Dream Market, the Top Dark Web Marketplace, Will Shut Down Next Month (zdnet.com) 113
Dream Market, today's top dark web marketplace, today announced plans to shut down on April 30. From a report: The announcement came on the same day Europol, FBI, and DEA officials announced tens of arrests and a massive crackdown on dark web drug trafficking. The timing of the four announcements immediately sent most of Dream Market's users and dark web threat intel analysts into a frenzy of theories that law enforcement might have already seized the site and are now running a honeypot operation. Their fears are based on a similar event from June 2017 when Dutch police took over Hansa Market and ran the site for a month while collecting evidence on the portal's users. Law enforcement later used passwords collected from Hansa Market users to gain access to accounts on other dark web marketplaces.
I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:5, Interesting)
It does mean you can't just abandon addicts though, e.g. you can't just lock them up in a hole in the ground, you need to provide treatment, but even then the treatment is often cheaper than paying somebody to guard the hole, so to speak.
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Drug mafias are very rich and very powerful, precisely because their product is illegal.
If you make drugs legal, you pull the rug right out from under them. They don't want this, so they use their wealth and power to apply political pressure to the end of keeping drugs illegal.
People who don't understand how the world actually works often object to the above statements. They seem to think that the criminal mafias can effectively compete against legitimate drug sellers. They are straight-up wrong, which i
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It is clearly part of what is going on. The other part is that religious fuckups deeply desire to control what others can do with their bodies. No fun except in prayer. Some even say this openly. It is really a coalition of evil.
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Indeed. You may also find this research pretty much proves this: https://www.theauthoritarians.... [theauthoritarians.org]
Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, according to the ACLU [aclu.org]: "...for-profit companies were responsible for approximately 7 percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal prisoners in 2015 (the most recent numbers currently available)".
While that seems to start being a little high on the Federal side, it doesn't seem to be really THAT high of a number that everyone seems to keep touting as a reason to keep funneling people into the prison system.
While I agree it could put pressure on the system to try to fund itself, it doesn't appear to be as much of a central problem to legalizing drugs as some would have you think.
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You forget all the people employed to keep the "non-profit" prisons running. And all the suppliers. And all the judges, police, prosecutors, etc. They all want profits or job-security. The mere fact that the US has a lot of people behind bars (the only thing were the US is a real world-leader) creates huge incentives for keeping that going. Utterly perverted incentives.
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1- Name one place it's been tried and didn't turn to shit (as seen in Vancouver)
Many problems here. First off, Vancouver did not legalize drugs, probably just marijuana. And, that was partly in response to the fact that it was being treated as legal at the ground level already. Hardly a useful example.
Amsterdam is not a shithole, and certainly not MORE of a shithole than prior to decriminalization. Portugal has had positive numbers (lower youth use, less secondary and tertiary problems from addiction, falling use in general, etc). I honestly, can't think of ANY examples where it did *t
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1- Name one place it's been tried and didn't turn to shit (as seen in Vancouver)
Many problems here. First off, Vancouver did not legalize drugs, probably just marijuana. And, that was partly in response to the fact that it was being treated as legal at the ground level already. Hardly a useful example.
Amsterdam is not a shithole, and certainly not MORE of a shithole than prior to decriminalization. Portugal has had positive numbers (lower youth use, less secondary and tertiary problems from addiction, falling use in general, etc). [...] I've responded to this strawman enough.
The prohibitionists need to keep this strawman going, mostly with direct lies, because the have no rational arguments. They need to distort the perception of reality of others or they lose and their real motivations become obvious ("no fun except in prayer", desperate desire to control others, plain greed, plain maliciousness, etc.).
Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, that's why I only buy my whiskey from moonshiners. I'm not paying those taxes and who cares if the product might be total poison. Only suckers pay taxes on whiskey.
Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:4, Informative)
You might look at Portugal [theguardian.com], as that they pretty much legalized/decriminalized all drugs...and they have actually had a positive result.
I"m surprised more countries don't start looking at their model.
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>
I"m surprised more countries don't start looking at their model.
That would need rational politicians that actually try to understand stuff instead of just plain pushing their ideology and winning elections at any cost. We only have a tiny number of them and they are not very successful. What we get is those drunk with thirst for power and for control over others.
Maybe this can be the next thing some small country tries: Politicians that actually care to find out the facts and then act according to them.
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Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean as opposed to now where they're strung out on illegal drugs and so have little to lose by adding one more criminal charge?
Try running the prisons properly and legalizing drugs. Then the prospects are: Avoid crime and use drugs or commit a crime and 'enjoy' a few years in a drug free prison.
With the significantly reduced prison population and taxes on the drugs, we will easily be able to afford to upgrade the prisons and still save money.
Re: I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:4, Informative)
Because the money would got to the wrong people, mostly in South America.
If it was legal, they would no longer be the "wrong" people. They would be law abiding capitalists.
During prohibition, alcohol sales and distribution was control by criminals. Today, brewers and distillers are just normal businesses.
The same can happen with cocaine and heroin.
Re: I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs (Score:2)
I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs
That should be obvious to anyone with a pulse: someone is benefitting from their criminalization.
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Do you want cults? Because that's how you get cults.
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Surprise surprise!! There are actually people in the world that don't want to have to deal with zombie-like idiots that are strung out on drugs, walking around everywhere.
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Making drugs legal won't instantly transform hordes of otherwise-responsible people into drug users. Despite drugs being illegal, they are easily available basically everywhere; so the people who want to use them already are.
Your laws aren't making "those people" vanish. Your laws are just ensuring that tremendous amounts of wealth and power are being funneled into the hands of mafia bosses, instead of lawful tax-paying citizens.
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...(many killing themselves via OD)...
That does not happen. With clean, medical grade drugs, even heroine addicts do not have a reduced life-expectancy (and can even work regular jobs). This is one of the lies pushed in the "war" on drugs. Alcohol, smoking, sugar and fat are a different story. They do massively impact life-expectancy unless used very carefully.
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Indeed. The base-problem is that we have these fuckups in society that want to control what other people do, no matter what. And they think the only thing fun in live should be prayer.
In actual reality, anybody that wants drugs can get them. None of the deterrents work. The deterrents waste an extreme amount of money though and cause massive secondary damage. So legalizing drugs would have a number of advantages.
First, the cost goes down massively and the quality goes massively up and becomes reliable. That
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the real solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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If a cop looks in the window of your car and see a pile of drugs, they don't need your permissions or a warrant to "search" it at that point.
What if they just walk the dogs around every window of every house in your neighborhood?
Re:the real solution (Score:5, Interesting)
If they did that, they would be forced to admit that there's enough residue on common items that the dog would alert to everything.
For example, money. Pretty much all of it will test positive for at least cocaine.
The dirty secret: Most of the time the dog alerts due to subtle cues from it's handler, not from something it smells.
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That's certainly an interesting assertion. Is it anecdotal or have people/studies shown this?
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The AC's link is good. Here's another [reason.com]
Even ignoring that, the problem is more fundamental. Let's imagine for a moment the world's one and only infallible drug sniffing dog. He alerts to the SMELL of drugs. That is not the same as alerting to drugs actually in the package. If someone else's package full of drugs got damaged, there may be drugs ON the innocent package. If it rode in the back of a hot truck next to an imperfectly sealed box of pot, it will smell like pot. In either case since it is rare for on
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Also, the whole thing does not work on the tech side in the first place. If it did, the packaging of the wares would just be upgraded to something the dogs cannot snuff though. Also, it is absolutely no problem to send, say, 10% fake shipments to people that never ordered anything, probably with just the carton soaked in the stuff to set off the dogs, but not endanger anybody at the target. That would kill the dog idea pretty fast. They would collapse from overwork and no useful result would ensue.
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You might be surprised. How much trace do you suppose you leave in a footstep? We know dogs can smell that and differentiate between two people.
Re:the real solution (Score:4, Informative)
When I was a UPS Driver in Santa Cruz we would get back to the building with our pick ups and there were San Jose PD drug sniffing dogs going over the conveyor belts. Any hits and they would pull the packages aside and then let the dogs go over them more thoroughly outside.
The dogs were from the San Jose PD, and I don't know how many centers they would check, or maybe it was just Santa Cruz, but it happened every fall during harvest time. I told my grower friends if they are going to use UPS, make sure to use Next Day Air, those are taken from the truck to the airport shuttle pretty quickly to make flights out, so the dogs never got to sniff those.
This was back in 2000 though, so things may have changed until it became legal.
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Everybody has grower friends. Some just don't know it.
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I worked at a UPS hub in San Diego and they had no drug sniffing dogs. Sure, if a driver noticed a massive marijuana smell from a package, the package would be given to the police, but it is not hard to keep your package from being so smelly that the driver picking it up has no idea what is inside.
There may be drug sniffing dogs in some distribution centers but certainly not in all; furthermore, it is likely illegal (not tested in a court of law, yet) to have a dog at a distribution facility.
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Envelopes and parcels jostle together an awful lot. That means that enough residue for a dog to smell will easily pass from the envelope or parcel with drugs to one without. That means a lot of false positives. That means unreasonable search and seizure.
Re:the real solution (Score:4, Interesting)
let's see.
1 dog, 6 packages/minute (unlikely they could actually do one in 10 seconds)).
8 hours sniffing/day (no idea how many they actually can work, but between food, and walks, and what not, seems reasonable)
that's 2800/dog/day
UPS sends 15.8 million packages/day on average.
So that's 5600 drug dogs (though they'd need 50% more in the winter).
So, 4000 for the dog, 1000 for the training stuff, 2500 for food and vet over it's life, for 5 productive years
1500/year * 5000 is 7.5 million/year.
Of course, 5200 handlers is likely another 150 million or so.
And to cover Christmas we're at 50% more.
That's a lot of money, ignoring the fact that a 10 second per package bottle neck would make shipping that many packages practically impossible.
Re:the real solution (Score:4, Insightful)
If they did this, an obvious counter-measure would be for the drug gangs to pay an insider to smear a bit of cocaine paste on random packages.
Misting all the packages with capsaicin would also work.
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There is a bigger horror here:
What if Big Brother decides that its okay, and start tracking down people sending cocaine paste packages? I can see forced verification of return address to ship becoming common if somebody bothered.
Generally the most interesting thing about enforcement is that it works so long its actually consistent and upheld. And what isn't enforced won't be enforced and will go nowhere.
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You overlook two things: First, getting drugs is actually easy. And second, it is mostly tolerated, simply because doing something effective would cost a lot of people their jobs. The same people that are employed in the "war" on drugs, incidentally. So they just need to make enough arrests (mostly small, the occasional larger one, but never threatening the whole business) to keep the fear going and to justify their pay-checks. But they must never actually put a real dent in the thing.
Why is there such a pervasiveness about drugs? (Score:2)
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Doing something positive with the money? Naa, we cannot have that. Doing negative things like fighting some trumped up evil is far easier, because you do not actually have to be effective. Some small victories here and there, the occasional larger one, but never anything decisive and never even attempt to win overall. That way you can be seen doing "good" all the time without needing any actual success or endangering your job.
You are government property (Score:1)
You are government property. That's why they get to decide what substances you can, can't, and must consume. People don't like corporations? Corporations don't send armed men to your house in the middle of the night to abduct you because you have a plant they don't like.
Government is the worst, freedom is so much better.
I mourn for Slashdot (Score:2)
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