Consequences of the internet drug trade

[Burnt Offerings]

I see the dark web thing as being a net plus. I still buy "street drugs" (i.e. meth, heroin, weed, etc.) on the street, but anything a little more "exotic" (like MDMA, for example, or even LSD)? Good fucking luck find that on the street level here. Something a little more rare than that (such as MXE, for instance) you simply won't be able to find, period. The fact that these drugs can be found easily and even vetted "Consumer Reports"-style online, with 3rd party drug testing and consumer reviews/findings and all of that...to me that is an awesome development!

 

[andy85258]

As good as it sounds, i dont think i could ever bring myself to leave an electronic footprint when it comes to illegal substances.
which sucks cause getting things mailed to my door would def be better than having to deal with sir sketch alot and his knights of the shadowy table.

 

[SmokingAces]

^if you know what your doing you wont.

 

[Dresden]

Keep getting such nice, once rare and hard to find Schedule I or II drugs from an email address or darknet marketplace in the USPS mail over and over and you will get busted. UPS and FedEx are probably not much safer. And the penalties of you will be convicted will be draconian. In person with a trusted friend who has quality goods at decent prices is still the only way I go. I don't do BitCoin or TOR and have no idea where on the darknet to go looking for my hedonistic Shangri-La party favors. The last clearnet RC website I blew $106 bucks on ripped me off hardcore. At least in the old days we had safeorscam.com. I'm just too old for all this new crap.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

^ actually the penalties I've seen have been surprisingly lenient/rare, in the USA at least. That one kid who was getting serious weight shipped to him from the Netherlands (MDMA) & had been under DEA surveillance for some time only got a few years, IIRC. Someone in my hometown got busted while receiving 25 grams of heroin in the mail (not deep web related, to the best of my knowledge) and copped down to a drug misconduct misdemeanor (probably because he rolled on his supplier). Depends a lot on the circumstances of the individual case.

 

[One Thousand Words]

The biggest problem about being a bedroom warrior is the real risk of isolation and the mental effects this brings. Living in an online world comes with the ability to censor and limit information you don't want to hear. I'm not talking about copping from some dirty corner dealer, but when you have a legit connect they will often point out an increase in quality that may need a little more care. Even the simple act of putting pants on to go meet someone prevents a lot of users dying alone in their own filth.

The higher up the drug dealing food chain you go the more likely there is to be trust and dare I say respect between transactions. I guess it also comes with having the confidence to pull out your own scales and test kits in their lounge room, but the personal touch comes with a little more professionalism. There is also the opportunity for them to introduce you to a new product or perhaps a sample of their private stash as you share a spliff and a beer while exchanging stories about family etc.

Don't be fooled into thinking that many vendors are some sort of Amazon warehouse of drug supply. Any neck beard can create a slick looking website. Reality is a lot of online businesses are living the same lonely basement existence as their customers. They are often packaging shit on their kitchen table like a hobby. Online competition is the only thing perhaps keeping the quality in check.

 

[dopemaster]

I think I had one of my plugs die cuz dude just diasappeared one day and he told me he had just got a shitload of high quality.

I dunno what happened and like his name vanished of the web.

The shit he had was really heavy duty and like i mean you would have to know what you were doing with that shit but yeah one fuckup and a person can die like nothing.

So yeah rc fents are kinda sketchy cuz they are hella easy to od on and that is not good. It is dirt cheap but lacking in euphoria as fent sucks anyways. It has like no rush and short legs, but is dirt cheap, so constant redosing to maintain a buz so like srs pain in the ass unless you use like a time release method like im or blotters. I guess it takes a while to get your fent tolerance at a anywhere close to safe level.

Like for real that shit is hella sketch. Its dirt cheap but fucking sketch.

 

[neurotic]

what SKL said...

 

[SKL]

I see the dark web thing as being a net plus. I still buy "street drugs" (i.e. meth, heroin, weed, etc.) on the street, but anything a little more "exotic" (like MDMA, for example, or even LSD)? Good fucking luck find that on the street level here. Something a little more rare than that (such as MXE, for instance) you simply won't be able to find, period. The fact that these drugs can be found easily and even vetted "Consumer Reports"-style online, with 3rd party drug testing and consumer reviews/findings and all of that...to me that is an awesome development!

MDMA and LSD can be found in the right scene, if not on street level retail. This is a good thing. The Internet if anything has just beshitted the quality of what is offered retail. Of course, drug testing, harm reduction, etc. but when any fool can buy any chemical, it's a disaster for the local ecosystem. Things are better when shit is run on a bit more of an elite basis.

And the "consumer reports vetting" is a joke. Do you think massive fraud and shilling doesn't go on? Even back in the pre-Tor/Darkweb days entire forums would be set up and run on pretense for months with the sole purpose of running a single large scale exit scam. I understand that it still goes on. Can you really believe shit you read on the Internet? A man's word is his bond IRL, or he's a piece of shit. I would never do business with someone who I could neither shake hands with nor shake down if the necessity eventuated.

As good as it sounds, i dont think i could ever bring myself to leave an electronic footprint when it comes to illegal substances.
which sucks cause getting things mailed to my door would def be better than having to deal with sir sketch alot and his knights of the shadowy table.

^if you know what your doing you wont.

This sort of overconfidence and techno-optimism is why Ross Ulbricht is going to die in prison. Naïveté in this arena has real consequences.

If you really, really, really know what you're doing, to a level that very few people do
(it's not just a matter of install Linux, Tor, PGP, whatever) maybe your COMSEC is secure
but your OPSEC won't be secure, ever
you, after all, still have to transfer drugs and money
the Achilles' heel

The biggest problem about being a bedroom warrior is the real risk of isolation and the mental effects this brings. Living in an online world comes with the ability to censor and limit information you don't want to hear. I'm not talking about copping from some dirty corner dealer, but when you have a legit connect they will often point out an increase in quality that may need a little more care. Even the simple act of putting pants on to go meet someone prevents a lot of users dying alone in their own filth.

The higher up the drug dealing food chain you go the more likely there is to be trust and dare I say respect between transactions. I guess it also comes with having the confidence to pull out your own scales and test kits in their lounge room, but the personal touch comes with a little more professionalism. There is also the opportunity for them to introduce you to a new product or perhaps a sample of their private stash as you share a spliff and a beer while exchanging stories about family etc.

Don't be fooled into thinking that many vendors are some sort of Amazon warehouse of drug supply. Any neck beard can create a slick looking website. Reality is a lot of online businesses are living the same lonely basement existence as their customers. They are often packaging shit on their kitchen table like a hobby. Online competition is the only thing perhaps keeping the quality in check.

QFT, I have little to add.

what SKL said...

Word.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

MDMA and LSD can be found in the right scene, if not on street level retail. This is a good thing. The Internet if anything has just beshitted the quality of what is offered retail. Of course, drug testing, harm reduction, etc. but when any fool can buy any chemical, it's a disaster for the local ecosystem. Things are better when shit is run on a bit more of an elite basis.

eh, to hell with that. That's not the way the world is moving and frankly I'm not nostalgic for a world in which a certain select group of people are "gatekeepers" of something, whether that something is culture or drugs or whatever. I'm a consumer and I want a decent product at a fair price. If that involves some of the local rip-off artists going out of business, oh well!

The nostalgia for "mom and pop" operations is dumb. These same operations (both legal and illegal) are the same outfits which would routinely rip off their customers and price gouge with glee, then cry when some equally ruthless (but larger and more capable, as opposed to merely be exploitative on a micro scale) competitor moves in on their turf, a la Wal-Mart. The mini capitalist exploiter falls victim to the major capitalist exploiter, oh well

And the "consumer reports vetting" is a joke. Do you think massive fraud and shilling doesn't go on? Even back in the pre-Tor/Darkweb days entire forums would be set up and run on pretense for months with the sole purpose of running a single large scale exit scam. I understand that it still goes on. Can you really believe shit you read on the Internet? A man's word is his bond IRL, or he's a piece of shit. I would never do business with someone who I could neither shake hands with nor shake down if the necessity eventuated.

Oh sure, I never would believe (and never did believe) just what some seller scrawled on their page. But a lot of vendors did ship very small quantities of their product to labs in Europe for testing, and many of them weren't all that happy with the results as I remember, for cocaine specifically.

I don't get the affection for real-world druggie interaction. Most of the people I know who like what I like are pieces of shit, honestly. One of my drug dealers was the first person to convince me to shoot up...another stole my car (briefly)...another still owes me money which I'll probably never see because she moved out of state...another started pulling out guns in a parking lot because he thought we were about to be robbed...another is now in jail for armed robbery because he stabbed a cab driver with a broken bottle during a robbery for trivial amount of money...etc. I can do without that kind of "quality time" thank you very much. Compared to that bullshit an email address looks warm and inviting. 8)

 

[Broseph Smith]

eh, to hell with that. That's not the way the world is moving and frankly I'm not nostalgic for a world in which a certain select group of people are "gatekeepers" of something, whether that something is culture or drugs or whatever. I'm a consumer and I want a decent product at a fair price. If that involves some of the local rip-off artists going out of business, oh well!

The nostalgia for "mom and pop" operations is dumb. These same operations (both legal and illegal) are the same outfits which would routinely rip off their customers and price gouge with glee, then cry when some equally ruthless (but larger and more capable, as opposed to merely be exploitative on a micro scale) competitor moves in on their turf, a la Wal-Mart. The mini capitalist exploiter falls victim to the major capitalist exploiter, oh well



Oh sure, I never would believe (and never did believe) just what some seller scrawled on their page. But a lot of vendors did ship very small quantities of their product to labs in Europe for testing, and many of them weren't all that happy with the results as I remember, for cocaine specifically.

I don't get the affection for real-world druggie interaction. Most of the people I know who like what I like are pieces of shit, honestly. One of my drug dealers was the first person to convince me to shoot up...another stole my car (briefly)...another still owes me money which I'll probably never see because she moved out of state...another started pulling out guns in a parking lot because he thought we were about to be robbed...another is now in jail for armed robbery because he stabbed a cab driver with a broken bottle during a robbery for trivial amount of money...etc. I can do without that kind of "quality time" thank you very much. Compared to that bullshit an email address looks warm and inviting. 8)

What Burnt Offerings just said!



Really find few pros and far more cons to a street dealer versus online. I really don't get how there can be an objective argument.

SKL and others can play in the streets, I prefer safer and cleaner areas when doing my grocery shopping.

?

 

[SKL]

eh, to hell with that. That's not the way the world is moving and frankly I'm not nostalgic for a world in which a certain select group of people are "gatekeepers" of something, whether that something is culture or drugs or whatever. I'm a consumer and I want a decent product at a fair price. If that involves some of the local rip-off artists going out of business, oh well!

The nostalgia for "mom and pop" operations is dumb. These same operations (both legal and illegal) are the same outfits which would routinely rip off their customers and price gouge with glee, then cry when some equally ruthless (but larger and more capable, as opposed to merely be exploitative on a micro scale) competitor moves in on their turf, a la Wal-Mart. The mini capitalist exploiter falls victim to the major capitalist exploiter, oh well

All I can say is, the customer is not always right. ITT I was never really talking about the customer anyway. People buying pissant quantities of drugs don't really have a right to an opinion on how the scene should be run. Silk Road type sites leveling the playing field to a degree (but to a degree only) really screws up the ecosystem by disrupting this fact.

Your local middleman is not only supporting himself and his family but if he is not a total shitbird is acting as a quality control measure and probably has people accountable to him and people to whom he is accountable. An email address, who the hell knows? Especially given that they can seem totally legit and then turn a 180 on you and there's nothing to hint that to you and nothing you can do about it. If, during the days when I was playing ball, somebody pulled that shit to me, damn sure I would be up in his place with a gun in his face demanding that he make things right. Since he would know well that that was a possibility, he wouldn't really entertain playing that sort of bullshit on me, would he? The last time that someone tried to rip and run me he wound up hiding up in some cabin 3 states away and through an intermediary offering a settlement which I eventually accepted. If he hadn't offered the settlement or if I hadn't accepted it, there would've been IRL consequences for the both of us. This is what keeps the market ecosystem alive. Online, what the fuck? Just get a new email address and start building a new rep for a new scam. If I had lower ethics than I do I would be doing this all day and making bank.

Also, aren't drugs sold at preposterously overinflated prices on these sites anyway? I browsed briefly and was particularly shocked by what people were selling LSD for even in semibulk/bulk quantities. MDMA was cheap but NL MDMA has always been cheap, coke/dope were usually taxed but not much more than you'd pay in a rural area, but whatever, why not just support your local businessmen and get fucked to all that Internet and postal service bullshit.

Everyone does realize that this stuff is eventually going to come crashing down in flames, right?

Yet the spice must flow ... and it will flow as it has since the beginning. Modern technologies will be involved, of course, but the end user will not be invited, because that's asking for trouble. Enter into an arena where larger than personal use amounts of drugs are being sold and you are expected to act like a fucking professional, otherwise facing the consequences. Anonymous bitcoin whatever the fuck email address communication eliminates that and that's the fundamental problem with this paradigm.

Oh sure, I never would believe (and never did believe) just what some seller scrawled on their page. But a lot of vendors did ship very small quantities of their product to labs in Europe for testing, and many of them weren't all that happy with the results as I remember, for cocaine specifically.

Whatever. You're still likely to be paying an inflated price, especially taking into account the costs of converting money into BTC and establishing the infrastructure to receive drugs (i.e. fake ID, P.O. box obtained under the same, etc., and if you don't do this, youi're an idiot), taking additional risks on in the form of receiving drugs in the mail, and so on.

I don't get the affection for real-world druggie interaction. Most of the people I know who like what I like are pieces of shit, honestly. One of my drug dealers was the first person to convince me to shoot up...another stole my car (briefly)...another still owes me money which I'll probably never see because she moved out of state...another started pulling out guns in a parking lot because he thought we were about to be robbed...another is now in jail for armed robbery because he stabbed a cab driver with a broken bottle during a robbery for trivial amount of money...etc. I can do without that kind of "quality time" thank you very much. Compared to that bullshit an email address looks warm and inviting. 8)

As I said, supra, 21st century schizoid man.
Drug culture isn't meant to be antisceptic-clean and it will not remain so
It's just not possible
The idea that the online stuff will make it clean is just naïve
believe me the same scumfuckery exists behind the curtain
it's just cloaked in some cute CSS sheets or whatever
just watch
this whole online stuff is good for a laugh like Pharcyde says
but when the pedal meets the metal
people with IRL operational skills are like cockroaches
we'll survive whatever no matter how many of us get locked up
the lilly livered bourgeois hipster-aspergian-libertarian Ulbricht's of the world are nothing
an irrelevancy, a drop in the water
his sin was to think that he mattered, that his bullshit knockoff S.E. Konkin philosophy mattered
and that he could just wade into our scene and make some kind of philosophical point
what he did is to damage a fragile ecosystem
the consequences are baleful
and are just now playing out
kids who grow up ordering drugs like Amazon books
are missing out on half of the experience of drugs
which, if you don't know, because you are such a kid
isn't just about the effect on your neurotransmitters
it's about a culture and a scene and this feeling that you get
you and the scene vs all the rest
not just some transactional bullshit with a receipt and an escrow
fuck all that and let Ross contemplate his intrusion into our world in fed prison for the rest of his life
and so too to all his successors who will either wind up in prison or as scammers
I don't wish prison on anyone like I don't wish cancer on anyone
but if anyone needed a wakeup call
if anyone was asking for a wakeup call by disrupting the natural order of things
it was Ross
I have an extraordinarily low degree of sympathy for the kid

 

[Burnt Offerings]

Whatever. You're saying that people don't have a "right" to dictate how the scene should be run; I'm saying you're full of shit and the idea that the illegal drug world should have arbitrators so that Joe Pissant can't score his dimebags at his own convenience rather than relying on some "middleman" (lol, yeah, everyone loves a bag pincher right...but hey, if your 50 bag doesn't weigh you can always grab your piece and wave it in their face, right?) in the name of protecting THE SCENE, which in my mind is like trying to make sure a giant pile of trash & filth is protected from the carrion birds.

Elitists in every subculture hate it when certain aspects of that subculture become a little more popularized/less insular, I suppose.

 

[SKL]

All very well and good for the end user, with some quite problematic exceptions.
Airbnb is, with some quite problematic exceptions, all very well and good for the end user.
Uber is, with some quite problematic exceptions, all very well and good for the end user.
Airbnb is bad for hotels, Uber is bad for taxi drivers (and quite often for Uber drivers.)
Heck, the Internet itself ... although there's no simple formulation for that.
All of these things that seriously "disrupt" the way society is run need questioning rather than automatic embrace based on convenience.

And why shouldn't the illegal drug world have arbitrators? Everything does. That's the natural order of the world.
Ulbricht's little libertarian pipe dream was him entering or world knowing nothing of our world and respect less, just to make some ideological point.
His minions and successors are profiteers, scammers, and the selfsame middlemen that you decry.
And the customers are part of an increasingly atomised society buying overpriced drugs by post from email addresses.
It's all a mess.

Remember all, I'm speaking not against Internet drug trade eo ipso, but against it's being widely and openly available to the public without any sort of vetting, and thus not existing as a smaller, more comfortable community which is based on trust (as were the online communities that existed prior to Silk Road, should you have been privileged to have been a part of one. I'm sure many Bluelighters were. If you are Bluelighter with deep connections to the Internet community and I'm saying that people shouldn't have ready access to Internet drugs then I'm probably not talking about you.) That is the fundamentally destructive consequence of the "Darknet Markets" as they exist today. Atomisation and loss of trust, identity and community. The rest are just ripple down effects. That is the heart of the beast.

 

[namnoc16]

Um what was the question again,lol?

 

[SKL]

Um what was the question again,lol?

There wasn't really one, this thread started as a bunch of random discussion in the Lounge.
I think several people are in here answering several different questions.
The question I'm answering is "what is the impact on the scene of the extension of the availability of online drug sales to the end user in an easy transactional manner?"

 

[namnoc16]

It's easy transactional but where do you think your purchasing info goes. I know,I know it's all encrypted but trust me once that posts is out there, there is always a way to trace it back to you. The new generation is to trusting and I think buying drugs online is crazy,imho))Not to mention opiates are my DOC and I couldn't imagine paying for my shit and having to wait a week to get it,now pot or psychedelics I could wait but dope I'd be ready to rip the mail mans head off every time he shows up empty handed!

 

[SKL]

It's easy transactional but where do you think your purchasing info goes. I know,I know it's all encrypted but trust me once that posts is out there, there is always a way to trace it back to you. The new generation is to trusting and I think buying drugs online is crazy,imho))Not to mention opiates are my DOC and I couldn't imagine paying for my shit and having to wait a week to get it,now pot or psychedelics I could wait but dope I'd be ready to rip the mail mans head off every time he shows up empty handed!

yep. not to mention you would cry to see the prices opiates demand on these sites when I looked at them. acid too, for that matter. and pretty much everything else except maybe MDMA.

 

[belligerent drunk]

yep. not to mention you would cry to see the prices opiates demand on these sites when I looked at them. acid too, for that matter. and pretty much everything else except maybe MDMA.

I find it hard to agree with you about acid. I've found that acid/analogues are actually quite cheap (not allowed to give an estimated price, right?) compared to what I'd have to pay around here, "on the street", plus I'd bet my middle nut that the "acid" I'd be buying on the street would not be acid. Let's just say that 250 μg blotters have cost me more than twice less than some sub-100 μg pseudo-LSD I managed to find "on the street". IMO if deepweb markets are good for something, it's for psychedelics.

I honestly believe that the free, rather big-scale, market that is the online market has considerably better quality, quality control and convenience; of course the degree of risk is debatable, but still I think the fact that you don't have to deal with shady people, who often have a few screws loose in their head, is a big plus. In addition to that, quasi-legal stuff is always good in places without stupid analogue laws (I don't live in the US).

 

[SKL]

No, online prices I've seen (I've never actually used any of these "darknet markets," but I browsed a few for my own edification and amusement), from tab to gram, are reliably inflated over what they are in the hippie festival/Dead/jamband circuit in the States. I can't speak for any other market and as per forum rules I can't speak as to specific numbers.

Also these mega-dosed blotters I cannot for the life of me understand. This is a Euro thing or an Internet thing or both that I just don't get. What is the fixation with putting large doses of LSD on single blotter squares and deviating from the (modern, yes we know that doses used to be much stronger in the acid test days) "industry standard" of 100mcg per hit thus 10mg per blotter, 100mg per tenpack, 1g = 10 tenpacks. Putting larger doses on blotters, of which I'm always skeptical when people start throwing numbers around, is just asking for trouble in terms of people getting in over their head (so it's irresponsible to sell them IMO and more of a dicksizing thing than anything), and buying them for correspondingly more expensive doesn't make a lot of sense either, why not just adjust the dose appropriately? And if you're buying them to resell, who would believe you if they told you had 250mcg blotters and they were worth 3*x where x is the usual price?