Dark net drug markets kept alive by great customer service
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100,000 people have died so far in the 8-year Mexican Drug War. How would you like if that number turned into 0 without any need for political intervention?
This is what Ross Ulbricht described his goal as on LinkedIn:
"I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind."
Is that clear enough? The guy studied organic solar cells and EuO thin-film crystals for 5 years as a grad student, describing his goal then as to expand the frontier of human knowledge.
Do you think a person like that would suddenly plunge himself into a crazy get-rich scheme? Let's be honest here: that kind of person meticulously plans these kind of things, and they do it ultimately to help the world in an abstract way -- not constantly empathetic of each individual person, but ultimately concerned with the total human condition.
"Dark net markets make drugs more available more easily, and that's nothing to celebrate. It will, I suspect, tend towards higher levels of use, which -- legal or illegal -- creates misery. "
So, the argument is that increased supply probably will actually increase misery, and will not be "an absolutely fucking wonderful thing".
I think it's this discussion which is the key one to be having - what will happen to society, and what do we want our societies to be?
A couple of independent harm analyses: http://welshcouncil.org.uk/english/dangerlist.html http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
Similarly, higher drug use isn't necessarily a problem, since legalization would allow for treating drug addiction as a health problem, which would likely lead to decreased health problems as people are now free to seek treatment for their issues without worrying about arrest or other legal consequence.
Also, drug violence is a HUGE source of crime. The Mexican cartels, for instance, receive about 10x the funding of NASA by selling to the US drug market.
There's no way to overstate just how bad it is that we're funding paramilitary groups around the world to the tune of hundreds of billion of dollars a year, and the small increases in misery caused by any rise in drugs (which we haven't seen in nations that have taken laxer stands on drugs) would be offset by removing hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to some of the most violent organizations on Earth.
I don't think anyone wants our society to be a constant civil war so we can lock people in boxes for liking altered states of consciousness. It's clear that people who want drugs aren't going to stop, even if the other people threaten to throw them in cages and murder them for their habit. The only path drug prohibition can lead us down is to continue this civil war.
I think people who are against drug legalization literally don't know what's happening or how things work, because when they try to explain their stance to me, it always critically depends on things that are simply untrue.
There is no debate over prohibition: it's a failed policy and gives us an objectively worse outcome, no matter what your goal was, unless your goal was to see constant violence between large organizations, such as the US government and paramilitary groups.
All the people I've met who took drugs and then became violent or addicted had problems well before the drugs were there.
All the people I've met who could handle drugs were well adjusted, or were on their way to becoming well adjusted.
And then twice paid money to (what he believed) have somebody killed that was causing him a problem.
But upon further contemplation, maybe there was more wisdom behind donning the name Dread Pirate Roberts than Ulbricht realized. Power is a corrupting influence, and theres the old saying about what happens to those who fight monsters.
But ultimately, such corruption was his downfall, and delivered him into FBI custody. Now theres not only a new DPR, but a slew of new Silk Roads to replace him.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it was right, because that holds the assumption that he 100% would be helping people. What if you're wrong? What if there's a better way? 2 lives gone and nothing to show for it. In reality, it's pretty likely that he just went a bit fucking crazy. The point is that the creation of Silk Road was likely with the goal of changing the world for the better, and I can absolutely see that happening.
Now, I don't know how the state of such a product range would change if it were legalized. Who knows, they might even come up with ingenious ways to spice things up without increasing dosages. Flavors, combinations, negative-effect suppressants, whatever. Or how about people come up with ingenious places/ways to take drugs that prevent addiction, or simply enhance the setting.
I don't know. What I do know is that we should let people use/do what they want to their bodies. Will this have negative effects? Sure, they might, they might not. Personal choice trumps any sort of wide/vague societal benefits, otherwise society is just a bunch of tyrants. As long as what individuals do doesn't physically harm anyone, then they should be allowed to do it.
Eh, I dunno. I can see both sides of it. I worry that heroin is basically an advertiser's wet dream and you'd see all sorts of shady shit encouraging addiction. On the other hand we've already semi-successfully navigated those waters with tobacco. But then, I don't see people on the street in the bronx willing to blow someone for a cigarette. Maybe that's because it's legal. I dunno. Seems like something we should investigate before making policy decisions.
There're a lot of factors to be considered and "personal choice trumps all" is just as silly of an axiom as the opposite. There's a plethora of disallowed personal choices that the vast majority of people would agree are net positives for society, if only because "doesn't harm anyone else" is a very gray area.
As a high school kid (a decade ago), it was FAR easier to get marijuana, opiate pills, shrooms, and other drugs than it was to get alcohol, because alcohol required that we go through someone we knew personally not invested in the criminal market for their income, and was vaguely watched by the government (since they could regulate the caution the stores took).
> There's a plethora of disallowed personal choices that the vast majority of people would agree are net positives for society, if only because "doesn't harm anyone else" is a very gray area.
And being gay should be discouraged because it spreads AIDS.
The simple fact is that drug use doesn't require any risks to the public that we don't allow already for other substances, drugs are already being used by almost everyone who wants them, and our prohibition has cost us being able to effectively deal with the reckless uses of drugs because people are hiding all uses of drugs.
That you're trying to argue against the facts - prohibition is a failed policy that makes drug use more dangerous than treating it as a social health issue - seems awfully reminiscent of people who don't like gays inventing reasons they're dangerous.
Edit:
I made a several off-topic replies in my posts, including this one, to the person above me. For a more complete discussion of it, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218789
> And being gay should be discouraged because it spreads AIDS.
Wow! That's incredibly homophobic. Unprotected sex spreads AIDS. Being gay has nothing to do with it. If you didn't get the memo, in the 21st century we don't fear 'the gays spreading evil diseases' anymore.
> That you're trying to argue against the facts - prohibition is a failed policy that makes drug use more dangerous than treating it as a social health issue -
I wasn't arguing for prohibition. Where did I argue for prohibition? Did I say the word 'prohibition' anywhere? In fact, you touched on exactly my point:
> The simple fact is that drug use doesn't require any risks to the public that we don't allow already for other substances,
We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum?
Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.
We don't know where that maximum utility is though, because it's taboo to talk about. People immediately see the word 'drugs' and froth at the mouth and go off on tangents either about personal choice and cartels or conversely they go off about 'think of the children!'.
> seems awfully reminiscent of people who don't like gays inventing reasons they're dangerous.
Actually, you're the one who did that in this conversation :).
It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.
Why?
> to contrast the features of your argument (I think both have a couple of the same fallacies in their structure)
You were assuming I was arguing about something completely different (something about kids getting their hands on drugs or some such nonsense). It’s like you didn’t even take the time to read what I had written, and instead had some canned response ready to go.
> It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.
I took what you had written and used it as a podium to argue something completely different. Sound familiar :)?
> We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum? Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.
Three points on this:
1. When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.
2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.
3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is. Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids? Well, that's incredibly hard to assess, even once you pin down several of the subjective aspects. Instead, courts have been deciding the merits based on the impact this has to freedom and how consistently that reasoning is applied across similar cases. I greatly approve of this method of decision making. It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never. It's similarly reasonable to look at how people raising objections apply those same objections to similar cases - if they're consistent, then perhaps they have a real objection; if they're not, they need to explain this either by differences between the two cases or concede that's not their true objection.
No, I didn’t misunderstand it. It was dumb at best, and incredibly insensitive at worst (I’m sure the gay community appreciates you appropriating their plight).
> When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.
My point is that we vary greatly in our legal attitudes towards those substances, even recreationally. Tobacco at 18, Alcohol at 21. Can’t advertise tobacco much, but beer commercials are literally everywhere. What are we going to do with cocaine? Heroin? Is there any difference in our stance towards those two?
> 2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.
Well, ignoring that there are tons of other legal recreational drugs (caffeine comes to mind), there are actually some pretty general laws regarding them (e.g. tobacco at 18, alcohol at 21) and more specifically, advertising them. Implementation details of how we’re going to transition those drugs into the general populace is actually THE most important question in my mind.
> 3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is.
Horse shit. Deaths caused by drug warfare, death rates caused by complications (e.g. liver cirrhosis). Two metrics right there that nearly everyone cares about.
> Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids?
Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.
> It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never.
“by getting permission from his peers” is essentially what we do with alcohol and tobacco (hence the age restrictions, if we think of minors as individuals). “should be allowed to on a whim” is what we do for caffeine. They’re treated differently. What should we do for other drugs?
I was otherwise enjoying our conversation, but far from it being me who seems to have an issue with topics involving gays, I think it's you. You're unable to have a real discussion about the logical fallacies of well trodden, publicly expressed arguments from recent years (eg, I've seen all of these expressed by people fighting against gay rights in the past 5 years published in major news articles), and how they're similar to the argument you're making about drugs.
> Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.
I'm not ignorant of homosexuality in any manner, I just think you're advancing arguments on the topic of drugs with the same flawed logic that I routinely hear trotted out against me when discussing people I have sex with or might want to one day marry. That I chose personal examples of flawed arguments doesn't tell you anything about my stance on those topics.
Again, it's very unfortunate that you've chosen to attack me personally rather than address the topic, but I'm going to have to stop conversing with you.
I'll take that to mean you're sufficiently embarrassed about grandstanding for no reason. I hope in the future you read more carefully =).
I'll do so here and edit my original reply (if I still can): I'm sorry for my replies to you, they were partially off topic, and I think I initially misunderstood your point.
I still think you're overly focused on kids' safety, which is one of the main things the regulation you're talking about implementing as the main question we face is actually supposed to deal with. (The other things it deals with is other kinds of verification that you're buying appropriate amounts, eg, not reselling.) I do agree that how we implement such decisions is one of the key questions about how we implement a decision to legalize drugs, but I'd argue it's entirely irrelevant (and a variation on "think of the children!") to the decision of whether or not to go about legalizing more recreational drugs.
> your incredibly dumb appropriation of the gay rights plight as an analogy for drug legalization
Gay rights isn't an analogy for drug legalization, nor have I ever tried to claim the two were analogous. It just happens that many good examples of clearly fallacious arguments which are widely known come from people arguing against the rights of gays, and I elected to use two arguments that have been told to me personally as examples of poor arguments which have a similar structure to ones you were making. There is no deeper link nor analogy between the two topics.
The vast majority do seem to make it through though although some odd things do happen, some packages appear to have been held up in customs for literally years before they're released, it's not unusual to hear stories of people receiving orders that they already received (because they were shipped a second time and those got through) a couple of years after the initial order. You've got to suspect that might be an attempt to damage the companies selling them economically by making them re-send to destroy their margins.
But the trade still thrives, not just for the US but also for high tax countries ordering from abroad is a much cheaper and practical option.
Good packaging consists of multiple layers of vacuum seal and some kind of visual barrier. Fake names, vacant addresses, no return address, trying to mask smells with coffee/foods, etc. are all generally thought to be criteria for 'flagging' a package for more careful review (drug dogs, x-ray machines).
Just the other day I ordered £0.99 worth of self-adhesive hooks on ebay, with free shipping from Hong Kong.
It's hard to say whether the parcel passed an inspection that left no marks, or whether it just wasn't inspected.
I've also purchased Zopiclone and Valium through Silk Road which has been shipped from the U.S. without issues (Hyperdontia, so with frequent toothache I need to know I can get to sleep at night so that I can work the next day, and I've had better experiences with the vendors on SR than I have with doctors and dentists.)
FYI if you have an abcess then you should really get it seen to!
http://worldental.org/teeth/abscessed-tooth-complications-an...
I went to my GP asking for a single Ambien (Zolpidem) to help me sleep on a long haul flight and they said no as it 'could cause dependency'. So I bought 60 over the counter with no prescription in Thailand.
I don't have a fear of dentists, I think spending money on solving pain issues is the best money one can spend. And I use a private dentist rather than NHS (since every NHS dentist near my home does not seem to be taking new patients.) – It's not an abscess that I have, I seem to sprout new teeth frequently, I'm on my third and fourth set of adult teeth (different teeth in their own different generations), and they keep coming, and as they're pushing through it causes a lot of pain, which is manageable apart from a pain perspective, but I don't get much sleep whilst waiting for an appointment. Zopiclone helps with that, but it's not easily obtainable despite the condition being on medical record.
You can imagine that with a consistent system, this reputation can be transmitted/communicated to new parties. Think EBay for a clear example. Perhaps not the best of analogies, as EBay has money back guarantees/insurance, etc. But as long as drugs remain in the dark underbelly of government-hate, don't expect much protection from conventional institutions.
Tor is a browser now?