Summary: Canadian police dismantled the largest drug “super lab” in the country, seizing a record amount of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and firearms. The operation was linked to organized crime and had been mass-producing and distributing drugs across Canada and internationally.
54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.
Just to put it in perspective:
- Assuming the lethal dose (LD50) of fentanyl in humans is similar to in mice (probably a good assumption), it is 7 mg / kg of body weight by injection. Assuming an average body weight of 70 kg, 54 kg is enough to kill 110,204 people.
- Apparently for opiate tolerant people (e.g. addicts), the therapeutic dose for strong pain relief is 12 μg / h, so in a month, an addict wanting to stay dosed up the whole time might use 8.64 mg total. 54 kg is enough to supply 6.25 million addicts for a month.
- According to a UNODC estime, in 2023, there were about 60.3 million opioid (including opiate) users worldwide, including prescription drug users. So that one stockpile could supply 1/10th of the world’s opioid users for a month. It almost certainly isn’t for supplying prescription drug users, and many opioid addicts likely try to avoid fentanyl, and there are other competing sources - so 1/10th is a lot.
I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.
Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.
Bet $20 the 54 kg includes the weight of the cutting agents in stuff that was already cut to ~heroin strength
Wait… So they fly this stuff all the way from Canadia to Mexico and then have the Guatemalans sneak across our open borders into Texas to kill kids? Ohhhhhh. Now I got it.
“Canadia”
I mean, one of the benafits for fentanyl specifically from the perspective of drug dealers is that it’s a synthetic. With heroin or cocaine or something you have to have space to grow the plants or a source for the plants and those can only grow easily at certain latitudes, etc. So you’re limited by the supply chain. With synthetics you can set up a lab anywhere relatively easily, like in Canada for example
It’s also significantly more potent making smuggling that much more efficient. Orders of magnitude more doses per unit mass.
For fun, watch the movie “The French Connection.”
Besides still being a great film with plenty of action and suspense, you get to marvel at the fact that, at one time, the police seizing 60 pounds of heroin was headline news around the world.
Economies of scale. Once the cartels figured out it’s just a numbers game, a lot of the “smuggling” turned into " just send 10 full containers of the stuff, if 9 get seized we still win". Production is cheap.
And they’re not catching even a tenth, much less 90%.
Yup… this is something where heavy automation could play a role. Scan 100 pct of containers and have software look for contraband. Then signal people to take action.
That wouldn’t help. The software would have to know what to look for, and the scanner would need to see something.
One method used for instance is infusing drugs into other materials, like tents. Then just shipping said tents. Scan the packets, you just see tents. Drogs (drug dogs brainfart but im leaving it lol) won’t smell it, and quicktests won’t reveal it, because of the altered composition.
There is literally no way of shutting down the drug trade.
“Signal people to take action”
You seem to underestimate how many people use illegal drugs, I think, and you still believe that it’s just about proper policing and we can “get rid of drugs”. Never gonna happen. Pretty much all drug laws need to be completely rehauled for progress.
Oh I fully realize that the war on drugs needs to be a healthcare “war” and not a law enforcement war.
People to take action referred to customs agents.
In the mean time I am for cannabis legalisation, and xtc too probably. Opioids and other drugs should get much better treatment options. By giving people options that are not very harmfull and allow them to scratch their itch, they are less likely to opt for very harmfull substances and less likely to opt for stuff that is illegal. And should they become addicted to harmfull stuff we should help them get off it, or provide it safely (like the Dutch heroin program).
All drugs have be legalised to put them under regulation and take the markets away from the cartels.
I think broad decriminalization for possession, use, and small time dealing, with strict criminalization for production, and large scale distribution is the best possible solution. Legalization can be a step too far for certain extremely dangerous drugs like Fentanyl that should never be used outside of a hospital setting. We just need to make sure that whatever war we’re waging against drugs is against the actual people responsible for the problem, not the victims of the problem.
Fentanyl shouldn’t be available to anyone but doctor’s, but that’s just the flavour of opiates. If there’s a legal, mild one, people will gravitate towards that more than a hard to get, illegal, dangerous thing which more or less does the same thing as the legal one.
That’s why moonshine really isn’t a thing after the prohibition of alcohol ended, because it’s too strong for a consumer, so it’s not provided legally and despite people still being able to illegally manufacture moonshine, there’s zero market for it, because who’d go for illegal moonshine when you can go buy legal beer or wine or even vodka.
Regulation is key. For instance with alcohol things milder than 3% aren’t illegal for under-18’s to buy here in Finland, although nowadays most stores don’t sell them to underage people. However even as an adult, you can still buy them at any hour of the day. A few years back the strongest you could get from a store was 5%, now it’s 8%, anything stronger than that is from Alko, a government owned liquor store chain with a monopoly on selling out alcohol. As in “takeaway”, restaurants can still sell to people ofc and buy from companies which aren’t Alko. But Alko has the monopoly on selling consumers unopened alcohol stronger than 8%. From alko you can buy alcohol up to 21% when you’re 18. At 18, you can get stronger drinks like vodka in a restaurant, but you can’t go purchase a bottle of it to take home. Only when you turn 20 are you allowed to buy the stronger stuff from Alko as well.
Something like that, but for drugs. Should work well enough. It doesn’t need to have all substances ever made, but most of the basics. Weed, amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, some milder opiates, shrooms, ketamine, etc.
I just think that the ones which require more responsibility and knowledge in using them should have a licence of some sort, which can then be taken away if you’re found abusing or behaving poorly.
This would actually take the drug trade away from the cartels and manage the worst abusers at the same time. This would mean that literally most visible type of crime in a lot of the most affected countries could just up and vanish.
Most violent gun crime in the states for example? Like the people who keep saying “18-year olds aren’t kids” (referring to the leading cause of death study), most of the gun crime with youth is gang related. And if it’s gang related, well, gangs are funded by the drug trade. So what happens when there’s actually no money in hustling? Like literally? Those gangs won’t be able to sustain themselves. They’ll “starve”.
And the people who actually are high up in the current drug trade? They would obviously keep the situation as is, because of how much it makes, but I wonder if some of them wouldn’t prefer their business being legal so they could actually use all their money and wouldn’t have to be worried about getting killed all the time. It’s a business, and the only way they have of settling scores is violence. If they were allowed — through paying taxes and following the regulations — access to the systems other businesses use to resolve their conflicts, they wouldn’t need the violence. A debt could be reliably collected without chopping off limbs or busting kneecaps.
There’s seriously almost only positives I can think of. And massive positives they are. And what’s the alternative, as drugs are currently completely prohibited, yet completely ubiquitous. I could have pretty much any drugs delivered to my door faster than the shops will open for alcohol. You can get them even in prison. So as long as you don’t encourage abuse and have systems to take care of potential abusers, how much worse could it really be?
The worst thing I see is purely decriminalising use. Honestly. Societally, that is. Individually, it’s great and it is beneficial and it’s the step we’re gonna have to go through. But my point is if we stop purely at decriminalising personal use, then the situation won’t change for the cartels, for drug dealers, for gangs. In fact, it will improve for them, as people will buy easier.
Which is why we have to actually legalise in some form to take control of the market which will exist whether we want it to or not. We can’t allow a trade of hundreds of billions be left to violent criminals just because we’re prudish about using drugs.
Noooo! Not my Fent! That’s the good stuff! /s
Guess I’m boofing bath salts for the foreseeable future!
For my BC peeps - Falkland. And Surrey… but Falkland.
Looks like the weed bust got them trying new things…
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