Prescription drugs? Because I need some and it takes months and time off work and repeated Dr and specialist and procedure trips just to get an antibiotic called Rifaximin that can cure certain types of IBS. Last time it took six months, a thousand dollars, four or five days off work, and a colonoscopy before I could get a prescription. But they don't prescribe enough to actually cure it. Is there a black market for this? I'm asking for a friend.
For antibiotics specifically, many manufacturers will sell them "for fish use". This will have an identical manufacturing process, but won't follow the guidelines for packaging, storing, and shipping antibiotics. So a bit more risk, but no prescription needed and significantly cheaper.
Alternatively, Indian mail-order pharmacies will successfully ship most things to the US in a plain brown envelope. It's technically illegal, but there's approximately zero enforcement action against it, the most they'll do is seize the shipment. Painkillers, opioids, amphetamines, and other pharmaceuticals with abuse risk are probably not going to be available this way (or advisable), but everything without a significant abuse risk has pretty much zero arrests.
Katherine Bean's Bottle of Lies documents how the same companies will produce drugs to lower safety standards when producing for countries with lower safety regulations.
Good link. On his podcast, Peter has also talked about generics vs. name brand differences. He had a chemist on who started a pharmacy selling generics where some statistically significant amount of each batch of drugs is tested for chemical verification.
I have not the remotest idea how I would test a cancer drug for myself to see if it was pure. I suppose I could hire a chemical laboratory, if I could figure out what kind of one would do that kind of work...
> I have not the remotest idea how I would test a cancer drug for myself
As someone with only a high school level of chemistry training I would check the melting temperature.
Although seriously get it professionally tested. The delta between USA prices and India/China prices is so high a lab test will barely change the margins.
The first thing to do would be look up the Scientific Discussion or Monograph as filed with the FDA for the brand name product. With the details obtained from there, you'd know what to test for.
The first steps would be assay and impurity tests for the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). If you bought tablets you'd probably want to do dissolution as well.
If everything looked fine after that, I'd still be concerned about uniformity. If you just performed dissolution on half a dozen tablets, how do you know all the tablets are the same from the whole supply?
Next question is then stability. What happens to the API over an extended time period? Does it deteriorate due to climate or poor storage conditions?
The main issue is quality control. Even an approved generic has to file with the FDA (or equivalent of wherever you are) concerning processes, batch sizes, critical quality attributes etc.
You should not buy such important drugs from a dubious source.
Drugs from an official Chinese Pharmacy are probably very safe. If someone sells sugar instead of antibiotics be assured that he might face the death penalty.
Most raw materials are produces in China anyway, even if the medication is obtained from a western company.
Did you need to handle the customs paperwork? I find it hard to believe the customs would just ignore a bunch of strange powder coming through the mail...
And even if they did believe you it was not cocaine, I would still assume they would not be happy about someone importing a prescription drug.
> ordered 5lbs of the drug for $100 usd including shipping.
Nothing like the sensation of dying with placebos knowing that you saved $4k dollars and you are smarter than the other guys. Can be done even cheaper: you could have obtained lots of carrot juice for $50 also. Did not worked for Jobs but maybe in your case could be different, why risk not trying?.
Seriously, don't do this. Even legit chemoterapy can dissolve you from inside and I'm not talking metaphorically. There are reported cases of unexpected and massive organ destruction. Chemoterapy is poison, can kill you faster than cancer if you have a secondary hidden condition.
Had the same problem getting the same antibiotic. Going locally resulted in unnecessary tests as you describe without luck. With me it started with a positive hydrogen breathe test at a naturalpath. Based on those results I went the telemedicine route and said my np recommended an antibiotic. I got lucky and got it filled twice but had to repeatly try but the provider I used didn't charge unless you accepted the prescription.
At the end I still needed more but gave up. Going starch free helped more.
My last M.D. was a quack, too. He made a wrong call (not griping, I understand differential diagnosis) on my stomach infection, wrote a prescription, then went on vacation. Meanwhile, I did not know this, nor did I know my labs came back with my pathogen identified. I went back to the office only to overhear all that through a closed exam room door. Oh, and they let me make that appointment same-day, knowing he was on vacation.
That doctor is so very fired, and I made sure every patient there knew what happened to me on the way out. I have never been so angry about mistreatment.
They can't at least where I am. And my experience with was more about getting that appointment fee so treatment is spread over many appointments.
Still a better experience compared to doctors. Anything internal seems to be an area they don't understand yet. Perhaps in time things will get better.
After the experience I strongly believe anyone should be able to buy medicine without a prescription. There are good and bad things that could come from that but I believe freedom of choice should be more available in this area.
> I strongly believe anyone should be able to buy medicine without a prescription.
While I can’t disagree that doing so is mightily convenient, it’s a really terrible idea, due to antibiotic resistance.
Now, if people could be trusted to only purchase antibiotics when they actually need them, and to complete their courses of them, this would be fine - but you can’t trust people.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Russia over the years. Hangover? Antibiotics. Head cold? Antibiotics. Tired? Antibiotics. The myriad incredibly inappropriate things people use antibiotics for is phenomenal.
And you’re talking about how a witch doctor told you you had quantum demon breath and so you need antibiotics. I’m sorry, but this is absolutely part of the problem, and underscores why antibiotics must be regulated.
I think the story of how we are becoming of how we are becoming resistance is a false narrative. Doctors giving antibiotics to freely is an issue but the fact that they are allowed to use antibiotics in our animal feed is probably more likely the cause why this problem exists and whole classes of antibiotics are not prescribed anymore. If this is your first time ever using antibiotics penicillin should work.. but they need to jump to amoxicillin.
I know why they add it in our animal feed and I see the benefits but it also creates these issues.
To blame the patient is a little bit shortsighted. In my experience, well established doctors do prescribe too much antibiotics as well. I used to have a doctor who basically gave me antibiotics for everything I went to see him. After a while, my general health started to deteriorate. Once I understood the pattern, I started to throw away his prescriptions and did also get better.
The problem with this is many developing countries overprescribe antibiotics or have them available without prescription. In developed countries you see antibiotics used en masse for livestock breeding. Both of these things dwarf any usage in people in developed countries. (You also see things like betablockers available OTC in places like India, and there was recently a research article on HN about how much this improves quality of life and quality of care.)
It is kind of a tragedy of the commons, but the real solution is not to let people in the US die from easily treatable diseases. After all, what is the point of effective antibiotics if you never use them anyway?
The real solution is probably to develop enough treatment options so that they can be cycled or used in conjunction.
I spent quite a bit of time in Russia and my experience is opposite. Everyone ever talks about how careful you should be using antibiotics. Not too little. Not too much. The exact prescribed amount for prescribed duration.
I did notice a difference but the bacteria comes back if something is affecting mobility.
After the second time. I did three things that really helped.
- Ate chicken/carrot for lunch. Fish/seafood/bacon/pork/beef roast with one or all of squash, zucchini, spinage. In between I made a loaf of banana bread with honey and most importantly carob and ate one a day. That digested earlier and didn't feed the overgrowth lower allowing me to put weight back on. The carob forced mototity
- I did pure cbd in very small amounts for 2 weeks. That seemed to help close intestinal valves.
- I stopped all starches. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas..
I'm 4 months off of the second round and feeling and looking much better.
2 years November this November after taking cipro. But only took the antibiotic 5/6 months ago. I dropped from 240 to 142 in the time beforehand (75 pounds first 45 days) and after the antibiotic and the bread I'm back to 180 and feeling better each week.
Wow, good job on the weight loss though. I've had this for years too but it's gotten worse. Or I've also become somewhat lactose intolerant. I always feel great when fasting (which I do regularly for weight reasons) but within 30 minutes of breaker ng the fast I'm burping again. Even fasting for like a week didn't seem to starve them at all.
I saw an article somewhere bthat said xifaxan should be taken for six weeks! So I'll probably try that next.
Oh also, weed edibles basically stop all stomach grumbling for me but they make me drowsy. IDK if they help kill the ... overgrowth though.
Seeing as you are at the point that you are looking for black market antibiotics, have you tried Kratom? Did it help? If you havent heard of it before, I should however warn you about the addiction potential.
First, have you looked into medical tourism? That might be a solution to just take a week off and go to a medical tourism friendly country. Looks like it's 2$ a day in Colombia (based on the wiki entry) vs 62$ a day in the United States so if you're insurance isn't cover a good chunk of it, that savings should soften the travel cost some.
>Is there a black market for this?
Sorta? A lot of prepper types will keep various fish antibiotics, which you can buy freely and legally online (in the United States anyway) that just happen to conveniently come in gel caps in human dosages. Personally I always keep a bottle of amoxicillin, penicillin and cephalexin on hand and replace them every 18 months or so (I've never taken any of them, but I take comfort knowing they are sitting in a drawer if there's ever some crazy scenario where I need one of them and pharmacies are dry).
I've never seen rifaximin though (probably because it is new and fantastically expensive).
you're right, i mixed up how the scheduling system works -- schedule 2 is significantly more legally risky and difficult to procure in grey markets, schedule 3 (basically anything that isn't a prescription version of a narcotic) is typically easily available.
Yes you can order on the clearnet from Indian pharmacies. I've ordered rifaximin this way. It's expensive, about 130$ for a 14 day supply. For my SIBO it, like all antibiotics, causes total symptom relief while I am on it and then the symptoms come right back once I go off. Good luck.
There is a black market for prescription drugs like everything else. Grey market really since it is a legal drug. I've used the grey market with success but ymmv.
And just like the black market for cocaine, what you get in that pill or powder could literally be anything, and there’s no guarantee of consistency between orders.
I believe this is more of the overall point being made in a lot of the comments here - that obviously decriminalization would allow for quality control.
Pressed pills in a sealed blister pack coming from a large pharma company in India is hardly "just like" the black market. All these companies are doing is taking advantage of geographic arbitrage and loopholes in different countries' laws to move stuff around. They're not making this stuff from scratch.
I love how often we hear companies are expected to hire slave labor in developing countries and we should all accept this race to the bottom will impact our own wages and benefits all because of the fact that we live in a global market, but the minute you want to buy drugs from other countries or even just play a DVD made for sale in another country it's illegal and immoral.
Or alternatively: that most of us happily accept the lower costs of goods and services from developing countries, but some people get upset that this drags our earnings down because of the competition from their workforces.
the problem is that is doesn't lower the cost of goods and services. If we were all paying the same prices they pay in developing countries for drugs maybe you could argue that it's fair when we accept their wages and working conditions.
Instead companies use sweatshops and slave cheap labor to boost their own profits while charging us a premium and expect us to compete with those workers while refusing to compete with the prices offered in the "global economy". If they want to pay workers at the lowest prices on Earth every American should only be paying the lowest prices for products and services found on Earth. That means that the drug that costs $1,000 in the US should only cost us $4. The movie ticket for $13.69 today shouldn't cost us more than $3.51.
The price difference is not wage difference, India does not enforce patents in many cases, also things are sold cheaper in countries without US health monopoly pricing.
The patent thing is the real difference. With the amount of citizens India has, it's the perfect storm. Any company can make anything (but the output is monitored), and the amount of people and their low salary make most drugs fairly cheap.
>And just like the black market for cocaine, what you get in that pill or powder could literally be anything, and there’s no guarantee of consistency between orders.
The same applies in any market - my last two orders from Amazon for something as simple as shampoo were counterfeit.
What's interesting about the article is that they claim that the Dream Market was able to enforce a level of consistency, because buyers could rate sellers. An independent lab tested some of the merchandise, and what you were really buying was usually what you thought you were buying.
Just like Amazon the on site ratings were normally pretty useless. Outside info sources like forums and Reddit normally had better results but were still full of constant FUD.
This writer is brilliant. Never have done (and really never was that interested in) drugs, but the air of mystery and cat & mouse that he wrote in was just fantastic.
A very serious subject with very real consequences but what a ride that story was. Well written and well played.
> full-service dealers advertise their wares is through Snapchat or WhatsApp:
Oh dear, just because a snap disappears doesn't mean a record doesn't exist.
While Snapchat (I don't know about WhatsApp) says that they "typically" don't retain your expired story data, you only need one of your friends/followers to be using a third-party app that does capture and retain data for your record to persist.
I'm guessing that the moment an account is of interest to law enforcement, a social network organization is obligated to start persisting and reporting account data.
It's raising the bar to where you need a warrant though. It means that the police can't just subscribe to that person and see everything that's gone on.
Most snapchat/whatsapp dealers are 100% fake. Engage with them and see how fast it turns into the same scam language someone on Craigslist trying to buy your item from another state is.
You'd be surprised how dumb some dealers can be. (This also depends on the location). I may or may not know of people who used to operate on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, but Snapchat is surprisingly popular.
Most dealers who have half a brain use Wickr (it being closed source; I still don't approve, but it's better than Snapchat).
Same goes as for food: buy local, short supply chain etc. Meaning also not every single thing is available, but at least you know what you get and where you got it from. And obviously: depending on where you live there won't be any people making what you want..
Its not just the obvious examples like cocaine and methamphetamines. Im mean MDMA and other synthetic drugs are usually manufactured abroad and smuggled into the UK/US by criminal organizations whose income also finances violence and corruption.
Theres no stopping the demand for party/recreational drugs, we may as well legalize them already. But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad. I find the idea of ‘safe’ illicitly purchased drugs deeply ironic.
> whose income also finances violence and corruption
I find this concept problematic. Does violence or corruption require funding? What sort of violence or corruption? Isn't the point of violence or corruption often to make money, rather than the other way around?
This argument is often made about drug sales but I'm not sure it holds up. It seems to me that making money is often the end-goal of such an operation.
> But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad.
Even if this is true, is that the moral responsibility of the buyer? If the government decided to ban carrots tomorrow and a black market sprung up around vegetables, whose fault would any collateral social damage be?
What do I mean by financing violence and corruption?
I mean that the money these organizations make is then used to strengthen the power and reach of these organizations through violence and corruption, the means of coercion. Mexico is a perfect example of how criminal organizations destabilize a country through both.
About moral responsibility...
If carrots were the only food around and the choice were between starvation and buying them, then of course it wouldnt be the consumers fault.
But were not talking about foodstuffs or basic needs here, I’m mainly concerned with recreational drugs whose consumption is not a prerequisite for survival. In this case I think that consumers have some kind of responsibility here to exercise discretion. I just find it deeply ironic that people in 1st world countries are paying for fun times, while their money goes on to destabilize other countries. I’m not sure what it is, but it just feels wrong to me.
Ah - you mentioned "chain of production" so I assumed you were only referring to the production of the drug, not its trafficking.
When you include trafficking you're right - but I did mention examples in my post that don't involve any exploitation, such as pharmaceutical diversion and people who grow and supply their own drugs.
I really don't care if people consume/purchase/make/sell drugs if the money isn't financing terrible things someplace in the world. I think the first step to making these kind of guarantees for consumers is legalizing the market for drugs.
I've got friends who grow weed and Ill smoke their stuff anyday cause I know where it comes from.
Most trafficking is not forced or exploitive. It's some poor person seeing a quick payday and going for it.
Beside, most drugs flowing into the US are from underground tunnel, or shipping container, or the back of a commercial truck. At one point they were buying used 747s, flying them full of coke to the US, and then just ditchiing the plane because they made way more than the cost of the plane.
> Most trafficking is not forced or exploitive. It's some poor person seeing a quick payday and going for it.
I'unno - after watching TV shows like _UK Border Force_ (which won't be unbiased, and undoubtably uses contrived selective editing to trigger some strong emotion from the viewer - either sympathy for people in crappy situations and the human-interest sob-stories, to reinforce xenophobic and anti-immigrant views about foreigners by focusing on the people the border officers refuse entry, and so on) but there's seemingly a lot of people shown who clearly were in very, very shitty situations where being a drug-mule was the least-worst option - like needing to find $20,000 quickly to pay for medical care of a loved one in a country without universal healthcare (INB4 jokes about the US).
In any event, ideally no-one should be in a position where they need to compromise their criminal record - or moral principles - to achieve at least a minimally comfortable standard of living.
> At one point they were buying used 747s, flying them full of coke to the US, and then just ditchiing the plane because they made way more than the cost of the plane.
I think that was happening in Africa with smaller jets. Which... is not that far from Brazil. Then smuggle over-land across Africa and mix in with N. African exports/shadow boats.
Who was ditching a 747? The joke from the cartels was they could afford to do that if they wanted to. Plenty of GA aircraft were ending up in fields and at the bottom of the Atlantic and gulf, though.
We all certainly have the capacity for it, but by no means can you say each and every person on Earth gives into it. Rise above it or not, its your choice.
Haven't seen a person (on the Internet or otherwise) who doesn't act in a manner consistent with your description. So far the evidence is pretty strong.
I think you have a very cynical view of things and expect anybody short of being a saint to be a hypocrite. Sure people care about some things while ignoring others, but that doesnt make them indifferent, there is only so much moral bandwidth a person can handle.
Let's make an open-source virus while we’re at it? Your target audience is very small, you're not going to get much help, and you'll be exposing any undiscovered vulnerability to state entities that have the resources to exploit them at the cost of the operator's freedom. Open source only works if you have a healthy number of eyes working on it otherwise you're better off with security through obscurity. Think of how many people work on the linux kernal and how bugs are still found all the time
A few years ago the police did something similar by running a honeypot site called Hansa [0]; they gained control of the site, but rather than shutting it down immediately, they quietly ran the site for a few months, making changes to it in the background. Then, they siezed the big darknet market at the time, Alphabay [1], which drove everyone on the site, dealers and users alike, onto Hansa.
Before the influx of users, they had modified the site to record a lot of data that a normal darknet market wouldn't. For example, instead of discarding photo metadata, it would extract it for law-enforcement use. They changed built-in PGP encryption software on the site, so that when people used it, it would first record the information entered before creating the message and sending it to the other user, which allowed them to get information like mailing addresses. Instead of hashing and salting passwords, they recorded them in plaintext, which allowed them to capture accounts on other markets when users had recycled usernames and passwords.
The operation, called Operation Bayonet [2], was complex enough that several different law enforcement agencies from Europe and the US were involved. The Dutch police, Interpol, the FBI and DEA etc. It was quite an interesting case.
You can protect against these attacks and maintain your privacy by doing the following:
1. After you take a picture, open that image on your computer and take a screenshot of that image and crop as needed. This removes all camera metadata.
2. Use a program for PGP encryption. Type out your message on Notepad or whatever, encrypt it locally, then paste the encrypted message into the website's message box.
3. Use a randomly generated username and password. Generate a different username and password for each site.
Yeah, this vector was avoidable by individuals who had good operational security, but the operation still got addresses for 10K+ individuals: they recorded around 27K transactions, so that means over a third of users relied on the built-in PGP tool!
I lurked Dread (reddit for Tor) pretty often during the Dream vs Wallstreet market battle. Wallstreet was well regarded as a solid market, whilst Dream was continuously called a LEO honeypot. I'm pretty convinced that all this talk was FUD spread by the German cyber-police after reading this article.
I completely agree that legalization and education is the only rational solution. In many countries people are already too confident in the legal system to make life choices for them, and they tell with a straight face that anything "is good for health because else why would it not be made illegal already?".
Okay I am going to contradict myself a little bit now... actually, today the state is also healing people when they are sick, using tax money for that. So, just letting people make themselves sick and then suck up tax money to get back on their feet is very counterproductive... which is why "prevention" is so important, and why so many substances are regulated or forbidden.
The state is not a business and does not have to make decisions based on the cost/benefit analysis from a monetary or tax collecting perspective. In the US for example, LSD and psilocybin are illegal even though there is zero chance for chemical addiction or dependence. In Canada and the US you can get a prescription for Klonopin, which sounds roughly as addictive as cocaine. People have gone to rehab for Klonopin addiction--for a prescription anti-anxiolytic!
But it has to be somewhere in the lawmaking process. Imagine there is a perfect but very costly cure for Alzheimer, imagine the price to cure one person is equivalent to the GDP of the whole country.
On the other hand, you cannot let people harm themselves and then do everything to save them. What is the cost to repair somebody who went out of his way to cut his hand in a very dirty way, such that it would take hundred of hours of surgery?
In democratic countries the politicians care about how the expenditure looks to the public. People think that 5 billion dollars in welfare is a lot of money, so it's hard to spend more welfare. People do not think that 5 trillion dollars on "defense" is a lot of money, so it's easy to spend more money on defense even though it has at best dubious return on investment.
Agora was another market who made sailed off in to the sea keeping true to their words. Everyone got their money from escrow, no one was scammed and was always under DDoS.
When I went on vacation to Europe, that was one of the most noticeable differences from the United States. In Prague in particular, people were aggressively selling drugs.
Who will sue the police?
Who will investigate the police?
LEA and intelligence agencies operate in legally grey areas because the know they can get away with it and the politicians are happy that results can be shown.
Parallel construction is often used, involving private sector 3rd parties.
CO cops just won on appeal for demolishing a home to catch a thief who made off with a shirt and belt from Wal-Mart. It's doubtful they could be held accountable for pigging up a computer network.
Depends on what laws you're considering. So not knowing exactly which country the server was located in or the country the police that enacted the DDoS are from it is hard to say if it's legal or not.
A dark web drug marketplace was well-secured, but a competitor was not. Frustrated law enforcement is rumored to have DOSed the well-protected site to drive buyers to the less-well-protected site, which was promptly seized by LEOs.
Medicines: Schedule a free consult with the doctor in your healthcare area. Obtain a stamped and signed recipe based in his/her professional opinion. Ask for the product in the next pharmacy and exchange your recipe for the product. Pay a small amount or nothing at all. Say thanks and have a good day. Finish.
Just decriminalize it already. Tax it, inspect for quality and offer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months (paid for by taxes and imports) and start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion; not possession or intent to distribute. 50% to 90% user rate drop, far less overdoses and overall huge tax increases.
I’d like to preface this by saying I support full legalization.
Incentivizing the legalization of drugs (or any vice for that matter) through tax structures makes me uncomfortable. I worry that it creates a positive feedback loop where the government generates tax revenue off it’s population’s addictions. Under this, it seems that effectively treating addiction is a double loss for the gov. It cost tax money to treat addiction, and the addicts were generating taxes.
I watch what legalized gambling in Illinois is doing. Those video poker machines at local restaurants are destroying lives. But with the current tax structure, the _state_ is the addict because it is dependent on the taxes those machines are generating.
> I worry that it creates a positive feedback loop where the government generates tax revenue off it’s population’s addictions.
Do you loose a lot of sleep over the fact that the government is doing this today with, for example, alcohol? Alcohol is an insanely destructive drug. It decimates families, relationships, careers, lives, etc. No one at all seems to say the government need to "stop profiting off the taxes". It frankly never comes up. Sure we talk a lot about how to help those who reach the stages of addiction, but there's never guilt over the tax revenue.
I'm asking you to honestly think why this is any different.
I do worry about it in the case of tobacco. I think the big push to ban nicotine vaping is driven by big tobacco, and politicians cashing in on the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement: it created really perverse incentives where states literally receive a portion of all tobacco sales, which can add up to a huge amount. Anything that reduces that is directly an attack on the state's budget.
you are assuming a lot about GP, how do you know they don't also oppose alcohol taxes?
personally, I accept grudgingly that tax dollars may be necessary to "sweeten the pot" of legalization for people who are otherwise opposed or apathetic towards it. ideally, the tax would go directly towards funding rehab for those who want it and be revenue neutral overall, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think alcohol should be taxed the same as food. This is a product of a lot of experience with alcoholism among friends and family. IMO we should be considering the epidemic as a symptom, in addition to providing addiction treatment/support as needed.
What drugs are you talking about? The article opens up talking about MDMA, which is generally non-addictive and taken infrequently. Some governments tax the sale of cannabis, which is probably a lot more psychologically addictive than MDMA. And of course they tax the sale of alcohol and tobacco, which are both a lot more physiologically and psychologically addictive than MDMA. What are your thoughts on those substances, and the government's role?
I'm in favor of just legalizing/decriminalizing it all. For drugs that are highly addictive, like heroin and meth, instead of the government selling them or taxing them, taxes from the less addictive substances could be used in part to fund treatment and recovery programs.
MDMA does have a lot more potential for physiological harm (including brain damage and death) than cannabis despite being much less addictive, so that may need to be in an in-between category that's focused more on prosecuting people selling impure products, and education (imagine FDA warnings and advice on every MDMA tablet), without most of the addiction recovery aspects.
Tobacco taxes have been found to discourage smoking among certain populations [1].
Perhaps that's not a fair comparison because the way legalization has been going, at least in the U.S. looks like a cross between tobacco and gambling. Taxing tobacco feels like the more correct metaphor, but I'm not sure why.
I observe that high tobbaco taxes have been a serious factor in discouraging or reducing smoking where I live, however, I'd like to point out a drawback. I'm not asserting that it would outweigh the benefits, but still.
What I'm seeing is that the high taxes, combined with a boundary to a neighbouring country with much lower taxes, is creating an extra financial incentive for crime that wasn't there. It suddenly created a situation where there's big money to be made in smuggling, and a strong pressure for corruption for various officials (customs, local police, administrative officials, municipalities, judges) funded by that money, and for violent crime (e.g. murdering honest officials that refuse to be bribed) funded by cigarette smuggling. In some sense it's comparable to the drug organized crime, because the market for 'gray' tobacco is comparable to drugs; while the customers pay much less, there are many more customers. And any black market has all kinds of negative side-effects on society simply by existing, as it adds incentives for bribery and corruption, and it funds people and organizations who naturally extend to other crimes - just like prohibition funded the rise of mob in USA.
So I'm worrying that the expected benefits of legalization are (in part) reliant on users moving from black market to legal means; however, in a legalized but heavily taxed environment many (most?) users would still prefer to keep their illegal dealers (because their product is affordable) and the expected decrease in crime and violence would not materialize because of that.
Black market has immense operation expenses. It won't be able to undercut a legal market, even very heavily taxed, but still free.
It's more profitable to just start a legal operation instead.
OTOH countries where a particular drug is illegal will feel a significant pressure if in a large neighboring country the same substance is legal. This.hopefully would provide both an example and an incentive to at least decriminalize the substance, too.
My observation about cigarettes is exactly a counterexample showing that, despite the criminal operation expenses, in practice the black market is able to undercut a heavily taxed legal market - not for everyone, probably not even for the majority of the market, but for a substantially large portion of population to have a meaningful consequences in corruption and organized crime.
It's getting better now, but mostly because cigarettes as such are being undercut by vaping that's cheaper.
IDK about that. In Sweden tobacco is heavily taxed, border control sometimes stops trucks loaded with smuggled cigarettes, with the resources they have it's assumed that many times more get through. I know some small shops sell tobacco for cheap under the table.
I see similar things, and suggest another quite bad externality: when people realize the law doesn't make sense or look out for their bests interests they quickly come to view it with contempt.
I agree, what you said has literally happened in my Place, Punjab India. Government gets a good chunk of money from 5ax on Alcohol, but at same time the religious beliefs prevent drinking. Politicians promise to curb alcohal sale, come to power, & do nothing because state depends on that tax. Funny reasons of tax like Education Cess on each bottle have been levied to justify alcohal sale.
I knew someone would say this. Full legalization for narcotics for drugs such as; heroin, methamphetamine and even "peaceful" psychedelics will spawn a whole host of problems our society isn't ready to deal with, including; psychiatric, welfare, substance abuse and worst case, the above 1984 situation you mentioned. It's why opiates were partly banned (besides the racist overtones) in the earlier part of the 20th century. If you want to see a historical example, look at China's opium crisis in the 19th century.
Full legalization is not the correct path, full decriminalization, subjective taxing, quality assessment and proper counseling and support is.
The right question to ask is "why am I being put in jail?" -- there is no way to satisfactorily answer such a question in the case of nonviolent drug possession / use.
We don't put people in jail because they drink (impairs the mind). We don't put people in jail because they ski (can kill people instantly). Putting someone in jail is the worst thing a state does to an individual, and an answer of "because we're not sure what will happen if we don't" isn't appropriate.
Read Legalize This: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs (Practical Ethics Series) by Doug Husak
I fully agree. I was hoping the increasing popularity of nicotine vaporizers would show people just how much money taxes are siphoning off of their alcohol and tobacco purchases. It looks like it is working, especially with marijuana, as people are still incentivized to buy black or grey market goods due to high taxes.
Most of these taxes are called sin taxes, and are higher because of a value judgement the government is making... and should not be making.
Drug legalization is about harm reduction for those already addicted. It makes it possible for them to get help for actual problems. Also it makes it less attractive to younger people as it's no longer recognized as "rebelling". AND it cuts off the flow of money to organized crime!
Portugal. Look into the drug situation in Portugal.
One of the big hurdles with full legalisation / taxation which you're suggesting (as opposed to decriminalisation) is how to deal with the approval processes for future substances.
Do you just grandfather in a certain number of existing drugs (ie marijuana, MDMA, etc?)
What happens when a new substance hits town? The approval process for new therapeutic drugs is huge and very expensive - and only major pharmaceutical companies can generally bear the cost (plus the safety requirements are stringent enough that many currently illegal drugs wouldn't pass).
If you allow future street/recreational drugs to get a free pass (and tax them), you're opening a loophole for new pharmaceutical drugs to make it to market without due approval and safety checks.
Decriminalisation (Portugal-style) is a different thing altogether, but you don't get the tax revenues and the implicit sanctioning that brings.
I'd argue that for most customers the various drugs are somewhat feasible substitutes for each other, many of them fill similar needs. The introduction of new "products" seems to be driven by supply side because they're easier to manufacture or transport, because some chemicals aren't yet illegal, etc.
IMHO if a limited number of mostly well-understood drugs (from different types) would be legalized, then it would seriously undercut the demand for any of the new substances.
I don't mean to detract from the point you were trying to make, but a lot of the novel psychoactive substances that have appeared in recent times (e.g. synthetic cannabinoids such as spice) only ever came to be because of current drug regulations - they were created because in many countries individual drugs are outlawed, so if you create a new one, it will be legal to sell it for a time.
The "traditional" drugs are more than enough for most psychonauts - why risk some novel substance with an unknown safety profile if you could legally and safely obtain high-quality cannabis, MDMA, cocaine etc?
> If you allow future street/recreational drugs to get a free pass (and tax them), you're opening a loophole for new pharmaceutical drugs to make it to market without due approval and safety checks.
I'd love being free to buy pharmaceuticals without the approval of my government and doctor; that's a feature, not a bug!
legalization doesn't have to mean that you can just walk into CVS and buy any drug you want, and it certainly doesn't have to mean that your doctor can recommend unapproved drugs to you.
legalization is compatible with certain reasonable constraints. advertisement of any drug (maybe even FDA approved) can be prohibited. sale of unapproved drugs can be restricted to certain specialty stores so there's no risk of people assuming it's safe just because it's at their pharmacy or grocery store. you can mandate warnings on the packaging and/or at the entrance to the store. you can say no such stores within x feet of a school.
What got me the other day was an article about how widespread drugs are in the prison system. If you can't even keep them out of such a locked down and controlled environment, it's a fools errand to think you can keep them off the streets.
Just legalize it, tax it, get rid of the criminal element here. Focus on education and rehab as a way of dealing with the negative effects. Way better bang for the buck than the war on drugs.
While I can see the argument for decriminalisation of most drugs, I can't believe something like fentanyl should ever be. Just like you can't legally buy cyanide without a permit - it's just too dangerous to allow free market distribution.
The rise of fentanyl trafficking is largely a result of prohibition. Imagine you are a drug smuggler. Now would you rather have truck load worth $100k or a briefcase worth $100k?
Sort of, but the calculus changes. In a regulated market, costs are likely to be dominated by the cost of the product, cost of service, regulations and taxes - shipping a truckload of product legally isn't going to come close to that. But with illegal drugs, cost of transport is one of the biggest contributors to cost, and so taking steps to minimize that is worthwhile.
For instance, cocaine costs ~2k/kg in backcountry Columbia, but ~20k/kg in US cities [0] (at least at the time the article was researched). And when your transport costs dominate that much, almost every way to reduce volume and weight is justified.
Transporting a truck of legal goods across a whole continent and multiple countries is much cheaper and easier than a briefcase of illegal drugs.
The total cost of risk-free (i.e. fully insured) delivery of a truckful of goods is trivial compared to even quite cheap products; while that briefcase would pretty much have to double in value after that long trip to make the transport profitable.
That briefcase will increase in value ten fold over the journey. So my point stands, easier to transport the briefcase and the returns are better. The risk is higher but that is why the returns are higher.
Probably? Hospitals use fentanyl all the time and I’d imagine they have no problem with dosing. It’s probably pretty great to have enough pain killers on hand for an entire hospital and not needing 100x the space (or whatever the scale is)
Guns are pretty heavily regulated in the US though? Many kinds you can't buy at all, and those you can require background checks. (A lot of people seem to think that there are fewer restrictions on guns than there actually are, and that's before you bring individual states into the equation)
It's just everywhere else is even more outrageously restricted, which makes the US look liberal in comparison...
But to call guns unregulated in the states is to say that cars (among many other things) are completely unregulated too.
Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.
Murdering cartels and private prison owners became billionaires off of enormous human suffering because someone wrote a law.
IDK - I've seen what a heroin addict can do not only to themselves but their family and community; and a natural product can easily be evil that needs to be restricted.
It's wishful thinking to expect that all people are capable of full responsibility for their actions and deserve the ill consequences of their choices given unrestricted access to everything. Our free will, motivation, goals and core values can be chemically altered - probably even more so in future. There's a tradeoff, there's an optimal amount of restrictions which results in best outcomes for most people, and while I'm not certain where exactly that optimum lies, I'm absolutely certain that zero restrictions is not that optimum.
It's not the government's right to tell you not to ruin your life. That is the domain of the family, friends, community, or religious group. People have had many options for self-destruction for thousands of years, yet we still survived. That people automatically assume the worst would happen if the police state stops watching over them is telling that we have gotten too cynical about our social structures.
Yes, heroin alters your free will. That's why it shouldn't be illegal. You should not punish someone dealing drugs to support their non-free will'd habit because the drug removed their intent.
Also all of the examples of destructive heroin addicts you know are from a system that prohibits it. You don't know what our culture would look like in a free market drugs universe. Knowing that there is no safety net, you would probably get mocked and beaten up for expressing an intent to use heroin. Addiction wouldn't be externalized to the government, and families would have to deal with addicts instead of the prison system. Culture would evolve drastically. People have coexisted with addictive plants for thousands of years before the police state showed up.
Well, our differences in value judgements and expectations of likely outcomes seem so different that it's probably not productive to debate, so I'll just note that I disagree with almost every assertion and assumption made in this comment.
I suspect most people outside of the most privileged circles know at least a couple opiate addicts who have ruined their own lives and harmed others around them.
the important question to ask is how much of this is inherent to the drug itself and how much is a consequence of prohibition. my take is that most of the horrible things that heroin addicts do is a result of the financial/legal situation that prohibition puts them in, not the inherent effects of the drug. in my experience, opiate addicts with a secure supply tend to be docile, if unproductive, members of society. I wouldn't say the same for alcoholics...
> Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.
It would become a lot more efficient without prohibition. A lot of heroin is derived from laborious manual processing of opium from poppies.
The agricultural-industrial complex would plant a field of a potent strain, fertilize it, let it grow, chop it all down, crush it up, extract out the goods and probably 5x+ crop yields with a team of 2 or 3 operating thousands of acres.
In the Golden Triangle or cocaine-exporting countries, the drug lords are often using slave labor (another reason prohibition is disgusting). Slaves are still more expensive than agribusiness automation though.
I don't know. It is my understanding that with opiates you build up resistance to a point where eventually you just need something of fentanyl strength - and in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no?
> in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no?
I don't see why.
The primary issue with fentanyl today is not that the people who need/want it are taking it, it's that it's being used to adulterate other drugs. Many people die from fentanyl having no desire to take it, nor any knowledge they are taking it. Others die because of incorrect labelling or unexpected purity. Regulate the market as we regulate other markets, and these problems go away.
My local supermarket sells a lot of things which would kill me if swallowed in relatively small amounts (acetaminophen and caffeine tablets, for example), but there's no crisis of people dying from taking a box of No-Doz because, well, why would you want to? Fentanyl overdose is a pretty baroque method of suicide in a hypothetical world where all drugs are legal and safe.
(I'm not especially against the idea that, even if heroine is legal, fentanyl should still be prescription only or whatever for some reason! I just don't see any obvious reasons why it would be uniquely dangerous. Most things will kill you at a sufficient dose; they're problematic only if you're at risk of accidentally taking that dose. And the obvious problems with fentanyl today would not apply so...)
Or even stop regulating the drugs that are currently illegal entirely, and let market mechanisms work! Drugs are in this middle ground that's both not policed by the government AND can't use standard market signalling methods.
Arguably the fact that you can get good, high quality drugs reliably from darknet markets is the "stop regulating the drugs entirely" mechanism at work, only by making enforcement impossible.
It is not possible to have a tolerance that high. Fentanyl is 100x the strength of morphine. Morphine alone is enough to kill you, so it is not possible to need something more than morphine unless you're immortal. Drug traffickers sell fake heroin that's actually fentanyl + 99% baby powder or whatever. When they mismeasure the fentanyl dose, people die. There is no way someone would choose this in a free market where real heroin were available. Fentanyl is 100% the government's fault.
Fentanyl is typically used as a cutting agent. Heroin, xanax, etc are all fairly expensive so if you can cut these drugs with fentanyl to provide a similar experience, then it may be in the dealer's financial interest to do so. From what I've read online, not a lot of users chase fentanyl itself unless it is the only opiate available to them.
then tough. If someone is to the stage where however much pure heroin they inject is not enough, then the the medical care on offer at such places is put into place way before this becomes a problem.
As a recreational drug, heroin is much more desirable than fentanyl. The problem with street heroin it is cut to nothing and expensive (relative). Fentaynl is pure strength, shorter lasting and less enjoyable.
Fentanyl, cyanide, heroin, and meth should all be legal and over-the-counter.
I don't think the government should tell a woman what to do with her body, and I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with yours.
When you advocate for drug legalization from the perspective of safety, then you get into doublethink territory. Some people simultaneously want cannabis and hallucinogens to be legalized yet want the tobacco age increased to 21. Cannabis is not exactly safe. Methamphetamine has been prescribed for decades for legitimate medical use, and hallucinogens have caused permanent schizophrenia. If cannabis were suddenly proven to be extremely dangerous, would you reverse your position and become a prohibitionist? Do you really want to prioritize safety over freedom?
Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.
>>Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.
You do realise that fentanyl is even deadlier than cyanidie, right? Few hundred grams dropped into a water supply would kill a stupid number of people.
What else do you think should be available over the counter? Industrial-strength acid? Organic mercury compounds?
It's not about "I will do what I want with my body" - it's just that dangerous materials and poisons shouldn't be available to everyone, just like automatic rifles aren't. Can criminals still get them if they want them? Sure, but that's not an argument for making them available to general population.
If by cyanide you mean hydrogen cyanide that sounds to me like something trivially easy to manufacture on your own. The permit thing must be to protect people from hurting themselves.
EDIT: yeah it is, if I’m reading Wikipedia right (and it’s accurate, I’ve seen bad chemistry on it before) a teenager could make it with ammonia and charcoal from Walmart.
Carbon in pulp gold miners/producers buy it by the hundreds of tonnes, key part of extracting mineralised gold.
While toxicity is very high and thousands of people handle it daily, number deaths at Gold mines is very low - I don't know last time Western Australia had an accidental cyanide death and there are hundreds of mines with 7% of global production from the state.
I doubt there'd be much demand for fentanyl if other opiates were available but the problems with it are caused by unknown quantity and quality. Solve that and overdoses get a lot rarer. "This amount is what you need to get high. More than that is dangerous."
The language I like to use is systemic risk. Legalize or decriminalize everything that's not a systemic risk. Overuse of antibiotics presents a systemic risk. Grandma's heart medication does not. Fentanyl is a borderline wmd.
I am slowly retreating from this school of thought seeing how ineffective states and provinces in the US and Canada have done with decriminalizing cannabis, resulting in an arguably more thriving black market that differs than the one pre-legalization. Call me pessimistic but I think as we decriminalize other drugs their black markets will mutate in a similar way.
In addition I am curious on your opinion and that of others on if a line should be draw and what characteristics that line is to be drawn on.
If they can't compete with the legal option, or, if the legal option has too many requirements, there will be black market. This apply to any business.
As someone concerned about my drinking habits - I actually want this. I assume a good overview of liver health can be ascertained through urinalysis or a blood test?
You can get a simple blood test for liver inflammation markers like alanine aminotransferase. Your GP can most likely prescribe it to you if you are worried about it.
> start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion
Or you know, just end criminalization and be done, because those laws should never have been created in the first place. Setting up heavyweight tax enforcement regime would allow the continuation of the same structured thuggery that exists today, just with new job titles and new law references to memorize.
The biggest moral hazard is from companies ramping up and becoming pushers at-scale. The more regulations there are to comply with, the more the market will centralize towards that.
I agree with you on legalization. However, I imagine these cool kids in my surrounding neighborhoods (that like to intimidate people etc etc) using them and it makes me think twice.
It feels like it would be anarchy. Which I believe most people think too.
With the risk of sounding grumpy. Some people are really immature and deliberately anti-social and defying social norms.
>start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion
This is already one of the ways they go after drug dealers if they can't get evidence of them dealing. Every successful long term drug dealer I've met also has a 'real job', as in, something to declare on the tax forms.
