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Comment by Smalltalker-80 | Hacker News Reader

The Mafia may also have shorter horizon: - Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death and then stop being customers. - Fentanyl is a much more debilitating drug than heroin and much cheaper. So Fentanyl customers are less able to gather the money for the next fix, and don't need as much (less revenue).

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Also if the family has some addicted to “normal” drugs it’s acceptable; but if they get fentanyl from you and die the next mafia family reunion will be spicy.

Hence they have a shorter CLV.

More than simply being alive, they want customers who can stay employed and so continue to pay higher prices over a greater number of years. Cocaine and pot are horrible but their users can maintain a working life for years or decades, making them more profitable drugs in the long term.

> Cocaine and pot are horrible

citation needed

>Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ---Robin Williams

>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...

David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips, Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis, The Lancet, 2010.

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.

> cocaine *and* pot

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.

We should probably start saying "sugar and cocaine". Since sugar is heavily addictive it can be equivocated the same.

Maybe that will help some people see how ridiculous it is to generalise like that.

The slope of addictive drugs with negative side effects starts with alcohol, then comes nicotine, pot, cocaine, crack, fentinal .... and then all the really exotic modern stuff. It is a spectrum. Some argue that there are upsides, and there are certainly uses for all these drugs, but no sane doctor would say they have no downsides, that unrestrained use is ever a good thing.

How are you determining this scale?

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.

That's what CLV means, dude ... come on.

lol. Whoosh

> Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death and then stop being customers

The Mafia kills people directly. That's a sudden-death right there.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o

though this is controlled and planned, I assume. As opposed to random numbers of customers dropping dead whenever they feel like it.

At much much lower rates than accidental overdose rates assuredly.

"The Mafia" is... many different things. From self-defense post-war southern-italian village organisations to pure-evil predatory psycho-clans, to anything in between.

For starters: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o44Zv4DY64

> From self-defense post-war southern-italian village organisations

That's not what the Mafia is. It's an origin story. Was would be more accurate.

Eh its islamic cultural remnant ?https://i.imgur.com/9zqcn0m.png https://i.imgur.com/tpClCSt.png

It's not sudden to the person planning the hit

But they’re not killing their customers (unless they want send a message, of course…)

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