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The Economics of Drug Sales On the Dark Web
HughPickens.com writes: Allison Schrager has an interesting article about how marketplaces for contraband drugs have only existed for about four years on the dark web, but they've made inroads fast. About 10%-15% of drug users in the U.K., U.S., and Australia [are believed to have] bought drugs off the net. According to Schrager, these marketplaces look remarkably similar to normal online marketplaces. Users leave detailed reviews on the quality of a vendor's product, speed of delivery, and how secure the shipping method was. There's information on where vendors are located and where they'll ship to. Some even post their refund and exchange policies. Purchasing meth from a dealer in the Netherlands feels as familiar and mundane as buying sheets from Macy's. The dark web makes transactions safer.
All the same, there are risks that Macy's customers don't run. Because there's no legal protection for illegal purchases, the bitcoin payments sit in escrow until the goods have been delivered and both parties are satisfied. That exposes the seller to exchange-rate risk, because bitcoin is an extremely volatile currency. And there is one other big source of risk: the point where the virtual world of the dark web and the world of physical reality intersect. In other words, getting drugs delivered. Certain drugs like MDMA and LSD may move mostly online. And the web may become the preferred source for affluent users and small-time pot dealers.
All the same, there are risks that Macy's customers don't run. Because there's no legal protection for illegal purchases, the bitcoin payments sit in escrow until the goods have been delivered and both parties are satisfied. That exposes the seller to exchange-rate risk, because bitcoin is an extremely volatile currency. And there is one other big source of risk: the point where the virtual world of the dark web and the world of physical reality intersect. In other words, getting drugs delivered. Certain drugs like MDMA and LSD may move mostly online. And the web may become the preferred source for affluent users and small-time pot dealers.
This is a matter of privacy, not criminality.
The world is a safer place when the government thugs are prevented from meddling in people's lives; the only reason the government is upset is that they're not getting "their" cut of the profits, and they're losing the massive political leverage they've built up for the drug war.
And, please, don't bother with straw man arguments about Ulbricht hiring murderers, or people buying stolen credit card information. People already did those things.
Incidentally, the fact that Bitcoin has enabled people conduct highly "illegal" commerce is as sure a sign as any that Bitcoin is both an interesting technology and a potentially lucrative investment, especially given that it has not jurisdiction—if the U.S. makes it troublesome to use Bitcoin, well, there's still the rest of the world out there.
Is this like studies which confirm that 110% of male teens have viewed harcore BDSM since they were eight, taken at least five class A drugs, and slept with nineteen women between the ages of 15 and 50 (at least half of whom were passed out)?
If a stranger asks you in person, "Have you done any of the following illegal things, and how?" then how you answer it depends on a lot more than your desire to be honest. And if it's an online survey, well, just fuck off.
Posting AC for obvious reasons, but at least in the UK you're simply taking a big risk by illegally buying drugs online in my experience. The current Conservative government are extremely hostile towards illegal drug buyers. They can and will intercept shipments and send the police to your door. They can and will prosecute. Sadly we really need massive drug law reform and until we get a reasonable government in place we aren't going to get any.
You don't really want crack to become legal do you?
It's not that expensive to produce, so if it were legal, there would be much less incentive to commit crimes since it would be much less expensive. The same argument applies to basically all drugs. The only reason people traffic them in spite of the often significant risk is because making them illegal has driven up the prices and the rewards are also significant.
If you give addicts enough drugs to OD on, then eventually they will either do that or find a level of addiction which they can manage, or even improve their lives and eventually kick the habit. Regardless, for the really dangerous drugs, drug addiction tends to be a self-limiting problem if you're not busy exacerbating it. When we make them illegal we simply create vicious cycles which lead to more drug use and more crime. How does that help? The best way to reduce drug use is to treat addicts like they have a health problem, not to treat them like criminals. That helps prevent them from becoming criminals in the first place.
How we treat criminals is also unfortunate, but probably outside the scope of this conversation — suffice to say, it's doing nothing to help us "win the war on drugs".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about we just lock up thieves?
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but not all thieves are drugs users and not all drug users are thieves. Seems like we should concentrate on the actual crime and not your preconceptions and prejudices.
I mean, we could lock up niggers too if they're gonna be black, because we know they all eventually steal from good white folks... makes about as much sense as your argument.
Eh? If crack became legal, it would cost less than a stick of gum - thus removing the motive to rob steal and kill to get money to pay for it.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
A friend of mine used to use a lot of substances. After a decades or two he realized that he was planning his days around his substance use. One day enough was enough, and he stopped, very rapidly. He described his cocaine days thusly: "Man, I wish I had some cocaine..." It's nice to feel cocaine-good, but you can get by without it.
Tweakers (meth users) go lurping (steal stuff) to support their habits. A different friend switched from cocaine to meth because it was cheaper. After a while, she realized that she didn't like her personality on Meth, so she stopped. The anxiety started soon thereafter. Her doctor put her on Xanax, then she discovered Vodka. Her third DUI put her in prison for almost 2 years. In many ways, alcohol is worse than meth.
This woman's son got hooked on opiates while she was anesthetizing herself with alcohol. He started stealing stuff to avoid the withdrawals.
The primary drugs that lead to stealing to support one's habits are meth amphetamine (not a plant) and the opiates. Society would be much better off if we switched meth users to cocaine, and supplied free opiates to our opiate addicts, so they wouldn't have to steal to support their consumption of artificially-expensive plant products.
I'm told that pure MDMA is actually fairly safe as illegal drugs go; the problem is with the variability in manufacturing along with mixtures and substitutions means that people using it don't really know what they're taking. Pure cocaine isn't good, but it's going to be a hell of lot healthier than crack cocaine cut with candle wax or something worse.
When you start looking at it statistically, most of the damage "done by" illegal drugs is either going to be because of these kinds of factors as well as the fringe lifestyle that comes with being a drug user more than the actual drugs themselves.
That's not to say that the drugs themselves are good, but a huge amount of harm would be prevented by making cheap, pure, and known-quantity supplies available to users along with a good supply of drug and mental health treatments.
Won't happen soon, of course, but I expect to see it in my lifetime.
Log in or piss off.
The issue is, pot is going to be legal soon, and anyone who has been following the issue for very long can see the writing on the wall.
It may briefly be that the dark web will be a prefered resource for the affluent, may even be now for some, but, after things shake out, that is just not going to last
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Personally, I find the trade of prescription drugs on the dark web more interesting. People buying inhalers over the dark web for $30 because they can't afford the $300 demanded at the pharmacy for the same thing.
Unfortunately, treatment of criminals is very much in the scope of this conversation, because certain ways to treat them - such as private prison industry or the desire to prove one's righteousness by attacking "evil" people, such as felons - create perverse incentives to manufacture more of them. That is the mechanism behind every witch hunt, and that is what the war on drugs is now, no matter what it might have started as.
There are people who hate and fear nothing as much as someone doing something labeled bad in their moral code and getting away with it. That's fine if "bad" means molesting kids, and not so fine if "bad" means smoking pot. And when their code is questioned some people drift towards moderation while others go to fanatical extremes to silence their own doubts. The end result is pretty much the same, whether it's called Inquisition, Al-Qaida or a SWAT team: a bunch of murderous thugs looking for new victims whose life the specific code they use to excuse their inexcusable actions lets them ruin with good conscience.
Treatment of criminals is at the very heart of the War on Drugs because "criminal" is just the specific form the concept of subhuman takes in the US. You can't have bread and circuses without a steady stream of acceptable victims to feed to the lions, after all. And like they say, the Dark Side is the quick and easy path to power, so the powerful are only too happy to sell their souls to it - as are the weak, all too often. After that decision's made, the only thing left is deciding who'll make the most convenient sacrifice. In the US it's the criminals, in the EU refugees (historically Jews), in Islamic world infidels. Dunno about the rest of the world.
What all this means is that the War on Drugs is a symptom, but the disease itself is something ancient and very nasty.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't get that.
I've seen so many drug scandals come out that I find it obvious that people can function just fine on cocaine and other addictive substances. It's probably harming their health, but that's more their problem than mine. It doesn't automatically make them spend everything they've got on drugs, or take as much as they can possibly buy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> If you give addicts enough drugs to OD on, then eventually they will either do that or find a level of addiction which they can manage, or even improve their lives and eventually kick the habit.
That's the whole issue in a nutshell.
Ethanol has already taught us nearly everything we need to know about this. If we are legal adults not under some kind of competency-related guardianship, and we are living in a supposedly free country, there are absolutely no good reasons why we should be punished for altering our consciousnesses as we see fit. Aside from basic safety concerns (i.e. if you have electricity, building codes dictate parameters of its installation, should be the same if you have a laboratory, etc.), it's nobody's business what you do to change your brain waves in the privacy of your own home.
Sometimes I think the conspiracy theorists are right, and our options for exploring our own minds are being limited in order to preserve the power of the elite. Honestly, though, I'm increasingly convinced it's simply yet another clusterfunk of basic human ignorance interwoven with our social structures. With time, I guess we seem to gradually smooth these things out... too much time, it sometimes seems, but oh well.