The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
economist.com
economist.com
(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)
I don't think these very different drugs should be compared equivocally.
And while both drugs have the possibility of abuse; most issues stem from legality - not the chemical effects.
Maybe that will help some people see how ridiculous it is to generalise like that.
Alcohol has greater negative side effects than pot, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or pot. I’m not sure what you mean by “exotic modern stuff,” but if it includes hallucinogens (what people usually mean by modern/exotic drugs) then they’re not really addictive at all.
I ask because the scale reads more like a morality scale than anything based on actual negative effects, either in the individual or society.
citation needed
>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...
https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...
Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.
Note that this study is now over 15 years old.
The Mafia kills people directly. That's a sudden-death right there.
For starters: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o44Zv4DY64
That's not what the Mafia is. It's an origin story. Was would be more accurate.
He’s been CEO less than a month and everything that’s happening right now has been in the works for multiple years….
Both these make Apple worse.
The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.
There’s zero indication Ternus is onboard with that - Cue yes, but Ternus was not CEO when any of the stuff that is happening now was being developed
Poor decision making exists everywhere. Size of a company is absolutely no insurance against it. See Tesla for a specific example.
Everything is then run by excel people with metrics. Innovation dies, product suffers and company spirals downward.
Convince shareholders that it's been leaving money on the table.
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.
When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)
Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.
Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
Increasing the potency of some drug with fentanyl is an interesting choice, because by the time the user *knows* how strong it is, there's some likelihood they're already dead.
Its lethal dose is a lot smaller than that of heroin, but it isn’t guaranteed to kill. If it were, why is it used so much in medicine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl: “Fentanyl is a highly potent synthetic opioid of the piperidine family, used primarily as pain medication
[…]
In 2015, 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) were used in healthcare globally.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.”
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
Micrograms (yes still many molecules) could be lethal
I don’t take fentanyl but I regularly take signaling peptides where the doses are typically in the mcg range and still rather potent - though with signaling peptides the response curve typically flattens out so bigger doses don’t necessarily mean stronger effects - they can be saturated. Depends on what you’re signaling though.
I had correctly predicted my hypersensitivity to semaglutide (ozempic) so started using it for treating autoimmune issues at a dose of 25mcg and I still ended up with temporary gastroparesis.
See these:
- The influence of PRNP polymorphisms on human prion disease susceptibility: an update [1]
- A naturally occurring variant of the human prion protein completely prevents prion disease | Nature [2]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26022925/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14510?utm_source=chatg...
for kids?
That a dose not too different from adult posology of paracetamol can be lethal?
Maybe you did not know that "heroin" was developed at Bayer (the informal name came out of the trials after the reports from the testers)...
Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs.
Everytime you deal with nominal professionals you should be concerned, because their professional ability is not granted. People who deal with bodies deal with an immensely complex and subtle mechanism: they do not know it as well as needed, and their regard is easily not too different from that of Robert Liston in their evaluation of compromises - your due diligence does realistically involve verifying that values are aligned (otherwise they may decide that they can sacrifice something that for you is critically vital).
> I am not sure why it was being downvoted
Neither do I - I did not. (I did take the implied into account.)
> snark
Good: since we are here, can you kindly explain what "snark" is, because I find the term in the guidelines, I have no idea how to interpret it, I asked it a few times and I got downvoted for the question?
Sometimes, text gives off a different vibe than intended. for instance:
"Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs" is a very obvious statement that anyone with a primary grade education should know. So, if an obvious statement is stated, it constitutes a snark, <as if the other person is too stupid to realize that>. But given your new comment, it appears you didn't mean that.
I think you now understood that with «Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs» what was meant is "If we interpret your questions as "could they have administered anything toxic", the answer would be "what they do is administering substances relevant to toxicity"".
I would approach the situation (just "my two cents") by trying to redirect towards health by maximizing healthy conditions. They do not sell "health pills" - but when one has had to take them, try to counterbalance that "compromise" with healthier lifestyle.
The reason synthetic opioids like fentanyl are used is because they actually have less side effects. Opioids can cause a histamine response, digestive issues and constipation. Newer synthetic and hybrid opioids cause that less, so they’re preferred in hospital settings.
There’s essentially no long term risk with the small doses required during surgery. The main risk is, of course, acute respiratory depression, which kills you. This is how opioid overdoses happen. This doesn’t happen under GA because the dose is tightly controlled, and your airway is supported anyway; you’re intubated.
Fentanyl may in some cases kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
The way you state it, there are zero fentanyl addicts in the world today.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
There were signs warning of this and if I remember correctly, they murdered two major fentanyl cooks, put their bodies on the side of a road, along with a warning sign and two huge piles of the drug around the bodies.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Herbert Simon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
Yes. And 70% of Earth atmosphere is nitrogen.
The two figures have about the same relevance to health.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ita/ita...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
Sure, they're OK with some heroin addicts. I'm suggesting they drew a line in the sand.
(It follows straight from the general population decrease.)
Curiously, this is still relevant to my comment nearby about "slow effect models" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842956 ).
Tobacco is incredibly damaging but because it doesn't kill you right away we tolerate it.
There's probably a rather grim metric that defines time to death ratio for addictive substances somewhere in a government report.
When you grow up in a society and see results of gambling, tabacco, alcohol and drug addictions around you that usually deter you from a getting into it. It does not deter everyone, but society actually sees the consequences.
Same with junk food and obesity - when you have people in your family struggle with weight, diabetis and tons of related health issues that's give you more healthy outlook on life.
This is why drugs that kill people fast are so dangerous - because you dont see addicts around you who sttugle to find meaning in life for years because heroine burned their brain. People just start to use and die, fast.
It's not even just about food or drugs. This is how Russia wage a war for 5 years with 400,000 people dead via mercenary army. Society dont see the scale of war because almost no one returns so people keep selling their life for $50,000 thinking its a good way to make money or get rid of debts.
> There's dozens of us!
~~ Arrested Development (the "Never Nude" syndrome)
them's fighting words
Saskatchewan is SK and Manitoba is MB if you want weird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_and_territories_of_C...
Who these days are more a front org for the CCP/triads who seem to be running much of the criminal underworld in Canada with their network of smuggling and money laundering.
My theory is that the CCP/triads leveraged drug addiction within the HA and killed anyone that objected, and everyone else got rich...
Ontario is different, East Coast is different, prairies are different and the West Coast is it's own beast.
HA uses puppet gangs, so while their power may be diminished, they are still lurking in the background, as key nodes for drugs, money and guns.
The power lost by the HA and traditional mafia has largely been taken over by CCP/triads groups. The Indian and Iranian OC are under the Chinese, who have deep into the government and economy as major developers. Read Sam Cooper.
Can’t be, right?
There isn't anything to measure if the poop is unable to leave the end-user.
Either way, the constipation would affect different users at different times, so I don't think it would matter to the data. In other words, your idea stinks ;)
It's complete fantasy that the mafia didn't deal hard drugs.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
Orson Welles said it best:
"'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed."
But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.
If they can kill with impunity they can certainly do the same with drugs.
Large-scale crack cocaine gangs existed too with substantial levels of organization but they still sell crack.
They're mostly unintelligent thugs motivated by greed. And I think the "Why would they kill their own customers?" implies they think that far ahead. Which is probably true as well for most major corps. They'll take short term profit over quite literally anything.
I disagree. "Unintelligent thugs" wouldn't be able to keep organized crime organized. There's necessary overhead that gives rise to administrative class, paperwork, meeting, planning, contracts, etc. that's fundamentally true to humans - it's how villages turned to cities, countries, nation states, international organizations too (in fact a criminal organization is probably more similar to a nation state than a corporation).
Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
You're just speculating. Go listen to the John Gotti tapes. Go read The Five Families, The Sicilian Mafia, or Excellent Cadavers. These aren't deep people. There are no Michael Corleone's. They're all Sonny's.
Most "mafia" is local bookies and theft rings. Organization doesn't require intelligence. Nor does holding people up with a gun or threatening their family if they go to the cops. It's not "smart" to record politicians with their mistresses, it's just the thing you do if you want to commit more crimes.
https://gangstersinc.org/2013/09/27/5-of-the-dumbest-moves-i...
> Corporations do think far ahead. But they often cannot act on it directly, because of short-term incentives.
Except tobacco companies, Wells Fargo, General Motors, Boeing, Purdue Pharma (I don't think getting your customer base addicted to drugs and dying from an overdose is "smart"), etc.
Not understanding how your actions may effect others (or simply not caring that they do) is a sign of a lack intelligence. Not understanding that your safety and wellness is directly tied to the safety and wellness of the people around you can only be excused if you're a toddler.
\- Alan Greenspan
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2009/03/30/...
The government can’t regulate a black market.
Or, just keep doing what they're doing. It's bound to work eventually, right? Drug cartels are definitely growing less powerful every year, the war of drugs is being won, rate of addiction is going down.
Or perhaps selling it directly?
Has this ever worked? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this is a good idea?
Western democracies haven’t really prioritized “war on drugs” (for lack of a better term) over the last probably 10ish years. Yeah there’s still funding and initiatives and some lip service.
Instead the focus has been largely infighting and major political factions fighting for political power in the next generation (“tech bros” political class for one)
So it’s no surprise state-sponsored (and just demand driven) drug trafficking into the US hasn’t received much action.
There is some hope though. With rare earth mineral access being a major national security priority, and many cartels controlling those areas in SA, the converging interests may produce some net positive. Background: https://youtu.be/q_n-74ifBZs?is=nw5g-mmPmKphGH2W
The Mafia keeping fentanyl out isn't a public service. It's a cartel protecting its own drug market, which says nothing about whether democratic states ( globally ) are failing their citizens.
You go to the hospital, you get the medications you need (and no more) for as long as you need them, and then you stop (or you deal with chronic conditions under medical control).
When AI can write screenplays like this one, then it's game over.
The movie was well-planned by Francis - but the mafia is a mass-murder organisation, without exception. Japan finally got the better of Yakuza for the most part (it is nowhere near as powerful as it was once); Italy still struggles, in particular with regards to Ndrangheta. So any article that attempts to white-wash the mafia in Italy - nope, sorry, not even good movies such as the godfather should disguise the mass-murder organisation. See how they bombed Giovanni Falcone to death, let's not forget that; and more recently how Ndrangheta executed women (2026; see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o) who stopped being silent about the genocidal activities of Ndrangheta. Let's put it short: the mafia needs to be eliminated completely. It's not easy since they infiltrated so much in Italy and in parts elsewhere (just study how Capone in the USA got big, then you realise that the USA has an even bigger problem here - plus, fentanyl too), but it has to be done. There is no alternative unless you want organisations to undermine the state and continue its genocidal tendencies. You can be sure they are also involved in smuggling weapons, thus contributing to genocide outside of Italy directly as well.
Please no more white-washing articles of the mafia as glorious heroes "because they keep fentanyl out of Italy". (Besides, this is not even correct to begin with; fentanyal at the least right now, plays a very small role in Europe at best; in the USA this is different. See how Trump tries to blame Canadians for Fentanyl, smuggled via eggs, which is another one of his non-stop lies about Canadians.)
It's a strong antidote to those romanticizing crime.
In US it should be available on HBO Max.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(TV_series)
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
> 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
— Orson Welles
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out. customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
Thus, no surprise that it shows up elsewhere.
The black market is very inconsistent with what it provides, (because it is unregulated,) thus "heroin" may have fentanyl in it; or may not even be available. (Because it's easier to smuggle fentanyl.)
Does lithuania not have methadone or prescribable diamorphine? They should reconsider if not, not everyone is going to make it sober, much cheaper and better outcomes to being pragmatic about it.
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?
- While drugs laced with fentanyl are also a problem, lots of people _do_ knowingly consume fentanyl. In fact, it has replaced Heroin in the US 'market', for example. It is also a contaminant in other drugs (cocaine, meth), due to how easy it is for fentanyl to stay in crevices, etc. It is also 'snuck in' to counterfeit pills, which is the only aspect you mention.
- The traffickers physically moving fentanyl into the country are overwhelmingly Americans. Pre 2019 traffickers used to get this straight from China, but stricter controls in China have shifted things to be staged in Mexico instead.
- The demand and traffickers are still largely American, and it is a "symbiotic" problem. US drug demand is empowering Mexican cartels and making everyday Mexicans less safe (the cartels also get most of their guns from the US). At the same time, powerful Mexican cartels mean it is much easier to "stage" fentanyl in Mexico then import it into the US than the older model of importing it directly from China.
Drug dealers will lace "normal" drugs with fentanyl. It gives a "different buzz". The customer knows they are buying "normal" drugs, and there is no quality control, so lacing happens. If the dealer messes up how much they lace, it is easy to add too much (because a small amount t of fentanyl goes a long way), and your customer ODs.
Those people were doing a line of coke, they had no idea they were about to overdose on an opioid.
Well, that depends on the legal definition of murder where you live.
In lots of places, intent matters. You said the pill was added with the intent to make more money. If there was no intent to kill, then in lots of places that isn't murder but might be some other kind of criminal homicide.
For example, people at Ford made the decision to sell the Pinto with a dangerous defect to make more money and people died as a direct consequence of that product decision. The people who made that decision were not charged with murder (or anything as far as I recall).
Also I think they charged people in the ford pinto case with reckless homicide but they got off.
If you want to find where to point the finger to, the systems that let prescription opiates be prescribed with such reckless abandon is a good superficial target. Getting political here - if you want to find the very root cause of all this, I would present the institutions that prevent the implementation or otherwise erode preexisting social safety-nets as the culpable party.
No, the pain pill debacle of the early aughts actually led to heroin usage.
What caused the rise of fentanyl was the US getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Taliban (or whoever took over) burning the poppy fields.
As much as 20% of Americans use these recreational drugs. Europeans on average use recreational drugs like half as much as Americans, maybe 10% use them.
ok so you are just spreading FUD
The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.
It’s an American problem.
I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.
The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.
Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.
But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
And don't get me started on how public health interventions in general seem to end up treated as moral hazards or wasteful in the US, even when they're _saving_ money...
For hard drugs, something closer to Sweden's Systemboaget [0] where the drug is carefully controlled (and taxed!) by a state monopoly, with the proceeds of this monopoly being used to fund rehabilitation efforts or other support/public-health efforts might be better.
Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.