Comment by bilekas
2 days ago
I'm no expert, but I've always thought that adding much more risk to the lives of your customers unnecessarily is not good for business.
2 days ago
I'm no expert, but I've always thought that adding much more risk to the lives of your customers unnecessarily is not good for business.
In this market, a better high for less money will attract lots of customers, even if it is less healthy than the alternative.
So, if you’re in the business of selling the somewhat healthier product, and one supplier starts to supply the otherwise superior product, that’s not good for business, either. You will lose customers.
Now, do you accept that, saying “I won’t sell that”, do you fight to outlaw the product (will be hard given at you’re not selling healthy products, either), do you fight the suppliers of the new product (a gang war) or do you add the product to your inventory?
There often isn’t a clear choice; each option has its pros and cons.
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.
Fentanyl isn’t a better high is just (much) cheaper to ship/transport given its potency
I guess if you’re the mafia you just murder the competitors. Can’t have stronger regulation than that!
"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.
> Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
Its lethal dose is a lot smaller than that of heroin, but it isn’t guaranteed to kill. If it were, why is it used so much in medicine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl: “Fentanyl is a highly potent synthetic opioid of the piperidine family, used primarily as pain medication
[…]
In 2015, 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) were used in healthcare globally.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.”
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>>>>Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
> Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
Fentanyl may in some cases kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
The way you state it, there are zero fentanyl addicts in the world today.
There were rumors that that the "Chapitos" in Sinaloa purportedly banned the production and sale of fentanyl in their territories.
There were signs warning of this and if I remember correctly, they murdered two major fentanyl cooks, put their bodies on the side of a road, along with a warning sign and two huge piles of the drug around the bodies.
Drugs are a lot more geopolitical than people realize. Who brings drugs in and why drugs are coming into your country are important questions that nations have to ask.
CIA, Oliver North and Reagan would like a word.
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And: shaking the scene in a way that will attract too much attention, including crackdowns, is very bad for business.
Almost like it's not really about "business" at all and something more is going on for all the parties involved
Yes, internal destabilizing of the oppossition is a tried and well working oractice of inter empire warfare..
Soon after John Stewart Mill we assessed that markets are not perfect.
Accelerations in the different directions of bounded incentives create as-if Brownian motions, - not the stability towards optimality of a perfect organic model.
Or: what you write is rational, but people are easily not... The supply side should disappear from the market when irrational, but changes are slow..
Did we? Because while seemingly obvious nowadays it is not a settled matter in orthodox econ academia.
Yes. Everybody here should be or get acquainted with Herbert Simon - he is both "Logic Theory Machine" and "General Problem Solver" and "linked lists", and "bounded rationality" and "satisficing".
Herbert Simon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon
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If its cheap enough to be worth letting a few customers churn, then profits will be positive
https://freesound.org/people/PicassoCT/sounds/848731/
When there are enough customers, individual customers do not matter.
Making it up with volume
Maybe the mafia saw the population curves and realized how precious each customer is now and will be in the future. Something tech companies would be wise to think about...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ita/ita...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
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When the risk is the benefit things get weird
Might want to look at the cigarette industry
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 ).
I think it’s what customers want though as it gets you higher and closer to that high they’re always chasing. That it can kill you is a marketing feature if anything.
The rest of the economics behind fentanyl are great for drug producers vs heroin though, so it probably doesn't matter?
You just need to keep your customers alive long enough.
70% of food in the supermarket is ultra processed. But as long as people make it to 65 years old they are still good customers. That is still 50 years of sales.
> 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.
They still traffic heroin though, which is not stellar for customer's life expectancy.
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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.
I know several doctors who mourn the addiction issues with Oxycontin because it was so useful for a lot of cases. Give someone some Oxycontin, then you can address the root problems, and then get them off - works very well... Now they won't give it to anybody - those addicted know exactly what to say to sound like the people who really need it.
Tell this to junk food manufacturers...
Junk food dont have a chance to kill a person on first try or high chances to kill them withih a year or so.
I was going to make a joke about how it depends on how fast you eat it but you're absolutely right.
Tobacco is incredibly damaging but because it doesn't kill you right away we tolerate it.
There's probably a rather grim metric that defines time to death ratio for addictive substances somewhere in a government report.
I think you are right, but doesn't that mean the consequences of fentanyl do not weigh in on society as badly as junk food? Dead people do not cause extra costs for the rest of society
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Now we have the unions, we have the gambling - and they're the best things to have - but narcotics is the thing of the future. Now if we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean, not now, but ten years from now.