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.

Comments

I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[rsilvergun]

There's pretty broad support for it. I know folks who don't want to legalize the hard stuff (think cocaine, meth and heroine) but there's places that have done it and then treated addiction as a medical condition and it's worked well.

It does mean you can't just abandon addicts though, e.g. you can't just lock them up in a hole in the ground, you need to provide treatment, but even then the treatment is often cheaper than paying somebody to guard the hole, so to speak.

Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[LittleNegative]

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.

Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[sjames]

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.

Re: I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[ShanghaiBill]

Because the money would got to the wrong people, mostly in South America.

If it was legal, they would no longer be the "wrong" people. They would be law abiding capitalists.

During prohibition, alcohol sales and distribution was control by criminals. Today, brewers and distillers are just normal businesses.

The same can happen with cocaine and heroin.

Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[cayenne8]

Can't work in America. I can't speak to other countries.

It's not that it wouldn't be of benefit to the general population, but that's not a criteria anyone in any level of power will even consider as modestly important. What's important is continuing the war on drugs because it feeds the for profit prison system. And that for profit prison system needs a steady stream of non-violent inmates to keep running costs low and prove the necessity of every increased capacity.

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.

Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[FictionPimp]

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.

Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[cayenne8]

1- Name one place it's been tried and didn't turn to shit (as seen in Vancouver)

You might look at Portugal, as that they pretty much legalized/decriminalized all drugs...and they have actually had a positive result.

I"m surprised more countries don't start looking at their model.

Re:the real solution

[sjames]

If they did that, they would be forced to admit that there's enough residue on common items that the dog would alert to everything.

For example, money. Pretty much all of it will test positive for at least cocaine.

The dirty secret: Most of the time the dog alerts due to subtle cues from it's handler, not from something it smells.

Re:the real solution

[anglico]

When I was a UPS Driver in Santa Cruz we would get back to the building with our pick ups and there were San Jose PD drug sniffing dogs going over the conveyor belts. Any hits and they would pull the packages aside and then let the dogs go over them more thoroughly outside.
  The dogs were from the San Jose PD, and I don't know how many centers they would check, or maybe it was just Santa Cruz, but it happened every fall during harvest time. I told my grower friends if they are going to use UPS, make sure to use Next Day Air, those are taken from the truck to the airport shuttle pretty quickly to make flights out, so the dogs never got to sniff those.
  This was back in 2000 though, so things may have changed until it became legal.

Re:the real solution

[AvitarX]

let's see.

1 dog, 6 packages/minute (unlikely they could actually do one in 10 seconds)).
8 hours sniffing/day (no idea how many they actually can work, but between food, and walks, and what not, seems reasonable)

that's 2800/dog/day

UPS sends 15.8 million packages/day on average.

So that's 5600 drug dogs (though they'd need 50% more in the winter).

So, 4000 for the dog, 1000 for the training stuff, 2500 for food and vet over it's life, for 5 productive years

1500/year * 5000 is 7.5 million/year.

Of course, 5200 handlers is likely another 150 million or so.

And to cover Christmas we're at 50% more.

That's a lot of money, ignoring the fact that a 10 second per package bottle neck would make shipping that many packages practically impossible.

Re:the real solution

[ShanghaiBill]

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.