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Online Drug Sales Triple After Silk Road Closure, Says Report (nbcnews.com)
The closure of Silk Road -- a marketplace where internet users could purchase drugs and other illegal goods -- in 2013 has had little to no effect on drug sales. According to a new report from RAND, online drug sales have tripled since the site was shut down. NBC News reports: "Since then, an estimated 50 'cryptomarkets and vendor shops where vendors and buyers find each other anonymously to trade illegal drugs, new psychoactive substances, prescription drugs and other goods and services,' have emerged to fill the void, according to the report. The research, which was commissioned by the Netherlands Ministry of Security and Justice, examined data from January and found dealers in the United States had the largest market share with 35.9 percent, followed by the United Kingdom at 16.1 percent and Australia at 10.6 percent. Marijuana was the top seller in January, accounting for 33 percent of illicit drug sales online, followed by prescription medication at 19 percent and stimulants at 18 percent."
People on various sides of various issues try not to believe it, would like not to believe it, but Markets Work. You can't stop them just by making rules against them, not without insanely powerful enforcement mechanisms..., and usually not even then.
Shutting down even top level targets has little to no impact?? Surely if we spend twice as much and sentence the next site runner to DOUBLE life, the online war on drugs will end in victory. -Typical drug warrior.
Wait until the retired start using the dark web to get prescriptions filled from 'virtual Mexico' nationwide.
Who could have ever imagined that this could happen. Remember when we shut down Pirate Bay and completely stopped all copyright infringement? Oh wait, we just spawned hundreds more torrent sites, and even though kickass torrents was just taken down, pirate bay is actually back up again... What a giant waste of money.
"According to a new report from RAND, online drug sales have tripled since the site was shut down. NBC News reports"
Who could have seen that coming? I mean, besides EVERYONE.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It causes less deaths than tobacco and alcohol and prohibition of it is just another form of social control. The absurdity of the 'house of cards' that prohibits it has more negative effects on society than the plant has ever caused and that's before we start looking at the plethora of medical benefits it has.
Take marijuana off the black market and the funding for many other criminal operations will dry up.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
the people who are "fighting" the "war on drugs" don't actually want to "win"
Think about it
perhaps we could just end prohibition and use the police and our government to pursue more productive endeavours?
... Said "Just say no to drugs". Why is it not working? Oh, the problem is more complex than the over simplified political drivel. Treatment and education is much more difficult to implement than incarceration, albeit cheaper and less profitable ...
Prohibition is a stupid law and makes the police and courts look stupid when they try and enforce it.
You can kill Silk Road, but you can't kill the IDEA of Silk Road. That's the real reason for the increase. Once people learn about the 'dark web' and how to use bitcoins to buy stuff on it, shutting down an individual site doesn't matter much, and every shutdown gets major publicity which turns more people on to the dark web.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Apparently, from what I heard, they just drop the illegal drugs in the mail. You know, like the US postal service. What the hell. When I asked someone why they don't have drug-sniffing dogs, they said it's an unreasonable search and seizure amendment thing. BULLSHIT IT IS. They're at airports. They're at ports. They're everywhere! Neither are considered completely US soil sort of but still. Looking at the outside of a car during a traffic stop is legal. A dog sniffing the outside of a package for cocaine powder is completely legal. This is utterly ridiculous. People shouldn't be able to just drop illegal items into the mail. In fact, I'm 99.9999999% sure they scan USPS mail for radiation and bust it open if it has radiation coming out of it. Why the hell are they not doing this for drugs?!
The only thing prohibition ever did was to create criminals and enable them to rise to power. You think Al Capone would have ever been more than a petty criminal without alcohol prohibition?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While much less than 1% of the (at least American) population abuses "illicit" drugs (at least according to consistent U.S. government usage statistics combined with the Institute of Medicine's dependency rates table), literally millions of non-violent (so sanely innocent) lives have been demonstrably ruined to varying degrees (including horrific and even deadly ones) by Certain Drug Prohibition (if you will) – the 'bigger and badder' sequel to Alcohol Prohibition, which "mysteriously" required a federal constitutional amendment to judicially establish and enforce.
Another similar amendment ended Alcohol Prohibition for basically the same reasons that should have intelligently prevented Certain Drug Prohibition in the "land of the free".
Several decades ago, the Commerce Clause ("To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes") was illegally judicially redefined (according to the public record combined with the English language) to regulate any activity having a substantial effect on commerce. By "interpreting" that clause, our Supreme Court granted Congress the authority to ban (not regulate) the mere possession of a certain plant, for prime example. That's why I put illicit in unrealism quotes above.
Factually speaking, the war on (some politicized) drugs is ineffective, destructive, expensive, unconstitutional, and unwarranted.
We don't even have a "drug free" prison system, nor one shred of concrete (so credible) evidence proving we live in even a slightly more "drug free" America as a result of spending many billions of taxpayer dollars annually.
Drug abuse (which is clearly distinct from use, despite the prohibitionists unethically interchanging use and abuse merely for their demonizing convenience) is a health – not criminal – issue by any sound reasoning.
The war on some drugs can only be righteously described as sanctioned thuggery.
Prohibition provides an enormous (and otherwise unachievable) profit margin to black market organizations of all sizes. That money empowers them (even small gangs) with military grade weaponry, bribery power, and so on – so is a much more serious threat to genuinely good members of law enforcement (including border patrol) and even those criminal organizations horrendously violently competing with each other.
Legalization (with a firm educational push involving the actual risks of any given drug in the Information Age logically leading to the Education Age) instantly cuts that serious financial supply line (as it did with Alcohol Prohibition), and the idea that drug use increases upon legalization must involve the assumption that prohibition works (which it clearly doesn't) – as opposed to market saturation theory (i.e. a minority of people desire the use of these drugs, apparently like a minority of people desire to skydive, and they already have workable channels to secure access to those drugs).
Drug prohibition addiction is the genuine drug "scourge" and "epidemic" (as the mainstream media loves to call the drug problem), ironically speaking.
Drug prohibition addicts deceive the public and effectively steal taxpayer money to get their prohibition fix – hypocritically the macrocosm of the stereotypical heroin addict.
Only a proper public intervention against drug prohibition addicts suffices to save literally millions of more innocent lives in the coming decades from yet another baseless and selfishly reckless form of minority persecution in the "land of the free" that was sold to the public in the pathetically traditional form of "protecting the children".
Sines of Impending Sines
Has to stop. All prohibition does is make cartels billions. That's all it fucking does. People who want it still get it, end-of-fucking-story. Stop worrying about what adults put in their own bodies and start fucking worrying about the sinking ship you're on.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You should also consider the flip side. Law enforcement and the private prison complex are another corollary from prohibition, and they are big money.
There's a lot of money to be made on either side of the fence with prohibition.
I would argue that both sides are cartels, and both sides seem to enjoy the war, it is very profitable.
BlameBillCosby.com
War is always profitable for those on top. It's those at the bottom that fight and die in it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
RAND generally doesn't make stuff up, and I haven't read the report yet, but my knee-jerk reaction is that these can't be known with any ballpark accuracy in anything approaching a short term.
The best way to reduce profits and insentive from drug sales? Legalize them, regulate them, and sell them like nicotine and alcohol.
Druglords can't compete with Walmart and thousands of liquor stores....
Just as the internet does, the drug trade routes round blockages. Fail to provide a legal alternative that is at least as convenient and inexpensive as the $300bn/yr worldwide industry run by organised crime, and, de facto, you give them a monopoly in a lucrative business. Only a safe, convenient legal alternative can deprive them of that market, aside from possibly a worldwide police state on a scale that would make 1984 look like a teddy bears' tea party.
John_Chalisque