re: Authorities seize record 1.7 million fentanyl pills in Arizona

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Looks like they are fake Roxies or something. I bet they are making fake versions of everything, which can definitely be dangerous for dumb kids wanting to frick around that aren't real habitual users. But for every bust you have to assume a ton more went through and its not just the cartel doing it, there are random people doing this shite all over the country, albeit maybe a smaller scale. It is a problem for sure.

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I read a really interesting book years ago called I Am the Market. Among many other anecdotes, one of the core tenets was to think about the sheer amount of drugs being used in this country in the span of a year. Then think about the sizes of drug busts you hear about. This one is eyebrow raising big, but most aren't. And this is fentanyl, which is dirt cheap. Then think about how big some shipments must be to meet national, or even regional, demand. He talked about professional mules carrying "substantial" in theory but in the grand scheme of things irrelevant amounts of drugs. If they get through, great. But more importantly, they keep the cops busy and help you find your rats. So that way when you push real volume, your odds of success are significantly better. He told one story of moving miles and miles of spooled "industrial wire" cored with straight cocaine, etc. When one of those shipments get pinched, that's when whole villages in South America get burned to ash, whole family lines are wiped out, etc. But those are the kinds of shipments that have to regularly get through in order for there to be drugs in basically every zip code in the country at all times.