The rise of fentanyl trafficking is largely a result of prohibition. Imagine you are a drug smuggler. Now would you rather have truck load worth $100k or a briefcase worth $100k?

Doesn't the same logic apply if you're a legitimate provider?

Sort of, but the calculus changes. In a regulated market, costs are likely to be dominated by the cost of the product, cost of service, regulations and taxes - shipping a truckload of product legally isn't going to come close to that. But with illegal drugs, cost of transport is one of the biggest contributors to cost, and so taking steps to minimize that is worthwhile.

For instance, cocaine costs ~2k/kg in backcountry Columbia, but ~20k/kg in US cities [0] (at least at the time the article was researched). And when your transport costs dominate that much, almost every way to reduce volume and weight is justified.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...

You’d rather have a truck load of legal goods than a briefcase full of illegal goods. Illegality is a big cost.

Not if the equivalent value was the same. The briefcase is easier and less conspicuous to transport.

Transporting a truck of legal goods across a whole continent and multiple countries is much cheaper and easier than a briefcase of illegal drugs.

The total cost of risk-free (i.e. fully insured) delivery of a truckful of goods is trivial compared to even quite cheap products; while that briefcase would pretty much have to double in value after that long trip to make the transport profitable.

That briefcase will increase in value ten fold over the journey. So my point stands, easier to transport the briefcase and the returns are better. The risk is higher but that is why the returns are higher.

Probably? Hospitals use fentanyl all the time and I’d imagine they have no problem with dosing. It’s probably pretty great to have enough pain killers on hand for an entire hospital and not needing 100x the space (or whatever the scale is)

Funny how you say that.

Fentanyl solution for injection that hospitals get is a lot less potent than the hydromorphone solutions for injection that they can stock.

(50mcg/mL vs 10, 20, 50 or 100mg/mL).

As for the actual dosing... fentanyl is a lot more forgiving than morphine or hydromorphone, as measured by therapeutic index.

This is very true! Fentanyl tends to cause less respiratory depression at higher doses than opioids like morphine.

The ODs are mainly because people don’t know what they are buying.

I believe fentanyl can be provided in a relatively safe form if it was legal.

No because of the increased risk of death means you might get a worse reputation if people OD.

It works so well with guns.

But guns in America are not regulated. In most countries guns are legal just heavily regulated.

A completely black market for guns would lead to things that could blow up in your hand or explode at any time, the same as unregulated drugs

Guns are pretty heavily regulated in the US though? Many kinds you can't buy at all, and those you can require background checks. (A lot of people seem to think that there are fewer restrictions on guns than there actually are, and that's before you bring individual states into the equation)

It's just everywhere else is even more outrageously restricted, which makes the US look liberal in comparison...

But to call guns unregulated in the states is to say that cars (among many other things) are completely unregulated too.

Guns are most certainly regulated in the US and quite heavily.

You can’t make a gun to sell without an ATF license. All guns must have serials numbers and customers pre-screened.

And that’s just federal law. Many states have even greater regulations.

Drugs are a thing which destroys the user. Guns destroy everybody else.

Following up Finch's reply, which said: "a large majority of gun deaths are suicides."

Specifically, in the US, 60% are suicides.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...

Well, to be fair, and we're on course to veer right off topic -- a large majority of gun deaths are suicides.

As a gun owner you’re far more likely to commit suicide than murder.

Nobody accidentally discharges drugs into the adjoining house.

You must not have experience with drugs abusers then, they destroy families and communities.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted.

Because it's double-wrong. Suicides have been already raised. The other side is: drug addiction destroys families as well.

But that’s true with alcohol as well.

Yes. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

The article states that Dream Market did not allow the sale of fentanyl.

Most of the time when you hear about fentanyl it's because an unscrupulous distributor added it where it shouldn't be.

I strongly suspect that the main thing keeping fentanyl popular is government policy.

Agreed.

Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.

Murdering cartels and private prison owners became billionaires off of enormous human suffering because someone wrote a law.

IDK - I've seen what a heroin addict can do not only to themselves but their family and community; and a natural product can easily be evil that needs to be restricted.

It's wishful thinking to expect that all people are capable of full responsibility for their actions and deserve the ill consequences of their choices given unrestricted access to everything. Our free will, motivation, goals and core values can be chemically altered - probably even more so in future. There's a tradeoff, there's an optimal amount of restrictions which results in best outcomes for most people, and while I'm not certain where exactly that optimum lies, I'm absolutely certain that zero restrictions is not that optimum.

It's not the government's right to tell you not to ruin your life. That is the domain of the family, friends, community, or religious group. People have had many options for self-destruction for thousands of years, yet we still survived. That people automatically assume the worst would happen if the police state stops watching over them is telling that we have gotten too cynical about our social structures.

Yes, heroin alters your free will. That's why it shouldn't be illegal. You should not punish someone dealing drugs to support their non-free will'd habit because the drug removed their intent.

Also all of the examples of destructive heroin addicts you know are from a system that prohibits it. You don't know what our culture would look like in a free market drugs universe. Knowing that there is no safety net, you would probably get mocked and beaten up for expressing an intent to use heroin. Addiction wouldn't be externalized to the government, and families would have to deal with addicts instead of the prison system. Culture would evolve drastically. People have coexisted with addictive plants for thousands of years before the police state showed up.

Well, our differences in value judgements and expectations of likely outcomes seem so different that it's probably not productive to debate, so I'll just note that I disagree with almost every assertion and assumption made in this comment.

I suspect most people outside of the most privileged circles know at least a couple opiate addicts who have ruined their own lives and harmed others around them.

the important question to ask is how much of this is inherent to the drug itself and how much is a consequence of prohibition. my take is that most of the horrible things that heroin addicts do is a result of the financial/legal situation that prohibition puts them in, not the inherent effects of the drug. in my experience, opiate addicts with a secure supply tend to be docile, if unproductive, members of society. I wouldn't say the same for alcoholics...

> Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.

It would become a lot more efficient without prohibition. A lot of heroin is derived from laborious manual processing of opium from poppies.

The agricultural-industrial complex would plant a field of a potent strain, fertilize it, let it grow, chop it all down, crush it up, extract out the goods and probably 5x+ crop yields with a team of 2 or 3 operating thousands of acres.

That's not happening in Myanmar or Afghanistan!

In the Golden Triangle or cocaine-exporting countries, the drug lords are often using slave labor (another reason prohibition is disgusting). Slaves are still more expensive than agribusiness automation though.

What makes you think there would be a market for fentanyl if alternatives were legal?

I don't know. It is my understanding that with opiates you build up resistance to a point where eventually you just need something of fentanyl strength - and in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no?

> in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no?

I don't see why.

The primary issue with fentanyl today is not that the people who need/want it are taking it, it's that it's being used to adulterate other drugs. Many people die from fentanyl having no desire to take it, nor any knowledge they are taking it. Others die because of incorrect labelling or unexpected purity. Regulate the market as we regulate other markets, and these problems go away.

My local supermarket sells a lot of things which would kill me if swallowed in relatively small amounts (acetaminophen and caffeine tablets, for example), but there's no crisis of people dying from taking a box of No-Doz because, well, why would you want to? Fentanyl overdose is a pretty baroque method of suicide in a hypothetical world where all drugs are legal and safe.

(I'm not especially against the idea that, even if heroine is legal, fentanyl should still be prescription only or whatever for some reason! I just don't see any obvious reasons why it would be uniquely dangerous. Most things will kill you at a sufficient dose; they're problematic only if you're at risk of accidentally taking that dose. And the obvious problems with fentanyl today would not apply so...)

Or even stop regulating the drugs that are currently illegal entirely, and let market mechanisms work! Drugs are in this middle ground that's both not policed by the government AND can't use standard market signalling methods.

Arguably the fact that you can get good, high quality drugs reliably from darknet markets is the "stop regulating the drugs entirely" mechanism at work, only by making enforcement impossible.

It is not possible to have a tolerance that high. Fentanyl is 100x the strength of morphine. Morphine alone is enough to kill you, so it is not possible to need something more than morphine unless you're immortal. Drug traffickers sell fake heroin that's actually fentanyl + 99% baby powder or whatever. When they mismeasure the fentanyl dose, people die. There is no way someone would choose this in a free market where real heroin were available. Fentanyl is 100% the government's fault.

Fentanyl is typically used as a cutting agent. Heroin, xanax, etc are all fairly expensive so if you can cut these drugs with fentanyl to provide a similar experience, then it may be in the dealer's financial interest to do so. From what I've read online, not a lot of users chase fentanyl itself unless it is the only opiate available to them.

then tough. If someone is to the stage where however much pure heroin they inject is not enough, then the the medical care on offer at such places is put into place way before this becomes a problem.

As a recreational drug, heroin is much more desirable than fentanyl. The problem with street heroin it is cut to nothing and expensive (relative). Fentaynl is pure strength, shorter lasting and less enjoyable.

Fentanyl, cyanide, heroin, and meth should all be legal and over-the-counter.

I don't think the government should tell a woman what to do with her body, and I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with yours.

When you advocate for drug legalization from the perspective of safety, then you get into doublethink territory. Some people simultaneously want cannabis and hallucinogens to be legalized yet want the tobacco age increased to 21. Cannabis is not exactly safe. Methamphetamine has been prescribed for decades for legitimate medical use, and hallucinogens have caused permanent schizophrenia. If cannabis were suddenly proven to be extremely dangerous, would you reverse your position and become a prohibitionist? Do you really want to prioritize safety over freedom?

Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.

>>Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.

You do realise that fentanyl is even deadlier than cyanidie, right? Few hundred grams dropped into a water supply would kill a stupid number of people.

What else do you think should be available over the counter? Industrial-strength acid? Organic mercury compounds?

It's not about "I will do what I want with my body" - it's just that dangerous materials and poisons shouldn't be available to everyone, just like automatic rifles aren't. Can criminals still get them if they want them? Sure, but that's not an argument for making them available to general population.

What, so cyanide can not harm more than one being? And fentanyl neither?

If by cyanide you mean hydrogen cyanide that sounds to me like something trivially easy to manufacture on your own. The permit thing must be to protect people from hurting themselves.

EDIT: yeah it is, if I’m reading Wikipedia right (and it’s accurate, I’ve seen bad chemistry on it before) a teenager could make it with ammonia and charcoal from Walmart.

Carbon in pulp gold miners/producers buy it by the hundreds of tonnes, key part of extracting mineralised gold.

While toxicity is very high and thousands of people handle it daily, number deaths at Gold mines is very low - I don't know last time Western Australia had an accidental cyanide death and there are hundreds of mines with 7% of global production from the state.

It's much easier to criminalize something like fentanyl when less harmful opiates (and alternatives to opiates) are around.

Decriminalization /= Legalization

Decriminalization means an activity is no longer criminal, but it can still be punishable as a civil infraction, like crossing a red traffic light.

When it comes to hard drugs, some people advocate for decriminalization but not legalization. So in your example, fentanyl will still be illegal.

I doubt there'd be much demand for fentanyl if other opiates were available but the problems with it are caused by unknown quantity and quality. Solve that and overdoses get a lot rarer. "This amount is what you need to get high. More than that is dangerous."

The other thing to keep in mind is some of what drives IV drug use is efficiency.

You get way more for your buck injecting heroin than smoking a much bigger dose.

If opioids were legal, I wonder how many would just be popping cheap OxyContin instead of shooting fentanyl laced heroin.

The language I like to use is systemic risk. Legalize or decriminalize everything that's not a systemic risk. Overuse of antibiotics presents a systemic risk. Grandma's heart medication does not. Fentanyl is a borderline wmd.

Why not?

Just mandate it can’t be solid unless diluted. Can’t sell pure powder. Properly diluted, it’s no more dangerous than other opioids.