With Google, Bitcoins, and USPS, Feds realize it's stupid easy to buy fentanyl
A congressional report released Wednesday lays out just how easy it is for Americans to buy the deadly opioid fentanyl from Chinese suppliers online and have it shipped to them via the government's own postal service. The report also lays out just how difficult the practice will be to stop.
After Googling phrases such as "fentanyl for sale," Senate investigators followed up with just six of the online sellers they found. This eventually led them to 500 financial transaction records, accounting for about $766 million worth of fentanyl entering the country and at least seven traceable overdose deaths.
[...] "Thanks to our bipartisan investigation, we now know the depth to which drug traffickers exploit our mail system to ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States," Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio said in a statement. "The federal government can, and must, act to shore up our defenses against this deadly drug and help save lives."
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(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday January 29 2018, @06:34AM (1 child)
You can call it silly if you like, but it is a personal experience I had and so I have to accept it as true. Pain may be just a signal, but the human physiology responds to that signal.
You should note that "hypnosurgery" still includes receiving a local, you just don't get rendered unconscious.
I'm not a fan of opoids myself, I generally don't need them for pain management. But, I'm not in chronic severe pain either.
Have you considered that you simply haven't encountered severe enough pain to make the observations I have made? I note you didn't say YOU had surgery using only visualization or hypnosis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:32AM
Have you considered the fact, that we're not all girly men? I've encountered real pain, it's just that as a recovered alcoholic, I have a greatly reduced set of painkillers available to me. I used to live with what doctors would consider debilitating pain. At first it really hurt, but with practice and effort the pain got to be bearable and eventually subsided completely.
These days, the issue I have more often is not feeling pain that I should have. I've even had minor surgery with no anesthetic at all and was just fine.
If our species was as weak as it is now even a couple thousand years ago, there's no way we'd still be around. Humans are resilient, but you don't get to be resilient by constantly chickening out of it.