Fentanyl is a huge problem in Vancouver, where we are usually ground zero for all new opiate trends. Besides killing over 1100 people a year in BC, the money also seeps back into our overheated real-estate market through casino money laundering. It is a crazy cycle. I have no idea why world governments and our own don't say and do more against China. Spineless.
This is the downside of having global economic integration (buy anything from anywhere for the cost of USPS shipping) without political integration. It's the same type of problem as Greek debtors vs. German creditors except in a different context.
Fentanyl analogues are not a problem in China, hence the relative slowness in cracking down on them.
The supplier is in China, but the buyer is the West. Why does moral culpability only fall on one party?
The Opium Wars began when the Chinese confiscated the British drug contraband (but property to the British) and lit a bonfire with them, as the opium trade was illegal. There is no comparison.
I think there is an important difference between trade being forced open at gunpoint, vs. trade deals peacefully negotiated.
What's more interesting though is the inherent impedance mismatch between money and goods (which are highly mobile and flow everywhere) and people and laws (which are much less so).
The crux of the problem is Americans are negatively affected by things that China sells. But what is the remedy?
Should China's government take American citizens' interests directly into account when making its laws? Is that a reciprocal obligation? How far does it extend?
How is it different from the current scenario, where presumably the US State Department identifies the harm, brings it up with China, and negotiates a change to Chinese laws? Should there be a bureaucratic mechanism with quicker feedback? Would that lead to an inevitable loss of effective sovereignty for nations?
I'm not sure what you're angling at with this weird historical whataboutism.
Are you saying that it's acceptable for Chinese companies and gangs to manufacture opiates and ship them off to the USA because Britain and the USA went to war with China 150 years ago to enforce the opium trade?
Fentanyl analogues are not a problem in China, hence the relative slowness in cracking down on them.
History suggests they will be. China happily exported and exports Ketamine, and are now dealing with a massive problem of heavy Ketamine addicts. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve lobbied internationally to sanction ketamine, which ran into a brick wall for good reasons.1
1 Ketamine is the only general anesthetic that doesn’t require loads of training and respiratory support to use, and as such is on the WHO lost of essentials.
Ketamine has potential as a novel treatment for depression.
It's not as addictive as some people would suggest. I have a prescription and it makes me sweat profusely and puke. Hardly enjoyable and I have no interest in dissociation because I want to live in the present.
Making Ketamine harder for patients to access is going to destroy a lot of lives. People with depression like myself are already being taken advantage of by Ketamine infusion clinics that charge exorbitant rates. These doctors, often not psychiatrists, could prescribe a lozenge for their patients to take at home if they were serious about helping depressed patients and not lining their pockets.
Making Ketamine harder for patients to access is going to destroy a lot of lives.
Even putting aside its use as a treatment for depression, restricting Ketamine was deemed unacceptable by the WHO, so don’t worry. It’s really really the only thing going if you need to intervene surgically and don’t have an OR.
Would you know if fentanyl abuse was a problem in China? With a billion people and all humans being human it's hard to imagine there is not a large sub culture of opiate and fentanyl abuse. Where would we get some quality statistics on the topic?
Any supplier thinking long-term I'm sure will recognize the economic downside of killing off their clientele. It's in their interests to self-regulate and enforce stricter quality control standards to mitigate fatal overdoses.
The tobacco industry and car industry are both counter examples to this.
There are real use cases for fentanyl (there's a report here locally of ambulance crews misappropriating fentanyl from the pain medication supplies.) I know there's media reports of "an opioid epidemic", but I'm suspicious about how much that's "real" and how much of it is "war on drugs" reporting pushed by law enforcement PR for the purposes of propping up the prison-industrial complex...
30,000 deaths per year in the US seems to be considered "acceptable" in the face of the benefits of 200-ish million people owning/driving cars. I wonder what the ratio of "people benefiting" vs "people dying" from opiates and fentanyl in particular is?
> Any supplier thinking long-term I'm sure will recognize the economic downside of killing off their clientele
maybe, maybe not. often when someone overdoses, the dealer has customers lined up around the block the next day. addicts don't know whether that particular stuff was cut with fent or just stronger than usual, and they don't particularly care.
even if enough people were dying that it made a significant dent in sales, i doubt it would change anything for the suppliers. selling fentanyl as heroin is massively more profitable than just selling heroin, and there's no way to do it safely. low doses of heroin are in the tens of milligrams, while fentanyl can have a potent effect at doses less than one milligram. this makes it really hard to achieve a homogenous mixture; there's basically always going to be some potentially lethal hotspots.
> the money also seeps back into our overheated real-estate market through casino money laundering
That's actually not likely how they launder the money. Money laundering regulations in Canada say that large sums of money cashed out an casinos are reported to Fintrac[0], who datamine and analyze that stuff pretty extensively. My knowledge of their capabilities is over a decade old (internship way back), but even then they would catch on if you were moving millions of dollars per year through a casino.
Your bank also reports any large transactions or international money transfers- anything over $10k, and that number doesn't adjust with inflation afaik. They have a lot of data and they have built some pretty big cases out of it.
When you return the chips it is called "cashing out". The casino doesn't let you buy in with a duffle bag of $250,000 and cash out for a cheque from the casino for $250,000 in the same transaction. You have to go play a low variance game like Baccarat and play your money through like 200%. Then you cash out $240,000 and get a cheque from the casino that you can easily deposit into a Canadian bank. Gambling winnings in Canada are also tax free.
Hey, here's a crazy thought. Why don't we end the drug war? Then people can easily get safe drugs with accurate dosages.
The deaths, money laundering. They're not symptoms of drug dealers, they're symptoms of the drug war. We should clean it up, but it's naive to think that we should just "fight the drug war harder".
Hey why don’t we change a few laws and eliminate a few huge government agencies, eliminate the government’s excuse to surveil everyone and the ability to persecute and jail millions of people at will, eliminate the incredibly profitable business of private prisons and eliminate the easy money streams which inevitably end up wetting the pockets of government officials on all levels.
This is a lot of power to give up.
The people whose jobs benefit from prohibition have a lot of say in this matter and they don’t look eager to unemploy themselves.
I think ending the war needs to come with viable solutions for them.
We can see that cannabis prohibition is slowly ending. I’m curious how will the prohibition industrial complex adjust.
They’re basically answering the question “do you want to stay employed?”
And the answer is “yes, absolutely, without a doubt.”
Similarly, we can’t go to Saudi Arabia/Canada/Russia/Us etc. and say “Hey, let’s stop extracting oil. It’s not good for the environment. Yes, it’s free money for you, but we want you to stop.”
Except that hopefully oil is getting less profitable. Drug prohibition will always be.
The Opioid/Opiate epidemic is the direct result of highly available, high quality, legal opioids. For the majority of places (i.e. anywhere that isn't a a top 10 city or former, now desitute, trade capital with a port like Baltimore) currently in the grasp of this crisis, it all began with the introduction of pharma-industry darlings like oxycontin and other branded opioids.
Not only were opioids massively overprescribed for otherwise legitimate purposes, once hooked, anyone could walk into one of several "Pain Clinics" located within a few miles of any population center and get a scrip for a pharma quality fix covered almost entirely by their insurance. Even without insurance, the scrip for a 3 month supply of Lortab I received after an emergency appendectomy was just $100 back in 2009 (thanks to manifacturer rebates!). That's a week's fix for any burgeoning pill junkie willing to do cold water extraction (to remove the acetaminophen) and all for a relative pittance.
Allowing mass quantities of high quality opioids onto the market is what caused this issue in the first place. Removing even more barriers to access isn't going to make things any better. In fact, it's guaranteed to make things worse based on the results so far.
the word you are looking for is corrupt. In some cases indirectly. So many Canadians have all their savings tided up in their homes, the government cannot risk taking drastic steps that might crash the housing market
Could it be they are aligned with developing countries all over the world with belt and road?
Could it be that they have arguably the single most intelligent population in the world?
Could it be that though Americans (that includes you canadians, continent-shamers) find their lack of democracy disturbing, Chinese citizens have generally not complained about the past several millennium of rather tyrannical, centralized governance?
What a head scratcher... Why, it's almost like they're different people!
Edit: oh by the way, there's literally a billion of them
Vancouver has been addicted to heroin and opiates my whole life, we had a nice flirt with meth in the late 90s early 00's (good frontline on its west coast spread). East Hastings is ground zero. We used to have the highest concentration of AIDS in North America because of needle sharing. Combination of being a main pacific-rim port, mild weather, aboriginal poverty etc. Lots of people are blown away when they get here and see it.
Vancouver has always been like that. When people talk about drugs and homeless in the streets, Vancouver comes off as even worse than Seattle in many respects.
maybe around when the first logging camps were set up in the early 1800s?
It's been here longer than any of the cities have been.
Oh, opium and addiction that is.
The term "skid row" is said to originate here or Seattle - both have good claim to the term with similar history.
Fentanyl has been here for a long time, but it started getting mass imported a few years ago into drug rules and may be connected to why Canada's legalizing pot now.
The death rates keep rising.
Downtown Eastside has been what seems the heroin center of North America since the early 1980s, well before it spiraled out of control south of the border.
Why do you bring "world governments" into it? Most of the world has next to no problem with fentanyl. Why, then, is "most of the world" supposed to "do more against" China?
The problems that the US and Canada have with opioids are of their own making, and that's also where they should look for a solution to these problems.
The local media likes to tie the opioid epidemic, money laundering, real estate prices and foreign ownership into one neat tidy narrative. I don't think it's that simple.
But China has THE strictest drug law anywhere on the planet. China doesn't consume those drugs, it is because there is a market so they are creating those drugs. Why didn't Canadian government just ban it? Put those dealers into jail and grab their profit? Stricter law enforcement works.
> The numbers have only continued to grow since then. In January, Xinhua reported that China handled 52,800 drug cases from late September to December 2014 alone
This is probably including Marijuana uses as well, which is already legalized in much part of West. It is the not on the same ground sadly, so I don't think it is nonsense.
I won’t even get into how you’re contradicting your first point about “strictest laws” and just quote from the first article.
It’s apparently spreading north as well – northeastern province Liaoning has been a “major growth area” for drug cases over the past few years, Ma said. Outside analysts believe that North Korea (which borders Liaoning) has become a major source of methamphetamine smuggled into China, although Beijing is reluctant to publicly point the finger at its ally.
Not to comment on the politics, but... I had fentanyl during a medical procedure a while back, and I can totally see why it's so addictive. It was wonderful. Both pain and anxiety were totally wiped out, and and the comedown was clean and fast, with no ill effects at all. It's the most pleasant drug I've ever experienced.
As long as this kind of high exists, people are going to take it.
As a paramedic, it is absolutely a double-edged sword. It is a phenomenal tool for pain management. Used as intended it much better than other options (historically, morphine).
It is not the least bit uncommon to have weeks that include administering fentanyl therapeutically for acute pain management, and administering Narcan to counteract the effect of Fentanyl taken "recreationally".
I find that interesting. Heroin and morphine both have a much nicer high than Fentanyl, taking IV recreationally — at least they did for me, back when I was an addict
Using it for (other people's) pain management, I don't really care about how "nice" the high is (and I don't have any experience with it personally).
The main reason I like fentanyl is that it peaks much earlier than morphine. The most common reason I administer opioids is due to a musculoskeletal injury of some sort. Often those patients would experience a significant amount of pain while being moved and loaded into the ambulance. Fentanyl acts quickly enough that it's worth it to administer it before starting to move them. With morphine that's just a waste of time. Better to get them moved and then medicate them on the way to the hospital.
I wasn’t suggesting you were :) was more discussing a tangential point. In Australia, if they are conscious they typically get them to use methoxyflurane (the “green whistle”). It’s quite nice, and very effective!
Yeah, but it also does very unkind things to your liver and kidneys... It was never used in EMS in the United States, and surgical anesthesiologists stopped using back in the 90's.
Some parts of the US do use nitrous oxide in an EMS setting though (technically it's in my protocols, but I don't know of any agencies around here that carry it).
I took Hydrocodone recreationally once, as I had some leftovers from my ribcage injury. Aside from enhanced dreams and occasional hypnogogia, I still didn’t really see the appeal. You can achieve the same euphoria with THC (IIRC, OPRM1 gene expression is altered upon consumption of THC).
OPRM1 is an interesting gene, though. Habitual use of morphine (and other substances like alcohol, OPRM1 expression is implicated in risk-taking behavior) would create reinforcement effects and increased gene expression of OPRM1. That would lead you down the dark path of addiction.
Hydrocodone is comparatively weak, and as it’s a codeine derivative it’s at the mercy of your particular genes and how they express CYP2D6 — my girlfriend is a terrible metaboliser of it, and so a lot of narcotics don’t work very well for her. It’s fascinating stuff.
Edit: also, you really can’t get the same euphoria from THC. Similar, sure, but not the same — THC doesn’t build life destroying addiction though, so definitely recommend instead!
> Edit: also, you really can’t get the same euphoria from THC. Similar, sure, but not the same — THC doesn’t build life destroying addiction though, so definitely recommend instead!
I can see that. THC feels like a “cleaner” mental euphoria to me, especially without the synergistic effects of cannabinoids like CBD and CBN.
I noticed both physical and mental euphoria with Hydrocodone. Not unlike the pleasure of wearing a warm sweater and sitting by the fire on a bitingly cold winter’s day.
In my case, I didn’t like the sluggishness (and itchiness!) associated with that feeling, though.
Hydrocodone is deliberately weak, to the point where it's hard to get high from it. It's like comparing the pleasant burn of a sip of whiskey to getting hammered drunk. It's not really representative of a true opiate high experience.
I had nausea for 2 days following a procedure where I had it. Compared to the same procedure a few years before with Demerol, which I cleared from my system in a few hours, fentanyl was horrid.
I took Demerol a few times as a kid, and heroin once as an adult. As an anesthetic, fentanyl was perfect. I was pain free, felt lucid, and then went right back to normal, no side effects at all.
As a kid, I suffered terrible migraines, and I am old enough to predate migraine medication. My parents also suffer migraines (as do two of my three sisters, yay genetics). Dad had a Demerol prescription for his. They wouldn't give me Demerol, because it was a dangerous addictive drug. Instead, they gave me the safe, effective state of the art circa late 1970s - phenobarbitol. I'd take one, stumble to the couch, wake up 14 hours later, and not remember what happened. I'll never put that poison in my body again! (Later, as an adult, a drug counselor friend told me barbituates were the only drugs he'd seen to be more addictive than tobacco.)
But if my parents needed me to be functional while fighting migraine? I got one of Dad's Demerol instead. Which was awesome, because I still had a migraine, but I didn't care anymore. I could stay awake and follow instructions and converse as needed, from my warm numb blanket of drug.
Working from memory here, I was a lot more "high" on Demerol, and it lasted longer. Fentanyl was much cleaner.
Best of all was the one time I tried heroin, though. Holy crap. Never touching that again. One of humanity's best and most dangerous inventions.
I woke up from surgery feeling great. I don’t know what anesthesia they used, but it was fucking awesome. Contrast that to 40 years ago when I woke up vomiting.
> A police officer suspected the windows of her silver Mitsubishi Galant were tinted too darkly, then found her license was suspended. He arrested her, and a search of her car
Straight up parallel construction, until demonstrated otherwise. Gotta love that strategically built weaseling - "suspecting" the tint and "suspended license". Regurgitating this uncritically shows just how little credibility the entire article has.
It seems like you are implying that because they might be obfuscating a hypothetical "source" that the findings are invalidated. What would you have the author do, instead?
The author could have investigated whether the windows ever actually were found to be too dark (or whether it was just a pretext), and what the actual reason for the suspended license was (eg something the person did, or the quite common no-notice suspension arising from some bureaucratic mess).
Without that, they're really just uncritically repeating the story of one biased and routinely corrupt party. Which mirrors the rest of the article, as it seems to be a hit piece setting up a pretext for going after these Really Bad Foreign People. Ostensibly with the goal of further empowering the agencies and broken legal regime that is responsible for the fentanyl crisis in the first place.
In Europe there are a lot of these so-called "research chemicals". They are basically illegal drugs but chemically they are different enough that they aren't illegal.
I would say that, if you're speaking of the whole category of "research chemicals"—rather than just the psychotropic ones—it's actually easier to get them in North America than in Europe.
Many of the actual pharma research companies creating this stuff are in the US, so there's no customs between you and an order of random-drug-sample #91245096. And even when there is, both the US and Canada are basically allow-then-deny when it comes to drug importation: if they haven't seen it before—and it doesn't smell like a known-restricted compound to the dogs/scanners—they allow it in.
While there are some pharma companies in the EU, there aren't many, and EU countries basically don't allow drugs to be shipped in from outside the EU, no matter what's in them. Indeed, you can't even order unscheduled, OTC drugs from other countries (e.g. Russia) into the EU. It's a big problem in the nootropics community. (Try to figure out how to get bromantane in Germany. I'll wait.)
I randomly browsed Reddit and wandered onto the 1P-LSD thread and saw that most of the stores mentioned were in Germany, Netherlands, Spain so I just assumed that it was more of a Europe thing.
EDIT: Any ideas why I get "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."?
Pharma research companies don't sell direct to individuals.
Most suppliers of research chemicals that are marketed to consumers in the US get their product from China. Whether they have it tested at an independent lab is up for debate.
There was a Times article several years ago about the rise of synthetic cannabis and they said legislators can't keep up with new chemical formulations. They take several months to study and ban one chemical, and the manufacturers turn around and tweak it slightly and it's a "new" drug that hasn't been made illegal yet.
From what I could tell that's almost exactly what's happening in Europe as well. One difference though is that it takes even longer since each member state bans these individually.
From what I saw there are RC variants of many drugs I've never heard of but I saw RC-LSD, RC synthetic cannabis, RC-ecstasy, angel dust...
It is very much a European thing, not as popular in the US due to easier access to cannabis and it was synthetic Cannabis (Spice) that started the whole craze a couple of years ago, followed by "bath salts" which then extended to the whole RC line of drugs.
Tbh the government reactions to this, banning specific substances cannabinoids in particular, have made this situation just that much worse.
This stuff booming like that should have told them the whole story: That there's a very real demand for legalization.
Instead, they continue prohibition practices even further, forcing manufacturers to use other (much more dangerous) substances, a game they've now played so long that by now most of these synthetic Cannabis variants have nothing at all do anymore with the "natural stuff" and instead have become extremely destructive and addictive substances [0]
By insisting on the prohibition stance the regulators literally made "weed" lethal.
>Instead, they continue prohibition practices even further, forcing manufacturers to use other (much more dangerous) substances
The inherent danger in iterative research chemicals is a lesson I had to learn firsthand. I had tried the initial formulations for "spice" a few times and found it to be a pleasant analogue to marijuana. I decided to pick some up several years later, and well, the effects were closer to that of a hardcore disassociative than anything resembling THC. Don't fuck around with products you can't be 100% confident in.
You can't legislate a state of mind, and people have different reactions to different substances, so I'm a little confused as to what form this "broad ban" would take.
(Keep in mind these laws do not apply to fentanyl -- in the United States, fentanyl is schedule II and is available as prescription medicine. Illicit fentanyl is more "illegal drug market" than "research chemicals"; cocaine is in the same boat in the US as well, a schedule II drug that's available on the illicit market. The above might apply to any fentanyl analogues though.)
The Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 was introduced in NZ after its failed experiment with legalising synthetic highs. I don't necessarily agree with the act, but it basically is a "broad ban" of new recreational drugs.
That's extremely non-selective - for instance [1] is a random paper discussing ethanol interacting with the 5-HT2A receptors (at least if you are a male rat that is).
It would likely also lead to unforeseen consequences. For example, the Czech government attempted to ban growing Phalaris, but had to backpedal as it's a common unassuming weed.
The story provides a figure depicting the structural formula of actual fentanyl, and next to it similar fentanyl-like molecules that are being trafficked.
Caption: "Yan Xiaobing was indicted for distributing these similar compounds; making slight changes to the molecular structure can have unpredictable effects on potency."
Also: [I]n recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use.
While Chinese authorities control fentanyl, they’ve been slow to ban new analogues.
While Chinese authorities control fentanyl, they’ve been slow to ban new analogues. And they didn’t begin restricting fentanyl’s two most common ingredients until this year, more than a decade after the U.S. (...) And unlike in the U.S., anyone can sell or purchase pill presses, which dealers use to trick addicts into thinking they’re buying milder drugs like OxyContin when they’re actually getting fentanyl.
I am amazed at what I read as a not-so-subtle suggestion, writ between the lines, that China is doing something wrong by not policing analogs and precursors more vigorously, and allowing the sale of pill presses.
China is a sovereign country, and, given that they do not have a massive problem with opioid addiction, there is little incentive for them to invest a lot of time and effort into expanding the war on drugs within their borders.
Perhaps, instead of blaming China for their problems, the US can take a long, hard look at their failed drug policies and dysfunctional healthcare industry (after all, over-subscription of legal opioids is what led to the current wave of addiction), and start to figure an honest, self-reliant way out the mess that they're in.
Interestingly enough, there's next to no problem with fentanyl in many European countries. Yet these same countries happily do trade with China, there are no embargoes in place or anything of that sort. I find that quite revealing.
> Because Yan used Gmail, operated by U.S.-based Google, [DEA agent] Gibbons and his team could persuade a judge to let them monitor his communications in real time.
So not only did Google share all of Yan's emails with the US government, they did it silently. Presumably that was a condition of the court order. I don't necessarily consider Google at fault for complying, but it's disturbing to me that a foreign government can read all my data ad libitum while ordering Google not to tell me about it.
Are there countries that have better privacy laws? Is anyone hosting email services out of those countries? I'd be willing to pay a monthly fee.
I doubt that any country has privacy laws that protect against surveillance authorized by a court. The best you could hope for is a court system that doesn't simply approve every request without pushback.
Reading from the article, one gets quite a few quite damning impressions:
1) fentanyl is apparently mostly delivered just through mail. Mail is apparently not inspected at all and walking into a post office with dozens of envelopes/packages with drugs is apparently not very likely to get you caught.
1 addendum) the post is not even going to stop you doing this AFTER YOU GET CAUGHT.
2) nor is getting your clients caught with the stuff. Tracking stuff back through the postal service is apparently not done, or not possible.
3) importing large quantities of fentanyl, cannabis and marihuana right through customs ... apparently not a problem. Not caught for years.
4) apparently paypal is perfectly A-okay with drug money. Funny how plenty of people seem to get their accounts blocked for this, yet this operation totally escaped all attention.
5) the drugs business is a full service operation. Next day delivery, credit card payments, tracking numbers for shipments (!), ... none of it apparently helped the police. Even sending a free replacement shipping when one "got caught by customs" did not let them track the source.
6) the police apparently got "live monitoring" going on a gmail account, which is how they found him.
All the ways the police COULD have tracked this yet missed ... and the extremely objectionable way they did track it. Clearly this is the default way the police works now. Get all online accounts to track people before doing so much as visiting the post office. At least they went through a judge I guess.
I mean this article is obviously a bragging attempt by the police, and yet I find it extremely objectionable how the police and the rest of the state operated in this operation.
Publishing this article and bragging about this given the state of these systems will obviously massively increase these businesses' reach.
>Chapman and Muhammad would later get prison sentences of nearly 17 and 120 years, respectively. In interviews, Muhammad, now 45, admitted to selling chemicals but said he did extensive research to remain within the law.
Well either the defense or the prosecution is lying through their teeth here.
The Chinese have a long memory of the effect that widespread drug addiction has on a nation and a people. It wasn't until Mao that the issue was addressed, and they were actually quite effective:
>The Mao Zedong government is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform.[9][10] Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops.
I have my doubts that the West will be able to adequately deal with the issue. They don't seem to have the stomach for it.
The attack that never happened and/or has never been proven?
From the line you yourself posted:
"Webb's series led to three federal investigations, none of which found evidence of any conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States."
You're right, it may not have been proven but based on the amount of coverage and writing on it, there must be some truth behind it. Do you really think these people decided to make it up? And regardless of whether they smuggled the drugs, they knowingly supported the people doing it.
Also, I haven't downvoted you and I'm quite confused by the votes on my original comment. Went straight into the negatives and now it's back up.
> You're right, it may not have been proven but based on the amount of coverage and writing on it, there must be some truth behind it.
Seems like a bad way to determine the truth. But either way, even if the crack epidemic was simply a result of the material conditions in the communities it effected, the government is culpable, though perhaps in a somewhat more limited way
> You're right, it may not have been proven but based on the amount of coverage and writing on it, there must be some truth behind it.
There has also been lots of coverage of Obama not being a natural born American, and thus an illegitimate president. Do you think that means "there must be some truth behind it?"
The kind of thinking you displayed in your comment leads to damaging nonsense like birther-ism. Don't go there.
If you read further, it also says that by CIA guidelines at the time, you were not required to report on CIA assets smuggling drugs. It's hard to find any evidence when you don't need to keep a record, and any payments made can be written off as part of Iran-Contra.
Where do you think the CIA fucking learned it from? MI6 (who learned it in opium wars 1&2) taught to OSS (CIA) how to get funding off books so congress couldn't pull the purse strings and they could do whatever they wanted... and this has indeed been proven multiple times...
You are the same kind of person who called us talking about NSA pre-Snowden "tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists" and then post-Snowden came out with all kinds of variations of "why are you surprised" and "we all already knew this whats the big deal", and "if you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" type of bullshit.
In the conspiracy theory arena, the main sticking point is that people far too often fail to understand the difference between inductive and deductive logic. In many cases we have very little evidence to go on, so we are forced to transition to inductive logic from deductive... but inevitably those decrying the lack of evidence the loudest tend to ignore the very real legitimacy of inductive logic and it's process when one is presented with a lack of hard evidence.
Isn't that being a tad overly-sensitive over what is, essentially, a technicality?
I agree that the tone borders on uncivil maybe crosses over with some vulgar language, but the only part that could be construed as ad-hominem is the phrase "You are the same kind of person" and, even then, the rest of the sentence goes on to accuse the commentor of making an argument by providing an analogy.
No name-calling occurred.
Threatening to ban someone for posting a comment that does, overall, make an important point, even when phrased awkwardly or not in the most civil way possible, is likely to have a chilling effect and "destroy intellectual curiosity", to borrow from the guidelines.
It's a trope of getting personal on the internet to say "you are the kind of person who". Both aspects are bad, not just the personalness but also the tropiness, because by definition it repeats very easily. It's important to nip that in the bud. And it's not like it's necessary to make any substantive point.
But what is getting personal? Other than the use of the word "person", there is no actual reference to anyone's person.
The personal aspect would be bad, except it doesn't exist.
The tropiness of the phrase I'll take your word for, as I don't frequent any other online discussion sites. It certainly doesn't add to the discussion.
Is a phrase that is extraneous, currently popular/cliche, and merely possibly offensive because it's typically used ad-hominem elsewhere, really cause for threatening to ban a user?
Anyone who was paying attention before Snowden knew there was mass surveillance happening. See Room 641A, Stellar Wind, Quest Communication's refusal to cooperate, etc. These were all reported well before Snowden in major media such as the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. I remember many of these were first reported back in 2006.
On the other hand, no reports on CIA programs selling crack cocaine to the inner city have ever been described or verified by any major media outlet, as far as I am aware[1]. Nor have I seen any convincing evidence of such a program.
But I'm open to any evidence you can show me, if you have any.
Also, as someone else pointed out, MI6 wasn't founded until a half century after the Opium Wars.
1. Despite many major media outlets—the same ones who outed programs like Stellar Wind—investigating the claims that the CIA smuggled drugs into black communities, they all found that there was no evidence of such a program.
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion is a 1998 book by journalist Gary Webb. The book is based on "Dark Alliance", Webb's three-part investigative series published in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996. Wikipedia
The major news outlets for the most part did not dispute his facts, just used former cia reporters to discredit his conclusions. Which led to Gary Webb "committing suicide" by shooting himself twice in the head with a revolver
So MI-6 learned it from wars they were never involved in, then taught it to the US intelligence service during WWII in case they needed it to jail black people? Which the CIA then decided it needed to do 20 years after the Civil Rights movement? Ok.
You made one claim (that the CIA pushed crack cocaine to black communities), but then you referenced 2 links that have nothing to do with that claim.
Your first link discusses the credible claim that Contra groups were involved with smuggling drugs into the US. All that media coverage of this accusation investigated the claim that the CIA was involved and found no evidence of this.
Your second link makes the credible claim that Nixon began the war on drug to discredit hippy and black political opponents (very likely). But nothing to do with the CIA smuggling drugs into the US.
I'm not sure why people think this is new. Far from it.
Even back in the 1960's there was a scene in a James Bond film where some gangster was complaining that competition from Latin America was driving the prices down on his trade in Chinese drugs.
Both, really. Americans were instrumental in pushing cheap, lower quality Turkish opium. Many of the great old East Coast fortunes were built on opium smuggling.
The Cabot family [1], one of the big Boston Brahmin families made their bones shipping slaves and opium. If the name is familiar, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was one of their most prominent sons.
Why, philosophically, do you think that children of wealthy parents deserve to inherit that wealth more than anyone else? Is it luck that they are born rich? Are they the reincarnation of their deseased parent? Has God decided so?
Would you also support changing the US to a monarchy? Is it different to be born into wealth than born into power?
Because I don't believe in stealing other peoples' things just because they have them. And because I want to make sure that I am free to dispose of my property as I see fit and allow my children to reap the benefits of my labor, and the labor of the generations that have come before them, clawing our way up off of rock farms in northern New England to something better.
> Because I don't believe in stealing other peoples' things just because they have them.
So that makes you a libertarian who thinks any tax is theft, and estate tax is just as bad as any other tax?
I always wonder how libertarians really think society would work, when nobody cares about anything other than themselves and their own wishes. Countries with weak governments are really not that nice to live in.
Seize his assets for being a mass-murdering, drug dealing shitlord, yes. Seize a portion from Jane Q Publique because she worked hard and invested wisely? No.
That was enlightening. I didn't know the US merchants were so involved in the Chinese opium "trade." That is in quotes because China had banned the opium and these people were bribing Chinese officials and smuggling the drugs ashore. From the article: "they use boats manned by dozens of rowers to speed past inspectors, sneak up the coast, and deliver opium beyond the official port".
They were essentially the drug cartels of the 1800's. The article goes on to say how this drug money extracted from China was used to kick start the US's industrial revolution, and still funds universities and hospitals with grants from these fortunes. But I'm not sure I see any difference between the actions of those Americans then and the drug lords now.
We the Commonwealth, plus the American colonies that had recently departed the Commonwealth but still maintained their trade relations from when they were in it.
I think it fair to say that while the British instigated it, it was mostly a metcantilist class who traded without the imprimatur of either government. In terms of who got rich, it was mercantilists from the US and the continent as well as local Turk and Indian producers.
Native American communities have indeed been affected severely, but it's not clear how much is due to this particular type of Fentanyl:
AP news reported recently that: "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures indicate the increase [in opioid overdose deaths from 1999 to 2015] was higher for Native Americans than any other group ..."
There certainly are a lot of stories about China's perceived misdeeds in Bloomberg, and a lot of Bloomberg articles are reposted on HN lately. Enough to make me go hmmmm.
The scrutiny increases in a manner beyond direct proportion to the size of your influence on the world, economically and militarily.
The US is subject to endless bashing, scrutiny, paranoia, unfair reporting, you name it. If the US does a thing, it's evil or wrong policy; if Germany, Denmark, Canada or France do the same thing, it's perfectly acceptable (see: immigration or corporate tax rates or trade barriers). That has particularly been true for the last ~40 years, since it became the sole superpower.
Now consider, the US is a liberal Democracy, not dissimilar from Western Europe. How much worse should the scrutiny be for an illiberal Communist dictatorship, that has few human rights?
China scrutiny is going to be dramatically beyond what the US has endured, as they rise to have the largest economy and a comparable military to the US.
> The US is subject to endless bashing, scrutiny, paranoia, unfair reporting, you name it. If the US does a thing, it's evil or wrong policy
I'm Chinese, and I just want to say in my experience this isn't true of Chinese media coverage of the US.
For the most part the US (and other western countries) are covered in positive, admiring terms. "This is how American educate their kids. We should emulate that" "How to make XXX-food the American way" "i was shocked how clean US cities are as" "ten most beautiful US destinations" etc etc.
American media and politicians often use the phrase "the Chinese" (also think: "the Russians"; you don't often hear "the British" "the French"). Chuck Schumer says just the other day something to the effect that we must be united in our "fight against the Chinese". It's hard for a Chinese person to read that kind of language without ... feeling a bit disheartened inside. Say what you will about Chinese media, when there is anything critical about the US the target is never "the Americans".
When you use language like "the Xs" you are speaking in tribal-war terms. Good for selling newspapers maybe. But we all know what tribalism can easily snowball into ...
It was frankly a surprise for me to find out just how much hostility there exists on the other side. I'm not necessarily talking about hostility in the sense of outright lying/fabrication in stories about China. A newspaper can choose to print all the true negative stories about blacks that come its way, and skip half of the true negative stories about whites, and still be able to claim they haven't printed a single false article about blacks. Doesn't mean it's not biased against black people. The hostility often resides at the level of what's implied rather than what's said.
That doesn't make much sense. The US wasn't meaningfully involved in the 100 years of shame. Britain, France and Japan were the antagonists. The US, if anything, helped to end the abuse by treating China as a legitimate peer trading partner and helping to build them up into a world power.
The US helped China re the Empire of Japan and WW2.
The US helped China re the Soviets.
The US was responsible for China gaining access to the WTO, which rapidly transformed their economy.
The US helped China develop by pouring trillions of dollars in capital into their country and trading with them in a mutually beneficial manner.
No other dominant world power in the last ~500 years has ever treated China with that kind of respect. As recently as 1992, the US had an economy 15 times the size of China, and it didn't seek to conquer them or humiliate them.
No, it's not. You're doing random pattern matching. Chemical engineering has been outsourced to China and factories there are making/exporting whatever people want to import, including industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The supply chain has been moved around with globalization, that is all. There is no political motivation behind it, much less political control.
First of all, are we talking about manufacturing or trafficking? Because fentanyl is legal medicine, used by hospitals. It isn't illegal to manufacture, use, or export when complying with controlled substance laws. What's there to prosecute?
There were some shady outfits that sold to individuals online and those should have been shut down if it was so easy to establish a link, but usually it goes through many hands long after it exits China. Like guns and "Made in China" goods, it's a supply-chain phenomenon that the source manufacturer happens to be in China. Doesn't mean China controls the whole trade. Obviously if the sale is in China for illicit uses there is a lot more big brother tracking and when found out the draconian drug regime there applies. You're reading non-existent things into sensationalist news stories.
Last year, China went along with the DEA to ban the manufacturing of some synthetic variants in illicit use, so they're helping if anything. They didn't have to even talk to the DEA when it's the DEA's job to crack down on drugs on the home turf where the real problem is.
"Chapman and Muhammad would later get prison sentences of nearly 17 and 120 years, respectively. In interviews, Muhammad, now 45, admitted to selling chemicals but said he did extensive research to remain within the law." - That's the real crime here! 17 years? 120 years? For receiving something in the mail legally, reselling it legally, and nothing else?
>For receiving something in the mail legally, reselling it legally, and nothing else?
I'm not sure why you would think that selling a schedule II controlled substance is "legal", just because the asshats selling it say they did "extensive research" on the law.
When drug kingpins + dealers kill off their customers, instead of addicting them to make as much money possible, then it feels like something more dark and ainister is at hand.
Given the history in the USA (i.e., black communities) perhaps American officials are just culling the herd?
There doesn't need to be anything sinister about it. Fentanyl is cheap and potent. You can take cheap, low quality heroin, mix it with a little fentanyl and sell it for more profit as high quality heroin.
However, if it's not mixed perfectly, you end up with "hotspots" of fentanyl. If someone ends up with a hotspot they can easily overdose. The occasion overdose also attracts more users because it gives the impression of potent, high quality heroin.
It's because users of opiates can build up a really high tolerance. Like an order of magnitude more than would knock a non-user off his rocker will be barely enough to feel anything.
And heroin is really expensive. So imagine someone who is extremely frugal buying expired food. Only cranked up to 10.
Nothing sinister about a biz model that kills its customers? This is hardly the (illegal) drug industry's traditional approach. The deviation begs to ask: What's the point then?
That was the conspiracy with crack cocaine, most of these fentanyl victims appear to be Caucasian. There are record over dose numbers in the wealthy suburbs near where I live, Montgomery County
> When drug kingpins + dealers kill off their customers, instead of addicting them to make as much money possible, then it feels like something more dark and ainister is at hand.
Fentanyl is extremely potent and very hard to dilute.
One particular problem is that overdoses often occur in people who are relapsing. The addict dries out for a while so their tolerance drops. Then they get a hit at the same level as they remember with maybe a little bit of extra potency, and they drop dead.
True. But that still doesn't explain why the dealers' approach is to (literally) kill off their subscribers. That's a complete 180 from Successful Drug Dealer 101.
The people that manufacture are several levels away, so they aren't as affected as, say someone who sells it to the same 50 or so people every week/day or whatever.
The point of my post was to let you know how easy it would be to accidentally kill someone due to mismeasuring the dose. Calibrating a scale before and after measuring a dose then verifying with a second method is something dealers aren't used to doing.
The dealers' intended approach is likely not to kill off their customers. I'm willing to bet they simply don't realize what to look out for.
I would think they treat it like other businesses treat churn. As long as you have more new subscribers than cancelling subscribers, you're still growing.
