YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

I believe it's urine based.

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

Drugs are detected in urine, not feces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. And 70% of Earth atmosphere is nitrogen.

The two figures have about the same relevance to health.

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

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.

Making it up with volume

"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.

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

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.

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

I'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.

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

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.

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

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

> but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?

Well obviously I would think it's highly racist to take any action against them or try to secure the border in any way.

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.

Some things to correct here:

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an American problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).