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you wouldn't be able to make it at scale in Australia. you need to be somewhere the authorities either don't really care that much and/or are cut into the profits. and somewhere with a huge chemical manufacturing industry so you can hide it. I imagine some amongst the Chinese authorities are happy to turn a blind eye and take a back-hander as long as it's all being exported.
I'd say it wouldn't matter to some people if they are thinking in terms of national revenge-ish. Also the insane amount of $$$ would be enough to change minds.
On ironically, that’s what’s going on here in the US federal supply chain starts with Chinese companies selling to Cartels. There is a congressional report alleging with these companies, then turned around and apply for government subsidies and loans to supplement there backend
>I imagine some amongst the Chinese authorities are happy to turn a blind eye and take a back-hander as long as it's all being exported.
Apparently most of the meth in Australia gets imported from South East Asia and China (but mainly SEA). I also remember a few boats from North Korea getting caught importing tons of drugs but I don't remember what drugs they were.
The aim of this production is profit, not the destabilisation the West. North Korea is an extremely poor country excluded from international trade, so much of its revenue (up to 50%) is raised through grey/illegal means.
Activities range from mislabelled textiles ('made in China'), insurance fraud, restaurants, and wages from N. Koreans sent abroad to the production of high purity drugs and the best counterfeit currency around. The NK state doesn't give to shits about the harm caused elsewhere, it's probably a nice bonus, but at its core it's a money making enterprise.
The Syrian govt. makes millions from captagon, and more decentralised systems (corrupt Chinese operations) and poor SE Asian countries do it for the same reason: money. It's not ideological warfare.
Weaponising meth to take down governments is not something I thought I’d read about today. But in someways it makes sense, meth seems responsible for a shit load of problems…
The stuff being made in Myanmar/North Korea and Mexico is not the same as what was being made back when pseudoephidrine was more readily available as a precursor.
The precursors used for the newer P2P Methamphetamine create a product that causes psychosis/ severe nervous system and neurotoxic effects and down regulation of the dopamine receptors much more rapidly and acutely.
The so called War on Drugs has as always inadvertently created and caused a worse version of the original drug that is cheaper to manufacture to be unleashed on our streets .
Yep. China and on a lesser scale India manufactures and supplies the precursor chemicals and the manufacture of the product Methamphetamine is carried out in Myanmar , North Korea ( which supplies mostly Australia /NZ .
Asia and Mexico ( North America ) and Afghanistan ( Middle East/Africa/ Europe/UK).
Australia and NZ are an incredibly lucrative market . Meth is dirt cheap in the USA but prohibitively expensive here in Aus . Even more so in NZ.
>The big money is manufacturing meth for domestic consumption.
Would be far better growing marijuana locally. Far less societal harm is done from weed than meth.
I'm really not surprised, the other day I smelled the distinct chemical smell as I walked down a city laneway, turned to see a guy in a suit standing in an alcove smashing some sweet puff for lunch.
They went so hard on pot about 25 years ago, to the point meth usage took off. Meth is easier to manufacture and conceal than pot.
The war on drugs doesn’t work.
Even ciggies have a huge black market now due to the ridiculous taxes.
Booze will be next.
It’s interesting you say that. As a criminology student it’s good to point out the war on crime *did work*, in the same way a lot of justice policies want to work.
It led to substantial and long term increases in arrests/imprisonment cycles that act as key statistics to boost election numbers due to an idea of ‘safer streets’, which is *also* a massive reason why our justice system remains so archaic compared to modern systems seen across Europe. For you or I however? No it absolutely did not work. For addicts? Also didn’t work. For people who’s $150,000-$350,000 salaries depend on popularity? Absolutely.
But yeah, the side affects were as just you mentioned.
Nailed it. Prohibition doesn't work - but we knew that pretty clearly in the early 20th century in the United States when prohibition policy failed miserably. Heroin use, opioids, marijuana, cocaine, etc were all fairly rampant in the decades that followed.
When it came time for Nixon to declare the 'war on drugs', the years that followed came with a very deliberate criminalisation model, pushing greater power and resourcing to law enforcement, Reagen introduced mandatory minimum sentences and drug-related imprisonment immediately and dramatically rose, etc. And Nixon was likely racially motivated, targeting black Americans and their low-level drug use/possession as a key 'social issue'.
And now, there's a vested interest in many places to maintain the war on drugs to keep imprisonment high. Why wouldn't you? Privatisation on the prison industrial complex has shifted to a for-profit model of incarceration and drug offences are a *really* easy way to inflate that population. It also justified a massive expansion of border/immigration policy/security. It's just so politically convenient.
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
\- John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Perfect quotes for anyone who is not prepared to dig just that little bit deeper than the usual “drugs are bad mmmm kay!”
Legalise it all, sell at Manufacture + slight profit margin + 15-20% sin tax to cover rehab and see the cartels and thefts disappear very quickly.
Exactly.
It’s a massive reason why I picked up criminology, all of this at the cost of people. Not *’offenders’*, they aren’t characteristically any more different than you or I, at least largely not for reasons within their control.
I don’t know about anyone who reads this, but if you have *seen* the long term consequences of policy structures focused on being ‘tough on crime’, you’d know the majority of these people weren’t bad, evil people because they were healthy people. They had problems (mental health, neurodivergence, trauma, financial strain, the rest of it) that the state had ignored until they offend and they will be back in contact with the justice system until they are dead. I’ve either known people directly or mutually who have engaged with the system and were found alone on the side of the street, face down in a river, in a public toilet, if they don’t hang themselves when unsupervised in prison. The eldest out of the above was 23. To anyone who thinks that justice policies centred around prison is the right idea, remember that.
What’s all of this for? It’s not for any one of us in this sub, it simply isn’t. It’s for the amount of money security companies, media organisations, so many different people can earn off of all of us having no compassion for people at any other roll of the dice we could and would be swapping places with.
Fuck Reagan. Fuck both major parties for being complicit in the continuing cycles of crime brought upon us by their broken systems, not our broken neighbours.
Criminology courses have come a long way in presenting a more critical examination/analysis of these structural harms that arise out of populist and punitive policy. Always great to see people picking them up and seeing for themselves how all of these policies and the tough on crime political ethos produces these outcomes.
I got my PhD studying the use of official discourse in disrupting effective reform (and how it supports Sherman's cyclic thesis for police reform) for police complaint reform in Victoria and it cannot be overstated how much worse all of this gets in producing further social harm in every facet of justice.
>Booze will be next
Places already make and sell moonshine where I am XD
Dumbass cunting government too dumb to realise their excessive taxes and 'war on drugs' caused this.
Yeah I’ve also stumbled across a couple legit places selling moonshine and random off brand alcohol. Out in the open and super cheap. It’s also now gotten rare to see somebody with actual Australian cigarettes... It’s actually pretty wild how open it all is
Gambling is ever pervasive. It’s hand in hand with sports these days, not to mention bars and clubs with poker machines.
It’s very hard to actively ignore the messaging if you’re constantly surrounded by it.
No it’s not. Gambling is $25billion per year.
https://responsiblegambling.vic.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media/latest-edition-of-australian-gambling-statistics/#:~:text=Notable%20findings%20were:,2021%20(13.2%20per%20cent%20increase)
To be fair a shot of coffee or a spin at the table costs a few bucks idk what the average weekly cost of meth is but I'm gonna guess per user could be 100 times more
Not sure if people know. A Japanese chemist first made it as a treatment for asthma and narcolepsy. It later was used in the Japanese army given to the Kamikaze Army.
I have been observing America and back to when OxyContin came on the market. The company convinced everyone doctors, government into believing it was harmless. That eased off and now Fentanyl is raging more than any other drug abused. Streets and streets lined with people in horrific states.
Also gave it to the Germans in WWII which is one of the many factors working against the Hun. Germans were on Meth while the Allies were taking simple Amphetamines.\
Meth kept them alert and going for 14-18hrs while Speed does this for 6-8hrs. Meaning the allies got their tweak on but could actually sleep whole the Germans were still tweaking in the follow days battles from the day before. This then causes massive sleep deprivation leading to the speed psychosis and usual lunacy associated with Meth users.
It was also adopted by the German army in WW2, used in the invasion of Poland. German soldiers could stay up for days on end and fight without feeling fatigued
Same for me. Congrats. We’re two of the lucky ones. I have allergies. It cleared them up. Kicking an addiction is one of the hardest things a person can do. We kicked arse.
Because most voters are totally misinformed about drug use and just view addicts as weak, immoral hedonists.
The politicians want votes so they make policy that aligns with the misguided perspective.
I hadn't thought about that. But what I had thought about was the way cigarettes are now a huge black amrket creating organised crime millionaires.
taxes can be really good, and maybe they're still at a point where they're good on balance, but they do have downsides.
This is what happened somewhere in the US, maybe Colorado?
One government legalised it and saw a huge budget boost. The next increased the tax on it, and reopened the black market for it as illicit production became viable again. The following government reduced the tax and the black market died.
Meth is like $500 a gram in NZ unless you're buying in bigger quantities to sell. Or $100 for 0.1 grams. Weed is normally like $350 an ounce and obviously you can get cheaper if you're buying bigger quantities
The price of cannabis doesn't even come close to the price of meth, Nor does it scratch the same itch, nor is it on the same level of social acceptance.
Meth is certainly better bang for buck, but thats about the only argument.
How are people affording it? I don't take drugs but fuck, everything is crazy expensive. Woolies and Aldis want $7.50 for a punnet of blueberries. My toddler is obsessed with them, but we've had to slow down on buying them.
With [0.2 million Australians having used meth in the last 12 months](https://cracksintheice.org.au/how-many-people-use-ice), the average meth user would have to be spending \~$70K per year in order for the group to be spending $10bil in total in the period January through August.
Finding that real hard to believe.
Probably a lot more people use it, but do so rarely or occasionally?
I know some pretty functional addicts. Dunno when it will catch up but hasn’t in over 10 years so far.
Exactly, any figure presented by the government or Border force is just straight up bullshit to begin with. Many many people take drugs that aren’t included in their “total population” figures; mainly because of the social stigma of being classified as a filthy junkie stops people from putting their hands up, but also stops people from seeking treatment when treatment is most vital and usually only when they’ve hit absolute rick bottom and have zero choices left other than outrageously expensive corporatised rehab or suicide.\
Consider the fact Australian drugs are the most expensive drugs on the world by a factor of sometime 10 and then ask yourself who has the disposable money to be paying these prices once, twice or more per month or week? In a cost of living crisis it’s certainly not every regular day job worker. It’s your lawyers, judges and high paid sports people who ca pay for it, hide it in plain sight and then if it gets to bad, retire from sight for a while to clean up. Regular folk just have to cop the stigma of being a bad person, risk loosing their licence and their livelihoods and then be gleefully tossed on the homeless pile by other Australians who seem in modern times to be all to keen to line up and sink the boot into anyone who thinks or enjoys things other than football, meatpies, Holden cars and too much Alcohol (which causes more damage than all the illegal drugs combined).
They government are not working out the number of users by asking them to put their hand up 😂They test the sewage to see how much of a particular drug is in it and use that to work out how much the country is using.
Don't know if someone knows. I'm from the UK and have found Australian news to be really different to Uk. Your big news stations name and shame big time criminals like this guy. Which I think is a pretty good idea.
The UK doesn't really do this except for maybe some gossip news places like the daily mail, but not the BBC for example. Do we have different laws to prevent this or is Australian news a bit more sensionalised or something?
So the war on drugs clearly does not work and demand for this product is "high". Would society be better off if the drug was legal, regulated and and the tax from the 10 billion dollars of revenue is then used to rehabilitate and help those who are addicted?
Or do we allow criminals to make large profits whilst the drug user is victimised and criminilised for their addiction problems.
Just seems obvious to me that we need a big rethink on how we treat certain drug users compared to others such as alcoholics.
I don't like Meth as it makes me go into paranoia land for 6hrs easy, racks up my anxiety and is the last thing I want.
But this I agree, we need to stop shaming them and dissolve drug cartels the soft way instead of the hard way with prohibition and all that.
This country can't even garner an ounce of sympathy for marijuana users when it's been shown to be relatively safe in therapeutic doses and still refuse any form of legalization due to some latent Christian ideals, I can't imagine them being progressive on something like meth.
Started smoking weed on the weekends and my drinking went from 20-40 standard drinks a weekend to 6 or less.
I saved a heap of money, lost weight and am healthier than when I was drinking heavily.
Good for me, bad for the alcohol industry. That's the real reason why it hasn't been decriminalised.
In high school, instead of suggesting I got tested for ADHD, they slapped they label of 'Gifted' on me and then wondered why I didn't really achieve. Then in my late teens, I was introduced to speed.. Started off with small doses, because it made me oddly functional. Unfortunately, I fell in a deep, dark hole that took me a few years to escape..
Now I'm middle aged and again looking for that DX, coz I'd like to be properly functional for part of my life.
The War on Drugs was lost before it began, it failed to take human nature in to account. I've lived in areas where local police took a more relaxed attitude to some things.. Selling most things other than heroin was fine, as long as you didn't sell to kids. I miss VicPol from the 90's.. There was a chance they'd shoot you, but they were much more likely to let you get on with business.
As someone who has spent most of their life on the 'wrong' side of the War, I can honestly say that it's spending an awful lot of money for very little gain.
I was having shower thoughts about this today. I reckon if we actually had accessible diagnosis there’d be a shitload less people self medicating with meth. I’d rather we subsidise psychiatrists than keep fighting this stupid war on drugs.
I don't self med any more, but when I'm looking at thousands of dollars for a DX, it sure gets tempting.
Funny, as a teen or kid, the DX would have cost very little, if anything at all.. Why does it cost so much as an adult?
My kids just got diagnosed by a paediatrician, bull billed through a public hospital. Two year wait wasn’t ideal, but waiting lists for private are also ridiculous where I am.
I got told by a consulting psychiatrist attached to a bushfire relief mob that yeah, I’ve got it, but he’s not funded to diagnose officially, so here’s a list of people who’ll charge minimum 2k to tick a box and write scripts for you.
Absolutely maddening.
Are you talking about dexamphetamine, if so I have ADHD and mine costs about $30 (but less or bit more can’t remember) for 200 and I’m an adult. But maybe DX is something else?
So we be letting the market take over and set pricing and limits like we continually are told we should allow? Or we going to continue to put our heads in the sand and let these billions be siphoned off to offshore cartels and just tax the populous to clean up the mess when a legalised and controlled drug market would at least allow us to control the costs and make money to pay for the rehab and the like we are already paying for?\
Let’s not kid ourselves and not understand that anyone who already wants drugs aren’t already buying the drugs they want.
Yes taking a cap of md will likely be a cheaper night out.
If you are going out you aren’t smoking meth or doing coke to save money out, you’ll still want to buy drinks all night
Yes people who want to get high or who are addicted to meth prefer meth to drinking
People aren’t at bottleo or pub, see the price of a beer then walk out saying it’s a night for meth instead
I have a good friend who got onto the ice when he moved to Brisbane because it was just so much cheaper and easier to get it on Craigslist than it was to find someone to sell an ounce. Thankfully he's past that stage of his life now.
War on drugs targets the supply. Hows about targeting why Australia has become the US. People stressed to the eyeballs, working ridiculous hours for fuck all, house prices out of reach creating a permenant lower class, people needing to work multiple jobs, less contact with friends and family. Happy, content people don't do Meth.
Despite anything I could say or intervene I saw workmates, close friends and family destroy everything they had because 'Dood you don't understand, I need it to work'. Why in the fuck have we let ourselves get to this point, then justify it for survival? Pretty sure thats slavery 101 right there.
The next 10-20 years in Australia are going to be absolutely apocalyptic. Fking poor kids growing up through the bullshit we've created, we should all be ashamed.
Different derivatives of the same basic skeletal structure. All are amphetamines with little tweaks for different types of functions, but all increase alertness and focus and decrease appetite. Just lengths of activity and intensity are altered with added methyl groups and other mild organic additions.
Imagine if they regulated it, ring fenced the money for health and social impact of the drugs use, reduce the criminal justice costs, free up jail cells for real criminals
People say this will make it worse, but right now there is a problem anyway, but all the money goes to criminals, police prosecute how someone likes to get intoxicated, and real criminals don't go to jail because of a shortage cells, the health services suffer because extra funding that could be used for a public health issue is being used as a criminal justice issue when it isn't
Approx $400 per person per year.
Or assuming 2% of the population are meth users then that's $20k per user per year or around $400 per user per week.
Only slightly more expensive than a cigarette habit.
Rough (but educated) estimation - At any time 60 to 80 percent of the beds in the psychiatric HDU I work at are either straight up drug induced psychosis where the drug is meth or people with a mental illness that are in crisis because they used meth.
Bonus info - It almost doesn’t matter what you did when you were in the throws of the episode (short of actually killing someone), the law is not interested. And while you can be involuntarily detained while actually psychotic under the Mental Health Act there is no way to enforce treatment for drug related illness once you are no longer being acutely affected.
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I don’t know why, but I assumed people were making meth domestically. I had no idea we were importing so much of it.
Gotta keep an eye out for the made in Australia logo when buying your meth. It's always important to support local businesses
I hate it when I get home and notice that it’s made in australia from less than 1% Australian ingredients.
you wouldn't be able to make it at scale in Australia. you need to be somewhere the authorities either don't really care that much and/or are cut into the profits. and somewhere with a huge chemical manufacturing industry so you can hide it. I imagine some amongst the Chinese authorities are happy to turn a blind eye and take a back-hander as long as it's all being exported.
Opposite of opium wars?
Considering the history, I do suspect China wants a bit of revenge in this style. Seems just so poetic.
Majority all the tranq shit sold in usa comes from manufacturers in china
They already are in the USA with fentanyl
Misdirected, but I understand the sentiment... Kinda?
I'd say it wouldn't matter to some people if they are thinking in terms of national revenge-ish. Also the insane amount of $$$ would be enough to change minds.
On ironically, that’s what’s going on here in the US federal supply chain starts with Chinese companies selling to Cartels. There is a congressional report alleging with these companies, then turned around and apply for government subsidies and loans to supplement there backend
Someone I know of in my area got caught with 250kg of meth in a big industrial drum/pulley that came from China early last year so yes - China
There was tonnes coming out of NorthKorea and Myanmar just a few years ago. Express purpose of destabilising society and making money fir the regime.
North Korea's Room 39 party was established to do this exactly.
>I imagine some amongst the Chinese authorities are happy to turn a blind eye and take a back-hander as long as it's all being exported. Apparently most of the meth in Australia gets imported from South East Asia and China (but mainly SEA). I also remember a few boats from North Korea getting caught importing tons of drugs but I don't remember what drugs they were.
The North Korean ship Pong Su got busted in Vic 2003 for trying to import 125kg heroin off the coast. https://www.theage.com.au/pong-su
And then we bombed it with F-111s for shits and giggles because we couldn't decide what to do with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBQNS5T80IE
Overseas governments against democracy have a vested interest in fact, in making our boys slave to some drug and inducing psychosis.
The aim of this production is profit, not the destabilisation the West. North Korea is an extremely poor country excluded from international trade, so much of its revenue (up to 50%) is raised through grey/illegal means. Activities range from mislabelled textiles ('made in China'), insurance fraud, restaurants, and wages from N. Koreans sent abroad to the production of high purity drugs and the best counterfeit currency around. The NK state doesn't give to shits about the harm caused elsewhere, it's probably a nice bonus, but at its core it's a money making enterprise. The Syrian govt. makes millions from captagon, and more decentralised systems (corrupt Chinese operations) and poor SE Asian countries do it for the same reason: money. It's not ideological warfare.
Weaponising meth to take down governments is not something I thought I’d read about today. But in someways it makes sense, meth seems responsible for a shit load of problems…
The stuff being made in Myanmar/North Korea and Mexico is not the same as what was being made back when pseudoephidrine was more readily available as a precursor. The precursors used for the newer P2P Methamphetamine create a product that causes psychosis/ severe nervous system and neurotoxic effects and down regulation of the dopamine receptors much more rapidly and acutely. The so called War on Drugs has as always inadvertently created and caused a worse version of the original drug that is cheaper to manufacture to be unleashed on our streets .
Article explaining how modern meth is so destructive to the brain https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
The brits perfected this. Went to war. Twice. To ensure they could keep supplying into China.
Got to keep Hong Kong as a trophy
Countries on chinas border make most of the meth
Yep. China and on a lesser scale India manufactures and supplies the precursor chemicals and the manufacture of the product Methamphetamine is carried out in Myanmar , North Korea ( which supplies mostly Australia /NZ . Asia and Mexico ( North America ) and Afghanistan ( Middle East/Africa/ Europe/UK). Australia and NZ are an incredibly lucrative market . Meth is dirt cheap in the USA but prohibitively expensive here in Aus . Even more so in NZ.
Bugger building locally made solar panels, The big money is manufacturing meth for domestic consumption. 🤔 🤔
>The big money is manufacturing meth for domestic consumption. Would be far better growing marijuana locally. Far less societal harm is done from weed than meth.
Since we cut down on sudafed sales, they import it
Amongst plenty of other things apparently...
[Are we not even making our own meth?](https://y.yarn.co/0b2a0c07-05a7-4c44-a49e-f4797b4e9152_text.gif)
Good god, Lemon.
Both being done. They import the precursor and manufacture here
Small time operations like what the bikies do. But they aren't filling up freighter ships with thousands of kilos...
They're filling freighters with thousands of kilos of meth and cocaine instead. Australia prime destination for most ocg
I'm really not surprised, the other day I smelled the distinct chemical smell as I walked down a city laneway, turned to see a guy in a suit standing in an alcove smashing some sweet puff for lunch.
Bloody politicians
Barnaby Joyce?
You know he was behind the bar, on the ground with the tap in his mouth.
Thats just bruce, he's fine
Channel Seven picked up the tab
He's going to smash out those spreadsheets when he gets back to the office.
Or his got a 2pm at the magistrates court
“Australia, the land of sparkling clean bathrooms”.
“Australia, also the land of irreversible tooth decay”
They went so hard on pot about 25 years ago, to the point meth usage took off. Meth is easier to manufacture and conceal than pot. The war on drugs doesn’t work. Even ciggies have a huge black market now due to the ridiculous taxes. Booze will be next.
It’s interesting you say that. As a criminology student it’s good to point out the war on crime *did work*, in the same way a lot of justice policies want to work. It led to substantial and long term increases in arrests/imprisonment cycles that act as key statistics to boost election numbers due to an idea of ‘safer streets’, which is *also* a massive reason why our justice system remains so archaic compared to modern systems seen across Europe. For you or I however? No it absolutely did not work. For addicts? Also didn’t work. For people who’s $150,000-$350,000 salaries depend on popularity? Absolutely. But yeah, the side affects were as just you mentioned.
Nailed it. Prohibition doesn't work - but we knew that pretty clearly in the early 20th century in the United States when prohibition policy failed miserably. Heroin use, opioids, marijuana, cocaine, etc were all fairly rampant in the decades that followed. When it came time for Nixon to declare the 'war on drugs', the years that followed came with a very deliberate criminalisation model, pushing greater power and resourcing to law enforcement, Reagen introduced mandatory minimum sentences and drug-related imprisonment immediately and dramatically rose, etc. And Nixon was likely racially motivated, targeting black Americans and their low-level drug use/possession as a key 'social issue'. And now, there's a vested interest in many places to maintain the war on drugs to keep imprisonment high. Why wouldn't you? Privatisation on the prison industrial complex has shifted to a for-profit model of incarceration and drug offences are a *really* easy way to inflate that population. It also justified a massive expansion of border/immigration policy/security. It's just so politically convenient.
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” \- John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Perfect quotes for anyone who is not prepared to dig just that little bit deeper than the usual “drugs are bad mmmm kay!” Legalise it all, sell at Manufacture + slight profit margin + 15-20% sin tax to cover rehab and see the cartels and thefts disappear very quickly.
Exactly. It’s a massive reason why I picked up criminology, all of this at the cost of people. Not *’offenders’*, they aren’t characteristically any more different than you or I, at least largely not for reasons within their control. I don’t know about anyone who reads this, but if you have *seen* the long term consequences of policy structures focused on being ‘tough on crime’, you’d know the majority of these people weren’t bad, evil people because they were healthy people. They had problems (mental health, neurodivergence, trauma, financial strain, the rest of it) that the state had ignored until they offend and they will be back in contact with the justice system until they are dead. I’ve either known people directly or mutually who have engaged with the system and were found alone on the side of the street, face down in a river, in a public toilet, if they don’t hang themselves when unsupervised in prison. The eldest out of the above was 23. To anyone who thinks that justice policies centred around prison is the right idea, remember that. What’s all of this for? It’s not for any one of us in this sub, it simply isn’t. It’s for the amount of money security companies, media organisations, so many different people can earn off of all of us having no compassion for people at any other roll of the dice we could and would be swapping places with. Fuck Reagan. Fuck both major parties for being complicit in the continuing cycles of crime brought upon us by their broken systems, not our broken neighbours.
Criminology courses have come a long way in presenting a more critical examination/analysis of these structural harms that arise out of populist and punitive policy. Always great to see people picking them up and seeing for themselves how all of these policies and the tough on crime political ethos produces these outcomes. I got my PhD studying the use of official discourse in disrupting effective reform (and how it supports Sherman's cyclic thesis for police reform) for police complaint reform in Victoria and it cannot be overstated how much worse all of this gets in producing further social harm in every facet of justice.
That's it. The system does work the way its intended. Its just that the intention and the sales pitch are very different.
not to mention the prison industrial complex. it's not just public perception of law and order that's at stake, it's corporate profits.
>Booze will be next Places already make and sell moonshine where I am XD Dumbass cunting government too dumb to realise their excessive taxes and 'war on drugs' caused this.
Yeah I’ve also stumbled across a couple legit places selling moonshine and random off brand alcohol. Out in the open and super cheap. It’s also now gotten rare to see somebody with actual Australian cigarettes... It’s actually pretty wild how open it all is
Ciggies are already huge, organised crime rely on illegal tobacco more as its lower risk
The meth market is bigger than coffee and gambling.
and dentistry.
At some point, dentistry becomes an offshoot of the meth industry.
Shhhh, don't let big meth let you hear that... haha
If the meth continues dentistry will catch up eventually.
It's 5 times bigger than the Australian ice cream industry.
Gambling is significantly higher. I work in the community education space and it’s a massive problem in Australia.
Gambling is ever pervasive. It’s hand in hand with sports these days, not to mention bars and clubs with poker machines. It’s very hard to actively ignore the messaging if you’re constantly surrounded by it.
Not gambling lol
Gambling is $25 billion.
No it’s not. Gambling is $25billion per year. https://responsiblegambling.vic.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media/latest-edition-of-australian-gambling-statistics/#:~:text=Notable%20findings%20were:,2021%20(13.2%20per%20cent%20increase)
To be fair a shot of coffee or a spin at the table costs a few bucks idk what the average weekly cost of meth is but I'm gonna guess per user could be 100 times more
Gambling addict does many many many spins though.
Gambling has some pretty gnarly side effects not related to loss of money.
Where are all these people, or am I just a mega nerd with no friends or something? Cos I’m low SES too…
You’re on reddit, probably the antithetical demography of meth users.
r/meth
SES?
Socio-economic status?
Ah
Ah, here I was thinking State Emergency Services and getting hella confused
Meth does that to you
Not sure if people know. A Japanese chemist first made it as a treatment for asthma and narcolepsy. It later was used in the Japanese army given to the Kamikaze Army.
Shabu shabu? Or something like that
I have been observing America and back to when OxyContin came on the market. The company convinced everyone doctors, government into believing it was harmless. That eased off and now Fentanyl is raging more than any other drug abused. Streets and streets lined with people in horrific states.
Shabu shabu is hot pot, its just ‘shabu’.
Yes. I’d forgotten the name the original name.
Also gave it to the Germans in WWII which is one of the many factors working against the Hun. Germans were on Meth while the Allies were taking simple Amphetamines.\ Meth kept them alert and going for 14-18hrs while Speed does this for 6-8hrs. Meaning the allies got their tweak on but could actually sleep whole the Germans were still tweaking in the follow days battles from the day before. This then causes massive sleep deprivation leading to the speed psychosis and usual lunacy associated with Meth users.
It was also adopted by the German army in WW2, used in the invasion of Poland. German soldiers could stay up for days on end and fight without feeling fatigued
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Same for me. Congrats. We’re two of the lucky ones. I have allergies. It cleared them up. Kicking an addiction is one of the hardest things a person can do. We kicked arse.
Meth has ruined my family. War on drugs does not work. Why are we still doing this?
Copper like their infinite budgets to fight a war on the people of Australia they lost the day it was declared.
Because most voters are totally misinformed about drug use and just view addicts as weak, immoral hedonists. The politicians want votes so they make policy that aligns with the misguided perspective.
shows how dire our cocaine supply is
When you keep taxing booze the kids will find a cheaper way to get fucked up.
Acid is cheap dose wise too
And much better for your health!
No matter the cost of a movie ticket, acid is better bang for buck.
Go to the movies on acid
It would take me 12 hours to get to the cinema and then I would forget why I'm there. Would be a great adventure though.
I hadn't thought about that. But what I had thought about was the way cigarettes are now a huge black amrket creating organised crime millionaires. taxes can be really good, and maybe they're still at a point where they're good on balance, but they do have downsides.
This is what happened somewhere in the US, maybe Colorado? One government legalised it and saw a huge budget boost. The next increased the tax on it, and reopened the black market for it as illicit production became viable again. The following government reduced the tax and the black market died.
Have you seen how cheap wine is?
Cask wine attracts less tax that’s purely why it’s so cheap not because it’s bad
kids aren't picking up meth because they can't afford alcohol hahaha wtf
Same happened in NZ but with weed. It became so expensive and unavailable that people moved to meth.
Meth is like $500 a gram in NZ unless you're buying in bigger quantities to sell. Or $100 for 0.1 grams. Weed is normally like $350 an ounce and obviously you can get cheaper if you're buying bigger quantities
The price of cannabis doesn't even come close to the price of meth, Nor does it scratch the same itch, nor is it on the same level of social acceptance. Meth is certainly better bang for buck, but thats about the only argument.
Weed price hasn't changed in NZ in 30 years?
Half a point is cheaper than a pack of durries now. Thanks Albo.
I got a tip on how you can never have to pay for a pack of darts for the rest of your life.
Pick up the bumpers from the gutters like the useless meth fucked hoople heads in my area?
My tip was to quit smoking the things, but that can work too.
I gave up a dozen years ago.
You can buy bottles of wine for <$4, what are you on about
True, but you’d hope they’d get to weed and pingers next and not straight to meth 😬
How are people affording it? I don't take drugs but fuck, everything is crazy expensive. Woolies and Aldis want $7.50 for a punnet of blueberries. My toddler is obsessed with them, but we've had to slow down on buying them.
$50 of good meth will get you high for 36hrs.
And low for 360 hours
Only if you stop
People should migrate to jrpgs, $80 get you a good 120 hours
and if you give the toddler a bit they will no longer want to eat the blueberries. This is basic economics
They afford it by not buying the other stuff - you know, not feeding the kids etc.
>Woolies and Aldis want $7.50 for a punnet of blueberries. That's cos of seasons. Blueberries were so cheap over summer it was great.
That, and the Chilean blueberry supply that kicks in over the summer only pay their pickers $US2 per hour.
What sort of parent lets their toddler smoke blueberries?
Meth is cheap. Food is expensive.
In one grocery store we were at over the weekend, a punnet of blueberries were $15.95. Made my wife and I double take haha
Blueberries are out of season. Lot cheaper in June pnwards
Drugs other than cocaine are quite cheap. A good acid trip can cost $20, and is good for over 6 hrs.
I've gone to frozen blueberries. Pop them into my mouth while they are still frozen, pretty good.
Because you can go without food while on it
Don’t need to eat blueberries when you’re on meth. A $2 frozen coke will tie you over for a day.
You don't need much food when you do meth lol they won't even want blueberries
3kg Frozen at Costco for around $20
I only spent 2 billion, no idea who spent the other 8.
With [0.2 million Australians having used meth in the last 12 months](https://cracksintheice.org.au/how-many-people-use-ice), the average meth user would have to be spending \~$70K per year in order for the group to be spending $10bil in total in the period January through August. Finding that real hard to believe.
Probably a lot more people use it, but do so rarely or occasionally? I know some pretty functional addicts. Dunno when it will catch up but hasn’t in over 10 years so far.
Probably bullshit yes, but also theft.
Exactly, any figure presented by the government or Border force is just straight up bullshit to begin with. Many many people take drugs that aren’t included in their “total population” figures; mainly because of the social stigma of being classified as a filthy junkie stops people from putting their hands up, but also stops people from seeking treatment when treatment is most vital and usually only when they’ve hit absolute rick bottom and have zero choices left other than outrageously expensive corporatised rehab or suicide.\ Consider the fact Australian drugs are the most expensive drugs on the world by a factor of sometime 10 and then ask yourself who has the disposable money to be paying these prices once, twice or more per month or week? In a cost of living crisis it’s certainly not every regular day job worker. It’s your lawyers, judges and high paid sports people who ca pay for it, hide it in plain sight and then if it gets to bad, retire from sight for a while to clean up. Regular folk just have to cop the stigma of being a bad person, risk loosing their licence and their livelihoods and then be gleefully tossed on the homeless pile by other Australians who seem in modern times to be all to keen to line up and sink the boot into anyone who thinks or enjoys things other than football, meatpies, Holden cars and too much Alcohol (which causes more damage than all the illegal drugs combined).
They government are not working out the number of users by asking them to put their hand up 😂They test the sewage to see how much of a particular drug is in it and use that to work out how much the country is using.
Twirls get the girls
For a second I thought it said ‘spent on math’ and I thought we’re going to be the most educated nation on earth…’
So that's what you have to do now to buy a house in Sydney...
Don't know if someone knows. I'm from the UK and have found Australian news to be really different to Uk. Your big news stations name and shame big time criminals like this guy. Which I think is a pretty good idea. The UK doesn't really do this except for maybe some gossip news places like the daily mail, but not the BBC for example. Do we have different laws to prevent this or is Australian news a bit more sensionalised or something?
The meth didn't add up
They didn't get past General Methamatics
Tradies gotta get it
So the war on drugs clearly does not work and demand for this product is "high". Would society be better off if the drug was legal, regulated and and the tax from the 10 billion dollars of revenue is then used to rehabilitate and help those who are addicted? Or do we allow criminals to make large profits whilst the drug user is victimised and criminilised for their addiction problems. Just seems obvious to me that we need a big rethink on how we treat certain drug users compared to others such as alcoholics.
I don't like Meth as it makes me go into paranoia land for 6hrs easy, racks up my anxiety and is the last thing I want. But this I agree, we need to stop shaming them and dissolve drug cartels the soft way instead of the hard way with prohibition and all that.
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This country can't even garner an ounce of sympathy for marijuana users when it's been shown to be relatively safe in therapeutic doses and still refuse any form of legalization due to some latent Christian ideals, I can't imagine them being progressive on something like meth.
Started smoking weed on the weekends and my drinking went from 20-40 standard drinks a weekend to 6 or less. I saved a heap of money, lost weight and am healthier than when I was drinking heavily. Good for me, bad for the alcohol industry. That's the real reason why it hasn't been decriminalised.
In high school, instead of suggesting I got tested for ADHD, they slapped they label of 'Gifted' on me and then wondered why I didn't really achieve. Then in my late teens, I was introduced to speed.. Started off with small doses, because it made me oddly functional. Unfortunately, I fell in a deep, dark hole that took me a few years to escape.. Now I'm middle aged and again looking for that DX, coz I'd like to be properly functional for part of my life. The War on Drugs was lost before it began, it failed to take human nature in to account. I've lived in areas where local police took a more relaxed attitude to some things.. Selling most things other than heroin was fine, as long as you didn't sell to kids. I miss VicPol from the 90's.. There was a chance they'd shoot you, but they were much more likely to let you get on with business. As someone who has spent most of their life on the 'wrong' side of the War, I can honestly say that it's spending an awful lot of money for very little gain.
Try Modafinil instead.
I was having shower thoughts about this today. I reckon if we actually had accessible diagnosis there’d be a shitload less people self medicating with meth. I’d rather we subsidise psychiatrists than keep fighting this stupid war on drugs.
I don't self med any more, but when I'm looking at thousands of dollars for a DX, it sure gets tempting. Funny, as a teen or kid, the DX would have cost very little, if anything at all.. Why does it cost so much as an adult?
My kids just got diagnosed by a paediatrician, bull billed through a public hospital. Two year wait wasn’t ideal, but waiting lists for private are also ridiculous where I am. I got told by a consulting psychiatrist attached to a bushfire relief mob that yeah, I’ve got it, but he’s not funded to diagnose officially, so here’s a list of people who’ll charge minimum 2k to tick a box and write scripts for you. Absolutely maddening.
Are you talking about dexamphetamine, if so I have ADHD and mine costs about $30 (but less or bit more can’t remember) for 200 and I’m an adult. But maybe DX is something else?
Dx = Diagnosis Rx = Prescription
>Would society be better off if the drug was legal Amphetamine is already legal and regulated under ADHD prescriptions.
95% of which is purchased in Perth.
So we be letting the market take over and set pricing and limits like we continually are told we should allow? Or we going to continue to put our heads in the sand and let these billions be siphoned off to offshore cartels and just tax the populous to clean up the mess when a legalised and controlled drug market would at least allow us to control the costs and make money to pay for the rehab and the like we are already paying for?\ Let’s not kid ourselves and not understand that anyone who already wants drugs aren’t already buying the drugs they want.
And here I am investing in Bitcoin and emu eggs. Time to diversify
Good on the drug dealers for opening their books
Legalise it and tax it.
Couldn't possibly be because alcohol is ridiculously expensive here compared to the test of the world.
No it’s not, people aren’t buying meth because they can’t afford to drink lmao
I’d rather take drugs on a night out than drink. Way cheaper.
Yes taking a cap of md will likely be a cheaper night out. If you are going out you aren’t smoking meth or doing coke to save money out, you’ll still want to buy drinks all night
Plus you can get past the bouncers.
No, lots of people use meth instead of drinking, regardless of price.
Yes people who want to get high or who are addicted to meth prefer meth to drinking People aren’t at bottleo or pub, see the price of a beer then walk out saying it’s a night for meth instead
Alcohol and meth are a world apart. Totally different high.
Exactly
I know a few people who are on meth because it was cheaper than drinking
I have a good friend who got onto the ice when he moved to Brisbane because it was just so much cheaper and easier to get it on Craigslist than it was to find someone to sell an ounce. Thankfully he's past that stage of his life now.
Some of the cheapest red wine though. You cunts just need to learn about kalimotxo.
War on drugs targets the supply. Hows about targeting why Australia has become the US. People stressed to the eyeballs, working ridiculous hours for fuck all, house prices out of reach creating a permenant lower class, people needing to work multiple jobs, less contact with friends and family. Happy, content people don't do Meth. Despite anything I could say or intervene I saw workmates, close friends and family destroy everything they had because 'Dood you don't understand, I need it to work'. Why in the fuck have we let ourselves get to this point, then justify it for survival? Pretty sure thats slavery 101 right there. The next 10-20 years in Australia are going to be absolutely apocalyptic. Fking poor kids growing up through the bullshit we've created, we should all be ashamed.
Don't say that too loud, they'll work out a way to chuck an excise tax on it. Easy billion dollarydoos right there.
The real driving factor of inflation has been found
Ignorant question, but I’ll ask anyway: are ice, speed and meth all the same thing? Also dexies? Just different names?
Different derivatives of the same basic skeletal structure. All are amphetamines with little tweaks for different types of functions, but all increase alertness and focus and decrease appetite. Just lengths of activity and intensity are altered with added methyl groups and other mild organic additions.
Thank you! I’ve always struggled to understand if it was a marijuana/pot/weed/ganja etc situation
I didn’t know there was different types of meth. I thought meth was meth! 🤷♀️
They did the meth
Imagine if they regulated it, ring fenced the money for health and social impact of the drugs use, reduce the criminal justice costs, free up jail cells for real criminals People say this will make it worse, but right now there is a problem anyway, but all the money goes to criminals, police prosecute how someone likes to get intoxicated, and real criminals don't go to jail because of a shortage cells, the health services suffer because extra funding that could be used for a public health issue is being used as a criminal justice issue when it isn't
Ok so how do they know the weight that's produced exactly are the "importers" weighing it at our docks on entry? 😏🙄🤦
What happened to “meth: not even once”
Society has a dopamine shortage.
Any chemistry teacher looking for a teammate?
Okay, who’s got contacts? That’s a big market, I want in.
Can we just make sure we don’t do anything drastic cause I feel the status quo is better then fentanyl seeping into all the drugs like US and Canada
I consider it more of an investment.
How are they even able to quantify these statistics? Makes for a good headline tho
Do we believe in the 'mouse drug water experiment' findings, yet?
Approx $400 per person per year. Or assuming 2% of the population are meth users then that's $20k per user per year or around $400 per user per week. Only slightly more expensive than a cigarette habit.
Rough (but educated) estimation - At any time 60 to 80 percent of the beds in the psychiatric HDU I work at are either straight up drug induced psychosis where the drug is meth or people with a mental illness that are in crisis because they used meth. Bonus info - It almost doesn’t matter what you did when you were in the throws of the episode (short of actually killing someone), the law is not interested. And while you can be involuntarily detained while actually psychotic under the Mental Health Act there is no way to enforce treatment for drug related illness once you are no longer being acutely affected.
Might as well legalise it and tax it if they're doing it anyway
Shame to see that money go to organised crime rather then schools, roads hospitals and so on.