Also if the family has some addicted to “normal” drugs it’s acceptable; but if they get fentanyl from you and die the next mafia family reunion will be spicy.

Hence they have a shorter CLV.

More than simply being alive, they want customers who can stay employed and so continue to pay higher prices over a greater number of years. Cocaine and pot are horrible but their users can maintain a working life for years or decades, making them more profitable drugs in the long term.

That's what CLV means, dude ... come on.

lol. Whoosh

> Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death and then stop being customers

The Mafia kills people directly. That's a sudden-death right there.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o

that doesn't mean the early signs aren't here that that commitment is headed for the ash heap.

Maybe this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801939

The dubious signs (which predate Ternus) are the focus on service revenue and advertising.

Both these make Apple worse.

Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.

The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.

To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?

Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.

Fentanyl is not a better high. It's decidedly less euphoric than traditional opioids. It's just dirt cheap, ridiculously potent so it's easier to traffic, and doesn't have any agricultural footprint. The market pressure for fent is completely on the supply side.

I guess if you’re the mafia you just murder the competitors. Can’t have stronger regulation than that!

Fentanyl isn’t a better high is just (much) cheaper to ship/transport given its potency

"less healthy" is a bit of an understatement; they're not selling cigarettes that will kill you in the long term (or even the medium or short term). Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.

Increasing the potency of some drug with fentanyl is an interesting choice, because by the time the user *knows* how strong it is, there's some likelihood they're already dead.

Drugs are a lot more geopolitical than people realize. Who brings drugs in and why drugs are coming into your country are important questions that nations have to ask.

Almost like it's not really about "business" at all and something more is going on for all the parties involved

Did we? Because while seemingly obvious nowadays it is not a settled matter in orthodox econ academia.

> 70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed.

Yes. And 70% of Earth atmosphere is nitrogen.

The two figures have about the same relevance to health.

Making it up with volume

Kills you very late, gives all the time to reap.

Curiously, this is still relevant to my comment nearby about "slow effect models" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842956 ).

Oxycontin was built on the idea of turning a drug (MS Contin) for the terminally ill (too small a market) to a lifelong dependency for as many people as possible, and each taking as many milligrams as possible.

Junk food dont have a chance to kill a person on first try or high chances to kill them withih a year or so.

I'll be honest, this was helpful for me even as someone who lives about 2km from the Quebec border. I was uncertain as you don't often see it in the Hacker News context.

Until you explained I was having so much fun thinking of a quality control department in the 80s dealing drugs on the side.

There's been a criminal civil war raging between HAs and every other smaller org that wants to expand (look at Blood Family Mafia specifically, Arab Power as well). HAs have lost some feathers in pretty gruesome ways. They're all older and neglected to replenish the ranks in order to preserve prestige. Street gangs didn't. If I'm competing in that world, I'm funding the underdogs until leadership trembles, then we make a deal. I believe we're at that point now. All those groups - including the Sicilians - have all been slowly invalidated and Angels are appearing more stable/powerful these days (even though we just outlawed their colours - but even that gives them prestige).

I assume drugs that are potent in tiny quantities leave less metabolites.

Statistics can detect a lot of things below the noise floor given enough samples. However there are a lot of questions when it attempts this.

I believe it's urine based.

Either way, the constipation would affect different users at different times, so I don't think it would matter to the data. In other words, your idea stinks ;)

Drugs are detected in urine, not feces.

There is no need to stay "on the good side of the law." They pay off cops. They pay off the judges.

If they can kill with impunity they can certainly do the same with drugs.

Large-scale crack cocaine gangs existed too with substantial levels of organization but they still sell crack.

They're mostly unintelligent thugs motivated by greed. And I think the "Why would they kill their own customers?" implies they think that far ahead. Which is probably true as well for most major corps. They'll take short term profit over quite literally anything.

Guinea-bissau is basically a narco state, much more so than Mexico, and has deep ties with latin-american cartels. They transport their drugs in the sahel with the help of jihadists. The same jihadists get funding from moroccans to smuggle their hash. These networks got deep networks within Europe (e.g. in Belgium and Netherlands). It might not be as bad yet but could turn worse quickly.

what do you think where europe gets their cocaine from...

The government can’t regulate a black market, but they could stop the charade of illegal drugs, convert the black market into a regular market, and regulate that. Suddenly you get less fentanyl overdoses, better outcomes for addicts (they're not criminals anymore), AND you remove the power of drug cartels (they'll still exist, but will compete with each other through less murder-y means, like any other capitalist company). Plus, stabilize a lot of third world countries where illegal drug production and export is a big part of the economy, which is what allows the cartels to fight and corrupt the state.

Or, just keep doing what they're doing. It's bound to work eventually, right? Drug cartels are definitely growing less powerful every year, the war of drugs is being won, rate of addiction is going down.

A war on drugs can only be won through heavy penalties on the users and the political classes refuse to come down hard on the users (themselves, their children) but rather come down hard on the dealers (poor people) or traffickers (foreigners). For this reason we never really had a war on drugs, just lip service towards one, hence a failure of government.

Absence of land borders simplifies the problem considerably.

The evidence doesn't seem to bear this out. Texas has punitive laws around drug use and also plenty of drug users.

It's just considered one of the best movies and screenplays of all time. My quote is a relevant line in said movie.

it is absolutely critical to watch Gomorrah in Italian. The English dubs are comically poor quality (think of how MS Word used to emotionlessly read text aloud).

It must be appealing to people who want to get high, and heroin seems vastly superior in the same general category.

Unpredictable market forces the black market is subjected to. Europe doesn't have as much fentanyl for the same sorts of reasons America doesn't have as much ketamine.

Simple supply and demand. Why risk smuggling heroin when fentanyl is 100s of times more potent, meaning its way better bang for their buck all other things being equal.

Does lithuania not have methadone or prescribable diamorphine? They should reconsider if not, not everyone is going to make it sober, much cheaper and better outcomes to being pragmatic about it.

Some things to correct here:

- While drugs laced with fentanyl are also a problem, lots of people _do_ knowingly consume fentanyl. In fact, it has replaced Heroin in the US 'market', for example. It is also a contaminant in other drugs (cocaine, meth), due to how easy it is for fentanyl to stay in crevices, etc. It is also 'snuck in' to counterfeit pills, which is the only aspect you mention.

- The traffickers physically moving fentanyl into the country are overwhelmingly Americans. Pre 2019 traffickers used to get this straight from China, but stricter controls in China have shifted things to be staged in Mexico instead.

- The demand and traffickers are still largely American, and it is a "symbiotic" problem. US drug demand is empowering Mexican cartels and making everyday Mexicans less safe (the cartels also get most of their guns from the US). At the same time, powerful Mexican cartels mean it is much easier to "stage" fentanyl in Mexico then import it into the US than the older model of importing it directly from China.

It's not murder. People are not forced to take fentanyl... Wouldn't these people get into a different drug if it wasn't fentanyl?

I would argue that fent became an issue only after the oxycontin et al. peddling was slowly curtailed; together with fent precursors becoming absurdly cheap to procure and process, compared to other opiates. Users originally hooked on the pills needed a replacement, and as suddenly the chemistry got much cheaper, everyone switched to fent. The physical volume of illicit substance you need to smuggle is also lower with fentanyl, so I'm sure that would have played into this trend as well.

If you want to find where to point the finger to, the systems that let prescription opiates be prescribed with such reckless abandon is a good superficial target. Getting political here - if you want to find the very root cause of all this, I would present the institutions that prevent the implementation or otherwise erode preexisting social safety-nets as the culpable party.

But who buys these drugs with fentanyl and why? There might a link I'm missing, sorry! :)

They’re not coming here and forcibly injecting people. Maybe we should be asking ourselves why so many are choosing the oblivion offered by drugs similar to and including fentanyl.

The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.

It’s an American problem.

> Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?

I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.

The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.

Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.

But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

What about the American McDonald’s that kills much more in Europe?

[flagged]

the article pasted into reddit comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1wpt6ye/comment/pby...

> Who is being informed here?

I am being informed about the public opinion. Which I value more than articles. (Don't come me at with AI, I'm well aware that it makes all human communication bad and pointless in theory and more and more in practice, thx.)

Not every correlation deserves to be published in the press. If you think about it, it is weird that they even make articles out of statements that only "may" be true.

I think it means just that, which is why I used TL;DR? The article points out the correlation between mafia prevalence and lack of fentanyl overdoses and some speculation on whether those two things are connected.

[dead]