meh.
$1000 isn't really that much for a month's supply... That's about what I spend for good weed for me and my girlfriend... But I do consider us to have a pretty big habit.
Nevermind if we did something really expensive like heroin or coke...
Post-Silk Road, Feds bust chaps for 'dealing heroin, coke' on world's largest dark web souk
Two men from Brooklyn in the US have been indicted on charges of selling heroin and cocaine on AlphaBay – believed to be the world's largest dark web marketplace. Abudullah Almashwali, 31, and Chaudhry Ahmad Farooq, 24, were cuffed on August 2 after agents bought packages of the drugs from members of the Tor-hidden souk …
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Friday 12th August 2016 22:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: meh. just an aside, but, Super-Size me Danny Boy!!
admittedly i've never done drugs so my references are from film and TV, but i've always found it amusing in the difference between Britain and the USA. When you see someone dealing cannabis in the US the bags of pot are enormous, and yet in blighty the bags seem to be the size of a ketchup pack! Is this true and if so why do we always end up with the small portions?
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Saturday 13th August 2016 17:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: meh. just an aside, but, Super-Size me Danny Boy!!
>Our's is pure skunk, whereas theirs is cut with heaps of oregano.
Depends on where. The stuff coming out of the west (BC included) where in many states pot is legal or quasi legal is competitive with almost all the stuff in Euroland. The one exception that immediately comes to mind is top level Nederhash which after decades more to perfect basically legally, is on a whole nother level.
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Saturday 13th August 2016 10:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: meh.
The study found that since the Feds took down Silk Road, one of the first online drug marketplaces, the online sale of illegal narcotics has tripled and revenues for sellers has doubled.
The modern prohibition of narcotics seems to be about as effective, and just as pointless, as the prohibition of alcohol was in the 1920s.
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Sunday 14th August 2016 23:21 GMT P. Lee
Re: meh.
>The modern prohibition of narcotics seems to be about as effective, and just as pointless, as the prohibition of alcohol was in the 1920s.
It depends on the drugs. If you can easily make it yourself, its hard to control. If it has to be processed, there are choke-points which can be squeezed. Do we want to bring back the opium dens of yesteryear? Having gone to the bother of mostly eradicating tobacco on the grounds that addictive substances which damage your health should be generally banned, do we then want to allow far more addictive and destructive substances?
Either way, the real barrier is social acceptability. As with prohibition, the social acceptability of alcohol (then, any other drug now) even when it was illegal, fed the criminal gangs and violence which was mostly hidden from the direct consumers allowing them to mentally disassociate themselves from the problems their habit creates.
Taking down the silk road maybe a good example of the Streisand Effect or the increased revenue may just be an indicator of the size of the silk road, with subsequent demand being diverted to other souks.
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Monday 15th August 2016 03:14 GMT asdf
Re: meh.
Let's start by prefacing something like between 5% and 15% of the population is going to have destructive addiction(s) no matter, what end of story. Another anecdote I have heard is of these addicts about 1/3 will be able to stop on their own, 1/3 will stop will help, and about 1/3 are hopeless.
> If it has to be processed, there are choke-points which can be squeezed
And the addiction will then take another form. Here's a not so secret, gambling problems, alcoholism, crack smoking and even morbid obesity are all symptoms of basically the same disease.
>Either way, the real barrier is social acceptability.
A true addict doesn't really give a shit about that fairly early on. I agree young adults are going to experiment with stuff and the majority of them won't go on to be addicts. Definitely want to steer them away from the things that are easy to overdose on accidental and die like opiates (the epidemic cause by big pharma which sadly has also had the effect of making it much easier to find organs these days). That said nothing short of death or jail (even then a maybe) will stop a significant number of people.
>Taking down the silk road maybe a good example of the Streisand Effect
Yep wack a mole it is. Fact is when the black and grey markets can account for up to 25% of economic activity in some markets it ain't going away.
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Monday 15th August 2016 04:02 GMT asdf
Re: meh.
>1/3 will be able to stop on their own, 1/3 will stop will help, and about 1/3 are hopeless.
Also to clarify generally just because you stop doesn't really mean you are no longer an addict, it just means you have managed it. Once you have those genes they are for life and it becomes how you deal with it.
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Monday 15th August 2016 03:52 GMT asdf
Re: meh.
>Having gone to the bother of mostly eradicating tobacco
Also um 20% of the US population still smokes. It is dangerous to infer other drugs can be treated like tobacco. It contains the most physically addictive chemical known. Therefore also due to social pressures caused by the tobacco companies basically inventing modern advertising and being among the first to take advantage of advances in psychology last century it was a case of many people who don't have addictive personalities being physically addicted to a drug. They were also allowed to bury the truth about it for far longer than they should have been able to. In the last few decades though its been my experience that the majority of people who do smoke now do so because they have addictive personalities. Long story short we can't just will drugs away. The addiction will find another outlet in some people. That said we should do research, free from the drugs are bad m'kay mentality and make sure the population is educated if they so choose to be.
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Monday 15th August 2016 11:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: meh.
It depends on the drugs. If you can easily make it yourself, its hard to control. If it has to be processed, there are choke-points which can be squeezed.
The US spends about $40 billion a year on drug enforcement, i.e. $125 dollars for each American, mostly trying to limit the supply side ("squeezing the choke points"). But it has failed because it hasn't stemmed the flow of narcotics in any meaningful way. It is still easy to purchase these drugs, and at a price which is affordable to the millions of Americans who do so.
And the prohibition generates a colossal amount of violent crime, since as the marketplace operates outside of the law, altercations are invariably settled either by violence or the threat of it.
You asked if we want to bring back the opium dens of yesteryear. They never went away. These days they are called "crack houses".
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Monday 15th August 2016 16:28 GMT asdf
Re: meh.
>the US spends about $40 billion a year on drug enforcement, i.e. $125 dollars for each American, mostly trying to limit the supply side
And then we went and spent many more billions to basically militarily set up an opium growing paradise in Afghanistan (not the end goal but basically an own goal).
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Monday 15th August 2016 07:56 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: meh.
It's worse than Prohibition. Firstly, Prohibition did actually have SOME positive effects, e.g. incidents of domestic violence fell sharply when alcohol was banned. Secondly, it was introduced in an era of severe depression when people turned to alcohol out of desperation and alcoholism was rampant. Like with drugs such as heroin, the problem isn't just the physical effect, but that the addicts / alcoholics life sucks so badly that there seems little gain from coming off it. I.e. it's an escape as much as it's an addiction.
So like I say, flawed though it was, Prohibition did have some supportable rationale behind it. This? I think closing them down is actively harmful. On Silk Road you had Amazon-style ratings, buyer-feedback and you also didn't have to go and seek out contact with some people you might rather avoid in some cases. In short, safety was markedly increased.
Plus it allows better market-feedback. Sick of roller-coaster skunk and want something mellower and more traditional? On Silk Road you can not only find it, but it can be demonstrated that it's actually preferred by many and the market adapts to meet that need.
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Saturday 13th August 2016 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Although small by comparison to the traditional illegal drug market, online forums are still generating a lot of revenues. The researchers estimate that dark web drug forums generated between $12m and $21.1m in January of this year, and sales are growing fast."
Cool. Although obviously not as fast as funding for agencies to combat the war on drugs, which is well over $40bn a year. To labour the point, it took five agencies - "the Drug Enforcement Administration, with assistance provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service" - an unknown amount of time to bust two dealers for what I can make out is selling three grams of brown for $165, and a bunch of circumstantial evidence based on details of transactions they don't mention how they verify, and that he bought postage. No actual possession charges, either.
But according to /r/DarkNetMarkets, these guys sold crap gear anyway, and the general feeling was that they weren't to be trusted. So it looks like the Feds did everyone a favour by taking them out of the loop. It's a shame they have to spend $40bn a year on this crap when they could spend less than 10% of that on an efficient and powerful regulator, and have at least half of that paid for by the manufacturers - because they already do that, and it's called the FDA.
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Sunday 14th August 2016 02:03 GMT GrapeBunch
$1000 a month is around what alcoholics spend on themselves.
"a quarter of buyers were spending over $1,000 per month, suggesting that they are reselling the goods to others"
Huh? A recent BBC documentary had buyers of experimental recreational drugs (which are now illegal) spending about that in a week for their own use. The ~suggestion~ is a lie, and it is a lie with a purpose.
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Sunday 14th August 2016 09:20 GMT Martin Maloney
You just can't fix stoopid (sic)
"...after agents linked the "encrypted email address used by 'Area51' and 'DarkApollo'" to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook social media accounts."
In reality, the so-called "social media" are intelligence gathering/data mining operations.
So what kind of clueless idiots, who are engaged in illicit online businesses -- drugs, prostitution, kiddie porn, etc. -- also sign up for social media accounts?
The kind who get caught.
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Monday 15th August 2016 10:54 GMT David Pollard
Professor David Nutt
After being sacked by the UK government for publicly proposing a sensible drugs policy, David Nutt wrote an excellent book: Drugs without the hot air.
If authorities wish to help drug users rather than persecute them then they would do well to obtain a copy and read it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drugs-Without-Minimising-Harms-Illegal/dp/1906860165/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1471258099&sr=1-1&keywords=david+nutt
Biting the hand that feeds IT
