribus). Likewise for prostitution. Of course in both cases there are labour concerns, but in general not arresting people for doing non-violent work is a good start to worker enfranchisement.
I also strongly question at best reductive view, at worse highly sexist, view of personal relationships that your comment indicates.
I hate to break it to you. Maximum employment is the one thing the righty capitalistic federal reserve and the lefty communists have in common. if anything the socialists are more (in theory) while capitalists are more in practice.
> Prostitution lowers the price of sex with women. One of the biggest motivators of employment and productivity among men is the high price of marriage, monogamous sex with women.
Perhaps we don’t see more economic arguments for the status quo because they sound stilted and weird. Good lord, “the price of sex with women” is the most joyless thing I’ve ever read here. If someone seriously made that argument to me I’d be more distracted by how weird that sounds more than anything else.
(By the by I also think it’s a bad argument. It fails to understand why people get married, whether or not impressing a partner is actually economically important in aggregate, the differences between low attachment sex and marital sex, engage with the differences in marital rates before and after prostitution was made illegal, the impact of social expectations and norms on marriage, and the economic output of women among other issues).
Prostitution is an industry entirely built upon the price of sex with women.
You can do a thought exercise about what would happen if it was entirely legal with modern financial tools. it would be a bigger shift than just adding property tax in China. Everything would get repriced, from real estate to the wage gap in non prostitutional professions. These thought exercises are not for the faint of heart.
Must take some cognitive dissonance to think my cold analysis is more disrespectful of women and relationships than prostitution itself.
Smoking is a poor lifestyle choice. Deeply addictive with negative effects to your health in the long term, that much is clear.
Heroin and meth can destroy you in less than a year. Physically and economically. It will bankrupt you and turn you into a zombie, after which you will do anything at all for the next fix, crime included.
Smoking does none of these things. It doesn't even alter your state of mind nor do you get high. Smoking doesn't fuel violence in a way alcohol can, nor does it make you delirious in a way strong weed can.
For instance, the big players sell drugs in kilos or dozen of kilos but enforcement calculates the value at the street price of an ounce. It makes for bigger and more impressive numbers but isn’t the reality. When we value a mining company for instance, we’re talking about bulk ore value, not finished retail products made out of that ore value.
21B is a lot of money, but it’s probably not very close to the actual amount.
I would say that the kind of value captured by illigal activity is usually from pathological market cases and you really don't want this value captured (we already had a period where cocaine was added to soft drinks, I'm sure if you launch that you would create massive "value". Doubt this is a society most here would want to live in.
You can buy weed, but only at so-called coffeeshops, which are often shady looking places with a security guard asking for ID. In some areas, the local authorities have made them members-only clubs because of drug tourism, so you need to sign up for them first. And of course, while you can buy it if you really want to, you can't legally grow it. Although there's trials for growing them legally at the moment, because all the growing was done by crime networks in dodgy and unsafe circumstances (think power theft, fire risk, etc).
Tobacco is legal, but over the years they have added more and more measures to discourage them; in rough chronological order, they banned advertising, they added bold text warning people of the security risks, then graphic images of cancers and damaged lungs. Over time they bumped up the extra taxes so that a pack of cigarettes is now over €10. They banned custom packaging, so everything now looks bland. And last year they forbade the products being on display, so they have to be behind a door or in a drawer now. This led to more 'illegal' tobacco imports from abroad.
Prostitution is technically legal, but local counties have clamped down on the locations where it can be practiced, trying to turn the red light districts into gentrified fashion stores. And last year, prostitution was banned entirely as part of corona measures. I mean it's sorta back now, but the amount of from-home and illegal brothels has exploded since then - with human trafficking and slavery to go with it, because there is not enough oversight anymore.
>What gave traditional organized crime its strength in the past—the violence, the control of territory, the ethnic loyalty and defined hierarchies—are the heart of its weakness in the present. Tse had a better system. Instead of ethnic loyalty, transnational and inter-organizational co-operation. Instead of territory, logistics. Instead of hierarchy, metrics. Instead of centralized control, connections. Tse Chi Lop is easily the most significant criminal in Toronto’s history, and he represents, in an entirely diseased way, a perverse triumph of the city. His vast criminal organization flourished through open-mindedness and entrepreneurship, by creating markets and exploiting them in a spirit of eager globalization and cosmopolitanism.
Imagine how much money criminal syndicates could make if they took notes from this guy and all worked together.
Let's set aside what an abject failure the so-called War on Drugs has been in the US and the violence of the drug trade and just appreciate the market economics for a second.
One episode listed all the stages coca leaves took to becoming crack cocaine. Processing in jungle labs, transportation to smugglers, further processing, flying to Mexico, entering the US and distribution. And each stage there is loss to law enforcement, rival gangs, theft, etc and that loss rate is reflected in how the price jumps at each stage.
In another, it detailed how meth (IIRC) entered the US primarily in Phoenix. As a result, Phoenix has (so the show said) the cheapest meth in the US. For every 1000 miles you radiated away from Phoenix, the price doubled.
To me it was fascinating to see people who generally had little education, came from terrible backgrounds and grew up amidst crime and violence talk about the math of distance and price and how it impacted his distribution organization. It's sad to see someone who actually has a talent for hustling and basically sales be lost to the drug world.
This is yet another reason why I think the "are you a felon?" question should basically be outlawed in the US.
Additionally you see how organizations have evolved to insulate themselves from disruption (from rivals or law enforcement). Most people know very little and certainly not the big picture. Merchandise frequently changes hands.
I don't know what the solution here is. I fully support legalization of recreational cannabis in any world where alcohol consumption is legal. I certainly don't think we should be sending people to prison for possession.
At the same time, you have cities like Seattle, Portland and San Francisco that are literally being destroyed by non-policing of drugs and small property crime.
But the US prison industrial complex is and always has been a direct attack on the poor and minorities.
I mostly agree with this. First, you shouldn’t be allowed to ask about arrests, indictments, or other form of accusations. You should only be allowed to ask about convictions.
Further, those questions should be limited to convictions for crimes directly related to the job at hand, and should be time limited. For example, if you’re hiring an accountant that will be managing the organization’s cash, I think you should be allowed to ask if the applicant has been convicted in the last N (let’s say 10) years of embezzlement of an employers funds. But that’s it. No questions about drug convictions, petty cash theft convictions, or anything else.
Spent convictions only show up in the standard/enhanced criminal records check, and employers may only request access to these for certain roles (for example, working with children or in healthcare). Further, "[i]t's against the law for an employer, university or college to refuse you a role because you've got a spent conviction or caution, unless it makes you unsuitable for the role. For example, a driving conviction might make you unsuitable for a job as a driving instructor".
https://www.gov.uk/tell-employer-or-college-about-criminal-r...
Depends on what you think it's goals were. If it was to eliminate or significantly reduce drug use, yes, total failure.
But if the goal was to continue to limit the power of African-Americans and other minorities, and transfer a ton of tax-payer dollars to the private prison industrial complex, it's been a wild success.
Centuries of chattel slavery, a century of overt de jure discrimination and segregation after slavery, and continued institutional discrimination by policies that do not correct for but instead perpetuate the effects of the earlier overt discrimination.
One (but not the most significant) direct effect of which was the alienation of the African-American community from institutions and the normalization of a culture of distrust of institutions, including the law,aw enforcement, schools, health systems, etc. (Some aspects of which are arbitrarily labelled “ghetto culture”.)
The 20% of crime that is left I assume is drugs-related
Apparently you no longer have to go to some shady area at night, you just place your order on WhatsApp and you get it by mail. Indeed, Amazon level convenience.
When I was younger, our idea of fun was to get drunk, which is pretty costly once you build up a tolerance for alcohol. These days, youngsters pop a cheap party pill (XTC) for 5 euro and that's about all they consume for the night.
Late night cab drivers used to complain how these drunk kids would puke in the car, now they shit in the car instead. Even in the very nice peaceful town where I live, street corners show piles of "laughing gas" capsules on the floor, which is the new thing.
All of this said, the truly hard drugs like heroine, crack, meth do not seem commonly used here in the general population.
Back on point, I've never understood the appeal of being a drugs kingpin. It never ends well. You can never check out and retire. You have enemies everywhere. You're always on the run. It doesn't matter whether you control a revenue of 1 billion or 10 billion in any practical sense. It must be a power trip I don't understand.
Gustavo Fring would be proud.
This one would probably have been up there, if not at the top.
> The ’Ndrangheta – based in the southern region of Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot – is reputed to be one of the richest and most feared criminal organisations in the world. A study by the Demoskopita Research Institute in 2013 estimated its financial strength as more than that of Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s combined, with an annual turnover of €53bn (£44bn).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/27/uk-to-come-und...
Another good book is "Gomorrah" about the Comorra mafia[1]. Their reach is simply staggering across Europe.
Afghanistan after first overturning the Taliban had the biggest increase ever in drug production ever when the CIA was running the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book)
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...
Obviously they have sold drugs before, so a quantification exercise would be interesting.
I went on opium interdiction missions in Southern Afghanistan. The Taliban runs its own opium ring down there to fund it's activities. I'm not even sure it'd be fair to say the CIA was "running the country". They trained Afghan special forces, whom I only ever saw once and that was near Kajaki Dam. The people who were digging up weapons caches, setting up field hospitals, etc that we fought in the area while doing opium interdiction didn't look anything like Afghan special forces, much less act like them.
> Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. The series follows the stories of several characters whose lives are fated to intersect including CIA operative Teddy McDonald who helps to secure guns for the Contras. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb.
Although I am not to sure if the suicide wasn't really a suicide. On the other hand a group that is known to have done worse than this it doesn't sound implausible.
I don't really understand why you would do something like that. I've been seeing it relatively frequently recently.