It’s CLV (customer lifetime value): the integral of the MRR. Something most companies mentioned on HN should understand though it feels like Apple is the only one that takes it seriously
(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)
The Mafia may also have shorter horizon:
- Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death
and then stop being customers.
- Fentanyl is a much more debilitating drug than heroin and much cheaper.
So Fentanyl customers are less able to gather the money for the next fix, and don't need as much (less revenue).
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.
Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.
Yes, this is the problem I was referring to. There is internal opposition but the exec team will clearly turn over in the next few years (due to retirement) which will inherently bring in a team more aligned with the CEO’s objectives.
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.
That is too bad - how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity? I hope he doesn't start trying to monetize privacy.
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.
I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.
Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.
The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
In this market, a better high for less money will attract lots of customers, even if it is less healthy than the alternative.
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
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.
"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.
There's always a continuity there ("the dose makes the poison"), there's no known substance that will reliably kill you if you're exposed to a single molecule of it.
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
Even with prions, there evidence that the body (and probably more so with some people than others) has some level of ability to resist, slow, or sometimes prevent a prion infection.
See these:
- The influence of PRNP polymorphisms on human prion disease susceptibility: an update [1]
- A naturally occurring variant of the human prion protein completely prevents prion disease | Nature [2]
Soon after John Stewart Mill we assessed that markets are not perfect.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Yes. Everybody here should be or get acquainted with Herbert Simon - he is both "Logic Theory Machine" and "General Problem Solver" and "linked lists", and "bounded rationality" and "satisficing".
People would benefit from learning some control theory too. A little tinkering with (even abstract) PID controllers can quickly disabuse one of the notion that feedback loops settle instantly.
Maybe the mafia saw the population curves and realized how precious each customer is now and will be in the future. Something tech companies would be wise to think about...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
Now we have the unions, we have the gambling - and they're the best things to have - but narcotics is the thing of the future. Now if we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but ten years from now.
I think it’s what customers want though as it gets you higher and closer to that high they’re always chasing. That it can kill you is a marketing feature if anything.
I think you are right, but doesn't that mean the consequences of fentanyl do not weigh in on society as badly as junk food? Dead people do not cause extra costs for the rest of society
I can understand where is your cynical take comes from, but even from that perspective I would say you're wrong. Having people around who are burden to their families, friends and society is a "good" thing.
When you grow up in a society and see results of gambling, tabacco, alcohol and drug addictions around you that usually deter you from a getting into it. It does not deter everyone, but society actually sees the consequences.
Same with junk food and obesity - when you have people in your family struggle with weight, diabetis and tons of related health issues that's give you more healthy outlook on life.
This is why drugs that kill people fast are so dangerous - because you dont see addicts around you who sttugle to find meaning in life for years because heroine burned their brain. People just start to use and die, fast.
It's not even just about food or drugs. This is how Russia wage a war for 5 years with 400,000 people dead via mercenary army. Society dont see the scale of war because almost no one returns so people keep selling their life for $50,000 thinking its a good way to make money or get rid of debts.
You just need to keep your customers alive long enough.
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
For big pharma it is great business! Life long debiliating condition, that requires medication to manage... acceptable risk to customers is around 5% yearly mortality rate!
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.
I know several doctors who mourn the addiction issues with Oxycontin because it was so useful for a lot of cases. Give someone some Oxycontin, then you can address the root problems, and then get them off - works very well... Now they won't give it to anybody - those addicted know exactly what to say to sound like the people who really need it.
I always assumed this was an america-only drug that no one actually does or at least not to the excess that it's claimed by the publications using it for the normal fear journalism purposes.
Its gaining popularity in the UK and is starting to show up sporadically, but the opiod epidemic provided pretty extreme fuel to start the fire in America. No idea if itll ever take off here to the extent heroin did, depends on the economy I guess.
based on documentary style interviews I've seen of drug addicts in Lithuania, there's supposedly no more old school heroin left on the streets, it's been pushed out by fent.
it’s an issue in that not everyone using it even knows they are using it. maybe you think your plug is a great hookup for grey market pharmaceuticals. or are they?
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out.
customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
2/3 of all ODs in US. More deaths per year than gun violence and car collisions combined, which are both quite high in US. Seventh most common cause of death overall. Over a quarter million people dead since 2018.
No one "does" fentanyl, it's a highly addictive additive that is secretly added to other things. Even so, 50,000 - 70,000 Americans per year die to it (more than suicide and gun violence many other things).
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
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?
- 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.
While I agree that "murder" is the wrong word, there is an angle that you are missing.
Drug dealers will lace "normal" drugs with fentanyl. It gives a "different buzz". The customer knows they are buying "normal" drugs, and there is no quality control, so lacing happens. If the dealer messes up how much they lace, it is easy to add too much (because a small amount t of fentanyl goes a long way), and your customer ODs.
I’ve heard from an HSI friend that a lot more of the fentanyl deaths happen from accidental exposure in their drugs from shared surfaces. For example, somebody buying cocaine that was cut up on a table that was previously used to cut up fent and not properly sanitized.
So if you bought a bottle of water, and inside of that water was a poison that kills you, intentionally added by a criminal because it makes them more profit, that's not murder?
Those people were doing a line of coke, they had no idea they were about to overdose on an opioid.
Well, that depends on the legal definition of murder where you live.
In lots of places, intent matters. You said the pill was added with the intent to make more money. If there was no intent to kill, then in lots of places that isn't murder but might be some other kind of criminal homicide.
For example, people at Ford made the decision to sell the Pinto with a dangerous defect to make more money and people died as a direct consequence of that product decision. The people who made that decision were not charged with murder (or anything as far as I recall).
That I would see as extreme recklessness leading to somebody dying, might be called murder in the US. I wasn't aware this is happening on a larger scale. The solution could be to vote for politicians that legalize drugs so users can get them safely
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.
It is typically laced into other drugs. A small amount of fentanyl is highly powerful, so if you mix it into heroine, you get a different buzz. But if you (a drug dealer, not a chemist) mess up and drop too much, then your customer will accidentally OD.
Tiny bits of fentanyl are added to a variety of recreational drugs used extensively by all kinds of people, rich and poor. They add it to cocaine, heroin, meth and even marijuana. They imitate oxy, percocet, vicodin, xanax and adderal using fent laced pills as well.
As much as 20% of Americans use these recreational drugs. Europeans on average use recreational drugs like half as much as Americans, maybe 10% use them.
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.
> 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.
This was the way it worked up here (in QC) with the 81s. If you sold shit that could draw attention to you, your organization or suppliers, you were swiftly taught not to. They had decent quality control, but as their grip slipped so did quality. Now we get fentanyl overdoses weekly.
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.
Who these days are more a front org for the CCP/triads who seem to be running much of the criminal underworld in Canada with their network of smuggling and money laundering.
My theory is that the CCP/triads leveraged drug addiction within the HA and killed anyone that objected, and everyone else got rich...
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).
Montreal and Quebec is only one part of the criminal world in Canada.
Ontario is different, East Coast is different, prairies are different and the West Coast is it's own beast.
HA uses puppet gangs, so while their power may be diminished, they are still lurking in the background, as key nodes for drugs, money and guns.
The power lost by the HA and traditional mafia has largely been taken over by CCP/triads groups. The Indian and Iranian OC are under the Chinese, who have deep into the government and economy as major developers. Read Sam Cooper.
From what I understand this uses overdose numbers. They should also not be assumed to be comparable across countries (recording practices vary widely), but if they tell the same story as wastewater monitoring there may be something to it.
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 ;)
I've had a friend pass from an OD, when consuming what he thought was cocaine, which was actually laced with fentanyl. I wonder if the Italian mafia has a more profitable cocaine market, and don't want it contaminated, as is likely to happen with fentanyl, as the cocaine market, which I assume is recreational, would contract.
There is not that much difference between the state and a mafia. The fact that the mafia has successfully managed to keep out fentanyl shows just how much democratically elected states are failing their citizens. This outcome is not surprising.
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.
This is a bit of a straw man “do the ends justify the means” statement, with hints of anarchism read between the lines.
Western democracies haven’t really prioritized “war on drugs” (for lack of a better term) over the last probably 10ish years. Yeah there’s still funding and initiatives and some lip service.
Instead the focus has been largely infighting and major political factions fighting for political power in the next generation (“tech bros” political class for one)
So it’s no surprise state-sponsored (and just demand driven) drug trafficking into the US hasn’t received much action.
There is some hope though. With rare earth mineral access being a major national security priority, and many cartels controlling those areas in SA, the converging interests may produce some net positive. Background: https://youtu.be/q_n-74ifBZs?is=nw5g-mmPmKphGH2W
This is a false equivalence, which means equating two things based on surface similarities while ignoring key differences.
The Mafia keeping fentanyl out isn't a public service. It's a cartel protecting its own drug market, which says nothing about whether democratic states ( globally ) are failing their citizens.
Fentanyl is made by Mexican cartels from Chinese precursors. I suppose there aren't many Mexico's with massive organized crime networks in Europe to pour deadly drugs into their countries.
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.
I'm afraid some crime syndicates have found out they can just steal it from hospitals, some 80 vials went missing from the ospedale israelitico in Rome during the summer and there are already reports of an increase of users in the outskirts of the city..
“Le Mafie” includes Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia) ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia), Camorra (Napolitano mafia), Sacra Corona Unita (Pugliese mafia), Banda della Magliana (Roman mafia), Mala del Brenta (Veneto mafia) and others (but I’m no expert, I’m from Milan).
That’s arguably true, but nowadays Mafia or the plural “le Mafie” (the Mafias) is often used as a catch all term for such organised crime groups in Italy, with the Sicilians referred to as the Cosa Nostra.
That I've heard, on the street, the Mafia is a credible alternative state power in a fair fraction of Italy. Just one not claiming Democratic ideals, nor much desire to become a nation state or adopt a political agenda.
Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.
The Godfather overly romanticized the mafia and made them out to be "violent but in a principled way" people and nothing could be further from the truth.
It's complete fantasy that the mafia didn't deal hard drugs.
Well, I don't buy the "principled" part either, not at scale.
But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.
"For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, 'I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing.' So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia."
When AI can write screenplays like this one, then it's game over.
That was deliberate. I don't think a casual reader, like most are, would have understood the nuance and the post would have been another casualty of indignation culture. I got downvotes as it was!
> IN “The Godfather”, Don Vito Corleone refuses to engage in the heroin trade because he considers it “a dirty business”.
The movie was well-planned by Francis - but the mafia is a mass-murder organisation, without exception. Japan finally got the better of Yakuza for the most part (it is nowhere near as powerful as it was once); Italy still struggles, in particular with regards to Ndrangheta. So any article that attempts to white-wash the mafia in Italy - nope, sorry, not even good movies such as the godfather should disguise the mass-murder organisation. See how they bombed Giovanni Falcone to death, let's not forget that; and more recently how Ndrangheta executed women (2026; see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o) who stopped being silent about the genocidal activities of Ndrangheta. Let's put it short: the mafia needs to be eliminated completely. It's not easy since they infiltrated so much in Italy and in parts elsewhere (just study how Capone in the USA got big, then you realise that the USA has an even bigger problem here - plus, fentanyl too), but it has to be done. There is no alternative unless you want organisations to undermine the state and continue its genocidal tendencies. You can be sure they are also involved in smuggling weapons, thus contributing to genocide outside of Italy directly as well.
Please no more white-washing articles of the mafia as glorious heroes "because they keep fentanyl out of Italy". (Besides, this is not even correct to begin with; fentanyal at the least right now, plays a very small role in Europe at best; in the USA this is different. See how Trump tries to blame Canadians for Fentanyl, smuggled via eggs, which is another one of his non-stop lies about Canadians.)
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
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).
These comments are oddly common, but I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may." 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.
It is a matter of thresholds, of consequential bets over provisional non-trivial assessments, and of journalistic duty (taking note - the idea is not from the analyst but from sources; journalists take note that sources made statements).
Analysts work speculatively. And the results of the speculation are not trivial when supported by strong elements.
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.
(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)
citation needed
>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...
https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...
Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.
Note that this study is now over 15 years old.
The Mafia kills people directly. That's a sudden-death right there.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o
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.
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.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
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.
Its lethal dose is a lot smaller than that of heroin, but it isn’t guaranteed to kill. If it were, why is it used so much in medicine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl: “Fentanyl is a highly potent synthetic opioid of the piperidine family, used primarily as pain medication
[…]
In 2015, 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) were used in healthcare globally.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.”
The issue with potency is that the more potent a substance, the more precise equipment and quality control you need to stay on the safe side. With fentanyl, healthcare and pharmaceutical industry can handle the precision and QC demands (which includes guarantees and maintaining public trust). Criminal enterprises cannot.
Micrograms (yes still many molecules) could be lethal
See these:
- The influence of PRNP polymorphisms on human prion disease susceptibility: an update [1]
- A naturally occurring variant of the human prion protein completely prevents prion disease | Nature [2]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26022925/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14510?utm_source=chatg...
for kids?
That a dose not too different from adult posology of paracetamol can be lethal?
Maybe you did not know that "heroin" was developed at Bayer (the informal name came out of the trials after the reports from the testers)...
Pharmacology is the discipline that deals with drugs.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Herbert Simon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ita/ita...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
Curiously, this is still relevant to my comment nearby about "slow effect models" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842956 ).
Tobacco is incredibly damaging but because it doesn't kill you right away we tolerate it.
There's probably a rather grim metric that defines time to death ratio for addictive substances somewhere in a government report.
When you grow up in a society and see results of gambling, tabacco, alcohol and drug addictions around you that usually deter you from a getting into it. It does not deter everyone, but society actually sees the consequences.
Same with junk food and obesity - when you have people in your family struggle with weight, diabetis and tons of related health issues that's give you more healthy outlook on life.
This is why drugs that kill people fast are so dangerous - because you dont see addicts around you who sttugle to find meaning in life for years because heroine burned their brain. People just start to use and die, fast.
It's not even just about food or drugs. This is how Russia wage a war for 5 years with 400,000 people dead via mercenary army. Society dont see the scale of war because almost no one returns so people keep selling their life for $50,000 thinking its a good way to make money or get rid of debts.
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
Yes. And 70% of Earth atmosphere is nitrogen.
The two figures have about the same relevance to health.
Helthy people do not contribute to big pharma!
Thus, no surprise that it shows up elsewhere.
selling “oxycodone”? maybe don’t bother acquiring oxycodone at all—press fentanyl into a convincing little blue pill and sell that instead.
selling “adderall”? methamphetamine is cheaper. counterfeit xanax? who knows what benzo is actually in it.
customer might not find out. customer might not even live.
mafia seems delightfully old school about this. they know business. this is bad business.
This is an "American" thing because fent primarily comes from Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation).
They buy precursors from China, they produce it in labs in Mexico, and then smuggle it into America where they kill 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year.
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?
- 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.
Drug dealers will lace "normal" drugs with fentanyl. It gives a "different buzz". The customer knows they are buying "normal" drugs, and there is no quality control, so lacing happens. If the dealer messes up how much they lace, it is easy to add too much (because a small amount t of fentanyl goes a long way), and your customer ODs.
Those people were doing a line of coke, they had no idea they were about to overdose on an opioid.
Well, that depends on the legal definition of murder where you live.
In lots of places, intent matters. You said the pill was added with the intent to make more money. If there was no intent to kill, then in lots of places that isn't murder but might be some other kind of criminal homicide.
For example, people at Ford made the decision to sell the Pinto with a dangerous defect to make more money and people died as a direct consequence of that product decision. The people who made that decision were not charged with murder (or anything as far as I recall).
Also I think they charged people in the ford pinto case with reckless homicide but they got off.
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.
No, the pain pill debacle of the early aughts actually led to heroin usage.
What caused the rise of fentanyl was the US getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Taliban (or whoever took over) burning the poppy fields.
https://youtu.be/925wmb-4Yr4
As much as 20% of Americans use these recreational drugs. Europeans on average use recreational drugs like half as much as Americans, maybe 10% use them.
ok so you are just spreading FUD
The only reason they’re selling it is because people are buying it.
It’s an American problem.
Well obviously I would think it's highly racist to take any action against them or try to secure the border in any way.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/01/milo-yiannop...
> take any action
Action must be surgical. Even with mosquitoes - with humans, you figure.
I am shocked at how you can suppose you can propose zero quality like that here.
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...
> There's dozens of us!
~~ Arrested Development (the "Never Nude" syndrome)
them's fighting words
Saskatchewan is SK and Manitoba is MB if you want weird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_and_territories_of_C...
Who these days are more a front org for the CCP/triads who seem to be running much of the criminal underworld in Canada with their network of smuggling and money laundering.
My theory is that the CCP/triads leveraged drug addiction within the HA and killed anyone that objected, and everyone else got rich...
Ontario is different, East Coast is different, prairies are different and the West Coast is it's own beast.
HA uses puppet gangs, so while their power may be diminished, they are still lurking in the background, as key nodes for drugs, money and guns.
The power lost by the HA and traditional mafia has largely been taken over by CCP/triads groups. The Indian and Iranian OC are under the Chinese, who have deep into the government and economy as major developers. Read Sam Cooper.
There isn't anything to measure if the poop is unable to leave the end-user.
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 ;)
The government can’t regulate a black market.
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.
Western democracies haven’t really prioritized “war on drugs” (for lack of a better term) over the last probably 10ish years. Yeah there’s still funding and initiatives and some lip service.
Instead the focus has been largely infighting and major political factions fighting for political power in the next generation (“tech bros” political class for one)
So it’s no surprise state-sponsored (and just demand driven) drug trafficking into the US hasn’t received much action.
There is some hope though. With rare earth mineral access being a major national security priority, and many cartels controlling those areas in SA, the converging interests may produce some net positive. Background: https://youtu.be/q_n-74ifBZs?is=nw5g-mmPmKphGH2W
The Mafia keeping fentanyl out isn't a public service. It's a cartel protecting its own drug market, which says nothing about whether democratic states ( globally ) are failing their citizens.
Wielding power to benefit the ordinary people, long-term, is an age-old sign that those wielding the power have and/or aspire to some level of long-term legitimacy and popular support. Doesn't matter if you're looking at early Chinese dynasties, Old Testament kings, or modern authoritarian states banning non-government organizations.
It's complete fantasy that the mafia didn't deal hard drugs.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
Orson Welles said it best:
"'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed."
But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.
When AI can write screenplays like this one, then it's game over.
The movie was well-planned by Francis - but the mafia is a mass-murder organisation, without exception. Japan finally got the better of Yakuza for the most part (it is nowhere near as powerful as it was once); Italy still struggles, in particular with regards to Ndrangheta. So any article that attempts to white-wash the mafia in Italy - nope, sorry, not even good movies such as the godfather should disguise the mass-murder organisation. See how they bombed Giovanni Falcone to death, let's not forget that; and more recently how Ndrangheta executed women (2026; see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o) who stopped being silent about the genocidal activities of Ndrangheta. Let's put it short: the mafia needs to be eliminated completely. It's not easy since they infiltrated so much in Italy and in parts elsewhere (just study how Capone in the USA got big, then you realise that the USA has an even bigger problem here - plus, fentanyl too), but it has to be done. There is no alternative unless you want organisations to undermine the state and continue its genocidal tendencies. You can be sure they are also involved in smuggling weapons, thus contributing to genocide outside of Italy directly as well.
Please no more white-washing articles of the mafia as glorious heroes "because they keep fentanyl out of Italy". (Besides, this is not even correct to begin with; fentanyal at the least right now, plays a very small role in Europe at best; in the USA this is different. See how Trump tries to blame Canadians for Fentanyl, smuggled via eggs, which is another one of his non-stop lies about Canadians.)
It's a strong antidote to those romanticizing crime.
In US it should be available on HBO Max.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(TV_series)
The first two seasons are great, watch it with subtitles (fun fact: in Italy it was also shown in tv with subs because most people cannot understand neapolitan dialect).
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/the-pizza-connection-35th-a...
> 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
— Orson Welles
These comments are oddly common, but I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may." 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.)
Analysts work speculatively. And the results of the speculation are not trivial when supported by strong elements.
I thought about it. And it's very stupid to imagine uncertainty should be off limits. I hope that isn't what you meant.
edit: What do you think other people think that may means
Not any speculation but educated guesses from knowledgeable people.
If you would sell unaproved medication during covid, you would get several years in prison.
Why someone who sells unapproved medication without prescription, gets released and can keep selling this stuff? Medication thst kills people!!!