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?
What's more interesting though is the inherent impedance mismatch between money and goods (which are highly mobile and flow everywhere) and people and laws (which are much less so).
The crux of the problem is Americans are negatively affected by things that China sells. But what is the remedy?
Should China's government take American citizens' interests directly into account when making its laws? Is that a reciprocal obligation? How far does it extend?
How is it different from the current scenario, where presumably the US State Department identifies the harm, brings it up with China, and negotiates a change to Chinese laws? Should there be a bureaucratic mechanism with quicker feedback? Would that lead to an inevitable loss of effective sovereignty for nations?
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?
History suggests they will be. China happily exported and exports Ketamine, and are now dealing with a massive problem of heavy Ketamine addicts. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve lobbied internationally to sanction ketamine, which ran into a brick wall for good reasons.1
1 Ketamine is the only general anesthetic that doesn’t require loads of training and respiratory support to use, and as such is on the WHO lost of essentials.
It's not as addictive as some people would suggest. I have a prescription and it makes me sweat profusely and puke. Hardly enjoyable and I have no interest in dissociation because I want to live in the present.
Making Ketamine harder for patients to access is going to destroy a lot of lives. People with depression like myself are already being taken advantage of by Ketamine infusion clinics that charge exorbitant rates. These doctors, often not psychiatrists, could prescribe a lozenge for their patients to take at home if they were serious about helping depressed patients and not lining their pockets.
Even putting aside its use as a treatment for depression, restricting Ketamine was deemed unacceptable by the WHO, so don’t worry. It’s really really the only thing going if you need to intervene surgically and don’t have an OR.
Probably because it’s the death sentence.
There are real use cases for fentanyl (there's a report here locally of ambulance crews misappropriating fentanyl from the pain medication supplies.) I know there's media reports of "an opioid epidemic", but I'm suspicious about how much that's "real" and how much of it is "war on drugs" reporting pushed by law enforcement PR for the purposes of propping up the prison-industrial complex...
30,000 deaths per year in the US seems to be considered "acceptable" in the face of the benefits of 200-ish million people owning/driving cars. I wonder what the ratio of "people benefiting" vs "people dying" from opiates and fentanyl in particular is?
maybe, maybe not. often when someone overdoses, the dealer has customers lined up around the block the next day. addicts don't know whether that particular stuff was cut with fent or just stronger than usual, and they don't particularly care.
even if enough people were dying that it made a significant dent in sales, i doubt it would change anything for the suppliers. selling fentanyl as heroin is massively more profitable than just selling heroin, and there's no way to do it safely. low doses of heroin are in the tens of milligrams, while fentanyl can have a potent effect at doses less than one milligram. this makes it really hard to achieve a homogenous mixture; there's basically always going to be some potentially lethal hotspots.
That's actually not likely how they launder the money. Money laundering regulations in Canada say that large sums of money cashed out an casinos are reported to Fintrac[0], who datamine and analyze that stuff pretty extensively. My knowledge of their capabilities is over a decade old (internship way back), but even then they would catch on if you were moving millions of dollars per year through a casino.
Your bank also reports any large transactions or international money transfers- anything over $10k, and that number doesn't adjust with inflation afaik. They have a lot of data and they have built some pretty big cases out of it.
cashed out?
that's not how you do it. it's about a corrupt casino funnelling the money in and pretending it is gambling earnings..
see also: the movie 'casino' (unsurprisingly)
The deaths, money laundering. They're not symptoms of drug dealers, they're symptoms of the drug war. We should clean it up, but it's naive to think that we should just "fight the drug war harder".
This is a lot of power to give up.
The people whose jobs benefit from prohibition have a lot of say in this matter and they don’t look eager to unemploy themselves.
I think ending the war needs to come with viable solutions for them.
We can see that cannabis prohibition is slowly ending. I’m curious how will the prohibition industrial complex adjust.
Remember how the DEA keeps testifying about cannabis totally deserving a schedule 1 status? (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/31...)
They’re basically answering the question “do you want to stay employed?”
And the answer is “yes, absolutely, without a doubt.”
Similarly, we can’t go to Saudi Arabia/Canada/Russia/Us etc. and say “Hey, let’s stop extracting oil. It’s not good for the environment. Yes, it’s free money for you, but we want you to stop.”
Except that hopefully oil is getting less profitable. Drug prohibition will always be.
Not only were opioids massively overprescribed for otherwise legitimate purposes, once hooked, anyone could walk into one of several "Pain Clinics" located within a few miles of any population center and get a scrip for a pharma quality fix covered almost entirely by their insurance. Even without insurance, the scrip for a 3 month supply of Lortab I received after an emergency appendectomy was just $100 back in 2009 (thanks to manifacturer rebates!). That's a week's fix for any burgeoning pill junkie willing to do cold water extraction (to remove the acetaminophen) and all for a relative pittance.
Allowing mass quantities of high quality opioids onto the market is what caused this issue in the first place. Removing even more barriers to access isn't going to make things any better. In fact, it's guaranteed to make things worse based on the results so far.
Edit: I meant that as a compliment.
Could it be they are aligned with developing countries all over the world with belt and road?
Could it be that they have arguably the single most intelligent population in the world?
Could it be that though Americans (that includes you canadians, continent-shamers) find their lack of democracy disturbing, Chinese citizens have generally not complained about the past several millennium of rather tyrannical, centralized governance?
What a head scratcher... Why, it's almost like they're different people!
Edit: oh by the way, there's literally a billion of them
Please elaborate.
I am actually surprised that something like this happens in Canada, usually seems that news report these sorts of "epidemics" mostly from the US.
Fentanyl has been here for a long time, but it started getting mass imported a few years ago into drug rules and may be connected to why Canada's legalizing pot now. The death rates keep rising.
The problems that the US and Canada have with opioids are of their own making, and that's also where they should look for a solution to these problems.
http://www.williamwhitepapers.com/pr/China_and_Substance_Abu...
As for laws, Singapore or Iran probably have stricter ones in practice.
This is probably including Marijuana uses as well, which is already legalized in much part of West. It is the not on the same ground sadly, so I don't think it is nonsense.
It’s apparently spreading north as well – northeastern province Liaoning has been a “major growth area” for drug cases over the past few years, Ma said. Outside analysts believe that North Korea (which borders Liaoning) has become a major source of methamphetamine smuggled into China, although Beijing is reluctant to publicly point the finger at its ally.
So, not pot.