DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf]

dea.gov

32 pointsKincadeHoney26 comments

> The 2024 NDTA highlights the dangerous shift from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs

It's almost as if it was a mistake to spend decades throwing people in jail for using the plant-based drugs... But perusing the document, I see no such admission. In fact, in their section on marijuana they use scare-quotes around "legalize" and "legal", showing they absolutely haven't learned their lesson.

The DEA's War on Americans Who Use Drugs is not just an abject failure, it's directly responsible for much of our nations ills including the decreasing respect for fundamental rights, law and order, and the police.

I think we need to stop making an argument about personal rights with the drug war and make it about what most of this document is about.

The drug war is empowering the most dangerous organized crime gangs ever created. They could be destroyed overnight by law makers with a pen.

At some point we are going to have to make the decision that dealing with kid's coke and heroin addictions is easier than dealing with thousands of Al Capones that will chop your head off.

We seem incapable of long term planning though so I doubt we will do anything for decades yet. We are like a cancer patient in denial that this cancer is growing and spreading.

>The drug war is empowering the most dangerous organized crime gangs ever created.

Are you talking about the feds or cartel?

It's the same picture.

From some of the unique positions of insight that I have been exposed to, I think it’s safe to say that at least in the late 90s through early 2000s, the primary political will to fuel the “war on the low price of drugs” was to prop up the ability of the USA to covertly divert funding to favoured political groups worldwide.

The Iran-contra shenanigans made it clear that political cover could not be relied upon for overtly shady air-America style operations, and a plausibly deniable strategy was needed for our covert influence operations.

By being in charge of the semi-global” war on drugs”, the USA could make sure covert allies were well funded by allowing them relatively unimpeded access to the wildly profitable US illicit drug market.

This was largely accomplished by targeting any competition and ignoring or sometimes even assisting favoured groups. We saw this on blatant and dramatic display with US troops protecting poppy crops in Afghanistan.

The war on the low price of drugs also made for great television, so most people were happy for a while.

Inevitable consequences being what they are, now that the cartels have become powerful enough to supplant the US influence on market conditions, this strategic justification is increasingly weak. Accordingly, international spending has plummeted.

But do not despair, gentlereader. Our adventurism has created shiny new villains for us to combat, so all is not lost. Great television is once again within our reach.

The MIC and Netflix will be well employed in the coming cartel wars and eventual occupation of regions of Mexico. We just have to wait patiently for the cartels to start using autonomous weapons with alarming frequency on us soil, a treat we can reasonably expect to see soon enough.

I think the tide has shifted. Marijuana laws are incredibly lax now and if anything this kind of plays into the “slippery slope” argument they tried to make for decades.

I think you're both overthinking things. There are more drugs, that are more powerful, and they are more easily available than ever before. Fentanyl is easy to make (thank you biochemical advances), easy to distribute (thank you massive e-commerce market for the camouflage), easy to buy (thank you crypto), and a rice grain's worth will kill. This isn't because of DEA policy, or a slippery slope, this is human progress meeting human flaw.

One proposed explanation I've heard for the rapid rise of fentanyl is that prohibition gives a major competitive advantage to more potent drugs, even if people who use opioid drugs would prefer the less potent alternatives, because they are cheaper to produce and much easier to smuggle.

People who abuse opioids are very price sensitive. Even in an open market, fentanyl's price advantage alone would probably be enough.

Yes it makes sense that we'd see arguments like this on a polarized issue. But these discussions end up in hypothetical territory quickly. Did we do a survey of nationwide opiate addicts that showed they'd self limit to less potent alternatives if they were legal? OR would they enjoy unfettered access to their drug of choice so they can use much more of it? Hard to avoid "just so" stories around all this.

Yeah, that's why session beers don't exist and everyone only drinks everclear nowadays.

I don't get the argument you are attempting to make here. If its that prohibition drives people to more potent substances, I'll point out that legal marijuana has become insanely potent.

Also, cheap vodkas are cheaper and more accessible to people who abuse alcohol, not mention far far more palatable. And that's exactly what alcoholics tend toward.

Lots of factors play into which drugs people consume, and prohibition plays a role.

You jest, but this actually happened during the era of alcohol prohibition: hard liquor went from around 40% of US alcohol sales to 75%. Bootleggers preferred liquor because the profit margin was higher and because it was easier to conceal. After prohibition ended, the proportion of hard liquor dropped, as people returned to wine and beer.

In current times, drinking rates among young people are dropping now that they have access to legal marijuana, which is a good thing from a public-health perspective.

It's a bit frustrating to observe the US on this issue go from draconic prohibition to laissez faire commercialization when probably the solution lies in a legalized but regulated approach.

Ezra Klein interviewed Charles Fain Lehman on a podcast titled, “The Hidden Politics of Disorder”. Charles brought up this exact point about the US struggling to find middle ground in regulation. I had t considered it before but it’s a really interesting point and I intend to agree with it from recent experience.

Where has US drug law changed from draconic to laissez faire? The only laws I'm aware that have changed are at the state level with the Marijuana legalization and every one of those states adopted a regulated approach.

Capitalism + ever more powerful cannabinoid drugs => problems. Many states (including the one I live in) are struggling to limit advertising, in particular.

> Capitalism + ever more powerful cannabinoid drugs => problems.

This is even more true of the black market. Legalization will reduce these problems, even with no regulations (which is not the case).

Plant-based in this context means traditional heroin (which is harvested from Poppies) not Weed.

Heroin isn't harvested from poppies, opium is. A lot of the problems of the heroin trade could be solved by letting people grow and smoke their own poppies, like they did for thousands of years before prohibition. A similar thing could be said for cocaine and the coca leaf.

Heroin is derived from poppies. It is simply the product of acetylating the morphine isolated from the poppy plant. Also, the person you replied to was right, the DEA is referring to heroin and cocaine, not cannabis. This is spelled out in the second paragraph of the executive summary in the pdf: "traditional plant-based drugs like cocaine and heroin".

> A lot of the problems of the heroin trade could be solved by letting people grow and smoke their own poppies, like they did for thousands of years before prohibition

Yeah no.

Poppy growing used to be endemic in the part of South Asia I'm from and we're still reeling from the impact of opioid abuse along with how it undermined local political institutions.

There's a reason villages are now dealing with it via vigilante justice [0][1]

[0] - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBTcOmQMvee/?igsh=MWcxNGlyY2l...

[1] - https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuZCHhcp_dF/?igsh=MXh0dTB6Nnd...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

They only care about their own preservation.

> Ecstasy and molly (pill and powder forms of MDMA, respectively) are the most common types of phenethylamines, but similar substances go by the street names N-bomb and Smiles.

Good to know the DEA is still as clueless as ever (MDMA is a very mildly psychedelic empathogen with a long history of use and relative safety with a dose of ~100mg. 'N-bomb' refers to the 25x-NBOMe series of extremely strong psychedelics that are active at ~0.75mg, known for intense visuals and overwhelming effects, and a tendency to randomly and abruptly kill people who haven't taken all that much. meth and mescaline are both phenethylamines, that's about all they have in common.)

Interested to see how new administrations take this into account, especially with younger generations being more open to drug legalization. Fentanyl will be especially challenging to curtail.

The DEA is the threat

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