U.S. busts Tor drug market, arrests eight

Liquor companies; prison guard unions; police units who self-fund from drug raids; even semi-legal MMJ growers who oppose full legalization. All of these entities, and others, have a strong incentive to perpetuate the persecution of millions of Americans for the crime of questionable health choices.

PS: My mother has a PHD in neurology with a focus on brain development and MDMA is the drug she was most frightened of. Not that that actually means much in the grand scheme of things, but she has done a lot more literature review of MDMA than I or I suspect anyone on HN has done.

It's not even so much that (comparing two drugs like that doesn't really make sense). It's that the dosage administered was far more than what would be comparable for methamphetamine. 6 mg/kg of one drug is not necessarily comparable to 6 mg/kg of another drug... 300 mg of methamphetamine for a ~110 lb. person over 9 hours is absurd - the maximum prescribed dose of Adderall (d-amphetamine) is generally 40-60mg per day, and that's only for individuals with high tolerance (or very severe problems such as narcolepsy). These are oral dosages, mind you, whereas the study used subcutaneous injection, which amplifies the effect of the drug further. Then account for the fact that methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more easily than its cousin that lacks the methyl group, and you start to wonder why only one of the five monkeys died.

Even before they realized the drug mixup, the Ricaurte, et. al. study is so flawed that it's almost laughable that it was published in the first place. Your study is intended to simulate the environment of a club/rave? 20% of your subjects died after what you considered to be a moderate dose, and you didn't think that was cause to question your methods? Raves may not be the healthiest places in the world, but if real life were anything close to what those data suggest, the morning after a concert or rave you would find the floor literally covered in dead bodies.

I won't even get into the absurd conclusions that they draw from their measurements themselves, since this is HN, not a neuroscience forum, but suffice to say that any college freshman in an introductory neuroscience class should have known better. It's as if they copied and pasted the analysis from another study and inserted their own data into it - that's how nonsensical it is.

The retraction for Ricaurte, et. al.: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ls39/peer_review/Ricaurte_retra...

(The original study is linked from the retraction page; I'd emphasize again that the study itself had enough other flaws in it that it should never have been published in the first place, even if the drug mixup had never been discovered).

One study of 52 users that where hand selected out of 1500 that showed no cognitive impairment. http://www.addictionjournal.org/viewpressrelease.asp?pr=147 Others studies both before and after have demonstrated issues. The problem is it's hard to find good data on individuals before they started heavy use, and sleep deprivation and dehydration are linked to long term cognitive impairment.

However, if you look at the existing literature there is no large scale and long term study's demonstrating it's safety. And a lot of evidence that MDMA is dangerous.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.

We have to add in the cost of Correctional Officer salaries and the Wardens who can easily make over $220,000 a year.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...

Acting as a user wanting to buy drugs online is the easiest thing for an undercover DEA agent. And then they can use full power of the US Government to find out the rest.

Bottom line: do not sell drugs online day in and day out, you will get caught.

No, only idiots do this to begin with.

Prohibition is basically a price-fixing scheme, and makes illegal drugs obscenely profitable. Years ago I knew a friend who got into it, and he made over $20,000 in one weekend by simply driving a car across the border once. (He ended up getting in trouble unfortunately, though he's much better now and no longer involved.)

If a person is willing to put up with the risk, there are few more profitable businesses.

I've heard recent figures around $400 billion per year globally. So you've probably got cartels that were they legitimate businesses would be on the Fortune 500.

With profits like that, large-scale operations have a lot of money to throw around to bribe cops, judges, government officials, etc. So as a result, the large cartels end up with a privileged position. Smaller operations that cannot afford to have such people on their payroll get targeted preferentially.

Look into the history of bootlegging in Chicago in the 20s. It's the same kind of thing.

The horrible thing about prohibition is that it's such a potent force for institutional corruption. The naiveté of the soccer moms that support it is disgusting. They all need to be beaten with a reality stick.

As api points out, there are also drug rackets and cartels that sell the nominally illegal stuff. Those guys can bend cops to eliminate their competition as well.

I only know of Singapore, where drugs carry a death penalty, and that's far less ethical than any kind of drug trafficking.

Also: I find it kind of amazing that there are still people naive enough to call me a paranoid conspiracy nut or "unstable" for suggesting that... gasp... there might be corruption in the world.

A paranoid conspiracy nut is someone who thinks that the world's leaders are shape shifting reptiles or that everything is run by a secret cabal linked to some kind of ancient secret society. I'm just suggesting that a large-scale illegal business with profits in the hundreds of billions and cash flow probably near $1 trillion might have an interest in putting a few people on the payroll.