Mostly MDMA, LSD. To a lesser extent weed (harder to transport), coke, heroin, etc.
They do have actual bad things on these sites as well, such as the aforementioned weapons and people, but this is the subsection that we actually SHOULD be going after.
As far as how much; not much. As one other user had posted, one of these illicit markets represents approximately 1/150,000th of the world market. It is a non-issue that the government spends a lot of money on for the purpose of visibility and increased funding (Look at us! We busted the bad guys! We're doing good! Give us more money!).
Your arguments are so baseless and outright ignorant that when I attempt to think about a counter it just makes my brain hurt.. it doesn't matter what points are brought up, you will ignore them all. Have fun being right all the time in your head.
It's great to hear that you don't do any drugs at all. I'm assuming you don't drink coffee/tea, wine/beer, smoke, or take any pharmaceutical medications. Congratulations on not being a hypocrite! You are in the proud 0.0001% of people who follow this strict code.
For the rest of us mere mortals, I suppose we will have to continue taking our medications.
This is exactly right, and the problem that our government just doesn't seem to 'get'.
If you want to stop people from doing something, you can't just take away their source, they will find another.. you have to give them a BETTER source.
With media, streaming services have done more to cut down in piracy than anything else.. it's convenient, so people will do it. If you're only paying a few dollars a month to save the frustration of finding movies/music, waiting to download, vs just clicking and having it right there. This is why things like Kodi were so popular, it's all about convenience.
Now drugs are not movies, but similar rules apply. Say one is addicted to heroin, and suddenly their source is taken away.. do you think they will just decide "Oh well, I am done with heroin now!", no, they will find another source. If you want to REALLY make a difference, give them a better/safer source, and help them. No one says "I want to be addicted to heroin", they have issues that cause them to be dependent on the drug (often pain). We DESPERATELY need to follow the lead of other countries and start providing drug havens for addicts. So many people die in this country ever year of opiate overdoses, with the solution right in front of our eyes (look at EU countries with drug clinics), but we refuse to do anything about it because our antiquated dinosaur politicians are afraid they will look like they support drug use; how they appear to the 1% is more important to them than saving tens of thousands of lives every year.
Why would they sign up for that when they can just as easily charge full price for those replacement drugs (as they do now)? The only people out there who can change this are making huge profits from the system currently in place, so why would they?
Sounds like you don't know what you are talking about. Your source is a book written with heavy influence by the Pharmaceutical industry to justify the obscene costs of their drugs, making billions in profits off of sick, poor people.
You are the one who is completely wrong.
The dosages most certainly do start out with a "best guess" in the pre-clinical phase. For any given drug we would guess at the doses based on our calculations, and give a range on either end. If we thought the effective dose would be 1 mg/kg, we would run an LD50 of doses much higher than that, 10mg/kg, 100mg/kg. Sometimes our guesses would be wrong, and the low dose animals would die as a result. After figuring out a safe dose, we would then split it further into different dosing groups to test the effectiveness of the compound. Most people in the field are underpaid, overworked, and do sloppy work
Please talk to someone who has actually worked in the Pharma research field, they will tell you most of what they do is just guessing.. why do you think only 1 in 10,000 make it through?
It's all a guess until the end, and even then we're often not sure. Look at anti-depressants. We still don't know how a lot of those work but prescribe them to millions of people regardless. How do you think they determined the dose when they don't know how the drug works?
You and the GP talking about entirely different things. You're talking about how investigators choose the initial dose for the clinical trials, he's talking about the dosage that is actually prescribed by doctors.
Hence the 'The dose we take is not a "BEST GUESS"' (emphasis mine). Unless you're a lab animal or a person in a clinical trial, the does you take is the end result of lots of money spent on first figuring out maximum safe dosages (Phase 1) to prescribing guidelines that doctors are taught (Phase 3).
Antidepressants are a unique group of drugs because the dosage is highly dependent on each person's unique brain chemistry and a huge part of a good psychiatrist's job is working with their patients to find the right dosage and combination. The problem is that many psychiatrists don't have the time (due to insurance billing practices) or the patience to do the work but any decent psychiatrist will tell you that recommended doses for antidepressants are just a safe starting point for most patients, not the dosage that they will eventually find most effective.
For the record, I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry on pre-clinical drug development and Phase 1-3 marketing applications and the GP's description is largely accurate whereas you seem to have a chip on your shoulder. I wouldn't trust a single book about the drug development process that wasn't heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry in one way or another just like I wouldn't trust anyone without semiconductor industry experience when talking about Intel's cutting edge fabrication processes.
> Antidepressants are a unique group of drugs because the dosage is highly dependent on each person's unique brain chemistry and a huge part of a good psychiatrist's job is working with their patients to find the right dosage and combination.
How does one accomplish this absent trial and error?
This fact undermines the entirety of your argument.
You do know what "unique" means in this context, right? Hint: it means that antidepressants are the exception to my argument because psychopharmacology is so much more dependent on genetic/environmental factors than the rest of the pharmacological field that we cannot draw conclusions on the effectiveness of dosages pre-treatment without spending 100-1000x more time and money on the clinical trials than we do now.
Please take your clearly ignorant bias and anti-pharma prejudice somewhere else - you have no idea what you're talking about.
It is not a guess. It is statistics. Typically, the dose is either effective or partially effective and often on the smaller side as Phase 3 also looks at side effects.
>It's all a guess until the end, and even then we're often not sure. Look at anti-depressants. We still don't know how a lot of those work but prescribe them to millions of people regardless. How do you think they determined the dose when they don't know how the drug works?
We know how antidepressants work, the chemical reaction is well known and can be quantified at different doses. We just don't know why they work because we don't understand why/how the brain works.
No, we don't know the antidepressive mechanism of antidepressants, therefore we don't know how they work.
Understanding some neurochemical reactions and biological adaptations they cause is not enough.
(We also don't have a complete understanding of depressive disorders, we don't really have very effective medication/therapy for many depressive people, etc.)
SSRIs, SSRIs, MAOIs and TCAs all have reasonably well understood pharmacology. As an extreme example, there are very detailed guidelines on how to prescribe venlafaxine, to whom, and who should supervise. You're free to dispute these claims but I think you need to produce more than a blanket dismissal, especially as the OP offers a seemingly reasonable source.
They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.
They do have actual bad things on these sites as well, such as the aforementioned weapons and people, but this is the subsection that we actually SHOULD be going after.
As far as how much; not much. As one other user had posted, one of these illicit markets represents approximately 1/150,000th of the world market. It is a non-issue that the government spends a lot of money on for the purpose of visibility and increased funding (Look at us! We busted the bad guys! We're doing good! Give us more money!).