
Deadly Chinese Fentanyl Is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins - devy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-22/deadly-chinese-fentanyl-is-creating-a-new-era-of-drug-kingpins
======
nacho2sweet
Fentanyl is a huge problem in Vancouver, where we are usually ground zero for
all new opiate trends. Besides killing over 1100 people a year in BC, the
money also seeps back into our overheated real-estate market through casino
money laundering. It is a crazy cycle. I have no idea why world governments
and our own don't say and do more against China. Spineless.

~~~
smallnamespace
This is the downside of having global economic integration (buy anything from
anywhere for the cost of USPS shipping) without political integration. It's
the same type of problem as Greek debtors vs. German creditors except in a
different context.

Fentanyl analogues are not a problem in China, hence the relative slowness in
cracking down on them.

The supplier is in China, but the buyer is the West. Why does moral
culpability only fall on one party?

~~~
Koshkin
Well, who was to blame for the 19th century Opium Wars? The Chinese?

~~~
toomanybeersies
I'm not sure what you're angling at with this weird historical whataboutism.

Are you saying that it's acceptable for Chinese companies and gangs to
manufacture opiates and ship them off to the USA because Britain and the USA
went to war with China 150 years ago to enforce the opium trade?

------
beat
Not to comment on the politics, but... I had fentanyl during a medical
procedure a while back, and I can totally see why it's so addictive. It was
_wonderful_. Both pain and anxiety were totally wiped out, and and the
comedown was clean and fast, with no ill effects at all. It's the most
pleasant drug I've ever experienced.

As long as this kind of high exists, people are going to take it.

~~~
e40
I had nausea for 2 days following a procedure where I had it. Compared to the
same procedure a few years before with Demerol, which I cleared from my system
in a few hours, fentanyl was horrid.

~~~
beat
I took Demerol a few times as a kid, and heroin once as an adult. As an
_anesthetic_ , fentanyl was perfect. I was pain free, felt lucid, and then
went right back to normal, no side effects at all.

As a kid, I suffered terrible migraines, and I am old enough to predate
migraine medication. My parents also suffer migraines (as do two of my three
sisters, yay genetics). Dad had a Demerol prescription for his. They wouldn't
give me Demerol, because it was a dangerous addictive drug. Instead, they gave
me the safe, effective state of the art circa late 1970s - phenobarbitol. I'd
take one, stumble to the couch, wake up 14 hours later, and not remember what
happened. I'll never put that poison in my body again! (Later, as an adult, a
drug counselor friend told me barbituates were the only drugs he'd seen to be
more addictive than tobacco.)

But if my parents needed me to be functional while fighting migraine? I got
one of Dad's Demerol instead. Which was awesome, because I still had a
migraine, but I didn't _care_ anymore. I could stay awake and follow
instructions and converse as needed, from my warm numb blanket of drug.

Working from memory here, I was a lot more "high" on Demerol, and it lasted
longer. Fentanyl was much cleaner.

Best of all was the one time I tried heroin, though. Holy crap. Never touching
that again. One of humanity's best and most dangerous inventions.

------
mindslight
> _A police officer suspected the windows of her silver Mitsubishi Galant were
> tinted too darkly, then found her license was suspended. He arrested her,
> and a search of her car_

Straight up parallel construction, until demonstrated otherwise. Gotta love
that strategically built weaseling - "suspecting" the tint and "suspended
license". Regurgitating this uncritically shows just how little credibility
the entire article has.

~~~
yayadarsh
It seems like you are implying that because they might be obfuscating a
hypothetical "source" that the findings are invalidated. What would you have
the author do, instead?

~~~
mindslight
The author could have investigated whether the windows ever actually were
found to be too dark (or whether it was just a pretext), and what the actual
reason for the suspended license was (eg something the person did, or the
quite common no-notice suspension arising from some bureaucratic mess).

Without that, they're really just uncritically repeating the story of one
biased and routinely corrupt party. Which mirrors the rest of the article, as
it seems to be a hit piece setting up a pretext for going after these Really
Bad Foreign People. Ostensibly with the goal of further empowering the
agencies and broken legal regime that is responsible for the fentanyl crisis
in the first place.

------
vis52
In Europe there are a lot of these so-called "research chemicals". They are
basically illegal drugs but chemically they are different enough that they
aren't illegal.

I think the most well-known example is 1P-LSD.

~~~
thousandautumns
There was a Times article several years ago about the rise of synthetic
cannabis and they said legislators can't keep up with new chemical
formulations. They take several months to study and ban one chemical, and the
manufacturers turn around and tweak it slightly and it's a "new" drug that
hasn't been made illegal yet.

~~~
vis52
Yup.

From what I could tell that's almost exactly what's happening in Europe as
well. One difference though is that it takes even longer since each member
state bans these individually.

From what I saw there are RC variants of many drugs I've never heard of but I
saw RC-LSD, RC synthetic cannabis, RC-ecstasy, angel dust...

~~~
freeflight
It is very much a European thing, not as popular in the US due to easier
access to cannabis and it was synthetic Cannabis (Spice) that started the
whole craze a couple of years ago, followed by "bath salts" which then
extended to the whole RC line of drugs.

Tbh the government reactions to this, banning specific substances cannabinoids
in particular, have made this situation just that much worse.

This stuff booming like that should have told them the whole story: That
there's a very real demand for legalization. Instead, they continue
prohibition practices even further, forcing manufacturers to use other (much
more dangerous) substances, a game they've now played so long that by now most
of these synthetic Cannabis variants have nothing at all do anymore with the
"natural stuff" and instead have become extremely destructive and addictive
substances [0]

By insisting on the prohibition stance the regulators literally made "weed"
lethal.

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-
birmingham-43600584](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-43600584)

~~~
cc439
>Instead, they continue prohibition practices even further, forcing
manufacturers to use other (much more dangerous) substances

The inherent danger in iterative research chemicals is a lesson I had to learn
firsthand. I had tried the initial formulations for "spice" a few times and
found it to be a pleasant analogue to marijuana. I decided to pick some up
several years later, and well, the effects were closer to that of a hardcore
disassociative than anything resembling THC. Don't fuck around with products
you can't be 100% confident in.

------
munchhausen
_While Chinese authorities control fentanyl, they’ve been slow to ban new
analogues. And they didn’t begin restricting fentanyl’s two most common
ingredients until this year, more than a decade after the U.S. (...) And
unlike in the U.S., anyone can sell or purchase pill presses, which dealers
use to trick addicts into thinking they’re buying milder drugs like OxyContin
when they’re actually getting fentanyl._

I am amazed at what I read as a not-so-subtle suggestion, writ between the
lines, that China is doing something wrong by not policing analogs and
precursors more vigorously, and allowing the sale of pill presses.

China is a sovereign country, and, given that they do not have a massive
problem with opioid addiction, there is little incentive for them to invest a
lot of time and effort into expanding the war on drugs within their borders.

Perhaps, instead of blaming China for their problems, the US can take a long,
hard look at their failed drug policies and dysfunctional healthcare industry
(after all, over-subscription of legal opioids is what led to the current wave
of addiction), and start to figure an honest, self-reliant way out the mess
that they're in.

Interestingly enough, there's next to no problem with fentanyl in many
European countries. Yet these same countries happily do trade with China,
there are no embargoes in place or anything of that sort. I find that quite
revealing.

------
titanomachy
> Because Yan used Gmail, operated by U.S.-based Google, [DEA agent] Gibbons
> and his team could persuade a judge to let them monitor his communications
> in real time.

So not only did Google share all of Yan's emails with the US government, they
did it silently. Presumably that was a condition of the court order. I don't
necessarily consider Google at fault for complying, but it's disturbing to me
that a foreign government can read all my data ad libitum while ordering
Google not to tell me about it.

Are there countries that have better privacy laws? Is anyone hosting email
services out of those countries? I'd be willing to pay a monthly fee.

~~~
yorwba
I doubt that any country has privacy laws that protect against surveillance
authorized by a court. The best you could hope for is a court system that
doesn't simply approve every request without pushback.

------
stretchwithme
End the drug war and the smuggling and most of the overdosing go away.

Most overdosing is caused by wildly varying potency that is not an issue with
legal drugs.

------
candiodari
Reading from the article, one gets quite a few quite damning impressions:

1) fentanyl is apparently mostly delivered just through mail. Mail is
apparently not inspected at all and walking into a post office with dozens of
envelopes/packages with drugs is apparently not very likely to get you caught.

1 addendum) the post is not even going to stop you doing this AFTER YOU GET
CAUGHT.

2) nor is getting your clients caught with the stuff. Tracking stuff back
through the postal service is apparently not done, or not possible.

3) importing large quantities of fentanyl, cannabis and marihuana right
through customs ... apparently not a problem. Not caught for years.

4) apparently paypal is perfectly A-okay with drug money. Funny how plenty of
people seem to get their accounts blocked for this, yet this operation totally
escaped all attention.

5) the drugs business is a full service operation. Next day delivery, credit
card payments, tracking numbers for shipments (!), ... none of it apparently
helped the police. Even sending a free replacement shipping when one "got
caught by customs" did not let them track the source.

6) the police apparently got "live monitoring" going on a gmail account, which
is how they found him.

All the ways the police COULD have tracked this yet missed ... and the
extremely objectionable way they did track it. Clearly this is the default way
the police works now. Get all online accounts to track people before doing so
much as visiting the post office. At least they went through a judge I guess.

I mean this article is obviously a bragging attempt by the police, and yet I
find it extremely objectionable how the police and the rest of the state
operated in this operation.

Publishing this article and bragging about this given the state of these
systems will obviously massively increase these businesses' reach.

------
dsfyu404ed
>Chapman and Muhammad would later get prison sentences of nearly 17 and 120
years, respectively. In interviews, Muhammad, now 45, admitted to selling
chemicals but said he did extensive research to remain within the law.

Well either the defense or the prosecution is lying through their teeth here.

~~~
gowld
Or both.

------
lr4444lr
As an American, the irony of comeuppance isn't lost on me, given that we did
have some involvement against them in the Opium Wars.

~~~
deft
Don't forget the targeted attack on black communities through pushing crack
cocaine and assisting smuggling efforts.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking)

[https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-
rich...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-
nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html)

~~~
StaticRedux
The attack that never happened and/or has never been proven?

From the line you yourself posted:

"Webb's series led to three federal investigations, none of which found
evidence of any conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the
United States."

~~~
arca_vorago
Where do you think the CIA fucking learned it from? MI6 (who learned it in
opium wars 1&2) taught to OSS (CIA) how to get funding off books so congress
couldn't pull the purse strings and they could do whatever they wanted... and
this has indeed been proven multiple times...

You are the same kind of person who called us talking about NSA pre-Snowden
"tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists" and then post-Snowden came out with all
kinds of variations of "why are you surprised" and "we all already knew this
whats the big deal", and "if you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"
type of bullshit.

In the conspiracy theory arena, the main sticking point is that people far too
often fail to understand the difference between inductive and deductive logic.
In many cases we have very little evidence to go on, so we are forced to
transition to inductive logic from deductive... but inevitably those decrying
the lack of evidence the loudest tend to ignore the very real legitimacy of
inductive logic and it's process when one is presented with a lack of hard
evidence.

~~~
dang
This crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that. Please
(re-)read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

~~~
mmt
Isn't that being a tad overly-sensitive over what is, essentially, a
technicality?

I agree that the tone borders on uncivil maybe crosses over with some vulgar
language, but the only part that could be construed as ad-hominem is the
phrase "You are the same kind of person" and, even then, the rest of the
sentence goes on to accuse the commentor of making an argument by providing an
analogy.

No name-calling occurred.

Threatening to ban someone for posting a comment that does, overall, make an
important point, even when phrased awkwardly or not in _the_ most civil way
possible, is likely to have a chilling effect and "destroy intellectual
curiosity", to borrow from the guidelines.

~~~
dang
It's a trope of getting personal on the internet to say "you are the kind of
person who". Both aspects are bad, not just the personalness but also the
tropiness, because by definition it repeats very easily. It's important to nip
that in the bud. And it's not like it's necessary to make any substantive
point.

~~~
mmt
But what is getting personal? Other than the use of the word "person", there
is no _actual_ reference to anyone's person.

The personal aspect _would_ be bad, except it doesn't exist.

The tropiness of the phrase I'll take your word for, as I don't frequent any
other online discussion sites. It certainly doesn't _add_ to the discussion.

Is a phrase that is extraneous, currently popular/cliche, and merely possibly
offensive because it's typically used ad-hominem elsewhere, really cause for
threatening to ban a user?

I think you're over-reacting.

------
dqpb
This is revenge for the "100 years of shame". China is at war with the West.

~~~
theNJR
I've long been confused why this isn't talked about more. It's seemed very
obvious to me that this is exactly what is happening.

~~~
nimrod0
No, it's not. You're doing random pattern matching. Chemical engineering has
been outsourced to China and factories there are making/exporting whatever
people want to import, including industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The
supply chain has been moved around with globalization, that is all. There is
no political motivation behind it, much less political control.

~~~
str33t_punk
But there is doe.

For a while China refused to prosecute these manufacturers unless they sold to
Chinese citizens.

Thus China is DIRECTLY trying to get revenge from the 100 years of shame

~~~
nimrod0
No they are not.

First of all, are we talking about manufacturing or trafficking? Because
fentanyl is legal medicine, used by hospitals. It isn't illegal to
manufacture, use, or export when complying with controlled substance laws.
What's there to prosecute?

There were some shady outfits that sold to individuals online and those should
have been shut down if it was so easy to establish a link, but usually it goes
through many hands long after it exits China. Like guns and "Made in China"
goods, it's a supply-chain phenomenon that the source manufacturer happens to
be in China. Doesn't mean China controls the whole trade. Obviously if the
sale is in China for illicit uses there is a lot more big brother tracking and
when found out the draconian drug regime there applies. You're reading non-
existent things into sensationalist news stories.

Last year, China went along with the DEA to ban the manufacturing of some
synthetic variants in illicit use, so they're helping if anything. They didn't
have to even talk to the DEA when it's the DEA's job to crack down on drugs on
the home turf where the real problem is.

------
thret
"Chapman and Muhammad would later get prison sentences of nearly 17 and 120
years, respectively. In interviews, Muhammad, now 45, admitted to selling
chemicals but said he did extensive research to remain within the law." \-
That's the real crime here! 17 years? 120 years? For receiving something in
the mail legally, reselling it legally, and nothing else?

~~~
cpncrunch
>For receiving something in the mail legally, reselling it legally, and
nothing else?

I'm not sure why you would think that selling a schedule II controlled
substance is "legal", just because the asshats selling it say they did
"extensive research" on the law.

------
chiefalchemist
When drug kingpins + dealers kill off their customers, instead of addicting
them to make as much money possible, then it feels like something more dark
and ainister is at hand.

Given the history in the USA (i.e., black communities) perhaps American
officials are just culling the herd?

~~~
cowboysauce
There doesn't need to be anything sinister about it. Fentanyl is cheap and
potent. You can take cheap, low quality heroin, mix it with a little fentanyl
and sell it for more profit as high quality heroin.

However, if it's not mixed perfectly, you end up with "hotspots" of fentanyl.
If someone ends up with a hotspot they can easily overdose. The occasion
overdose also attracts more users because it gives the impression of potent,
high quality heroin.

~~~
Johnny555
_The occasion overdose also attracts more users because it gives the
impression of potent, high quality heroin._

Is that really the case? Do people think "Oh my god, that stuff almost killed
me, must be good stuff -- give me some more!"

~~~
joncrane
It's because users of opiates can build up a really high tolerance. Like an
order of magnitude more than would knock a non-user off his rocker will be
barely enough to feel anything.

And heroin is really expensive. So imagine someone who is extremely frugal
buying expired food. Only cranked up to 10.

