Tag: drugs

Ibiza

Aptly named Ibiza, the film follows 3 American girls (who struggle to pronounce Ibiza correctly the entire film) as they travel to everyone’s favorite clubbing paradise and if luke-warm rom-coms are your thing, then you’re in luck. The lead character falls in love with an EDM DJ and absolute hilarity ensues (it doesn’t). We spoke to the director Alex Richanbach, who has never even been to Ibiza, about how he made the film, his influences and his take on glamorizing drugs. This is perhaps the most awkward interview we’ve ever done.

Fentanyl at scale

What happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. Narcos was child’s play:

Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes ~1 week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: 1 dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. 1 kilogram from China sells for $3800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30m.

2021-11-06: Easily scalable synthetic drugs created a new type of drug lord:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21b, the same as Citibank’s. Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for 3000 murders in a drug war that took 300k lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth $3b—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.

2023-06-19: China doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to crack down on fentanyl, arguably for geopolitical reasons.

From 2018 onwards, drug war cooperation with the United States declined in concert with the more general deterioration of US-China relations. In August 2022, cooperation ceased altogether. There have been no high-profile Chinese prosecutions since a trial in Hebei in 2019. While state media continues to boast of “an intensified fight against narcotics” and “the strictest drug control in the world,” this rigour does not apply to fentanyl. The opioid’s traffickers have come to enjoy a great sense of impunity. America’s crisis has intensified as a result, and the Party will certainly be enjoying the historical parallel.

2023-06-23: Deaths are through the roof and all this article manages to do is to paw ineffectually at prevention.

The shift to synthetics has put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage by dramatically reducing drug prices — recent estimates suggest that fentanyl prices have fallen rapidly, by roughly 50% from 2016 to 2021. It has also made it much harder to detect and therefore interdict drugs. A great deal more law enforcement is therefore needed simply to return to the pre-synthetic level of efficacy.

Senior Cannabis

Taylor is now a commissioner on aging in Alameda County, and is 1 of 2 people in California certified to train physicians and nurses in medical cannabis. She speaks at churches and senior centers. “In the beginning, they’ll sit, frowning, with their arms folded across their chests. I tell them I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m only here to educate you about the health benefits.” This summer, she plans to open iCANN Berkeley, a dispensary and wellness center, in a historically black neighborhood, which will cater to seniors. “Seniors are the most vulnerable population we have. People think they can give them a pill and not worry if it’s gonna kill them because they’re almost dead anyway.”

Paul Erdős Amphetamine

I began to wonder whether Paul Erdős (who I used as an example of a respected academic who used cognitive enhancers) could actually have been shown to have benefited from his amphetamine use, which began in 1971 according to Hill (2004). One way of investigating is his publication record: how many papers did he produce per year before or after 1971?

Red Hook Weed

The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped. Sometimes neighbors in apartments overlooking the building caught a few whiffs of marijuana along with the cherries. David Selig thought the smell of pot might be the result of workmen smoking it on their breaks. The police had failed to find suspicious signs. An increase in energy consumption consistent with the use of grow lights had not been detected, possibly because the factory had its own gasoline-powered generators, and a drug-sniffing dog had not been able to discover a definitive scent of marijuana. Independently, environmental investigators, acting on a tip, began to look into possible violations in the dumping of wastewater from the cherry-manufacturing process into the sewer. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office more or less forgot about the marijuana investigation.

Microdosing

Janet Lai Chang, a businesswoman, endurance athlete and psychedelics biohacker, reports on her year of psilocybin microdosing. “I’ll share data from my 12+ month experiment with sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin for the purposes of increasing social skills through decreased anxiety and elevated mood, empathy, and verbal fluidity.”

Ataraxya

Club drugs: when they’re good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, they’re better. 5 directors collaborated on this trippy animation that stands among the best depictions of a club trip I have seen. Headphones, full screen, and dark room strongly recommended.

Do psychedelics make you weird?

the explanation that weird people gravitate toward psychedelics, even in the sciences, is a strong one. But it’s sufficient that I am hesitant to repeat the common view that psychedelics are not at all dangerous, or that they have no permanent side effects. There seems to me at least a moderate chance that they will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.