7 ms·

Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle. However I still do

Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle. However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right?

LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
The street dealers aren't usually the ones cooking them and therefore don't know what's in them.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  but someone is and does?
  - LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
    True, but it's quite possible that people who cook illegal drugs for money often don't care because they get paid by the distributor. At the end of the day, they're just trying to make a living like the rest of us, and they usually don't have to care about what happens to their users because its outside of their feedback loop. An analog to the tech industry would be the universal frustration with end user data collection vs its continuing proliferation. Most of us don't like the lack of privacy online and how much data companies capture, and many if not most of us work at companies that aren't capturing end user data. But many if not most of us, do make tools that are sold to companies who do capture an insane amount of user data. Ultimately, we still are often paid, at least indirectly, through privacy-violating user data collection because it's an extremely common web monetization model. I'd be willing to bet that there more than a few Facebook engineers on this forum who unironically complain about the lack of privacy on the web. But what pays their salaries?
rqtwteye 4y ago
I don’t think drug dealers are very thoughtful. Whatever makes quick money is fine. And they probably don’t even know what’s in their drugs.
- ChancyChance 4y ago
  Yeah the rest of the article said that it is cheaper to make than most opioids so I guess it is just the walmartification of illegal drugs: fast and cheap and shoddy.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Illicit fentanyl is mass produced in foreign pharmacy (90% in China), and pretty easy to smuggle in (used to be direct, now via Mexico), making it really cheap. There is also licit fentanyl to consider, which can become illicit due to prescription fraud or theft, but usually its cheap enough to just get illicitly imported fent.
    - runnerup 4y ago
      China cracked down on fentanyl manufacture in 2019. “90% in China” is now more like 3%.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        Nope. The only thing that has changed since 2019 is that people in China are no longer mailing it directly to the USA anymore (China cracked down on that because America threatened to end preferential mailing rates from China to the USA). Beijing is no longer cooperating with US authorities on stopping fentanyl flow from China: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-chinese-chemicals-to-mexican-cartels-11671722056 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-... The chemicals are still making it to Mexico from China, that is still easy to track: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipeline-mexico-china-pkg-culver-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipelin... https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-china-mexico-north-texas-dallas/ https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-chi... Etc... TLDR; China is still the source for the vast majority of fentanyl in the states (a lot of it is seized in Mexico in containers that come from china, though they get around this by just shipping a lot of it), and no one (including China) is really claiming otherwise since it is just too obvious ATM.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
akiselev 4y ago
Fentanyl costs on the order of $1,000 per kilogram to produce and that’s enough to cut hundreds of thousands of doses of another drug while making them significantly more addictive. It makes other drugs so profitable that the loss in customers is well worth it. There’s a future user born every minute, afterall.
matthew9219 4y ago
> Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle. I didn't see this in the article. I read that Barnett didn't realize the trend until after a few events - but I didn't see anything indicating a lack of empathy. It's possible to both be emphatic and think an unfortunate event is a one-off caused by external factors, for which a policy change is not necessary.
yetanotherloss 4y ago
For the most part it's not intentionally lacing drugs, it's poor quality control and cross contamination. No one is intentionally mixing fentanyl and MDMA or cocaine but with poor lab work it's easy to get a bit of the wrong whitish powder and the people selling it down stream have no more idea than their buyers what's really in it. Affluent recreational drug connoisseurs can use basic chemistry and test kits to be highly confident what they're taking but even they get bit sometimes if reckless and using a new source.
- ChancyChance 4y ago
  Oh I see. It takes 2mg of fentanyl to kill a person so I bet that much ends up on dirty lab equipment.
  - Acutulus 4y ago
    Precisely this, yes. Anecdotal: I have had many exposures to the illicit drug markets in my areas throughout the years. The symptom of many underlying unresolved issues I am sure, but that is not relevant. What I wish to say is that I have seen many pressed counterfeit tablets in my lifetime and have had the luxury and wherewithal to test a majority of them before usage. I have personally never identified fentanyl in a product that was not marketed as an opioid. With illicitly manufactured oxycontin and its ilk you will come across it a majority of the time. But with other things such as MDMA, ketamine and such it's incredibly rare to see. That is not to say it doesn't happen however, there have been instances of things containing fentanyl which had no business doing so. Despite this I echo GP's claim that it's largely due to inadvertant cross contamination than it is some intentional reason. The supply chains for these drugs are very long and windy once they are finalized for consumer use inside the US as well, with many middlemen making a few dollars to facilitate a transaction. Each of those hand-offs is one more opportunity for the new seller to say "I bought X, but could sell much more if I said it was Y", and that ends up killing people occasionally too. Hypothesis: There is a number of factors at play here that add to the death toll. There is the occasional unintended cross contamination during production. It's also worth noting that individuals who import bulk drugs from overseas for their own sales often order multiple different substances and craft them for sale, further increasing the chance for that contamination during production. There is the fact that fentanyl and a majority of it's analogues are active at shockingly low doses relative to more classical opioids, which makes improper distribution of active ingredients into the final pill mixture highly likely when you consider they are usually not created with the best quality control procedures or equipment. There is the fact that younger users (I would argue they are more experimenters than users per se) of opioid drugs have less physical tolerance to these chemicals. We should also consider that youths also have less practical experience, and not knowing the "lay of the land" with these substances can kill you very easily. And then of course the obvious increase in the average American's listlissness, hopelessness, economic uncertainty, fear of the future and so on. The ground under our feet is shifting and drugs are a temporary respite from that, if harmful long term. Add to this the fact that we have a very drugs-illiberal society on the whole, whose governments oftentimes think the best way to address this problem is simply banning substances or once in a while executing operations to damage the supply chain, while completely avoiding the idea that perhaps most usage of these substances is symptomatic of a problem and not the problem itself? And you end up with an firehose of drug analogues that can escape easy regulation and restriction juuuuust long enough to gain a foothold in the market and shift the consumer culture of a particular drug. It's not a problem you can legislate your way out of, and it never will be. All of this is to say I expect US overdoses per capita, the "never-before-seenness" (and by extension lack of medical knowledge surrounding it) of the drug analogues on the market, and the overall appetite for drugs of dependency, all to continue increasing for the forseeable future. I wish it wasn't this way. But like most of the US' modern cultural issues we enjoy arguing about what could offer relief far more than we do finding a bipartisan way to address them.
cryptonector 4y ago
Not zero empathy. One's his county (Hays), the other's not (Travis). > However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right? I don't get that either. Maybe the dealers actually want their clients dead. Or maybe they're incompetent.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  They want their clients hooked. A few percent attrition for your SaaS product makes sense if you convert 50% more of your first month subscribers to annual.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
popcalc 4y ago
Illegal drugs are a perfect competition market like grain or white label milk. Not really a big opportunity to differentiate with a brand as you can't register a trademark or defend it in court (lol). A minor price advantage brings vendors a magnified sales volume because it is just so cutthroat. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
MaxHoppersGhost 4y ago
> However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right? I always assumed the dealers knew they had terrible cocaine and would lace it with fentanyl to give it more of an effect. The problem is that such a small amount is lethal so it doesn’t get mixed well enough or they just put too much in. No idea if that’s why.

LapsangGuzzler 4y ago

The street dealers aren't usually the ones cooking them and therefore don't know what's in them.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
but someone is and does?
- LapsangGuzzler 4y ago
  True, but it's quite possible that people who cook illegal drugs for money often don't care because they get paid by the distributor. At the end of the day, they're just trying to make a living like the rest of us, and they usually don't have to care about what happens to their users because its outside of their feedback loop. An analog to the tech industry would be the universal frustration with end user data collection vs its continuing proliferation. Most of us don't like the lack of privacy online and how much data companies capture, and many if not most of us work at companies that aren't capturing end user data. But many if not most of us, do make tools that are sold to companies who do capture an insane amount of user data. Ultimately, we still are often paid, at least indirectly, through privacy-violating user data collection because it's an extremely common web monetization model. I'd be willing to bet that there more than a few Facebook engineers on this forum who unironically complain about the lack of privacy on the web. But what pays their salaries?

rqtwteye 4y ago

I don’t think drug dealers are very thoughtful. Whatever makes quick money is fine. And they probably don’t even know what’s in their drugs.

ChancyChance 4y ago
Yeah the rest of the article said that it is cheaper to make than most opioids so I guess it is just the walmartification of illegal drugs: fast and cheap and shoddy.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Illicit fentanyl is mass produced in foreign pharmacy (90% in China), and pretty easy to smuggle in (used to be direct, now via Mexico), making it really cheap. There is also licit fentanyl to consider, which can become illicit due to prescription fraud or theft, but usually its cheap enough to just get illicitly imported fent.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    China cracked down on fentanyl manufacture in 2019. “90% in China” is now more like 3%.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Nope. The only thing that has changed since 2019 is that people in China are no longer mailing it directly to the USA anymore (China cracked down on that because America threatened to end preferential mailing rates from China to the USA). Beijing is no longer cooperating with US authorities on stopping fentanyl flow from China: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-chinese-chemicals-to-mexican-cartels-11671722056 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-... The chemicals are still making it to Mexico from China, that is still easy to track: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipeline-mexico-china-pkg-culver-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipelin... https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-china-mexico-north-texas-dallas/ https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-chi... Etc... TLDR; China is still the source for the vast majority of fentanyl in the states (a lot of it is seized in Mexico in containers that come from china, though they get around this by just shipping a lot of it), and no one (including China) is really claiming otherwise since it is just too obvious ATM.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

akiselev 4y ago

Fentanyl costs on the order of $1,000 per kilogram to produce and that’s enough to cut hundreds of thousands of doses of another drug while making them significantly more addictive. It makes other drugs so profitable that the loss in customers is well worth it. There’s a future user born every minute, afterall.

matthew9219 4y ago

> Notice how Barnett has zero empathy when he thought it was just an Austin thing, then did an about face after the subsequent deaths in Kyle. I didn't see this in the article. I read that Barnett didn't realize the trend until after a few events - but I didn't see anything indicating a lack of empathy. It's possible to both be emphatic and think an unfortunate event is a one-off caused by external factors, for which a policy change is not necessary.

yetanotherloss 4y ago

For the most part it's not intentionally lacing drugs, it's poor quality control and cross contamination. No one is intentionally mixing fentanyl and MDMA or cocaine but with poor lab work it's easy to get a bit of the wrong whitish powder and the people selling it down stream have no more idea than their buyers what's really in it. Affluent recreational drug connoisseurs can use basic chemistry and test kits to be highly confident what they're taking but even they get bit sometimes if reckless and using a new source.

ChancyChance 4y ago
Oh I see. It takes 2mg of fentanyl to kill a person so I bet that much ends up on dirty lab equipment.
- Acutulus 4y ago
  Precisely this, yes. Anecdotal: I have had many exposures to the illicit drug markets in my areas throughout the years. The symptom of many underlying unresolved issues I am sure, but that is not relevant. What I wish to say is that I have seen many pressed counterfeit tablets in my lifetime and have had the luxury and wherewithal to test a majority of them before usage. I have personally never identified fentanyl in a product that was not marketed as an opioid. With illicitly manufactured oxycontin and its ilk you will come across it a majority of the time. But with other things such as MDMA, ketamine and such it's incredibly rare to see. That is not to say it doesn't happen however, there have been instances of things containing fentanyl which had no business doing so. Despite this I echo GP's claim that it's largely due to inadvertant cross contamination than it is some intentional reason. The supply chains for these drugs are very long and windy once they are finalized for consumer use inside the US as well, with many middlemen making a few dollars to facilitate a transaction. Each of those hand-offs is one more opportunity for the new seller to say "I bought X, but could sell much more if I said it was Y", and that ends up killing people occasionally too. Hypothesis: There is a number of factors at play here that add to the death toll. There is the occasional unintended cross contamination during production. It's also worth noting that individuals who import bulk drugs from overseas for their own sales often order multiple different substances and craft them for sale, further increasing the chance for that contamination during production. There is the fact that fentanyl and a majority of it's analogues are active at shockingly low doses relative to more classical opioids, which makes improper distribution of active ingredients into the final pill mixture highly likely when you consider they are usually not created with the best quality control procedures or equipment. There is the fact that younger users (I would argue they are more experimenters than users per se) of opioid drugs have less physical tolerance to these chemicals. We should also consider that youths also have less practical experience, and not knowing the "lay of the land" with these substances can kill you very easily. And then of course the obvious increase in the average American's listlissness, hopelessness, economic uncertainty, fear of the future and so on. The ground under our feet is shifting and drugs are a temporary respite from that, if harmful long term. Add to this the fact that we have a very drugs-illiberal society on the whole, whose governments oftentimes think the best way to address this problem is simply banning substances or once in a while executing operations to damage the supply chain, while completely avoiding the idea that perhaps most usage of these substances is symptomatic of a problem and not the problem itself? And you end up with an firehose of drug analogues that can escape easy regulation and restriction juuuuust long enough to gain a foothold in the market and shift the consumer culture of a particular drug. It's not a problem you can legislate your way out of, and it never will be. All of this is to say I expect US overdoses per capita, the "never-before-seenness" (and by extension lack of medical knowledge surrounding it) of the drug analogues on the market, and the overall appetite for drugs of dependency, all to continue increasing for the forseeable future. I wish it wasn't this way. But like most of the US' modern cultural issues we enjoy arguing about what could offer relief far more than we do finding a bipartisan way to address them.

cryptonector 4y ago

Not zero empathy. One's his county (Hays), the other's not (Travis). > However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right? I don't get that either. Maybe the dealers actually want their clients dead. Or maybe they're incompetent.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
They want their clients hooked. A few percent attrition for your SaaS product makes sense if you convert 50% more of your first month subscribers to annual.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

popcalc 4y ago

Illegal drugs are a perfect competition market like grain or white label milk. Not really a big opportunity to differentiate with a brand as you can't register a trademark or defend it in court (lol). A minor price advantage brings vendors a magnified sales volume because it is just so cutthroat. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

MaxHoppersGhost 4y ago

> However I still don’t understand the point of lacing drugs with fentanyl. As a drug dealer you make more money with living clients, right? I always assumed the dealers knew they had terrible cocaine and would lace it with fentanyl to give it more of an effect. The problem is that such a small amount is lethal so it doesn’t get mixed well enough or they just put too much in. No idea if that’s why.