Europol investigation busts 150 'high value' darknet vendors
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I wish they'd go after the operations that actually hurt people. Hell, you can walk in plenty of places in Berlin (and it's often German authorities in the lead) and spot much worse dealers than those selling online.
People who sell online are very different from those who sell in-person. Most come from socio-economic backgrounds where all kinds of anti-social behaviour is normalized. They are also not "professional" so to speak, and do not know the words Op and Sec. Someone who's selling acid on the net will not rob you, since they're not dumb enough to. So it's an apples to oranges comparison in my opinion.
Regardless, I do wish they would cut it out with the useless arrests. Good job, you seized a car-full of drugs and some dudes who mail drugs, do they think the global drug market has felt real hit? That unlike at every point in human history in which something was prohibited, the black market will just stop? That this actually puts a dent into the bottom-line of criminals? Even if it did, momentary weakness by one criminal group is an immediate invitation for another to expand.
There's a great interview on YouTube with a former drug enforcement officer, whose department spent 7 months to bust a large drug ring. He said it took two hours before other dealers had moved in.
The main takeaway for me was that by busting a major drug ring, you are only helping the other major players b removing competition. They will fight each other (brutally!) to take over what was left behind by the now defunct ring, and instead of two or more large drug rings, you now have one massive monopolistic drug ring, and everyone is worse off.
I'm not sure what a solution here is. The more you fight organised crime, the more they fight back, and the situation escalates and becomes more violent to everyone involved. Perhaps decriminalisation along with better support infrastructure for victims and addicts could help?
There are certainly drugs which have less (but not none) of a violent pipeline (for example, lab-synthesized drugs), but just because you buy your cocaine from someone on Tor doesn't mean that there's not abuse, corruption, crime, violence and death associated with its sourcing and growth.
I think comments like this, or beliefs like this are a sort of feel-good mythology. Or "changing the world", or something. Superiority (though to be clear, I'm not ascribing any one of these to your specific comment). But it is a lot less grounded in reality than proponents would like to think.
That said, they will not break my door down to try and rob me. Street dealers have done that in the past. This is a selfish perspective sure, but street dealers are generally a much bigger danger to me than being murdered by Colombian drug lords. This is what I meant by "apples to oranges".. organized criminals are much worse morally (the law agrees here), but pretty unlikely to actually do anything to you, since they are organized and do not wish to attract attention.
If Colombia/Bolivia/Peru could collect an export tax or royalty on it before loading into the hold of a DHL cargo jet, I think their cartels would get disappeared overnight.
Biggest issue I see there is that you still have to deal with corruption or infiltration by those elements too, who want their pound of flesh (and not to mention, in some of those countries, the cartels have the willingness, and the equipment and ability, to go to war with the police/military to keep their operation going).
Unlike marijuana, these countries have an absolute advantage in that cocaine doesn’t grow like a weed anywhere you want. And it’s low yield, so greenhouses are poor competition.
It’s hard to get relatively-safe but difficult-to-smuggle opium and heroin due to supply disruption, so now the market has almost entirely shifted to fentanyl which is easy to produce and ultra potent (therefore easy to smuggle).
Yay?
For testing strips you can just go to dancesafe.org and get a kit
Sidenote: dancesafe and erowid were heavily funded by one of the earliest Microsoft employees
It's not like law enforcement hadn't heard of criticism against the drug wars before.
An existential dilemma: these institutions need to justify their budgets and positions. So, headlines are the currency they trade in and this 'high value' bust results in good PR for their agencies/departments, but still imparts low value to Society over all.
It's quite clear their are bigger fish to fry if the goal was to reign in on illicit dealings, be it from the Panama papers to the Paradise papers it's clear that illicit trafficking of funds is done not with Cryptocurrency on the DNM, but rather through traditional institutional banks.
But, the selective application of the Law and a tiered justice system ensures that laundering money for cartels is met soley with a fine, whereas charges like hosting a website (SR1/ Ross Ulbricht) can get you 2 life sentences.
It's possible to combat both online and offline drug trafficking. What do you think will happen when word spreads that darknet trading is way safer than offline?
Isn't that more or less already common knowledge?
Don't people do weapons and human trafficking on the markets? I think it would be cool if there was more progress made on that front.
DoJ press release: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/international-law-enforcement...
> Devices can be exposed to an array of malware ready to wreak havoc on the buyers’ data.
???
Learn to drive before considering driving without a seatbelt.
Putting what we choose into our own body is a basic human right. Mutually consentual exchanges of goods or services is a basic human right. All victims of these actions are victims of human rights abuses. Part of the global awakening is recognizing this, and rejecting the so-called government's authority to imprison people participating in voluntary exchanges.
If we are concerned about the nature of the goods or services being exchanged, we need to remember that our right to impose on others' freedom comes about only when they engage in direct violence.
Just as there is food safety and certain things are not allowed to be sold because it would be dangerous to you or harmful to the world to eat them, so some drugs also need to be illegal. If you don't believe that go and see any drug addict street, or visit a Brazilian slum where the kids waste away on glue fumes. At societal level high rates of hard drug consumption are unbearable and destroy any healthy community. Opium had two whole wars around it as it was forced into the market by Brits and French and destroyed the fabric of Chinese society with entire generations of men disappearing into (legal) opium dens and spending all their and their families' fortunes while wasting away and letting their children starve.
No one wants to be a drug addict and no reasonable person that has a basic understanding of what hard drugs can do can think drugs like that should be legal. Meth, crack and co are a dozen times worse than opium, not to mention krokodil or similar poison that will straight up destroy your organs from first use.
Portugal has taken the right route, with drugs still illegal but drug use not anymore criminalised, so they are getting people off the streets and off the drugs. There is no benefit in locking people up for using, as they 99% don't want to use - they just can't find the way out. But that hard drugs themselves need to be illegal and fought is without question.
Portugal literally allowed people to do hard drugs, no matter which, safely, instead of persecuting them. Portugal has a table in their legislation with the drugs amounts people can carry with them without ever being considered a crime if it falls under.
There was a heroine epidemic in the 90s, not only now they have proper places where they help people inject themselves, they also provide psychological help.
Compared to the normal way other countries deal with drugs, this is much more close to have all drugs legal than not. So I'm not understanding the position of no reasonable person would want drugs legal, given that in the 90s seeking for a close-state of being legal was what Portugal sought and achieve enormous results with it that it is still the law we have today.
source: I live in Portugal and I have tried a myriad of drugs from "soft" to "hard" without ever fearing for my safety in regards to the law.
Even for meth - pure meth aka desosyn is as or more effective than adderal for ADHD and taken by many daily without issue. On the other hand, yes many have ruined their lives using it but you need better data to make a judgement.