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Heroin Dealer Shares Experience Selling Drugs Online via Silk Road

neversickanymore

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Heroin Dealer Shares Experience Selling Drugs Online via Silk Road
By Nicole Arce,
January 30, 2015

Prosecutors called to the witness stand on Wednesday morning a 40-year-old man from Orange County, New York who, at one time, made $60,000 to $70,000 a month selling heroin on the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road.

The goal was not to prove that Ross Ulbricht, who is on trial for allegedly being the mastermind of the illicit drugs marketplace, is the man behind the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. By calling on Michael Duch to testify, prosecutors wanted to show the jury a grim picture of how Silk Road fueled the addictions of desperate drug addicts and how easy it was for them to obtain illegal substances via the website's private network.

Donning a dark blue prisoner's suit, Duch described to the jury how he was able to sell a total of 31,826 0.1 gram bags of heroin, or just about 3.18 kilograms of the illicit substance, by connecting with "sickdope" customers on Silk Road. Duch, who was arrested just as he was about to mail a package of heroin at the post office of Monroe, New York in October 2013, the same month Silk Road's operations were shut down and Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco, is cooperating with authorities in an attempt to reduce what would normally be a minimum of 20 years in prison for high-volume narcotics trafficking.

Initially, Duch went on Silk Road in 2012 after he heard about it in a news TV program. By that time, he was well into a five-year addiction for painkillers after a doctor prescribed it to him for a sports injury sustained in 2007. But Duch's addiction was increasingly becoming financially unmanageable, as he was making only $75,000-a-year for his work as an individual computer consultant, a figure not enough to sustain his $3,000-a-month addiction. That was when he decided to peddle the drugs himself.

"I had an addiction," an obviously pained Duch told the jury. "I needed to feed it."

Seeing how the "relative ease" offered by Silk Road could let him "potentially get away with it," Duch began peddling drugs online under the username Deezletime. He purchased bags of heroin from a street-level dealer, who sold it to him for $3 apiece or $349 for each 50-bag "brick," and sold it with a 100 percent mark-up to customers who paid through bitcoin, the electronic currency required by Silk Road.

Indeed, it was relatively easy for Duch to attract customers even for the price he offered because many of his anonymous customers were from areas that had no local supply of heroin. He estimates that he was able to sell some 400 to 600 bags of the substance every day, fulfilling more than 2,400 orders.

Duch's main selling point, he said, was the same-day shipping he provided. Duch would place the drugs in moisture barrier bags inserted into nondescript mailing envelopes to avoid drug-sniffing canines and ward off suspicion and the package would be received by his clients, many of whom were addicts going through withdrawal.

He did not, however, get rich. Duch said he placed part of his five-figure monthly earnings back into his drug dealing activities and another part he used for his own growing addiction.

Prosecuting attorney Serrin Turner showed screenshots of some of the messages sent by clients to Deezletime. One customer hidden by the username Wigglyworm begged Duch to send the package immediately, "otherwise, I'm gonna be sick."

Continued here http://www.techtimes.com/articles/2...rience-selling-drugs-online-via-silk-road.htm
 
That´s sad, but I guess it explains why he went on with this knowing this activity would always be fairly risky and predictable dangerous. He was just another junkie..
 
It is ridiculous to put someone in a cage and ruin their reputation and life because they have a opiate dependence. This drug war part of our society makes me sick. Peoples lives that are already probably not that great get even more screwed once caught with the substance of their dependence. And then are given a record, fined, jailed, whatever. It really makes no sense. Does 'the system' really think adding those kinds of burdens onto an already struggling person will help them in any way??:?
 
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They must think that BC everyday people wind up getting sentences well over that of people who have violently harmed other ppl andaybe it will stop others on the same persuit. Yea right....
 
Lolol
i know no real dopefiend is gonna stay getting shit off sr
at least if they use the way i used to and the people i used to use with
Waiting for it to come like that shit
we used to get mad if dude took 15 minutes let alone days.
 
LSDMDMA&12857574 said:
Lolol
i know no real dopefiend is gonna stay getting shit off sr
at least if they use the way i used to and the people i used to use with
Waiting for it to come like that shit
we used to get mad if dude took 15 minutes let alone days.


Yeah, I can see that. I see the demand for things like psychedelics that can be a little more planned. With something like this, even though I've never done it, I can imagine the wait being gruesome.
 
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