Australian drug users taking a punt on the new Silk Road
An online smorgasboard for illegal drugs is challenging global law enforcement, with Australians among the many thousands of international consumers weighing risk against the prospect of cheap and readily-available drugs. Chris Shearer reports.
“PERFECT timing,” says Robert, waving an envelope jubilantly in one hand. There’s nothing particularly notable about it except for the blue and green stamp that says it’s from The Netherlands. It is addressed to Robert’s house in Melbourne but the very common surname is fictitious.
Robert tears it open and pulls out two postcards featuring Dutch tulip fields. Each postcard has only ‘Thank-you for your order’ and a name printed on it. But wedged between them is a clear plastic slip that holds two thin, hexagonal ecstasy pills.
“It’s a free sample,” explains Robert, which is not the young man’s real name.
“Basically, if they’re a new vendor or want to promote a new product they’ll offer a sample as a way to get people to buy it or order it. Just to build a reputation.”
The ecstasy comes from the Netherlands but was ordered via Silk Road, an online black market for illicit drugs. Its users like to describe it as an “eBay for drugs” and it seems a pretty apt description.
The site features hundreds of vendors from across the globe offering thousands of products. Silk Road provides a platform for selling consumer goods, too, but it is its extensive drugs menu that gives rise to its notoreity. Like other e-commerce sites, it embodies user ratings, long product descriptions, categories and even a function that allows you to search the wares of domestic sellers only.
It is widely estimated that Silk Road is reaping annual sales of between $30 and $45 million, providing a neat dividend for “Dread Pirate Roberts”, the anonymous figure (or figures) behind the site. It may just be a small slice of the estimated hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit drugs that are sold globally each year, but Silk Road’s innovative purchasing system means potentially anyone can gain access with just a few clicks.
So, how is this all possible? Firstly, Silk Road operates on the bitcoin (BTC), an online crypto-currency not managed by a central authority. Buying bitcoins is legal and remarkably easy. It’s also extremely difficult to trace transactions made with the currency.
Secondly, Silk Road operates on the deep web and can’t be accessed without a Tor browser, which works aggressively to conceal the location and identity of the user. So far, this seems to have largely protected the site’s users and creators from unwanted law enforcement attention, although police across a range of constituencies are increasingly alert to the fast-expanding cyber conduit that has opened a new front in the battle against drugs.
“We know Australians were some of the early adopters among people who were purchasing drugs through Silk Road,” says Monica Barratt, a research fellow at the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University. Dr Barratt became interested in the workings of Silk Road after a friend pointed her to an article about the site in 2011.
Last year, she was involved in the Global Drug Survey, an international collaboration involving academics, researchers and media, and was able to include some questions about Silk Road in the questionnaire, including why people used the site.
“The most common response was . . . [that it provided] greater access to a variety of drugs they could otherwise not access,” she told The Citizen. “The second one was access to better quality drugs than they could access. The third one was they found it convenient.
“So, what was really interesting about these three reasons was we could be talking about eBay. None of them were drug-specific reasons.”
Just as the Internet more generally is connecting communities across the globe, the implication of Silk Road’s existence is that it is opening up a world of drugs to many Australians who otherwise would have never sought out, nor made, the kind of connections necessary to engage in this kind of international commerce.
“Robert”, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is one such Australian. The 25-year-old works in the service industry and confesses to occasional use of a variety of illicit drugs. With a friend’s help he first accessed the site in mid-2012.
“It was exciting. Also, kind of confronting to have it all there, you know, out in the open. I had a little look around, flirted with the idea of purchasing, but at that time the idea of buying bitcoins and putting them into your account was way above my head.”
But earlier this year he managed to do so and it didn’t take long for him to place his first order -- 50 ecstasy pills from the Netherlands. The seller had impressed Robert with the detailed terms and conditions, product description and explanation of stealth shipping methods, and was highly rated by previous customers.
The product description called them ‘mortal kombats’ because they had the logo of the popular video game stamped into each deep red pill. Each contained 205 milligrams of MDMA (the core component of ecstasy), potency beyond anything that Robert had experienced in Australia. The fabled ‘white hearts’ that had been pedalled through Melbourne a few years back, and which the old pill crowd still occasionally talked about, supposedly contained just 120 milligrams.
Nonetheless, taking the step from browser to buyer on Silk Road, and ordering 50 pills to his front door, was big. In the end, it was the price that sealed the deal for Robert – on Silk Road, the pills were a fifth of the price of local ecstasy.
“Basically, I wanted to try it out and if it was successful I wanted to have 50 ‘in the bank’, so to speak. Just for, you know, every now and then. And then I wouldn’t have to deal with buying them here.”
So he placed his first order.
“It was startling, really,” he reflects now. “Basically, just press a button and it will say ‘processing’ and it will go to ‘in transit’. Then you wait.”
Continued -
- See more at:
http://www.thecitizen.org.au/featur...aking-punt-new-silk-road#sthash.kDvxLqOK.dpuf
