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American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

justice.gov

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Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#91

Post by schwartzworld »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: post #6

A victimless crime - unless you think we should be locking up all of the alcohol sellers? Alcohol addiction is a sad, sad affair. I would rather someone be addicted to pharmaceutical grade opioids than street heroin laced with fentanyl and other junk.

> A victimless crime One should note that addicts do commit all sorts of crimes to continue their addiction. There probably needs to be some form of back attribution of said acts to those who leech off of addictions IMO $277M (the value of the bitcoin) should be confiscated as possible and redirected to help victims of such crimes ...

That is a side effect of prohibition.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#92

Post by ethanbond »

remarkEon wrote: post #74
ithkuil wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they returned home to a country where the drug was illegal. They also returned to their families and loved ones, trying re-introduce themselves to civil society and many figured out that heroin was not helping (illegal or not)

You (and others in this thread) are helping to make my point for me, which is that personal social structures are paramount for killing drug addiction.

I don’t think anyone is disputing that some variation of this idea is true. What’s not being stated explicitly is that if it’s true that social connectedness (ambiguously including identity, purpose, etc.) matters, then it’s also true that our current enforcement mechanisms are probably incredibly counterproductive.

Everyone gets the point you’re making, you’re just not following it through to something meaningful and instead supposing it implies something it doesn’t.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#93

Post by raducu »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #46
Aerroon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where most of the harm is coming from with opioids. Do the opioids themselves cause more harm than society does by making them illegal? The cases I've mostly heard about seemed to be that people hot addicted to opioids and the only way to keep it going was to break the law. That eventually got them in trouble. For some drugs it does seem like the government trying to protect you from the drugs do more harm t…

They need to let people take whatever they want to take and then educate everyone about how addictive some opiates are.

In the past, I've tried a lot of recreational drugs, including some opioids, and without trying to, I can't see how I could get myself addicted to opioids or benzodiazepines, but I know a LOT of people would.

As far as I remember, only 10% of people who ever used heroin get addicted to it. But that still leaves 10% at a very high risk, because of their neurochemistry and life circumstances.

So I don't think ALL drugs should be legal.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#94

Post by ethanbond »

neuroma wrote: post #65
Aerroon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where most of the harm is coming from with opioids. Do the opioids themselves cause more harm than society does by making them illegal? The cases I've mostly heard about seemed to be that people hot addicted to opioids and the only way to keep it going was to break the law. That eventually got them in trouble. For some drugs it does seem like the government trying to protect you from the drugs do more harm t…

Prof Nutt made and published a universal harm scale which accounts for multi dimensional harm of drugs, and potentially allows comparisons to be made between them https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109763/#B29 . This work got him sacked from his lead advisory role to the UK govt, as it undermined the policy and caused embarrassment. Nutt still works in Imperial College researching psychedelics as novel the…

Wow this is awesome. I’ve pondered the need for exactly this sort of thing for a while as the obvious desired basis for drug policy. Shouldn’t be surprised the Nutt has done it!

Obviously it’s lossy to reduce something with this much complexity down to a single dimension but it’s still a helpful tool nonetheless.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#95

Post by Donthatme »

jimkleiber wrote: post #35
ghthor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a novel opinion, and novel opinions are what a good scientist needs to make major breakthroughs. I sure people were saying the same things about Galileo as there were of the women from Alexandria before him, etc.

I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists. I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields. Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic. What is science, if not a never-ending quest to learn more about t…

> I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists.

Bold claim, or tortured use of often.

> I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields.

A lot of academic fields are fairly siloed from others. One example is presentations at a conference from a subfield that is just slightly oblique from yours is hard to follow because they use different jargon than you. It is getting a little better with some emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

> Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic.

From my experience with being blasted by spam ideas just because my contact information is in a university's physics directory, a lot of/most 'novel opinion' is noise.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#96

Post by DanBC »

263943736 wrote: post #9
CameronNemo wrote: post #2

Justice is such a poor way to describe what is happening here. I have full empathy with those who have struggled with opioid addiction or lost loved ones to the disease. But the fact is that opioid prescriptions are still being written with too little oversight, too few safeguards, and not enough support for patients. Withstanding such contradiction in treatment of opioid suppliers, the federal government cannot keep…

Opioids are among the best medications for treating severe pain. If we're focusing on patients I'd much rather focus on rehabilitative strategies since the current degree of increased scrutiny is already making accessing adequate medication more difficult for groups like the elderly or people with chronic pain. Even more increased oversight is just going to escalate hesitation among doctors.

> Opioids are among the best medications for treating severe pain

> people with chronic pain.

Chronic refers to the length of time the pain exists, it doesn't refer to severity.

Here's what the Royal College of Anaesthetists says about opioids

https://fpm.ac.uk/opioids-aware

> Key Messages

> 1. Opioids are very good analgesics for acute pain and for pain at the end of life but there is little evidence that they are helpful for long term pain.

> 2. A small proportion of people may obtain good pain relief with opioids in the long-term if the dose can be kept low and especially if their use is intermittent (however it is difficult to identify these people at the point of opioid initiation).

> 3. The risk of harm increases substantially at doses above an oral morphine equivalent of 120mg/day, but there is no increased benefit: tapering or stopping high dose opioids needs careful planning and collaboration.

> 4. If a patient has pain that remains severe despite opioid treatment it means they are not working and should be stopped, even if no other treatment is available.

> 5. Chronic pain is very complex and if patients have refractory and disabling symptoms, particularly if they are on high opioid doses, a very detailed assessment of the many emotional influences on their pain experience is essential.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#97

Post by DanBC »

m0zg wrote: post #84
raverbashing wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern opioid addiction is a mostly manufactured problem, mainly by pharma companies and physicians In other countries, where the answer to pain isn't "throw strong opioids at every chance" the issue is much less severe.

Citation needed. Here's mine: 31K people per year die of fentanyl overdose in the United States alone. Data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over... This is fentanyl, drug that is very rarely prescribed. According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription. I maintain that it is ludicrous to suggest that we should legalize _all_ drugs. We could, ho…

Why are those people taking fentanyl? They take fentanyl because they are addicted to opioids. How did they become addicted to opioids? Many of them were prescribed non-fentanyl opioids, and became addicted, and then had the prescriptions stopped. Some people were given meds that had been prescribed to other people - family members or friends.

So, while few people are prescribed fentanyl the root source of the addiction is the massive over-prescription of opioid medication in the US.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#98

Post by m0zg »

raverbashing wrote: post #90
m0zg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Here's mine: 31K people per year die of fentanyl overdose in the United States alone. Data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over... This is fentanyl, drug that is very rarely prescribed. According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription. I maintain that it is ludicrous to suggest that we should legalize _all_ drugs. We could, ho…

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/08/the-making-of-a... > According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription. Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl? This is not produced in backyards labs, these are made in professional labs.

> Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl?

This is mostly manufactured illegally in China, to make money. I thought everyone knew about this by now. The country is flooded with this garbage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/world/asia/china-fentanyl...

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#99

Post by popeathlete »

m0zg wrote: post #76
3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

The drug that kills tens of thousands of people who don't know any better and choke on their vomit because nobody told them to lay on their side. People who overdose because they got dope laced with fent. People who overdosed because they didn't know how much h they got. People who got addicted, because the safest option was to shoot. Surely controlled selling of the substance wouldn't fix any of these problems.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#100

Post by [deleted] »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #18
CameronNemo wrote: post #2

Justice is such a poor way to describe what is happening here. I have full empathy with those who have struggled with opioid addiction or lost loved ones to the disease. But the fact is that opioid prescriptions are still being written with too little oversight, too few safeguards, and not enough support for patients. Withstanding such contradiction in treatment of opioid suppliers, the federal government cannot keep…

> even moderate use can be balanced with a healthy lifestyle Genuinely curious: this doesn't really mesh with my understanding. I think opioids are extremely addictive (more so than tobacco or even cocaine or amphetamine) and as a result it's nearly impossible to be a "casual" user (and therefore I don't ever intend to try any opioids). Is there evidence that opioids can be "moderately" used?

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