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Dream Market, the Top Dark Web Marketplace, Will Shut Down Next Month (zdnet.com)
Dream Market, today's top dark web marketplace, today announced plans to shut down on April 30. From a report: The announcement came on the same day Europol, FBI, and DEA officials announced tens of arrests and a massive crackdown on dark web drug trafficking. The timing of the four announcements immediately sent most of Dream Market's users and dark web threat intel analysts into a frenzy of theories that law enforcement might have already seized the site and are now running a honeypot operation. Their fears are based on a similar event from June 2017 when Dutch police took over Hansa Market and ran the site for a month while collecting evidence on the portal's users. Law enforcement later used passwords collected from Hansa Market users to gain access to accounts on other dark web marketplaces.
1- Name one place it's been tried and didn't turn to shit (as seen in Vancouver)
2- The illegal market would continue just as before because legal drugs would be regulated, taxed, and generally expensive (as seen with pot in Canada)
3- If these drugs caught on, they would eventually require similar programs and laws as there are against smoking. Why go back to that?
I'm guessing there are at least a couple reasons to not legalize drugs: 1) Legalization would probably put a dent in big pharma profits 2) Legalization would give cops one less reason to pull over and arrest people.
Drug mafias are very rich and very powerful, precisely because their product is illegal.
If you make drugs legal, you pull the rug right out from under them. They don't want this, so they use their wealth and power to apply political pressure to the end of keeping drugs illegal.
People who don't understand how the world actually works often object to the above statements. They seem to think that the criminal mafias can effectively compete against legitimate drug sellers. They are straight-up wrong, which is why there is no bootleg alcohol mafia, tobacco mafia, or ibuprofen mafia.
People also think that criminal organizations have no political power. This is because people are idiots.
If a cop looks in the window of your car and see a pile of drugs, they don't need your permissions or a warrant to "search" it at that point.
What if they just walk the dogs around every window of every house in your neighborhood?
You mean as opposed to now where they're strung out on illegal drugs and so have little to lose by adding one more criminal charge?
Try running the prisons properly and legalizing drugs. Then the prospects are: Avoid crime and use drugs or commit a crime and 'enjoy' a few years in a drug free prison.
With the significantly reduced prison population and taxes on the drugs, we will easily be able to afford to upgrade the prisons and still save money.
Well, according to the ACLU: "...for-profit companies were responsible for approximately 7 percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal prisoners in 2015 (the most recent numbers currently available)".
While that seems to start being a little high on the Federal side, it doesn't seem to be really THAT high of a number that everyone seems to keep touting as a reason to keep funneling people into the prison system.
While I agree it could put pressure on the system to try to fund itself, it doesn't appear to be as much of a central problem to legalizing drugs as some would have you think.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
1- Name one place it's been tried and didn't turn to shit (as seen in Vancouver)
Many problems here. First off, Vancouver did not legalize drugs, probably just marijuana. And, that was partly in response to the fact that it was being treated as legal at the ground level already. Hardly a useful example.
Amsterdam is not a shithole, and certainly not MORE of a shithole than prior to decriminalization. Portugal has had positive numbers (lower youth use, less secondary and tertiary problems from addiction, falling use in general, etc). I honestly, can't think of ANY examples where it did *turn to shit*. Often decriminalization is only tried by desperate areas (shitholes if you will), so it's hard to get a good case study on what will happen to Omaha, NE, Lubbock, TX or Cincinnati, OH if drugs were legal. We simply don't have good places to point to. I've responded to this strawman enough.
2- The illegal market would continue just as before because legal drugs would be regulated, taxed, and generally expensive (as seen with pot in Canada)
Overtaxation. Sin taxes will definitely do this, especially when you're selling a plant anyone and their brother can just grow. For a drug like cocaine, I really doubt this would be an issue. But, even if it were, just like piracy, it's a pricing problem. The government has introduced regulation (large taxes on pot in Vancouver) which keeps the price of legal product distorted, maintaining demand. Tax it like everything else, and no problemo. No one is going to a drug dealer to save VAT or whatever you have in the great white north. People buying and selling locally should be no real problem, just like any other legal agricultural product like eggs or tomatoes. If pot is still being trafficked into BC, you have either a pricing problem or an availability problem or both. Neither of those are fundamentally the fault of legalization. The availability problem would be because you can't reasonably import the stuff, as it's illegal in the USA.
3- If these drugs caught on, they would eventually require similar programs and laws as there are against smoking. Why go back to that?
Too late. What now? Invent a time machine? I think you'll have to go pretty far back to get to before drugs caught on.
If they did this, an obvious counter-measure would be for the drug gangs to pay an insider to smear a bit of cocaine paste on random packages.
Misting all the packages with capsaicin would also work.
Yep, that's why I only buy my whiskey from moonshiners. I'm not paying those taxes and who cares if the product might be total poison. Only suckers pay taxes on whiskey.