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It's a bit of a stretch to me that the picture up top is trying to pin the heartfelt death of a father on Amazon when all Amazon did was sell a pill press... I

It's a bit of a stretch to me that the picture up top is trying to pin the heartfelt death of a father on Amazon when all Amazon did was sell a pill press... I'm not saying Amazon should be selling these things, but that choice makes me distrust this whole article.

animalmom 6y ago
The Wall Street Journal covered this extensively last year. Amazon allows sellers to list and sell many dangerous items that would never make it onto the shelves of a physical store. * https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its-site-the-result-thousands-of-banned-unsafe-or-mislabeled-products-11566564990 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its... * https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibility-for-unsafe-products-the-case-of-the-hoverboard-11575563270?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=10 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibilit...
elliekelly 6y ago
Corporate lawyers often say “no policy at all is better than a policy you don’t enforce or follow.” Amazon set a policy not to sell or facilitate the sale of that type of product and then didn’t follow/enforce it. Failing a test of your own design is failing to meet a preposterously low bar.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  They do enforce it, as the article points out. Of course a few things will slip through at the scale of Amazon.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    The question to ask is whether Amazon’s policy and corresponding procedures are reasonably designed and effectively implemented to prevent violations. Will a few things slip through the cracks of a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program? Of course. But a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program will iterate and improve each time something is identified that has “slipped through.” Over time compliance increases while the number of cracks decrease. Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings. Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      As an Amazon customer I'm fine with them dedicating the legal minimum effort to this. Prices going up or the service getting worse over having to dedicate more resources to banned items would be a loss for me.
tantalor 6y ago
Is it a bit of a stretch to hold Amazon responsible when counterfeit medicines, made with Amazon-sold equipment, harm people? The sole purpose of this equipment is to deceive. As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain: She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
- likeclockwork 6y ago
  Is Percocet a safe medication designed to help people relax?
  - fortran77 6y ago
    Certainly not. Of course, people who abuse drugs don't deserve to die, but there is some risk you have to assume. The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses. > She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax. This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!
- pdonis 6y ago
  How did the counterfeit medicines get to the people who took them? These are prescription drugs; even if someone made counterfeits of them, how are they going to get the counterfeits into the prescription drug supply chain? It's not like you can get prescription drugs on Amazon. I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.
- xkcd-sucks 6y ago
  To be fair, Percocet isn't exactly "safe" and it's never prescribed to "help people relax". Overdoses on non-counterfeit prescription opioids happen all the time -- Often in this exact scenario, where a (presumably) opioid-naive person takes a "normal dose" of an opioid-tolerant person like a hospice patient or an addict. Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all. In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.
mindslight 6y ago
The bulk of the article is about a guy who mixed fentanyl with xanax and passed it off as percocet, but yet the bad actor is supposed to be Amazon? The real meta-villain here is the war on drug users, which created a profit motive for doing something so maliciously stupid. And it's rooted in this same regressive idea of controlling what people can buy to solve society's problems. I personally enjoy being able to obtain "weird shit" of all varieties. I don't know what's involved in a pill press per se, but I can't imagine it's particularly complex or tough to improvise. Distributed 3d printing/milling culture can't come quick enough, and get us some refuge from this clueless fear of tools.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  I'm kinda shocked that the State hasn't already banned 3D printers and desktop CNC mills. I mean... you can make almost anything ^^GASP^^ ... OMG, the horror, won't somebody please think of the children??? It really is absurd how so many people want to continue with this ridiculous war on inanimate objects, when the problem is almost always people.
- ben509 6y ago
  Ending the WOD will move us from having organized crime producing drugs to sleazy outfits trying to get rich quick. I don't want to understate what a massive improvement it will be because you'll be buying from someone afraid of going to jail, but it's not like Bayer is going to start selling heroin again. You'll still often be buying drugs from people who are maliciously stupid.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    As far as I know, the marijuana rush hasn't created a trend of middlemen cutting weed with oregano and then making up for it with a little fentanyl. Sleazy doesn't imply deceitful. Black markets set a tone of little enforcement and no recourse, since participants are already criminals. This encourages negative-sum games.
    - Nexxius 6y ago

animalmom 6y ago

The Wall Street Journal covered this extensively last year. Amazon allows sellers to list and sell many dangerous items that would never make it onto the shelves of a physical store. * https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its-site-the-result-thousands-of-banned-unsafe-or-mislabeled-products-11566564990 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its... * https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibility-for-unsafe-products-the-case-of-the-hoverboard-11575563270?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=10 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-dodges-responsibilit...

elliekelly 6y ago

Corporate lawyers often say “no policy at all is better than a policy you don’t enforce or follow.” Amazon set a policy not to sell or facilitate the sale of that type of product and then didn’t follow/enforce it. Failing a test of your own design is failing to meet a preposterously low bar.

jimmaswell 6y ago
They do enforce it, as the article points out. Of course a few things will slip through at the scale of Amazon.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  The question to ask is whether Amazon’s policy and corresponding procedures are reasonably designed and effectively implemented to prevent violations. Will a few things slip through the cracks of a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program? Of course. But a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program will iterate and improve each time something is identified that has “slipped through.” Over time compliance increases while the number of cracks decrease. Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings. Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    As an Amazon customer I'm fine with them dedicating the legal minimum effort to this. Prices going up or the service getting worse over having to dedicate more resources to banned items would be a loss for me.

tantalor 6y ago

Is it a bit of a stretch to hold Amazon responsible when counterfeit medicines, made with Amazon-sold equipment, harm people? The sole purpose of this equipment is to deceive. As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain: She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.

likeclockwork 6y ago
Is Percocet a safe medication designed to help people relax?
- fortran77 6y ago
  Certainly not. Of course, people who abuse drugs don't deserve to die, but there is some risk you have to assume. The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses. > She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax. This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!
pdonis 6y ago
How did the counterfeit medicines get to the people who took them? These are prescription drugs; even if someone made counterfeits of them, how are they going to get the counterfeits into the prescription drug supply chain? It's not like you can get prescription drugs on Amazon. I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.
xkcd-sucks 6y ago
To be fair, Percocet isn't exactly "safe" and it's never prescribed to "help people relax". Overdoses on non-counterfeit prescription opioids happen all the time -- Often in this exact scenario, where a (presumably) opioid-naive person takes a "normal dose" of an opioid-tolerant person like a hospice patient or an addict. Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all. In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.

mindslight 6y ago

The bulk of the article is about a guy who mixed fentanyl with xanax and passed it off as percocet, but yet the bad actor is supposed to be Amazon? The real meta-villain here is the war on drug users, which created a profit motive for doing something so maliciously stupid. And it's rooted in this same regressive idea of controlling what people can buy to solve society's problems. I personally enjoy being able to obtain "weird shit" of all varieties. I don't know what's involved in a pill press per se, but I can't imagine it's particularly complex or tough to improvise. Distributed 3d printing/milling culture can't come quick enough, and get us some refuge from this clueless fear of tools.

mindcrime 6y ago
I'm kinda shocked that the State hasn't already banned 3D printers and desktop CNC mills. I mean... you can make almost anything ^^GASP^^ ... OMG, the horror, won't somebody please think of the children??? It really is absurd how so many people want to continue with this ridiculous war on inanimate objects, when the problem is almost always people.
ben509 6y ago
Ending the WOD will move us from having organized crime producing drugs to sleazy outfits trying to get rich quick. I don't want to understate what a massive improvement it will be because you'll be buying from someone afraid of going to jail, but it's not like Bayer is going to start selling heroin again. You'll still often be buying drugs from people who are maliciously stupid.
- mindslight 6y ago
  As far as I know, the marijuana rush hasn't created a trend of middlemen cutting weed with oregano and then making up for it with a little fentanyl. Sleazy doesn't imply deceitful. Black markets set a tone of little enforcement and no recourse, since participants are already criminals. This encourages negative-sum games.
  - Nexxius 6y ago