The Economics of Drug Sales On the Dark Web 53
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.
Privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
"about 10-15% of..." (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh please...
You're talking about cannabis here. I agree with you, cannabis is fairly harmless, and should not be anymore illegal than tobacco is.
But crack cocaine? Ecstasy?... Really?
I don't give a shit that people do crack. The problem is, when crackheads start suffering withdrawal and they're too broke to buy more junk, they become robbers and break into people's homes - something potheads don't do.
You don't really want crack to become legal do you?
Re:The War On Drugs is a War On Sick People (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re: (Score:1)
you realize that even water has a fatal dose [wikipedia.org]. and i mean from drinking, not drowning.
nearly everyone on the planet is drinking it regularly in some form, i don't know how you can get any more addictive than that. anyone that quits dies from the withdrawal symptoms. some even mix it with their alcohol or take it with their drug of choice!
Re: (Score:2)
but probably outside the scope of this conversation
And definitely outside the scope of his intellect. ;)
Re: (Score:3)
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 witc
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
My personal take is that money makes decisions, and the money has figured out that there's more money to be made by exploiting fear and ignorance than by caring for people's basic needs. And by money, I mean explicitly that they get to have more than the other guy, because that is specifically what they are after. Once your needs are met, and you have enough money for some entertainment, money doesn't appreciably add to your happiness in our current system anyway — unless having more money than other
Re:The War On Drugs is a War On Sick People (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Maybe not all drug users are thieves, but most addicts will eventually turn to desperate measures to obtain drugs including thievery and violence. Taking the funds that are currently used in the war on drugs and providing substance abuse assistance is likely to be far more effective than attempting to curtail the flow of drugs through other means.
Re: The War On Drugs is a War On Sick People (Score:1)
But crack still is affected by the fact that it is sold only on the black market because it is illegal. If you look at supply of coca leaves, the cost of extracting the active ingredient and making a crystalline/pure form of it, crack should cost about $15 for rock the size of a softball.
The whole argument that drug users steal or become violent or act in some other untoward manner simply because they can't obtain or pay for their drug is rendered meaningless because if it weren't for the prohibition laws,
lower price means more usage (Score:2)
I think the addictive nature of the drug causes such an obsession that people's ability to be productive to support the addiction will be affected by it's use. It doesn't matter if it costs $15 or $200. The users will
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Citation needed.
I'll bet you haven't counted foir profit markup, legal overhead to sue the shit out of the homeboy still cooking in his basement, government licensing fees, local healthcare taxes, administrative overhead, etc.
The end of prohibition *should* have put the moonshiners out of business. Guess what, they're still around. Assuming that legalizing drugs will suddenly drive the criminal enterprises out of business or into legal business.... Well, naive people are naive.
No, but.. citation needed. How much moonshining going on nowadays? I really don't know, but it is pretty minimal. At best this is not a good example. Try the situation with weed in states where it is now recently legal. See also: Netherlands.
Opiates and Meth lead to criminal behavior (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [urbandictionary.com] (meth users) go lurping [urbandictionary.com] (steal stuff) to support their habits. A different friend switched from cocaine to meth because it was cheaper. After a while, she realized that
Re:The War On Drugs is a War On Sick People (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Any product you consume that is supplied by producer unknown, of unknown quality and unknown safety is hugely risky. Be it heroin or soft drink or pharmaceuticals or chicken or bottled water. If you can not hold their feet to the legal fire the chances of suffering extreme harm are very high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Someone sells me stuff that makes me sick and risks my life, damn if an anonymous tip wont make it's way to those who will be able to legally enact revenge on my anonymous behalf.
S
Re: (Score:2)
Dark web == deep web == buzzwords.
You're taking a big risk (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
YAY for conspiracies, that all made a lot of sense, then i stopped making sense entirely.
i feel like that was a bait and switch on me.
The flip side (Score:2)
Pot? unlikely (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:3)
I am going to disagree with that. Possession of marijuana is still a Federal crime even though states may have legalized it. This means that if the next President feels like it, he or she can just seize the rolls of customers from the medical dispenseries and transaction logs from the toke joints, round the customers up and throw them all into prison for life.
Marijuana isn't going to be 50 states legal anytime soon, and it won't be legal in Colorado after 2017 when the new CIC decides to put brakes on the party.
If the next president does decide to do that, there will be a major amount of rioting in the legal states and senators/congressman governors will get shit canned if they didn't take action on it. What will happen is the DEA will go make arrests/seizures and the governors will then immediately pardon everyone and tell the feds to fuck off, fallowed by the congress/senators raising a shit storm in DC. No president will do that because of the bad plublicity it would generate when the whole left coast is riotin
Re:Pot? unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
best they could do is try and use the list for probably cause to get a search warrant, which would be a stretch
everyone forgets that Prohibition of Alcohol didn't end because the Feds decided it was a good idea
Prohibition of Alcohol ended because enough States said "Fuck you, its legal here, if you want to enforce Fed law, do it yourself"
The Feds don't have the resources to do that, alcohol's status changes at the Fed level.
That is what will happen with marijuana in the U.S.
Re: (Score:2)
Other drugs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
You can actually just buy them from Canada, eh? They still have old-school inhalers with HFCs in them, and you can order them over the web if you just scan and send your prescription.
the end of this (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Why can't you just mind your own business?
Bitcoin is volatile (Score:2)
Is it? It's been (except for a spike) not so bad over the last 6 months.
What these online dark markets could lead to (Score:2)
Kristov Atlas: Fear Not the Silk Road (Full speech w/ slides)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
His intro is pretty long, so maybe you want to skip that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
A big part from what he says is:
Dark markets can circumvent capital controls:
- tax avoidance (with the multiple layers of taxes, dark markets are a lot cheaper)
- trade barriers (trade anything with anyone)