Saturday, June 10, 2017

"Opioid Dealers Embrace the Dark Web to Send Deadly Drugs by Mail"

NYT:
The problem of dark web sales appeared to have been stamped out in 2013, when the authorities took down the most famous online marketplace for drugs, known as Silk Road. But since then, countless successors have popped up, making the drugs readily available to tens of thousands of customers who would not otherwise have had access to them.

...

Unlike heroin and prescription painkillers, which are relatively bulky, enough fentanyl to get nearly 50,000 people high can fit in a standard first-class envelope.

...

In 2015, the last year for which national data is available, fentanyl and similar drugs killed 9,580 people, or 73 percent more than 2014. The number of deaths rose even faster last year in areas that have released figures, such as Ohio and New Hampshire. Over all, deaths from drug overdoses are soaring in the United States, and most likely exceeded 59,000 last year.