DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf]

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2024-05/5.23.2024%20NDTA-updated.pdf

by KincadeHoney • 2 years ago

32 26 2 years ago

zugi• 2 years ago

The 2024 NDTA highlights the dangerous shift from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs

It's almost as if it was a mistake to spend decades throwing people in jail for using the plant-based drugs... But perusing the document, I see no such admission. In fact, in their section on marijuana they use scare-quotes around "legalize" and "legal", showing they absolutely haven't learned their lesson.

The DEA's War on Americans Who Use Drugs is not just an abject failure, it's directly responsible for much of our nations ills including the decreasing respect for fundamental rights, law and order, and the police.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

I think the tide has shifted. Marijuana laws are incredibly lax now and if anything this kind of plays into the “slippery slope” argument they tried to make for decades.

BobbyJo3• 2 years ago

I think you're both overthinking things. There are more drugs, that are more powerful, and they are more easily available than ever before. Fentanyl is easy to make (thank you biochemical advances), easy to distribute (thank you massive e-commerce market for the camouflage), easy to buy (thank you crypto), and a rice grain's worth will kill. This isn't because of DEA policy, or a slippery slope, this is human progress meeting human flaw.

ulrikrasmussen2• 2 years ago

It's a bit frustrating to observe the US on this issue go from draconic prohibition to laissez faire commercialization when probably the solution lies in a legalized but regulated approach.

tempodox• 2 years ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

They only care about their own preservation.

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

Plant-based in this context means traditional heroin (which is harvested from Poppies) not Weed.

krispyfi2• 2 years ago

Heroin isn't harvested from poppies, opium is. A lot of the problems of the heroin trade could be solved by letting people grow and smoke their own poppies, like they did for thousands of years before prohibition. A similar thing could be said for cocaine and the coca leaf.

shadowmanifold• 2 years ago

I think we need to stop making an argument about personal rights with the drug war and make it about what most of this document is about.

The drug war is empowering the most dangerous organized crime gangs ever created. They could be destroyed overnight by law makers with a pen.

At some point we are going to have to make the decision that dealing with kid's coke and heroin addictions is easier than dealing with thousands of Al Capones that will chop your head off.

We seem incapable of long term planning though so I doubt we will do anything for decades yet. We are like a cancer patient in denial that this cancer is growing and spreading.

K0balt• 2 years ago

From some of the unique positions of insight that I have been exposed to, I think it’s safe to say that at least in the late 90s through early 2000s, the primary political will to fuel the “war on the low price of drugs” was to prop up the ability of the USA to covertly divert funding to favoured political groups worldwide.

The Iran-contra shenanigans made it clear that political cover could not be relied upon for overtly shady air-America style operations, and a plausibly deniable strategy was needed for our covert influence operations.

By being in charge of the semi-global” war on drugs”, the USA could make sure covert allies were well funded by allowing them relatively unimpeded access to the wildly profitable US illicit drug market.

This was largely accomplished by targeting any competition and ignoring or sometimes even assisting favoured groups. We saw this on blatant and dramatic display with US troops protecting poppy crops in Afghanistan.

The war on the low price of drugs also made for great television, so most people were happy for a while.

Inevitable consequences being what they are, now that the cartels have become powerful enough to supplant the US influence on market conditions, this strategic justification is increasingly weak. Accordingly, international spending has plummeted.

But do not despair, gentlereader. Our adventurism has created shiny new villains for us to combat, so all is not lost. Great television is once again within our reach.

The MIC and Netflix will be well employed in the coming cartel wars and eventual occupation of regions of Mexico. We just have to wait patiently for the cartels to start using autonomous weapons with alarming frequency on us soil, a treat we can reasonably expect to see soon enough.

potato3732842• 2 years ago

The drug war is empowering the most dangerous organized crime gangs ever created.

Are you talking about the feds or cartel?

sterlind• 2 years ago

Ecstasy and molly (pill and powder forms of MDMA, respectively) are the most common types of phenethylamines, but similar substances go by the street names N-bomb and Smiles.

Good to know the DEA is still as clueless as ever (MDMA is a very mildly psychedelic empathogen with a long history of use and relative safety with a dose of ~100mg. 'N-bomb' refers to the 25x-NBOMe series of extremely strong psychedelics that are active at ~0.75mg, known for intense visuals and overwhelming effects, and a tendency to randomly and abruptly kill people who haven't taken all that much. meth and mescaline are both phenethylamines, that's about all they have in common.)

sbseitz• 2 years ago

The DEA is the threat

rampajar• 2 years ago

Interested to see how new administrations take this into account, especially with younger generations being more open to drug legalization. Fentanyl will be especially challenging to curtail.

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf]

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