My profile and flair color is 28bca3 
It has not been all bluster. New research from geospatial data company Alcis suggests that poppy production has already plummeted by around 80% since last year. Indeed, satellite imagery shows that in Helmand Province, the area that produces more than half of the crop, poppy production has dropped by a staggering 99%. Just 12 months ago, poppy fields were dominant. But Alcis estimates that there are now less than 1,000 hectares of poppy growing in Helmand.
Experience in the E.U. with previous periods of reduced heroin supply suggests that this can lead to changes in patterns of drug supply and use. This can include further an increase in rates of polysubstance use among heroin users. Additional risks to existing users may be posed by the substitution of heroin with more harmful synthetic opioids, including fentanyl and its derivatives and new potent benzimidazole opioids.
In other words, if heroin is no longer available, users will switch to far deadlier synthetic forms of the drug. A 2022 United Nations report came to a similar conclusion, noting that the crackdown on heroin production could lead to the “replacement of heroin or opium by other substances…such as fentanyl and its analogs.”
This undermines one of the fundamental premises behind the wars: the alleged association between the Taliban and the drug trade – a concept of a narco-terror nexus. However, this notion was fallacious. The reality was that Afghanistan was responsible for a staggering 80-90% of the world's illicit opiate supply. The primary controllers of this trade were the Afghan government and military, entities we upheld in power.
Hoh clarified that he never personally witnessed or received any reports of direct involvement by U.S. troops or officials in narcotics trafficking. Instead, he contended that there existed a “conscious and deliberate turning away from the unfolding events” during his tenure in Afghanistan.'
Opium addiction in Afghanistan is out of control, with around 9% of the adult population (and a significant number of children) addicted. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of adult drug users jumped from 900,000 to 2.4 million, according to the United Nations, which estimates that almost one in three households is directly affected by addiction. As opium is frequently injected, blood-transmitted conditions like HIV are common as well.
TL:DR
users are going to turn into 
users.
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This isn't complicated. The Taliban just killed everyone they thought was involved with the opium trade and promised to kill anyone else trying to pick it up.
We could do that in the west, but it would offend a lot of obnoxious white women.
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Sure, but the question becomes why the US didn't do it in Afghanistan.
Globohomo is warlike and imperialist enough to antagonize most of the native population, but too kitty to actually make the trains run on time.
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Because it would require killing everyone involved. That part is necessary. Drug smuggling and production won't stop until you kill everyone involved.
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https://rdrama.net/h/singapore/post/195175/mlaysian-arrested-with-more-than-47kg
https://rdrama.net/h/singapore/post/191675/every-time-singapore-is-mentioned-on
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Can't win hearts and minds when I destroy your only method for making a decent income.
The Taliban has show that they give no fricks about the ability of their people to have any money whatsoever and don't shy away from making life hard lmao
Remember when the Marines in Haditha executed a few folx in the street for planting IEDs and the whole world lost their shit? Yeah they don't care when Terry Taliban does it.
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The Taliban are already global pariahs. There's no more shit for the world to lose w/r/t Afghanistan. What do you want them to do, write a sternly worded letter to the ambassador who doesn't exist?
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How come the losers are just sitting there and taking it? Are you telling me we could slaughtered the Afghans en-masse and they would have just smiled and nodded?
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Yes but thats always true when you invade that shithole and its never worked for any of the empires that tried it. Murricans, Soviets, Bongs, Timurids, Mughals, it doesnt matter. Afghans are apathetic r-slurs but theyre so apathetic and r-slurred that trying to kill them all is pointless and trying to rule them inevitably leads to your entire polity collapsing.
Should just be nuked or cordoned off and then never spoken of again
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I mean, probably? We could have executed a few and they probably would have just been like “yeah, seems fair”
It's complicated, though. The average Afghan somewhat agrees with the Taliban to some extent and outright rebellion, which is punished harshly—the juice isn't worth the squeeze to them.
They're tough frickers, but they're pretty pragmatic. These are people who barely scrape by, not exactly idealistic patriots.
God, Family, Tribe and Town are by far more important to most than the western construct of Afghanistan
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Yeah, the US let those Afghanis make opium because they wanted them to feed their families so bad.
Fricking r-slur.
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Are you missing the point on purpose or you just a fricking effete autist cute twink that's going to fixate on a single sentence?
The US didn't “encourage” it, but also didn't execute people and raze homes for growing poppy. Never mind that at the end of it, post 2013, USFOR-A didn't have anywhere near the manpower to do jack shit, anyway. So yeah, they low-key tried to not alienate the useless fricks we were working with, because at least they weren't (openly) anti-American useless fricks.
The level of compliance needed for what the Taliban shitheads have here was not going to happen in a COIN environment in which we wanted at least minimal buy-in from the Afghan people.
That it was all a fricking waste of time is beside the point, that's due to a lack of national will/fortitude. Even though they don't have to contribute at all, they see it in CNN once in a while and it makes them feel sad that a terrorist butthole gets what they have coming to them.
I was there a few times, situation is more complex than “heckin basedarino mesolithic religious men making the
s run on time! So based, so keyed!—-Mom can I have my adderall and progesterone early?
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No, your point was just r-slurred, which is what I expect from a slobbering invalid like you. I'll ignore your feverish rantings and delusional deflections about how it was totally impossible because the population hated you (they hated you the moment you invaded) and reiterate:
The irony of this from an obese monkey born in the nation that invented the concept of a "War on Drugs", relentlessly persecuting their own citizens over illegal drug trade is astounding. Yet the Taliban are now ebil chuds for refusing to let their population fall into addiction. Now the Taliban are wrong for refusing to supply the opium that was flooding into the United States, justifying the War on Drugs. Is your r-slur brain big enough to recognise the self-serving hypocrisy?
!nonchuds !r-slurs
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Why are you guys arguing like this is reddit? Nobody is going to read this shit.
Show bussy or gtfo
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Suck my peepee you neurodivergent ping-abusing redditor pig
writing like you got a thesaurus jammed up your neovagina butt ho
cotdarn , just say you don't want to have a serious discussion, no need to ESL bardfinn me
I know this is going to sound wild but a lot of people don't like living under the taliban.
And who cares what the taliban want? At least a lot of them died painful deaths in blind terror.
Anything the US does is objectively correct
wtf are you responding to?
You are an r-slur and I'm an r-slur for engaging with you.
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Honestly the US should re-invade Afghanistan. The things the Taliban has done to people there is incredibly atrocious.
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I ain't reading EITHER of y'all's comments
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I love it when i get pinged to read pages of neurodivergent political discourse
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you're r-slurred, the taliban has been growing poppies themselves for decades
the reason they stopped is cause they don't have to finance their war effort anymore
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nothing i said was wrong
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I support you king
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ex-military?
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Ex-Taliban, Brozzer
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Partly because the 'new democratic government' only really held power around the capital, propped up by the US forces. Rest of the country, they had to make deals with the local warlords not to rebel and bog them down in constant skirmishes and that included "let us farm opium and make money off it, or else". Same way they were told to look the other way about the bacha bazi boys.
Taliban come in, they're "stop this or we chop your head off" and everyone knows they mean what they say and will do that.
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They have the manpower and resolve to do it. Plus it's a good way of showing that your in charge now.
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Globohomo is warlike but wins no wars.
It's just a pestillence.
Just like trans lives matter
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Lmao the chuds have had their buttholes caved in repeatedly by people putting fat black women in television shows. Cope
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Fiscally Left
Socially Right
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Sneed harder. Globohomo is the most successful sociopolitical system in the history of humanity and will remain the dominant paradigm for the rest of your lifetime.
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lol, it's just the latest one, r-slur, and it's only been, what, 40 years?
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Sorry, what? I couldn't hear you over all the vast wealth and culture courtesy of immigration, women enjoying bodily autonomy and gender and sexual minorities loving who and how they please.
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It sucks but less than gulaghomo or communism with Chinese characteristics
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Because the US wanted the opium trade to continue happening in Afghanistan. Strange how Americans find it impossible to stare at the dark heart of their empire. The US is the daddy of narco states, no way did the CIA want to lose their darling Afghani drug cash cow because of a few Muslims.
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Maybe… we should get rid of obnoxious white women??
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They didn't even go that far for most of it. They just kept destroying the crops and made it unprofitable.
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If you want to make drugs illegal, you need to make the RoI on dealing and smuggling negative. Since addicts will give up anything for their next hit, that basically means death or life in jail.
Drugs help keep the poors mollified and inflation down for non druggies, so
probably better than a dictatorial police state.
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Also it helped that the opium trade was a pretty lucrative way to fund their fight with NATO back then, but now they don't need to worry about money anymore so the opium stuff can just disappear, violently if need be.
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Yeah we don't care about that shit enough to kill (a lot of) people, we just want to be able to ignore it.
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Wasn't that what the west was doing anyways?
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The taliban sells a shit load of this stuff or did lol.
The taliban is brutal and more willing to control the supply.
The US had the thought process "if they can't grow poppy, what else are they going to do?"
A lot of farmers there have nothing else going for them.
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And rootless cosmopolitans
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Care to explain what you mean by that?
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Yuppies
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Yes, there's a big faction out there clamoring to invade Afghanistan again and it's something that totally could happen.
This is the most-debunked hoax in the history of journ*lism with the possible exception of Pierre Salinger's TWA Flight 800 bullshit.
Some of the things in this article may be true, but when I catch them deliberately lying like that, it's like Project Veritas. I don't have the time and energy to pick through it and try to figure out which parts are lies.
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the guy who has made his entire career "america bad" and only cites unnamed sources is trustworthy, !chuds
the cia sold crack in black neighborhoods and NO i will not provide a source, educate yourself
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CIA worked with drug traffickers is closer to the truth.
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this is true but commies treat "the cia sold crack" as absolute gospel even when it has literally no evidence
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Source?
AHHH IM DEBOOONKINGGGG
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The CIA is evil though.
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It's probably one of the least evil 3 letter agencies.
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Don't get him started on the FDA
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The strict approval regime of FDA has killed more people than every other part of USG combined.
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“Deeply involved” means maybe made a deal with some drug runners to move guns too, once or twice.
This has been transformed into “the CIA was selling crack in inner city parks”.
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AFAIK, besides the contras BS, there was only one time the CIA has been directly implicated in the drug trade when one of their registered planes got caught with kilos on it... beyond, you know, ignoring bad actors to plant agents into nation states. But the CIA isn't supposed to be a law enforcement unit and they always operate in the grey areas of other countries because that's usually where the most sophisticated criminals can be recruited from and where you can hide your black activity. But recruiting a few adjacent criminals is far from running drug cartels or protecting them like the DEA does regularly, which is supposed to be helping with the drug problem but fails consistently.
Rappers becoming the main pop culture thing in the 1990s really pushed a ton of r-slurred ideas into the mainstream.
Just listen to Dead Prez's Let's Get Free album for exhibit A (although I love that album to death)
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You right, homie.
If you want criminals, which the people usually willing to contravene the laws of their nation are, you want the smartest ones.
The smartest ones want to make money. Drugs make a lot of money by weight.
They also tend to ve really good a bribery and smuggling without being caught, but even if they are, it wouldn't be tied to the US.
Same with guys who work for the US govt willing to do things in a grey area and risk their life. Like you said, CIA are not LEOs, and have a much more flexible morality.
Edit: I love Dead Prez, too, even though they're conspiracy theorist r-slurs.
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No see the journo may have lied about this and that, but the rest of everything they write is solid and you can't prove otherwise Factcheck: This claim is 100% true.
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CIA gets caught once or twice with a plane full of coke in the 1980s and ever since then they are the reason Americans are junkies and neighbors are criminals
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[citation needed]
There was a CIA plane shot down in Nicaragua but it was carrying guns, not coke.
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Was that what it was? I can't remember, I thought it was drugs
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No, it was weapons that were being sent to the Contras after Congress had already forbidden it. Unless there was another incident I'm not aware of.
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That sounds naughty
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The president told me to tho!
Someday we're gonna need a shy blushing glowie marsey.
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The reduction in production is the main news I wanted to share. Another piece of evidence that America's presence there was a total failure.
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Yeah, once I saw that early on we already had a policy to not destroy opium if it would rock the boat too much, I knew we didn't have what it takes to win.
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Unironically keep yourself safe.
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Are there? at most there are those who want to full-in finance and train anti-Taliban guerrillas, and impose the worst of sanctions against the Taliban and countries who trade with them, but invade the place again? I have not heard that anywhere from anyone.
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Yeah I've heard zero suggestion of it. Everyone knows that it's politically totally impossible. It'll be a decade or two at least before Americans have any appetite to start a war.
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To give Iran a route to the Mediterranean.
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I thought i was Qatar, or was that the Arab spring?
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Whew boy I got news for you about the sexual habits of the Iraqi moids.
Especially on Thursday
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/07/us/iraq-gay-soldiers-love-story-seattle/index.html
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the taliban were literally the ones farming opium while the US was in control
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Yep the article even admits that lol. However now it's no longer beneficial, so away it goes.
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Thats only because fentanyl got popular. Its cheaper and gets you more fricked up. I have a former junky buddy who preferred the rush from heroin and would have to go way out of the way to get it. Because everything from pills to dope is fent now
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It makes sense, it was a win-win of financing their insurgency while directly feeding one of the western world's most socially destructive addictions
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More junkies dead and more whest being grown to feed the poor in Afghanistan? How is this not a win/win?
This morning, Cum went to the park. I went with Coom. And Cum brought Coomer frisbee. At least I think it was Coomers. By the end of the day, Cum started throwing the frisbee to Cumself.
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This is some
revenge on the burgers from the 
. Just embarrassing them wasn't enough 
.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/taliban-war-on-drugs-poppy-ban-opium-heroin-afghanistan/
total journo death total journo death total journo death
only journos and political scientists/experts could see eradication of heroin as a bad, the only negative in reality is that the junkies pop will drop meaning less funny people of no houses(ponh), though fentanylmaxxers may make them even funnier
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Probably just switched to selling opium to China who would never openly state it. Hopefully they just eradicated all thenopium fields
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Opium to China?
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Satellite images show the actual crops are gone, they had people with sticks destroy the crops on sight.
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That's good to hear. Opium is a blight so any destroyed field is a good field.
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https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/02/10/afghan-opium-production-increases-35-fold-since-u-s-invasion
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Yeah the Taliban banned production in 2000 then reversed their policy after the invasion https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terrorism8
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Also probably because Afghanistan can't import food on the US's dime anymore, and they have 40 million people to feed, half of them under 18.
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Based America making sure we all got our fix.
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So the Taliban did more for the war on drugs than the US did.
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there used to exist a practice where young boys became s*x slaves until the talichads banned them, when the us took charge prosecution pretty much stopped
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Dear Steve Huffman, /u/spez
And the Board of Directors of Advance Publications and of Reddit, Inc.
I am known for being verbose. So, in this instance, let me be as brief as possible:
Spez had some conversations with Elon Musk — the owner and CEO of one of Reddit's direct competitors —
And he came away from those conversations with ideas on how to “run Reddit” which, when put into motion,
have led to Reddit Admin Policies that kneecapped moderators three times in a row (PushShift, then mod bots, then the third party apps mods use in place of the official app),
Which resulted in the site exploding in protests and riots, decade-old user accounts deleting in protest, entire communities migrating to anyplace else (that's not Twitter), the people who volunteered their time and energy and expertise to keep community on this site walking away, the burning of literally decades of stakeholder expertise and skills, and damage to the goodwill and profitability of Reddit,
And the bigoted, violent harassers whom we finally got to decamp off to Twitter and back to 4chan in 2022 returning in force to Reddit to resume slandering and harassing moderators and communities, and celebrating the idea of bringing online their hate brigades to vote out any moderators foolish enough to stick around after Spez sneered at them —?
Your takeaway from conversations with the transphobic white supremacist who runs your business competition was to implement his ideas of running off all the good faith users and making your site inhospitable to advertisers —?
Dear Boards of Directors:
Start your candidate search. You have grounds. Act on them.
Signed,
/u/Bardfinn
Snapshots:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Also quick googling on prodcution costs: heroin costs about $6000 per kilo while fentanyl is only $1000 per kilo while being also significantly more potent depending on the analog and purity.
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Where am I going to get my poppyseeds fory lemon chicken now?
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Grow it yourself, what could go wrong?
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Haha, grow your own drugs. Nice try you little bastard.
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