American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged | Hacker News Reader

American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

justice.gov

58 pointsFjolsvith118 comments

Justice is such a poor way to describe what is happening here. I have full empathy with those who have struggled with opioid addiction or lost loved ones to the disease. But the fact is that opioid prescriptions are still being written with too little oversight, too few safeguards, and not enough support for patients. Withstanding such contradiction in treatment of opioid suppliers, the federal government cannot keep treating opioid abuse on the supply side. We need solutions that focus on patient health and wellness. An opioid on its own does not result in overdoses or abuse, and even moderate use can be balanced with a healthy lifestyle. The DOJ does not have the tools, skills, or experience necessary to address the public health crisis that is opioid abuse.

The DOJ has a hammer. They’re using that hammer in the only way they can (supply side). If you want the demand side fixed, fix it locally (and lobby the federal government for more funds if necessary). The St Petersburg police department (Florida) recently announced they’d hire 25 social workers instead of 25 police officers to address social needs that would’ve previously been handled suboptimally as a police dispatch. There is evidence local efforts can be made when the appetite and will is present.

Having seen opioid addiction up close, I have a hard time not condoning DOJ actions. It’s not perfect, but nothing is.

As long as the US federal government and the DEA continue their ridiculous war on drugs and refuse to reclassify certain substances despite overwhelming popular and scientific support I fear that any action by regular folks is wasted. It’s clear that higher powers prevail and as long as big pharma keeps funneling money into our “Democratic System” logic and reason will lose out to money and influence.

Opioids are among the best medications for treating severe pain. If we're focusing on patients I'd much rather focus on rehabilitative strategies since the current degree of increased scrutiny is already making accessing adequate medication more difficult for groups like the elderly or people with chronic pain. Even more increased oversight is just going to escalate hesitation among doctors.

Opioids don't aid in recovery though--they're not a band-aid, they're simply a veneer. They can prevent recovery since they delays][ physical rehabilitation. I honestly think cannabis is a much better solution long-term, but good luck transitioning an opiate user to cannabis.

Not being in crippling pain is usually considered a good thing. Sure, some things like a broken arm can probably get by with weed and yes some people respond exceptionally well to weed but there is a night and day difference between the two when it comes to treating most forms of severe pain such as what people with significant spinal trauma experience or what the elderly often (for any number of reasons ultimately relating to age) experience.

I agree (it's meaningless though, I'm just pointing out the obvious above, I'm not an expert here) for acute injury it makes sense to use opioids in severe cases like you mention, however, I think we still need to find the best strains and cultivate them for pain use, we've only scratched the surface with cannabis, it's a big genus. Weed ain't what it used to be.

For chronic cases, I think chronic makes a lot of sense.

Pain helps you get moving. Opioid's don't. Too much pain is debilitating. Surely we can find a formula here (a very very large one).

Cannabis never removes all the pain. I think that's the main feature here.

Check out therapies targeting sodium channels. I found out through my wife that her company (a major pharma corp) is working on therapeutics that can block voltage to certain sodium channels in the brain to suppress pain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5350027/

I wonder where most of the harm is coming from with opioids. Do the opioids themselves cause more harm than society does by making them illegal?

The cases I've mostly heard about seemed to be that people hot addicted to opioids and the only way to keep it going was to break the law. That eventually got them in trouble. For some drugs it does seem like the government trying to protect you from the drugs do more harm than what the drugs themselves do. Are opioids among them?

They need to let people take whatever they want to take and then educate everyone about how addictive some opiates are.

In the past, I've tried a lot of recreational drugs, including some opioids, and without trying to, I can't see how I could get myself addicted to opioids or benzodiazepines, but I know a LOT of people would.

As far as I remember, only 10% of people who ever used heroin get addicted to it. But that still leaves 10% at a very high risk, because of their neurochemistry and life circumstances.

So I don't think ALL drugs should be legal.

Prof Nutt made and published a universal harm scale which accounts for multi dimensional harm of drugs, and potentially allows comparisons to be made between them https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109763/#B29. This work got him sacked from his lead advisory role to the UK govt, as it undermined the policy and caused embarrassment. Nutt still works in Imperial College researching psychedelics as novel therapeutics. The money shot is this https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overall-weighted-scores-...

A recent article which contextualises the work is here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109763/

Wow this is awesome. I’ve pondered the need for exactly this sort of thing for a while as the obvious desired basis for drug policy. Shouldn’t be surprised the Nutt has done it!

Obviously it’s lossy to reduce something with this much complexity down to a single dimension but it’s still a helpful tool nonetheless.

Do you feel like chronic pain patients outside the US don't get adequate treatment? Because where I live opioids are prescribed much less frequently, but I don't think chronic pain patients suffer more than in the US.

> don't think chronic pain patients suffer more than in the US

How would you know who suffers more on average?

Doubt it

Especially as it is prescribed in the US, where drugs get preferred instead of other interventions. "Back pain? Opioids. No PT, no losing weight, just opioids. No, not even NSAIDS, just go for opioids"

Remember that some drug companies pushed for their medication to be in 12h regimens which increased their dependency potential, as opposed to a shorter interval preferred by doctors?

As a personal experience, opioids don't seem to work much for me on many types of pain.

> Opioids are among the best medications for treating severe pain

> people with chronic pain.

Chronic refers to the length of time the pain exists, it doesn't refer to severity.

Here's what the Royal College of Anaesthetists says about opioids

https://fpm.ac.uk/opioids-aware

> Key Messages

> 1. Opioids are very good analgesics for acute pain and for pain at the end of life but there is little evidence that they are helpful for long term pain.

> 2. A small proportion of people may obtain good pain relief with opioids in the long-term if the dose can be kept low and especially if their use is intermittent (however it is difficult to identify these people at the point of opioid initiation).

> 3. The risk of harm increases substantially at doses above an oral morphine equivalent of 120mg/day, but there is no increased benefit: tapering or stopping high dose opioids needs careful planning and collaboration.

> 4. If a patient has pain that remains severe despite opioid treatment it means they are not working and should be stopped, even if no other treatment is available.

> 5. Chronic pain is very complex and if patients have refractory and disabling symptoms, particularly if they are on high opioid doses, a very detailed assessment of the many emotional influences on their pain experience is essential.

Your comment reminds me of an episode of Joe Rogan with Johann Hari [1], talking about what really causes addiction and the failures of the "war on drugs."

He states, "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection." (18:08)

The former U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness an epidemic, and just wrote a book on it [2].

I believe the biggest challenge we face in the United States centers on emotional health. How do we feel? Whom do we trust? Who do we think loves us? How do we rebuild trust? How do we apologize and forgive? How do we grieve?

I watched a 60 Minutes episode talking about some of the pharma reps trying to convince doctors to prescribe more opioids [3]. One rep, Alec Burlakoff, had this interchange with the interviewer:

> Bill Whitaker: You're preying on these people-- > Alec Burlakoff: Yeah, because they're desperate. They'll try anything. And they may get relief from Subsys initially, But we all know what's gonna happen. We know. We've been doin' this long enough. We know how it ends. > Bill Whitaker: And that is? > Alec Burlakoff: It ends in addiction, withdrawal, pain, suffering, and even death. > Bill Whitaker: And you didn't care about that? > Alec Burlakoff: Back then, I was numb to that.

This reminds me that while I often think that the people who feel disconnected are the ones using the opioids, very often the ones selling them also feel disconnected. How did this man get so numb to selling products that he knew were causing so much pain and suffering to others? How did he get so numb in life in general? More importantly, how do we help him feel more alive?

I agree, I don't think the Department of Justice, especially with a focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, can lift us out of this hole. I believe it will require a focus on emotional health, on repairing relationships, on helping us feel less distant, more close, to our friends, family, neighbors, and fellow Americans.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDpjvFn4wgM [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Together-Connection-Performance-Great... [3]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioid-epidemic-pharmaceutical-...

> Johann Hari

A man whose professional experience is journalist and has no science, medical, public health, or psychotherapy background... and he’s trying to sell a book.

Is this too harsh a take? Is there a reason I should be taking his opinion seriously?

Because it's a novel opinion, and novel opinions are what a good scientist needs to make major breakthroughs. I sure people were saying the same things about Galileo as there were of the women from Alexandria before him, etc.

I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists. I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields. Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic.

What is science, if not a never-ending quest to learn more about the universe?

> I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists.

Bold claim, or tortured use of often.

> I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields.

A lot of academic fields are fairly siloed from others. One example is presentations at a conference from a subfield that is just slightly oblique from yours is hard to follow because they use different jargon than you. It is getting a little better with some emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

> Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic.

From my experience with being blasted by spam ideas just because my contact information is in a university's physics directory, a lot of/most 'novel opinion' is noise.

> Bold claim, or tortured use of often.

Fair point, it may not be that often.

> A lot of academic fields are fairly siloed from others. One example is presentations at a conference from a subfield that is just slightly oblique from yours is hard to follow because they use different jargon than you. It is getting a little better with some emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

True, jargon and other aspects can draw divisions really fast. I left the electrical and computer engineering department at my university to pursue international studies because it was interdisciplinary and I could basically build my own major from economics, intl business, anthropology, political science, and other areas. So I'm probably biased towards interdisciplinary stuff and maybe see more of it than there may be.

> From my experience with being blasted by spam ideas just because my contact information is in a university's physics directory, a lot of/most 'novel opinion' is noise.

I can only imagine how many novel theories of the universe you receive and how few have relevance. I still think sometimes we can see patterns in the odd/wrong suggestions they provide and come to hypotheses about things, but maybe more so in some fields than others, and maybe much less directly than I had postulated.

Anyway, really appreciate the back and forth dialogue :-)

> novel opinions are what a good scientist needs to make major breakthroughs

I wonder how frequently those opinions come from journalists trying to hawk books on fairly facile premisses tho

Hard to know...partially because I feel a bit embarrassed to admit, but I don't feel 100% confident I understand what "facile premises" means.

What do you mean by it?

I mean, you don't have to take his opinion seriously, or more importantly, as a final answer to the issue of addiction.

I personally don't think that just because he's a journalist without those backgrounds, that he's not capable of learning and presenting truth in those spaces—I see a lot of value in journalistic skills of investigation and interdisciplinary exploration. That being said, it doesn't necessarily mean he's right or that he's not exaggerating or oversimplifying.

I found the podcast episode to be quite compelling to get me more interested in looking up other sources to see whether they agree with him, or if they differ, and in which ways. Even you posting this, questioning his credibility, inspired me to search a bit of what people with more experience in directly related scientific fields have said. Some have questioned whether the studies done with rats extrapolate to humans, some have questioned his seeming disapproval of antidepressants, and more.

I guess it just depends on who and what you trust to give you the truth about this issue. I found the interview illuminating, but that doesn't mean you would or should.

I don't know anything about him, but based on his wikipedia article, I wouldn't put any stock at all in his journalistic skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

That's OK. Admittedly, if I had read that before, I may have seen his work more skeptically but I would still probably have engaged. With a lot of journalists reporting on science, if I can, I try to dig deeper into the studies they quote and go to the primary sources. Other times I probably just judge what they're saying based on my gut and intuition, trying to take shortcuts and hoping it's right :-)

Also a known plagiarist[1] and someone who has had his book's presentation of mental health/healthcare challenged[2]. It's an interesting (albeit I think too sweeping) opinion, but using him as a source just makes me question it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...

I didn't know about the plagiarism or the editing of his critics' Wikipedia pages to portray them in a more negative light. I find the plagiarism to be concerning for trusting what he has done, and yet I think in this case, I would find fabrication worse than quoting someone from another conversation. About the Wiki edits, I see it as petty and yet not detracting too much from what I quoted, but again, maybe I'm just sticking to it because I like the argument he made, unwilling to dig deeper.

On the second point, I think it would be hard to find a book talking about mental health/healthcare that weren't challenged, but I could be wildly wrong on this. I just get the impression that there are many many takes on mental health, especially coming from a variety of fields—psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, social work, sociology, criminology, etc.—and that I personally believe we still have a lot to learn in this space.

I agree the opinion is probably too sweeping, as I like to qualify most of my statements and some people, especially authors and politicians, often exaggerate theirs.

> Your comment reminds me of an episode of Joe Rogan with Johann Hari [1], talking about what really causes addiction and the failures of the "war on drugs."

I guess I'm a bit confused at such pushback on Hari, but maybe by putting "really" in my statement, with such confidence in the statement, I invited such a challenge.

Thank you for bringing that up. I often forget to validate sources prior to looking at their viewpoint.

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic (or ironic?), as I think about HN being a platform where we present our viewpoints with few of our identities able to be validated. However, I can see value in both.

> How did this man get so numb to selling products that he knew were causing so much pain and suffering to others?

If I had to take a guess, his income as the vice president of sales probably helped with that.

Yeah, I can imagine he faced many money/moral tradeoffs in his career, as do many of us, and perhaps he became more and more numb over time as he kept choosing the money, the whole boiling frog theory (if I used that correctly).

I guess I still see it as an issue of how connected he felt to himself and other people. I know plenty of people right now, who, if they were offered his salary to do the same job, would never do it. And others who were probably in a field like that and quit because it was getting too much, or maybe even became whistleblowers.

Makes me also think about how some of us can become workaholics to avoid pain in our lives, or crave lots of money to cover up for fears of not having or being enough.

I very much appreciate the way you’ve discussed these topics in this thread. You definitely have a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt and I don’t think that quality is inherently faulty. I do think we have to recognize that some actions may require a certain level of sociopathic behavior and that sociopathy is very real.

And I appreciate you saying this! I sometimes feel guilty for how I communicate on HN, being maybe a bit more emotional or colorful than other comments, but perhaps that's just me being self-conscious. So thank you.

I guess with sociopathy, even if they are behaviors that are very difficult or impossible for a person to change (something I strongly doubt in most cases), I'm still curious as to what brought a person to that stage.

This reminds me of one of the speeches that has touched my heart the most—"Love Your Enemies" by Martin Luther King, Jr.[1]—where he discusses how he strives to love a person, even if he doesn't like how they behave. I see sociopathy similarly—if the person can't change, I may remove myself as much as I can from their behaviors, but still wish them well. I don't know if it will help them change, but it sure helps me feel better :-)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522wcqUlS0Y

edit added link

> How did he get so numb in life in general?

You laden them with paralysing amounts of debt in their late teens, force them into capitalistic servitude for the rest of the life. Make sure they earn only just enough to survive. Make sure they work until they are totally exhausted and you can’t squeeze another dollar of productivity out of them.

Make sure they think the only alternative to this is homelessness/total destitution.

Then don’t give them a legal or ethical option that shows them any future other than the above until they are dead, while their bosses boss gets rich.

Then wonder why they act unethically

> even moderate use can be balanced with a healthy lifestyle

Genuinely curious: this doesn't really mesh with my understanding. I think opioids are extremely addictive (more so than tobacco or even cocaine or amphetamine) and as a result it's nearly impossible to be a "casual" user (and therefore I don't ever intend to try any opioids). Is there evidence that opioids can be "moderately" used?

They are extremely addictive. No one disputes that.

The actual drugs here - I’m talking pure, regulated pharmaceutical versions - are pretty benign physiologically. Constipation is about the worst of it.

The combination products (opioid plus something else) are a bit worse - but in those cases it’s the other thing (usually Tylenol) that’s actually hard on your body, especially the liver.

Although it’s much less common these days due to all the regulation, many doctors kept a up successful practices for decades while self medicating heavily.

What gets people killed are either things sold as other things (e.g. heroin laced with fentanyl, which is much stronger) or propel who quit for a while and then go right back to their old dose and OF because their tolerance is gone.

> as a result it's nearly impossible to be a "casual" user

I wonder about the truth of this. I've done a lot of reading at places like Bluelight (for research and curiosity), and it seems there really are a lot of people who set strict guidelines for their drug use and are able to use opioids periodically without addiction.

> Set against a background of assumptions that heroin use is inevitably problematic, there is significant evidence of its controlled use. This paper attempts to draw together the literature on patterns of heroin use which avoid physical and psychological dependence.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443....

This paper is a great read on the topic. Some suggest more than 50% of heroin users are casual users.

Moderate opioid use is possible if you take long enough breaks to avoid physical dependence. That of course requires the self-discipline to say no to the psychological pull. As far as I recall, I felt some mild withdrawals after about 3 consecutive days of poppy tea use, so the physical dependence does set in pretty quickly. But if you know your boundaries, it’s easy to avoid. I would wager a guess that you could do strong opioids once a week indefinitely without any negative repercussions.

This is your regular reminder that Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and usage did not go up but the health effects and negative societal effects of drug use all but vanished [1]. They went from worst in the EU to among the best in the EU in the decade that followed on pretty much every metric.

Addiction has a huge situational component. 20% of US GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. When they returned home 90% of them stopped using heroin overnight, indefinitely [2].

We're doing this all wrong.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

[2] https://jamesclear.com/heroin-habits

This is your regular reminder that extrapolating an outcome from a country like Portugal (an outcome we should all be happy about, by the way) to a country like the United States is unwise. I've never been to Portugal, but have friends that live in both Spain and Portugal and I'm pretty envious of the kind of community and shared identity they describe. I image that probably has something to do with the outcome seen there. So, while I think it's possible to decriminalize all drug use in certain contexts, we've tried this experiment in some US cities and it's not resulted in anything anyone could describe as a success.

>Addiction has a huge situational component.

Yes, this is exactly what I'm getting at.

>20% of US GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. When they returned home 90% of them stopped using heroin overnight, indefinitely [2].

This seems to contradict your previous point, no? In Vietnam there was of course zero enforcement, outside of the military (I'm being charitable here for reasons that should be obvious), and they returned home to a country where the drug was illegal.

Edit: very interesting, the negative reaction to this comment. What I said is true, so I can only assume that people who are reacting negatively are doing so because they are projecting a view on me that I do not hold.

> we've tried this experiment in some US cities and it's not resulted in anything anyone could describe as a success.

We have? Can we get a citation on that?

Portland, Oakland, Seattle for starters. Maybe you have a different definition of decriminalization.

For Oakland, that's marijuana decriminalization only though. Portugal's decriminalization affected all major street narcotics.

Citation?

Ehh, I lived in Portland - where do you see anything about a decriminalization of all drugs there? I must have missed it.

That the experience of war made people take more drugs does actually tell something, but I doubt it is favorable towards the argument for stricter enforcement.

> and they returned home to a country where the drug was illegal.

They also returned to their families and loved ones, trying re-introduce themselves to civil society and many figured out that heroin was not helping (illegal or not)

You (and others in this thread) are helping to make my point for me, which is that personal social structures are paramount for killing drug addiction.

I don’t think anyone is disputing that some variation of this idea is true. What’s not being stated explicitly is that if it’s true that social connectedness (ambiguously including identity, purpose, etc.) matters, then it’s also true that our current enforcement mechanisms are probably incredibly counterproductive.

Everyone gets the point you’re making, you’re just not following it through to something meaningful and instead supposing it implies something it doesn’t.

And... that ties nicely in with the defund the police narrative.

This has nothing to do with the "defund the police" narrative, Portugal did this 20 years ago.

> then it’s also true that our current enforcement mechanisms are probably incredibly counterproductive.

Fits nicely to me.

Ah, I see what you meant, I read it as implying that the "defund the police" people were driving the narrative I was referencing, not that the narrative I was referencing happened to fit the "defund the police" one.

I think the reason people are reacting negatively to your comment is that:

(1) We have data from 1971 onward, just shy of 50 years, that shows that the "war on drugs" approach used in most of the world has been an abject and total failure. Drug usage remains pervasive, social harms are clear, and we keep throwing people in jail. No progress is made.

(2) A country was doing terribly on every metric, then they made a bold decision that was the opposite of the failed approach everyone else is using.

(3) The results were spectacular.

(4) Your response is "well that'll never work here." This is an implicit endorsement of the failed status quo, and an explicit rejection of evidence in support of an alternative.

> This seems to contradict your previous point, no?

No, it doesn't. It's not at all related to availability or legality of drugs -- drugs are equally available literally everywhere. Nobody in the US who wants to do heroin has any trouble getting heroin, or any other opioids. Accessibility is not the issue. And nobody addicted to heroin goes "oh, well, it's illegal in America, guess I'll stop."

It's evidence to support that we need to end the abject failure of an approach we've squandered 50 years on, and start a new, public health and community support approach to managing addiction. As evidenced by a place it's been overwhelmingly successful.

We literally can't do worse than what we have now, unless you wanted to make drugs mandatory.

They decriminalized usage and possession of drugs for personal use, not dealing the drugs.

>“These charges are a warning to drug traffickers worldwide that neither the shroud of the darknet or of virtual currency can hide their illegal activities from the vigilance of U.S. law enforcement,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin for the District of Columbia.

The real warning to heed here is that we allow some countries to arrest citizens of other countries who committed crimes outside of their borders.

I know what extradition is, but the concept of spending your whole life in country A, and having country B decide it's time to arrest you and charge you within their jurisdiction makes me uncomfortable. I think more people will oppose it once global power balances start to shift this century.

This is already starting to happen.

A bunch of countries suspended extradition to Hong Kong after all the recent power consolidation by China because while they trusted an independent Hong Kong to have reasonable limits on its judiciary they do not trust China to do the same; after all this is a country that dismisses "rule of law". And in fact the whole protest situation was caused by Hong Kong's Government introducing a poorly worded extradition bill that would've essentially given carte blanche for Chinese extradition. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/world/asia/hong-kong-extr...

And the reason for the initial bill was due to a Hong Kong citizen murdering his girlfriend in Taiwan.

Taiwan and Hong Kong do not have extradition treaties.

The murderer is still free in Hong Kong.

I mean this was never going to happen anyways because cross-strait relations are fickle and perilous at the best of times, and Taiwan has specifically said that it does not really want to participate in extradition with HK after the whole fiasco. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/world/asia/hong-kong-murd...

The rational response to "hey the country who originally requested the extradition doesn't want to do it anymore" would be to shelve the bill, but at that point the Government and CCP wanted to save face and dug in their heels. Which makes the whole situation an extremely stupid case study of how not to de-escalate a situation.

What extradition "is" has almost nothing to do with the concern, it's all about the clauses in the extradition treaty about how it must be done. In the case of Costa Rica and the US it requires dual criminality, can't be a political or military crime, can't have passed the statute of limitations, and can be denied at will if the person is a national of the requested country.

One of the interesting caveats about extraditions treaties is that they generally only apply to things that the country doing the expediting consider to be criminal.

With that in mind, someone spends their life in country A and does a bunch of things country A considers illegal and involve country B. This isn't an obvious caveat and isn't discussed much, so I can understand where nothing here would surface it.

Extradition treaties mean that things don't become de facto legal because an international border is involved. Though I understand if some might consider such treaties to be simple abuses of hegemonic imperialism.

> The real warning to heed here is that we allow some countries to arrest citizens of other countries who committed crimes outside of their borders.

> I know what extradition is, but the concept of spending your whole life in country A, and having country B decide it's time to arrest you and charge you within their jurisdiction makes me uncomfortable.

That's not a very accurate description of what was alleged to have gone on here. It's more like someone spending their whole life in country A, while running a smuggling network in country B, and only then having country B decide to arrest you for organizing the smuggling of illegal items into their country.

This indictment wouldn't have happened if these guys had restricted their opioid sales to their country of residence.

Parent comment plays into the current narrative of Anti-American sentiments and bolstering their internal prejudices with twisted reasoning and siding with massive drug smuggling operations.

What’s worrying about anti-American sentiments is that people are willing to advocate for the worst of atrocities just to satiate their emotional state exasperated by media.

I saw similar opinions in countless other threads. America has become the punching bag, thanks to President Trump.

Not sure what internal prejudices or twisted reasoning I have about my own country. I certainly don't know what it has to do with Trump.

My concern is that countries will ship people to a country they've never been to for things like drug crimes. The standard for what's wrong is going to change in coming decades, and countries that thought it's normal to extradite people for things like drugs are going to find themselves opposing extradition for things like illegal speech, etc.

And there are various charities that send things like birth control or abortion pills to women who can't legally or safely access them. I think if we saw incidences of people being extradited for mailing birth control, most people would agree it's a huge overstep.

Most countries will not extradite their citizens to other countries for act that aren't crimes in their own country. This was a crime in both Costa Rica and the United States.

The US attempted to extradite a British citizen for copyright infringement that wasn't an offence in the UK. The British government approved the extradition, although he finally reached an agreement that allowed the US to fine him and remotely monitor him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Dwyer

"Most"

Of course there are always exceptions.

One guy was dual citizenship costa rica ( the ALLEGED darknet/bitcoin drug dealer ), and U.S.A., the other was a costa rican citizen ( the pharmacist ALLEGED to be selling the opioids )

The charges were "conspiring with persons to distribute controlled substances, distribution of controlled substances, conspiring with persons to import controlled substances, conspiring to launder money, and laundering of monetary instruments"

I'm pretty sure money laundering, illegally purchasing narcotics, packaging and shipping same internationally are all crimes even in costa rica?

I'm all for tempering goverment oversight, but c'mon... they were ALLEGED drug dealers, and by world standards at least if they get extradited to the USA they might stand trial -- I can think of a few countries where they would just be summarily executed...

That sums up why Pablo Escobar funneled so much money towards ensuring Colombia would remove an extradition agreement with the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extraditables

A victimless crime - unless you think we should be locking up all of the alcohol sellers? Alcohol addiction is a sad, sad affair.

I would rather someone be addicted to pharmaceutical grade opioids than street heroin laced with fentanyl and other junk.

> I would rather someone be addicted to pharmaceutical grade opioids than street heroin laced with fentanyl and other junk.

The two addictions are more or less the same. Someone addicted to street heroin can substitute pharmaceutical grade opioids. Someone addicted to pharmaceutical grade opioids can substitute street heroin. This is largely a class discrepancy, as the higher tolerance a person has the more expensive the pharmaceutical grade opioid use is compared to street heroin.

I don't believe I commit any crime when I put any substance of my choice into my own body, regardless of what the state says.

Right!?! Legalizing drugs would solve a lot of issues and let people actually address and talk about the real problems which is often mental health, however there are a lot of things like mushrooms and LSD that may cause people to "wake up" and not want to be a slave to the system anymore and I think that is mostly what they fear. People realizing they have more choice and power than they've been led to believe.

If you actually care about the human behind the addiction, pharmaceuticals are vastly less likely to land your child or loved one in a morgue. Addicts recover all the time, if they live long enough.

However, given the choice you would choose the pharmaceutical grade right? You are even asserting it is associated with social class. The Costa Rican doctor is actually making safer drugs available to a broader market. In that light, I think you could interpret the Doctor's actions as moral as he is simply meeting a market demand and is providing the least harmful product to meet that need.

Street oxy is super expensive. Heroin is a lot cheaper. 5-6 times cheaper where I’m at.

Why’s it expensive? Because of the ridiculous war on drugs.

It's inconsistency of dose that kills opioid addicts, that's one of many reasons why legalization is preferable.

> The two addictions are more or less the same.

Except pharmaceutical grade opiods are less likely to be cut with deadly shit like fentanyl.

If someone expects heroin but is then given heroin mixed with another chemical, they can overdose quite easily, especially with fentanyl and carfentanyl

Well your desire is paradoxical because people who get addicted to pharmaceutical pain killers are the ones that end up consuming street heroin when they cannot get pharmaceutical opioids anymore.

Right! So let’s ensure pharmaceutical grade opioids remain cheap and abundant for those who desire them. I don’t see why we need to throw them on the street(?)

> A victimless crime

One should note that addicts do commit all sorts of crimes to continue their addiction. There probably needs to be some form of back attribution of said acts to those who leech off of addictions

IMO $277M (the value of the bitcoin) should be confiscated as possible and redirected to help victims of such crimes ...

That is a side effect of prohibition.

People commit crimes to acquire all kinds of legal things, why wouldn't an addict do so to acquire legalized drugs?

If you are an addict and want to get clean, there are very few resources at your disposal (unless you are wealthy). Many addicts start out being prescribed drugs by a legitimate doctor, but are left without resources to break their addictions when the prescription runs out. Most if not all addicts do not want to be addicted. While there may be some small group of people who commit crime for fun to go buy drugs, typically it is an act of desperation. Nobody ever says "I want to be a junkie when I grow up".

When we're talking about agencies whose entire existence is about ensuring the War on Drugs continues (I know the article is about the DoJ, but talking about the DEA works too), they don't care of the morals, only the law. Things like the DEA need these kinds of busts to justify their budgets and show they're worthy of an increase come next fiscal year.

I see Silkroad mentioned, so I’m assuming these were crimes committed years ago?

23,900 bitcoin? That was a big business. No wonder why they were targeted.

If it truly was at the time of the original silkroad, you have to consider the change in value of btc since then to get a more realistic idea of the size and value of their business. Not saying it wasn't big, no idea, just stating we should consider that fact.

2013 - 2018, per indictment

There's so many questions left unanswered from this indictment. How did they get his emails, how did they get the bitcoin amount. I'm more interested in the details and opsec failures.

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy.

It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be lost on history.

I'm all for legalization and harm reduction, but declaring people enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation.

Shutting down the conversation locks in the status quo.

> I'm all for ending slavery, but declaring plantation owners enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation.

Thanks to the 13th Amendment, this is not an exaggeration. Thanks to the war on drugs, hundreds of thousands are slaves that wouldn't be otherwise. Manufacturing your license plates, freezing your Big Macs, and picking up your litter by the side of the highway.

At some point, history has to pick a side.

It's only by the political campaigning of abolitionists that there was enough support for the Civil War in the North. There were plenty of non-slave owners who needed to be convinced of the evils of slavery. Dr. King was so much more effective than Malcolm X because he didn't declare those yet-to-be-convinced to be his enemies.

Once you declare everyone who doesn't agree with you an enemy, they stop listening to you, and you've given up on campaigning. This only makes sense if you've given up on convincing people who aren't already convinced.

If you think the time for convincing is over and dialogue has failed, then you seem to be out of non-violent options. Are you raising an armed militia to raid prisons and free non-violent drug offenders?

If dialogue has been dismissed, and you're not advocating violence, what options are there beyond impotently yelling into the echo chamber?

Edit: also, there's a difference between picking a side and declaring enemies.

Edit 2: The great-grand-sibling by cgriswald put it much more eloquently.

At the same time, I find it difficult to parse this with the knowledge that Dr King also repeatedly stated disappointment with white moderates and also later in life fame to support and understand violence against property in response to police brutality. But these are generally ignored when contrasting him with Malcom X. I’ve even heard theories that King could not be effective without the threat represented by Malcom X.

You both reject any responsibility for swaying others to your way of thinking and put up road blocks for anyone who might otherwise have a change of heart and join your cause.

You show no compassion or empathy to those who disagree with you so your compassion towards those suffering due to the war on drugs rings false.

I’m pro-legalization and have been for decades; but I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t build guillotines and dare each other to use them.

> I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t build guillotines and dare each other to use them.

Beautifully put. I regret I have but one upvote to give.

DuckDuckGo can't find other uses of this sentence. Is it original? May I quote you?

Thanks. Yes to both questions.

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

Look at the reason why people use drugs. I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Large scale substance abuse is IMO an indication something went very wrong in society.

Irrespective of the reason, I argue there is a qualitative difference between e.g. marijuana (which should absolutely be legal), and e.g. fentanyl. To suggest otherwise is to be disingenuous and willfully obtuse.

> I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Even if that were true, it would still be possible that it was true because the same innate features which incline toward addiction work against having a happy fulfilled life in the same external conditions that someone without those features would have a happy, fulfilled life.

Modern opioid addiction is a mostly manufactured problem, mainly by pharma companies and physicians

In other countries, where the answer to pain isn't "throw strong opioids at every chance" the issue is much less severe.

Citation needed. Here's mine: 31K people per year die of fentanyl overdose in the United States alone. Data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over...

This is fentanyl, drug that is very rarely prescribed. According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription.

I maintain that it is ludicrous to suggest that we should legalize _all_ drugs. We could, however, and IMO should, replace punishment for addictive drug use with drug rehab and a cool-off period, seeing how this shit is almost inevitably deadly in the longer term and is no good for the addict or those around them, at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/08/the-making-of-a...

> According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription.

Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl? This is not produced in backyards labs, these are made in professional labs.

> Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl?

This is mostly manufactured illegally in China, to make money. I thought everyone knew about this by now. The country is flooded with this garbage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/world/asia/china-fentanyl...

Why are those people taking fentanyl? They take fentanyl because they are addicted to opioids. How did they become addicted to opioids? Many of them were prescribed non-fentanyl opioids, and became addicted, and then had the prescriptions stopped. Some people were given meds that had been prescribed to other people - family members or friends.

So, while few people are prescribed fentanyl the root source of the addiction is the massive over-prescription of opioid medication in the US.

The drug that kills tens of thousands of people who don't know any better and choke on their vomit because nobody told them to lay on their side. People who overdose because they got dope laced with fent. People who overdosed because they didn't know how much h they got. People who got addicted, because the safest option was to shoot. Surely controlled selling of the substance wouldn't fix any of these problems.

This is the same level of magical thinking as "abolishing police", in that it completely ignores the deadly realities on the ground and the people who suffer the consequences do not intersect in the venn diagram with those proposing the thing. In fact those who suffer the consequences tend to be overwhelmingly against the proposal.

It'll be interesting to see if the DOJ manages to confiscate the crypto this time around, and if so how.

I'm fairly naive about the details of BTC, but couldnt the network decide to either 1) quarantine those blocks/addresses or 2) Agree to a signature that assigns the value to another wallet?

The problem here (by design) is jurisdiction, the US DOJ doesn't stretch as far as the bitcoin network.

As an example, why would someone in Russia stop processing coins because the US DOJ said so?

Virtual currencies aren't the battleground for the US's war on drugs.

... because any wallet downstream of the tainted wallet in the transaction graph could be considered tainted as well. This would be a highly effective attack on Bitcoin as an illegal payment method - the onus would be on every Bitcoin user to ensure that they have provably done everything they could to avoid obtaining "illegal bitcoins".

Therefore, the person in Russia in your example would have an interest in not dealing with tainted coins, because they couldn't be sold for the same price anymore.

It would basically split Bitcoin into white (provably legit), grey (unsure) and black (illegal) coins.

Yes, this would probably also destroy Bitcoin, but that's a mechanism by which states could obtain extraterritorial power over what people do with Bitcoin.

This is almost exactly the concept i was thinking of. If the exchanges want to continue to do business in the US they will blocklist the FBI's "suspect" wallets / blocks or something like that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com