
American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged - Fjolsvith
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-darknet-vendor-and-costa-rican-pharmacist-charged-narcotics-and-money-laundering
======
CameronNemo
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 treating opioid abuse on the
supply side. We need solutions that focus on patient health and wellness. An
opioid on its own does not result in overdoses or abuse, and even moderate use
can be balanced with a healthy lifestyle. The DOJ does not have the tools,
skills, or experience necessary to address the public health crisis that is
opioid abuse.

~~~
263943736
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.

~~~
Aerroon
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 than what the
drugs themselves do. Are opioids among them?

~~~
neuroma
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](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 therapeutics. The money shot is this
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overall-weighted-
scores-...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overall-weighted-scores-for-
each-of-the-drugs-The-coloured-bars-indicate-the-part-scores_fig1_47635105)

A recent article which contextualises the work is here
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109763/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109763/)

~~~
ethanbond
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.

------
fiblye
>“These charges are a warning to drug traffickers worldwide that neither the
shroud of the darknet or of virtual currency can hide their illegal activities
from the vigilance of U.S. law enforcement,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Michael
Sherwin for the District of Columbia.

The real warning to heed here is that we allow some countries to arrest
citizens of other countries who committed crimes outside of their borders.

I know what extradition is, but the concept of spending your whole life in
country A, and having country B decide it's time to arrest you and charge you
within their jurisdiction makes me uncomfortable. I think more people will
oppose it once global power balances start to shift this century.

~~~
bobthepanda
This is already starting to happen.

A bunch of countries suspended extradition to Hong Kong after all the recent
power consolidation by China because while they trusted an independent Hong
Kong to have reasonable limits on its judiciary they do not trust China to do
the same; after all this is a country that dismisses "rule of law". And in
fact the whole protest situation was caused by Hong Kong's Government
introducing a poorly worded extradition bill that would've essentially given
carte blanche for Chinese extradition.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/world/asia/hong-kong-
extr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/world/asia/hong-kong-extradition-
bill.html)

~~~
throw443259
And the reason for the initial bill was due to a Hong Kong citizen murdering
his girlfriend in Taiwan.

Taiwan and Hong Kong do not have extradition treaties.

The murderer is still free in Hong Kong.

~~~
bobthepanda
I mean this was never going to happen anyways because cross-strait relations
are fickle and perilous at the best of times, and Taiwan has specifically said
that it does not really want to participate in extradition with HK after the
whole fiasco. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/world/asia/hong-kong-
murd...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/world/asia/hong-kong-murder-
taiwan-extradition.html)

The rational response to "hey the country who originally requested the
extradition doesn't want to do it anymore" would be to shelve the bill, but at
that point the Government and CCP wanted to save face and dug in their heels.
Which makes the whole situation an extremely stupid case study of how not to
de-escalate a situation.

------
seibelj
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.

~~~
bjo590
> I would rather someone be addicted to pharmaceutical grade opioids than
> street heroin laced with fentanyl and other junk.

The two addictions are more or less the same. Someone addicted to street
heroin can substitute pharmaceutical grade opioids. Someone addicted to
pharmaceutical grade opioids can substitute street heroin. This is largely a
class discrepancy, as the higher tolerance a person has the more expensive the
pharmaceutical grade opioid use is compared to street heroin.

~~~
seibelj
I don't believe I commit any crime when I put any substance of my choice into
my own body, regardless of what the state says.

~~~
techntoke
Right!?! Legalizing drugs would solve a lot of issues and let people actually
address and talk about the real problems which is often mental health, however
there are a lot of things like mushrooms and LSD that may cause people to
"wake up" and not want to be a slave to the system anymore and I think that is
mostly what they fear. People realizing they have more choice and power than
they've been led to believe.

------
refurb
I see Silkroad mentioned, so I’m assuming these were crimes committed years
ago?

23,900 bitcoin? That was a big business. No wonder why they were targeted.

~~~
fbi-director
If it truly was at the time of the original silkroad, you have to consider the
change in value of btc since then to get a more realistic idea of the size and
value of their business. Not saying it wasn't big, no idea, just stating we
should consider that fact.

~~~
ikeboy
2013 - 2018, per indictment

------
technonerd
There's so many questions left unanswered from this indictment. How did they
get his emails, how did they get the bitcoin amount. I'm more interested in
the details and opsec failures.

------
3131s
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 lost on history.

~~~
m0zg
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.

~~~
AniseAbyss
Look at the reason why people use drugs. I am convinced happy people with
fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Large scale substance abuse is IMO an indication something went very wrong in
society.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Even if that were true, it would still be possible that it was true because
the same innate features which incline toward addiction work against having a
happy fulfilled life in the same external conditions that someone without
those features would have a happy, fulfilled life.

------
ur-whale
It'll be interesting to see if the DOJ manages to confiscate the crypto this
time around, and if so how.

~~~
maerF0x0
I'm fairly naive about the details of BTC, but couldnt the network decide to
either 1) quarantine those blocks/addresses or 2) Agree to a signature that
assigns the value to another wallet?

~~~
aunty_helen
The problem here (by design) is jurisdiction, the US DOJ doesn't stretch as
far as the bitcoin network.

As an example, why would someone in Russia stop processing coins because the
US DOJ said so?

Virtual currencies aren't the battleground for the US's war on drugs.

~~~
svara
... because any wallet downstream of the tainted wallet in the transaction
graph could be considered tainted as well. This would be a highly effective
attack on Bitcoin as an illegal payment method - the onus would be on every
Bitcoin user to ensure that they have provably done everything they could to
avoid obtaining "illegal bitcoins".

Therefore, the person in Russia in your example would have an interest in not
dealing with tainted coins, because they couldn't be sold for the same price
anymore.

It would basically split Bitcoin into white (provably legit), grey (unsure)
and black (illegal) coins.

Yes, this would probably also destroy Bitcoin, but that's a mechanism by which
states could obtain extraterritorial power over what people do with Bitcoin.

~~~
maerF0x0
This is almost exactly the concept i was thinking of. If the exchanges want to
continue to do business in the US they will blocklist the FBI's "suspect"
wallets / blocks or something like that...

