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by LaikaF 2798 days ago
So something they briefly touch on is new research chemicals. What they don't mention is what happened earlier this year.

FOSTA has slaughtered many avenues of sourcing research chemicals. It is significantly more difficult to get them from a reliable source then it was this time last year. While this doesn't stop anyone sufficiently determined, it's harder to get a source of say fentanyl or U-47770 to cut with.

The US has been cracking down on producers of these in China, and many chinese or US based resellers have either ceased to exist or changed their operation (US seems to be heavily targeting opioids, China seems to be going after ketamine and analogs) . In addition the Darknet Markets have taken a big hit from Operation Bayonet. It's not to say that DNMs or their vendors or customers are gone, just they're finding it harder to regroup. Though there have been a number of high profile busts from the data of Operation Bayonet

This applies to more then just opioids though. Other drugs with overdose potential, like stimulants are just harder to get a hold of. Most US domestic sellers seem to focus on benzodiazepine analogs.

We'll see how long this lasts though, I doubt that whole scene is truly gone but it might just be in hibernation for a bit.

5 comments

Would I be right in thinking that these changes would raise the price? I can’t find any data fine grained enough, and am just getting yearly data points. I’d also assume that there is big regional differences which make any trend hard to generalise. The price does seem to be trending ever lower over time though. https://www.unodc.org/wdr2018/prelaunch/7.5_Standardized_pri...
I can't attest to street price.

At a certain point people just stop buying drugs unless they're heavily addicted. The thing about research chems is that the ones that tended to stick around dose in the sub 50mg range. The cost per dose is still low since they're produced in multikg batches, resold in fraction to multi gram increments.

Just wait until we stop subsidizing chinese epacket shipments. I bet those illegal drugs coming in with fall off of a cliff assuming china doesn't renegotiate the terms.
There's way too much profit for shipping costs to be any sort of factor in this.

Spend a few hundred (even after losing a few shipments) and you can still easily make it back with one good shipment getting through.

Honestly, I think that the bombs getting sent to government officials is going to hurt things for them more than shipping costs would.

we'll see what the future holds though.

I agree with you on that bombs thing. Currently USPS mail is very underscreened. All (or almost all) drugs in the US and coming in use USPS mail due the fact they need a warrant to open your package.

They currently have greatly stepped up their screening game though, mostly due to fentanyl. But that doesn't mean you have to ship straight to the US in bulk. A common route for fake pressed xanax was alprazolam powder to canada where it was pressed and either reshipped or smuggled into the US.

It's not the cost, it's the tracking. China epacket is not tracked, every other form of shipping inbound to the US is. So it will be a lot easier to get caught.
Your argument would work better if the EU wasn't also source for this sort of thing. Though the availability on that end has gone down due to a Russian lab being busted earlier this year that turned out to be behind two of the bigger source sites.
And the supply channels (basically a free for all using the US postal system) all dried up pretty much the moment trump went into office. say what you will about the regime, they absolutely did crack down on the thousands of kilos of research chemicals that were being tossed around
>FOSTA has slaughtered many avenues of sourcing research chemicals

FOSTA was the "Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act," and the bill seemed solely focused on that topic. I'm also not seeing any other bill that would obviously lead to that happening, but I only looked at the titles.

No you're right but what it lead to it was sites like Reddit closing down things like /r/darknetmarkets, and /r/rcsources which are both review and sourcing subreddits. It made other forums scared to touch the idea of sourcing because the act can be used against any illegal activity.

Here's the announcement of Reddit banning said subs along with many others: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/863xcj/new_a...

My guess is that if you have a place to illegally sell research chemicals online, that place could also be used to facilitate sex trafficking and will be used that way. So without explicitly targeting drug markets, FOSTA can still indirectly affect them as black markets in general.
Not generally an overlap there. As far as I'm aware there's no real one stop shop. Darknet markets have never had escort services to my knowledge.
Are you suggesting people can overdose on ketamine?
I am not, you'd pass out before you got to a lethal dose. Especially with tolerance.

However China has been cracking down on it (and analogs like Deschloroketamine).

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdxqk4/why-is-the-chinese...

And the list of people who died due to ketamine related things: https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_death.shtml

The latter is a rather predictable list of people dying while doing stupid things on ketamine and/or mixing it with depressants