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Head of Silk Road 2.0 Says It Will Be Back In Minutes If Shut Down
Daniel_Stuckey writes "It only took a month for the Silk Road 2.0 to go live after the now infamous Silk Road marketplace shuttered. One month. Should the budding deep-web bazaar experience the same fate as its predecessor, and be knocked out by authorities still whack-a-moling their way through the online front of the war on drugs, the Silk Road 3.0 would be up and running in 15 minutes, tops. That's according to the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous head of SR 2.0. In what are arguably his most breathy public remarks to date the 'new' DPR, who either cribbed his handle from the DPR of SR 1.0 fame or who is indeed the original DPR, opened up to Mike Power on his long-term vision for the site."
They keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.
I for one, welcome the new Dread Pirate Roberts.
We'll you know the last Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts anyway. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.
FTFA: "the 'new' DPR, who either cribbed his handle from the DPR of SR 1.0 fame or who is indeed the original DPR"
I don't think that works the way you (the editor) think it works...
We don't need this shit.
Fixing:
I don't need this shit, so nobody should be able to get it.
I would guess you're religious... it is the typical mentality "everybody should obey the god I believe".
no, what we NEED is for the us government to realize how dumb they are being with the 'war on drugs' billions of US tax dollars are wasted yearly on it, and they have nothing to show for it. each year prison overcrowding increases because they fill up the prisons with ppl who smoked weed. meanwhile they are letting rapists and murderers go free because they cant fit all the weed smokers in prison.
as soon as the us government stops the 'war on drugs', and decides to do something else about it, we will see a downfall of the drug lords. the exact same thing happened during prohibition. our government apparently never learned how those who dont learn about history are doomed to repeat it.
Yeah. Well you are going to hell, druggie.
Uhh, hello? Each occupied prison place is income for said government.
Requiem for the American Dream
Having a working web site doesn't accomplish anything if nobody uses it, for fear of going to jail.
Silk Road 1.0 didn't just get shut down. The Feds had complete access to it for months. If you use Silk Road 2.0 and end up in jail, it's your own fault.
....nothing of value was lost or gained.
But putting people in jail for smoking a plant while leaving schoolchildren hungry at night is an utter disgrace.
I couldn't agree more.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I think that keeping the name Dread Pirate Roberts is very appropriate to the movie it came from.
Dread Pirate Roberts:
Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.'
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The only people who earn money on prison inmates are prison operators who charge the government for each inmate they take.
Because, by tempting people with drugs, not only will they go to Hell, but those they tempted will go to Hell, too. Apparently a god exists who likes torturing people, and, rather than growing balls to stand up to this supernatural dictator, we should jail people for their own good, their own good being defined as doing things that don't make this entity angry.
However, we should also note the secular religion of Big Government of the Left does functionally the same thing, banniing stuff "for your own good". They just use a different audio stream of data to get their mechanized cogs (human brains) to behave in identical patterns.
Hah! I'll bet the lefties go a boner from the first paragraph, and the theocrats from the second. You are both part of the problem.
For exactly the same reason.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The last time Prohibition was repealed, it took a constitutional amendment.
It looks like this Prohibition will be just as difficult to get rid of as the last one.
Uhh, hello? Each occupied prison place is income for politicians' corporate overlords/future lobbying customers. FTFY.
Sounds like Silk Road joins the illustrious company of ThePirateBay as one of those indispensable services running on Amazon Web Services without Amazon particularly noticing.
(I wish Amazon hadn't called it AWS. It's not recognizable enough without spelling out Amazon, and you end up effectively writing Amazon Amazon Web Services or people don't know what you're talking about.)
Thankfully, this time prohibition exists, it's not an amendment, which is much harder to get rid of than a law.
You need to brush up on your history... Prohibition needed an amendment to repeal because it was an amendment that put it in place. The 18th amendment started prohibition and the 21st repealed it.
... but I really like croissants and French bread
Well, I will be amongst friends.
Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
You might be surprised to know that there is a such thing as a left libertarian.
That and that in the U.S. the right seems to be more hard line on drugs than the left(ish).
Considering that the Silk Road won't stop the Drug War (it might actually intensify it), I'd suggest that you work on getting the laws changed and getting laws changed requires changing people's minds (there are still plenty of people who support the drug war). That's the proper way to do it. And let's not forget that the Silk Road also offers other illegal services besides the drugs. The last guy who ran the Silk Road used it to hire hitmen to kill two different people.
That might mean something here if drugs were the only "products" for sale on Silk Road. There'd still be people selling murder for hire, stolen credit cards, and other such things that I doubt you'd want to see legalized.
Whoa, that escalated quickly.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
No, what we need is full legalization. The two most addictive and dangerous drugs known to man are currently available at almost every gas station in the country. It's a policy that works, and every other drug should be treated the same way.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bah, there Intellectual Property rights there and a worldwide reputation that's being infringed you know. The Silk Road was built on the work of the DPR and he deserves to be paid for his intellectual endeavors!
The new site is a cheap copycat fraud that fails to respect others rights. They threaten more clones like a game of whack a mole. No respect for intellectual property at all. How can you trust that kind of operation? Next thing you know the FBI will replace with front page with "It's a trap" and even the murders for hire will be fraudulent...
That's because it's not really prohibited. You just need to get your Pot stamp to be allowed to buy or use Pot. The fact that the stamps are not made is not the governments fault.
I realize this is no longer the case, but it is how he marijuana prohibition started out. They just started out regulating it with tax stamps that were impossible to get. They like to find ways to skirt the law to their own desires. Nevermind the fact that skirting the law is called breaking it if we do it. It's basically the same thing the NSA and the FISA courts have been doing lately.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
It costs taxpayers and society in general, but hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats and cartel members make their living off it, and politicians can harvest donations and votes from them.
Unless the murder for hire is used for politicians. I think that should be legalized. Oh, and murder for hire for people that work for illegal organizations like the NSA too.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
It's pretty easy to say that it is constitutional, actually. I think dealing with national scale black markets is a great justification for the existence of the interstate commerce clause, but people are realizing that this particular case, marijuana prohibition, is not a good fight and the fight has massive negative consequences.
Then clearly the answer is to make your own Pot stamps. The government would then be unable to prove that the ones you made are counterfeit as they could not provide "approved" Pot stamps to compare them against.
If its CIA - for doing their own drug smuggling, it's unlikely they'll blow their cover by sharing with your Oregon's PD.
If it's NYPD - they won't care outside of NY.
If it's NSA - they won't blow their cover for fear of more bad PR.
And that's just US agencies. Even if it is government, it's just as likely it's China's government. Or Singapore's. Or Russia's.
Or Afghanistan's, now that someone stopped the Taliban who were cracking down on Heroin.
And even if it is - wouldn't buyers and sellers take precautions to keep their privacy even from the guys (who are very likely criminals) running Silk Road anyway?
silk road isnt the problem, just like the drugs arent the problem. the problem is the people who do bad things. if A implies B, and B is bad, that doesnt necessarily mean that A is bad, it just means that under the current circumstances B goes along with A.
What!? The government doesn't make any income from prisons. They're spending thousands of our tax dollars lining the pockets of the for-profit prison industry.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
That's what I was thinking. Since they have the OG DPR and they've already got a confession / guilty plea from a key player on the website side I'd say that it's highly probable.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Please try to keep up. There a growing movement among the judiciary and state elected officials to reduce the prison pop. especially for non-violent drug offenders. Even that hero of the right, Richard Viguerie is behind the effort. Some are on board for the usual liberal causes, some are on board because it is expensive keeping people locked up.
A new Silk Road went online and the value of bitcoins dipped nearly USD$50 around 24~48 hours ago. Is it related?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
As you are, friend. I might as well make it worth it !
That's a good argument for regulating the traffic between state lines but not regulating what happens within a state. California comes to mind.
But without the drug war what excuse would you use to lock up all those undesirables?
There's this agency called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They handled cases where drugs cross state lines. I understand why you might not have heard of them, since they were only created 105 years ago.
Ron, let me clue you in: When you transport drugs across state lines, it falls under federal law. They can kick your ass so hard your kids will be born dizzy for that; In California, you can go from clean record to life imprisonment thanks to their whack-ass "three strikes" law, because I can think of at least half a dozen federal laws that are being broken from postal regulations to schedule I drug possesion, back to interstate transportation, and all the way across to "How do you plead?"
And even if it is - wouldn't buyers and sellers take precautions to keep their privacy even from the guys (who are very likely criminals) running Silk Road anyway?
You're asking me if people won't be stupid? Heh. Guess the answer. But even if they did, as has been pointed out before, "anonymous" bit coins... well... they aren't really all that anonymous. And there's still that pesky problem of... where do you ship your drugs to?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Uhh, hello? Each occupied prison place is income for said prison, lawyers and judges.
FTFY
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
"Newly surfaced legal documents say that the 29-year-old ordered not one but two hits on former associates." Source: http://gizmodo.com/actually-the-alleged-silk-road-kingpin-hired-a-hitman-1440610170
It's hard to use absolute arguments on this kind of subject. Take your argument to one extreme and you get something like "The problem isn't having easily-available nuclear bombs, the problem is those people who would use them." This statement goes too far at least in one way, that while drugs use causes some collateral damage so to speak, not nearly as much as nukes.
Another problem with legalized (free market) drugs is that many are physically addictive, so users are quickly unable to make free choices regarding their use. Marijuana is less addictive than most, which allows room for debate on legalization. (I voted "yes" on legalization in CO, though I'm willing to admit that may have been a mistake. I'm not sure yet but it makes an interesting experiment in any case.)
I felt like some of DPR's arguments supporting his website were delusional. Particularly this: "Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do? Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer or would you help them buy from Silk Road ..." As a parent I would not even consider either option for an instant. As soon as I become aware of my teenage (or younger or older) child's drug use, I have a very difficult responsibility and it's not as an enabler or bystander.
I'm a left libertarian. Here are some of my views.
For social. Society should, at a minimum, provide the poor and homeless with the level of care that prisoner's receive. Maybe prisoner's should receive less care, so be it. But at least respect the unfortunate, they suffer. Obviously our drug enforcement culture needs to end.
For politics. Possibly only use public funds for political campaigns. How would it work? I have no idea. But prevent, 100%, campaign donations from companies and dissolve all PACs. They are poison to the system. Possibly use a different Federal level voting system, we need more parties in contention badly. Make lobbying illegal, if a business wants to talk directly to a government official, that's fine, but no external parties being funded. Enact a balanced budget amendment (goodbye Military Industrial Complex, but so be it).
For business. Reform the patent system (how? I'm not sure, there are others that know more than I, but I can spot a failed/failing system). Gut the Fed. Reduce "barriers to entry", gut Sarbanes-Oxley and other "established business benefit programs".
For legal. Reform the entire thing, businesses control the system to their whims. RIAA, MPAA, you are who I'm referring to, at least to start with.
For security. Gut it all. Restore the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. NSA and TSA need to be shuttered, as good first steps.
"I have a dream" (TM, Martin Luther King Jr.), but I have little to no optimism regarding true progress under the current system. We have one national party split into two sects, divided primarily by social values. Reality is a voracious destroyer of dreams. I get by.
BlameBillCosby.com
And these bureaucrats are making money because the taxes revenue allotted to them X is less than their expenses Y, and the rest is their salaries Z. X - Y = Z. If there were not as many people in jail, X is smaller, but so is Y. You can have the same or even larger Z with a smaller X and a smaller Y, and everyone would benefit. In fact, the government could take the same amount of money X, free all the non-violent prisoners, making Z even higher, and rather than costing money, some of those ex-prisoners may even actually start paying taxes when they get jobs. The government gets more money, inmates have more freedom, and are more productive. If putting people in prison is a way of stealing money, it is a pretty inefficient way to do it.
Prisons are a giant waste of resources. We still need them to remove people that are unfit for society. Any extra people that don't need to be there are a travesty to both justice and economics.
Are you referring to nicotine and alcohol? I don't believe these are either the most addictive or the most dangerous on an individual usage basis. You may be right if you count aggregate effect (total number of people addicted to smoking or drinking) but this makes a good argument against legalization.
"The government" as in "every government employee" doesn't profit from this. The politicians profit from this with the bribes they are paid in the form of campaign contributions and whatever they get under the table. Maybe you could say that prison guards benefit, but that's very short sighted. If we didn't need so many prison guards they would have probably learned skills for other more productive careers.
Drug prohibition have never existed in the first place if they needed to get a constitutional amendment.
That's like saying,"Thank got none of my doors have locks, because it is now much easier to get rid of the burglar that's currently in my house without having to deal with a bunch of pesky locks."
I believe he is referring to petrol. It can get quite addictive if consumed regularly.
I hear there's petrol in Krokodil. That's pretty addictive and dangerous.
The consequences and (in)effectiveness of banning one mind altering chemical consumed by humans is quite similar to the consequences and (in)effectiveness of banning other mind altering chemicals consumed by humans.
The current ban was also instituted with broad popular support. Similar. The current ban closed down industries, many of which did not survive at all. Similar. The current ban started out targeting only sales, production and importation. Similar. Different only in recent years.
None of those things are particularly relevant anyway. The big similarities are the persistence of possession, usage, and commerce involving the substances, despite the ban, and the behavior of the criminal enterprises primarily engaged in such activity. These two similarities make the situations so comparable that you should just shut up now.
That was irony, son.
I know, Alanis Morissette has forever confused people.
Sad but true: I guess what Xicor should have said is that we need the government to stop being so corrupt, but that's less likely than if they stopped being dumb.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Yeah but it's taking like FOREVER to get Godwinned.
If it doesn't happen soon I'll have to do it myself.
and this doesn't scream Sting or front to anyone?. not to mention its just a bad idea in the first place
Dream of the Blue Turtles, or are we going back to Message in a Bottle?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Did I say that was the original justification, or a good one?
Social: I've come to the conclusion that fixing the problem(reform) has to be cheaper than warehousing prisoners. So pretty much ditto, though I'd actually treat prisoners better. The current treatment system actually causes mental damage and additional crime. Law enforcement, courts, and prison is expensive. Let's do the 'fix' right the first time.
As an ancillary, I'd stand up what I call the 'fedjobs' program. Historically the military was the biggest source of skilled craftsmen going. Today our professional military is much more vertical, with a higher proportion of career soldiers who get a second career as a GS or contractor, so they never hit the private sector.
Therefore I propose taking a page from Heinlein and setting up a program of mandatory employment that replaces various welfare programs. Yes, I know this program would be huge, but hopefully other factors would be set up such that ultimately fewer would be on the rolls. Like the military of the past, training would be provided after an initial period. In the case of Fedjobs, after a time of reasonable performance on the available minimum skill jobs they're transition to technical training on a balance of the individual's wants, the program's needs, and demonstrated ability via ASVAB equivalent. Projects worked would primarily be 'infrastructure' which by my definition would be 'anything that improves the quality of life and/or productivity of Americans that can be reasonably expected to last 20 years or longer with only routine maintenance'. Parks, Schools, bridges, roads, buried fiber, power generation plants, power lines, etc... Heck, even education counts under that definition.
Politics: I hate the idea of banning things because, well, they just figure out ways to get around it. Ban people giving the politicos money directly and you'll only see dozens of 'friends of XYZ' and 'enemies of ABC' pop up with their own ad campaigns.
Balanced Budget: On average, my friend, on average. The budget shall be balanced on a 15-20 rolling period, and no, they're not allowed to load the savings period on the back end. This is because I see programs like 'fedjobs' expanding and contracting in counterbalance to the economy, which operates on about a 17 year cycle.
Along with reforming prisons to reduce costs, end the war on some drugs. Treat addiction as a medical condition, not a crime.
Business: I'd hit the copyright system, vastly shortening terms before I go after patents. Patent wise I'd simply go back to requiring an example before you're allowed to patent it.
Legal/Security: Yep
Education: I'm more of the type where we can do this somewhat with the middle class/upper levels where parents are extremely interested in education levels. In poorer areas or where parents are on the whole utterly uninterested in their children's education, you have to step back and re-assess. Concentrate on teaching the kids what they'll need to live in today's society with a decent living. Shoot for lower-middle class, not middle class and higher for a few, discarding the rest.
I don't read AC A human right
Not to say it doesn't cost the tax payer anything. But there certainly are some groups of people that get a lot of extra money. Just imagine how much higher the military budget would have to be if they were to buy everything through normal channels and no longer prison work.
Citation please on the US Military buying anything standardly made by prison labor. The biggest source we buy from is 'Skilcraft' which employes the blind, not prison workers, and the supplies are an average of ~10% more expensive than standard commercial.
I don't read AC A human right
Actually if you search you'd find that they DID make them. Run of 100 with 10 retained as samples against counterfeiting... The other 90 were sold to various research firms.
I don't read AC A human right
Oh the horror of it all, someone who made enough money to support a small (or large) country through the benefits of society and the work of many might have to chip in a few bux to keep people from dying in the streets. OH the HUMANITY!
Just because a policy has negative effects doesn't mean it's not a net positive.
It took a Constitutional amendment, because Prohibition was enacted through a Constitutional amendment. There's only one way to change what the Constitution says - changing it again. And the Founders (rightly) made that hard to do.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Or legal goods.. that you didn't want to broadcast that you bought them. The ability to not be tracked ( easily ) in your purchases is nothing to be sneezed at.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They learned a different lesson - keeping the police unions fed with fresh police from the academy, and keeping the private prison operators fed with tax dollars does much more for keeping incumbent politicians as incumbent politicians. The rest is just spin to keep the voters thinking that it's a good policy.
This seems to be a lesson that other people are incapable of learning.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What's unpleasant about hell? According to themselves, the fundamentalists won't be there (of any kind of religion) since they're all up in heaven, right? Must be quite awful up there, imagine overzealous religious people constantly trying to kill the other lot of the other god. I cannot really imagine a worse place to be, it's like having to live in Israel, only a billion times worse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, judging from the Bible, he kinda does lean towards sadism, ya know? I mean, he's almighty and stuff, can't he find some more humane ways to kill people when he's pissed at them? Drowning isn't quite such a nice death and I can only assume that being turned to salt isn't so pleasant either.
He's also pretty unfair, I mean, how is it the fault of the son when the father is an asshole who doesn't let his slaves go free? Worse, how is it the fault of someone's son who doesn't even have anything to do with it and couldn't even do anything about it? How'd you feel about your son dying because of something Obama fucked up?
And take the omniscient thing. He must have known that people will fuck up when he made the rules. Like when he told Eve not to eat that apple, he did know that she'll eat it. Did he just need a convenient reason to get rid of the two nudist hippies and cancel their lease contract? That and other actions kinda feel like he needs some kind of justification for something he wanted to do anyway, kinda like provoking the other side to do something wrong by imposing rules that he knows they will not follow so he can be "vengeful" on them.
Sorry, but that's not what I'd expect from a God, that's the actions of an asshole.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They in fact are. Nicotine is harder to quit than heroin. Sigmund Freud, an early proponent of cocaine quit it when he realized the toll it was taking on himself. However, even after losing his jaw to cancer he never quit smoking cigars.
While alcohol addiction doesn't occur as rapidly, it is one of the few addictive drugs from which withdrawal can be lethal. Nobody dies from heroin withdrawal or methamphetamine withdrawal. People do die from alcohol withdrawal.
These are the hardest of the "hard drugs".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And there's still that pesky problem of... where do you ship your drugs to?
The sellers don't give a shit about the address they're sending *to*. On their end they can just toss a package in a corner mailbox with no return address. And the buyers figure the feds only care about the sellers, because who's going to waste time prosecuting some dude for buying a couple hits of acid when they can go for the guy selling and producing a couple hundred? Plus many police departments are funded partially from seized assets. Go for the buyer, you get drugs, and you burn them. Go for the seller and you get drug money, which will pay for your next year-end bonus.
Failures of bitcoins should be a major concern to sellers...along with any failures of Tor...but that's about all. Most buyers don't care even if it's guaranteed that some sellers are honeypots, because they figure the feds won't come after a small-scale buyer.
Actually, nicotine is very addictive. It's actually up there with Meth and Cocaine. The reason is simply that it, too, affects the dopaminergic system directly which leads to a very powerful psychological addiction. The physical addiction is actually pretty tame compared to it, if at all existent.
I was a heavy smoker. I tried a few times to quit, only to get back to it quickly. Oddly, though, one day I just didn't want to smoke anymore and I haven't smoked since. If I could ever find out what caused me to stop I guess I'd get very rich writing a how-to...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unfortunately it doesn't mean it is a net positive either and that's precisely why drug legislation change moves at such a slow pace.
No politician wants to be the guy who makes the policy change only for it to turn out that it makes things worse and until there are more case studies (i.e. countries who have done it succesfully) or more research that does a good job of predicting the knock on effects - i.e. higher drug driving casualties, cartel folk moving from drug trafficking to weapons trafficking or people trafficking or even ransoms or perhaps even terrorism against the governments of the countries they're in and so forth no one in a major nation is going to make the jump. Even if it isn't a net negative then there's still risk for politicians - say for example they legalise it in the UK and it makes things better in terms of reduced crime, but increases costs to the NHS even though the net effect is a reduction in burden on society the political opponents are still going to mop up the chance to say "Hey look his policy is putting massive strain on the NHS!".
The drug trade is such a massive part of the world economy also that there are economic effects of changing the balance too which need to be taken into account.
Part the problem is that precisely because the existing status quo is so firmly entrenched in both the global economy and global politics it's highly unpredictable as to the effects of such a fundamental change.
So it's not as simple as the "just legalise it all!" fantasists like to pretend - it's a much deeper, and much more complex problem than that, hence why most politicians wont touch it with a barge pole.
If it happens it's going to happen slowly, starting with legalisation of things like cannabis in some parts of the world (as seems to already be happening) and there'll be a period of observation to check the impacts - keep in mind that even the famous Amsterdam which was known for it's cannabis tolerance has sought to ban it for tourists because of the trouble they were causing when high so things can go backwards if it doesn't work out well - if it works out well though they'll try tackling the harder stuff.
But it wont happen overnight and understandably so. Economically alone you just can't turn an industry with so much of the world's money flowing through it on it's head overnight and not have shit go haywire because of legalisation in a major consumer state like the US. Previously unknown drug money being pulled out of the banking system alone by traffickers and barons in a panic could be enough to tip weaker banks over the edge, causing a similar cascade as we saw with Lehman in 2008 resulting in a crisis we still haven't all fully recovered from.
It's not a simple problem, and there's not a simple answer. Most importantly it can't be rushed and there's definitely not a quick solution for change.
The minute you declare what political powers "society" will allow for all individuals you become a collectivist and are no friend of individual liberty. Since you don't say these "rights" will be obeyed on an entirely voluntary basis I'm forced to assume you intend to compel those with means to support those without.
no, what we NEED is for the us government to realize how dumb they are being with the 'war on drugs' billions of US tax dollars are wasted yearly on it,
No, sir. What we need is the public who back the politicians who support this stupid war to realize the truth.
Which other politicians are there to back?
There are plenty of other politicians; you just don't generally hear about them because nobody backs them. Personally I voted for Rocky Anderson in the last presidential election...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/obama-marijuana-raids-rolling-stone_n_1451744.html
He's been making these same promises since before he was elected. And he keeps finding ways to *increase* prosecution while saying "That's not what I promised" whenever questioned.
Yeah, because dying a slow death from cancer is so much worse than being shot on a street corner by a black market dealer.
Organized crime damn near disappeared when alcohol prohibition ended. The same would happen today if you ended drug prohibition. Along with several billion dollars of savings to the federal government. So first of all, you're limiting the deaths to people who choose to engage in risky behavior...and secondly, if you run the numbers you'll find that the savings and increased revenue to the government would be enough to send every drug user through fully funded free drug rehab programs -- three or four times each.
Also, as someone from a family with a long history of alcoholism and tobacco use, I'm *very* happy my father was able to go to AA and get sober rather than being thrown in a prison cell for a couple years.
Oh so very well put sir - and funny too
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
However, at the same time, periodic testing and background checks are becoming a way of life. The big casualty in the War on Drugs is justice. Poor teenage drug users get incarcerated much more frequently than rich teenage drug users. The US government routinely routinely ruins the lives of young people doing nothing differently than what George Bush or Barack Obama did when younger(and in Bush's case had a father able to pull political strings to get his cocaine bust sealed).
I think that something like Silk road is pretty much inevitable-but so is expanded drug testing that will eventually include folks in positions of power and responsibility. At some point use of drugs may do little more than restrict someone from living in particular cities or communities-and lying about drug use to business associates or constituents will become impossible-but without the act of lying, much drug or chronic alcohol use will loose its allure.
No, the US government cannot reliable shut down Silk Road-but it could create a sound drug testing program for members of congress, the President and all senior members of the government. It could require that all police and prison guards-and attorneys be free of hard drugs or chronic alcohol abuse. Here is a published article where I developed some of these ideas previously.
I'm not entirely sure where you got the 'no' part. I am well aware of left libertarians.
Oh thank Goebbels for that you finally arrived.
Cheers!