Posts Tagged cocaine
Haupt-rc distributes lethal 2C-B-FLY
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Consensual Crimes on October 16th, 2009
2C-B-FLY (Wikipedia Entry) is a psychoactive chemical in the phenylethlyamine family, which also contains MDMA. Just this morning, news broke that a bad batch of something purporting to be 2C-B-FLY has hit the streets and is killing or hospitalizing people with frightening consistency. I say, “something purporting to be,” because people are being made sick with doses as low as 1-4 mg and being hospitalized with doses around 8-12 mg. A dealer who is reported to have taken an 18 mg dose died. It’s very unlikely that 2C-B-FLY would be active at all at 1-4 mg doses, so the powder in question is likely to be tainted, or something else entirely.
When things like this happen, law enforcement and the government usually jump to the message of how dangerous drugs are. I then respond that illegal drugs are made infinitely more dangerous by prohibition, which removes accountability between producers and consumers, and which forces producers to use less-than-ideal techniques to make the drugs. But this case is different. The “dealer” in this case was Haupt-rc, a legally-operating chemical supply company. These companies supply all sorts of chemicals, including illegal drugs, to research companies and others who are legally allowed to purchase them. The actual manufacturer of the chemical is reported to be a Chinese company. Below, you can see a 500 mg bag of the chemical in question, reported to have been purchased from Haupt-rc (click on image for original source, a thread on drugs-forum.com discussing the issue).
You can see that the label clearly prohibits “food, drug, household, or cosmetic use,” and notes “Dangerous if ingested!” That didn’t stop the owner of Haupt-rc from ingesting an 18 mg dose and subsequently dying, and it clearly didn’t stop some other people from ingesting the chemical either, so the most obvious conclusion we can draw from this experience is that people who are legally selling and buying psychoactive chemicals (for “research” uses) are illegally consuming those chemicals. I know, shocking, right? Hey, don’t tell me if you could legally buy a 500 mg bag of your favorite psychoactive chemical, you wouldn’t skim a few mg off the top for personal use. Oh, no, not YOU, you paragon of lawfulness.
The second, and more interesting conclusion is that here we have a case where the drug was produced in a totally above-board, legal, traceable manner, and people still managed to die from a bad batch. So, even the “professionals” get it wrong some time. But look at the difference between the response to this experience and the mostly-nonexistent response to another common tainted drug, cocaine cut with levamisol. In this case, people know the supplier and can quarantine the bad product, even down to the batch number, which is printed on the bag. Because some of them purchased it legally, they can send the stuff to a lab for analysis without fear of arrest. If this was a street product, all you would hear, if you heard anything, was, “Hey, watch out for 2C-B-FLY, I heard some people got sick after taking it and there might be a bad batch.” Instead, we get a massive, organized, immediate, and above-all, effective response that mitigates harm.
Edit: Analysis of the substance indicates that it was actually bromo-dragonfly, a chemical that is similar to 2C-B-FLY, but is active at much lower doses, hence the deaths at doses that are typical for 2C-B-FLY. The powder was also found to be only 95% pure (labeled as 99% pure, but we all know vendors fudge, right?) with about 5% synthesis impurities, which could have unknown effects. Additionally, the Chinese lab seems not to have been as “up to professional standards” as one might desire. The semi-clandestine nature of the Chinese lab means that prohibition still plays a role here, since there would be more, higher-quality sources for drugs in the absence of prohibition. What we have here is people using semi-legal means to acquire a prohibited chemical, but since the chemical is widely prohibited, there are few producers, and even the semi-legal ones are sketchy.
DJ AM Toxicology Test Results
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Consensual Crimes, Government and Law on October 5th, 2009
Toronto Sun reports:
NEW YORK — DJ AM died accidentally from a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and cocaine, the medical examiner’s office ruled Tuesday.
The toxicology report showed the 36-year-old had in his system cocaine, OxyContin, Hydrocodone or Vicodin, antianxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan, Klonopin which also controls anger, Benadryl, and Levamisole, a drug apparently used to cut cocaine.
Now, that’s a hell of a lot of drugs to have in your system at one time, I don’t care who you are, but the one that jumped out at me was the levamisole. I remembered reading about it a while back, but couldn’t remember why it was dangerous. From the AP:
The medication called levamisole … can be used in humans to treat colorectal cancer, but it severely weakens the body’s immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to fatal infections.
Scientific studies suggest levamisole might give cocaine a more intense high, possibly by increasing levels of dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitters.
Interesting. Gives the user a yummy dopamine rush, but also makes them susceptible to fatal infections. According to the article, levamisole is supposedly being cut in before importation, so it’s hard for users, or even dealers, to know whether their stuff has been cut with it.
Now, let’s consider when something like this happens with a legal good. Remember the melamine in baby-food imported from China? What about diethylene glycol in toothpaste? What about good old yummy lead paint? With legal goods, a regulatory or overseeing body detects the tainted product, blocks the importation, and notifies consumers which products should be avoided. The supplier could smuggle the product in, but that would dramatically increase the price, and anyway, everybody knows their stuff is tainted, so nobody would want it. In most cases, the supplier chooses to remove the offending toxin because importing stuff legally is much cheaper and easier than importing stuff illegally.
On the black market, of course, different forces apply. A black-market supply chain is necessarily long, convoluted, and opaque. There’s no way to tell where the stuff you’re getting came from. There’s no way to tell if it’s tainted, and if you do find out that it’s tainted there’s no way to tell whether any other batch is any better. Given how expensive, risky, and difficult-to-acquire prohibition makes drugs, you’re more likely to take your chances even if you do know the stuff is tainted. Given these conditions, producers can hardly be held accountable for cutting their products with toxic chemicals. There is a strong motivation to use adulterants, even if they have medium or long-term health effects.
As usual, The Man takes the wrong message home from this situation:
The tainted cocaine has received only limited attention in the U.S., though federal authorities are monitoring its use, said Paul Knierim, a DEA spokesman in Washington.
“I think the message is the same: Don’t use cocaine, it’s a dangerous drug,” Knierim said.
Well, actually, it sounds to me like levamisole is the dangerous drug. Nobody looked at the Chinese baby food, tooth paste, or lead-painted toys and concluded that baby food, tooth paste, and toys were dangerous. What makes cocaine particularly dangerous is the system of prohibition that encourages producers to taint it and prevents regulatory bodies from quickly detecting the contamination, containing it, and notifying the public.
Drug Prejudice
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Consensual Crimes on September 10th, 2009
There’s a particularly nasty drug. It’s very addictive. It ruins lives. People steal from their family members and even resort to prostitution to get it. Eventually, it ruins your health and leaves you a shriveled husk of your former self, if you don’t overdose and die from it first.
In the 80’s, it was cocaine. In the 90’s, it was crack. In the 2000’s, it has been methamphetamine. If you go all the way back to the 30’s, it was marijuana (”Reefer Madness” anyone?). And good old heroin has had a long run as the premier addictive, life-ruining drug, of which we should all be particularly afraid.
Once upon a time, I realized that there was a particular drug that I had a very negative view of, when I had previously used a different drug, about which there was similar negative propaganda. Dear reader, I invite you to examine whether you may be in the same situation. Have you used cocaine or ecstasy without ruining your life? Do you think that users of heroin or meth are probably dirty, addicted drug-fiends? Guess what? Some of them think the same of you, while going on about their surprisingly non-ruined lives.
Once upon a time, I tried a drug that was supposed to be particularly addictive. After the experience was over, I decided it wasn’t for me, and I never did it again.
I’m done with drug prejudice. All drugs have potential for abuse. Some drugs are more prone to abuse than others. Some people are more prone to abuse some drugs than others. But no drug is guaranteed to ruin the life of everyone who uses it, and lots of people regularly use any given drug without becoming addicted or ruining their lives and/or health. And if there’s a drug out there that’s so addictive that one hit will suck me into a downward spiral of addiction and abuse, I haven’t found it yet.
Okay, maybe caffeine.
Drug-related Hypocrisy (Or Not)
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Consensual Crimes on July 6th, 2009
Someone, somewhere wrote:
I believe that informed adults should be allowed to inflict whatever suffering they wish on themselves. But we are not entitled to harm other people. I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites. Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes.
I’d like to address the “revolting hypocrites” charge. Lemme ask you, if I drink fair-trade tea, but not coffee, am I a hypocrite? What about tea, coffee, but not chocolate? Where’s the line between “doing nothing” and “completely acting out your ideal in every aspect of your behavior” where I stop being a hypocrite? You can’t charge someone with being a hypocrite because they do some things, but not enough to suit you.
I see this a lot when people want to cut down someone else who’s trying to achieve some ideal. Somebody starts eating vegetarian most of the time, but every once in a while they eat meat. “Hypocrite. You say you care about the animals, but look at you.” Somebody buys a fuel efficient car because they want to reduce petroleum consumption, and the nay-sayers respond, “Big deal. You’re still killing the environment with all the other industrial processes that support your life.”
Tell you what: why don’t I just kill myself, and then I won’t do any harm to anybody anywhere. At least you won’t be able to accuse me of being a hypocrite anymore. The fact is that doing something is usually better than doing nothing, or at least not worse. Just because I don’t act out a given ideal 100% of the time doesn’t make me a hypocrite. It makes me a human, operating in complex and interconnected web of causalities.
Okay, you might say, the hypocrisy is because of the severe consequences of “cocaine”. If you claim to care enough to buy fair-trade coffee, shouldn’t you care about Colombian kids getting their arms cut off? But pointing that question at the drug consumer carries with it a moral judgment that consuming cocaine is wrong. Why aren’t we asking the prohibitionists, “If you care so much about life, why don’t you end prohibition?” The fact is that the prohibitionists can end almost all of the criminal enterprise around drug production and trafficking by ending prohibition. You don’t see kids getting their arms chopped off over tobacco or Prozac, do you?
Assume, if you will, that the choice to legally consume cocaine and the choice to prohibit it are morally balanced and you have to choose one of them based on the outcome. Assuming that you believe that taking cocaine is inherently harmful, the choice to take cocaine in the absence of a prohibition-induced criminal context harms only the consumer. The choice to prohibit cocaine induces the creation of a criminal market that harms, among others, innocent Colombians. Which choice is morally superior? Harming yourself or harming others?
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