It's interesting and probably not surprising that the most popular drug on the Silk Road 2.0 (and probably other darknet marketplaces) is MDMA. MDMA is difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you buy MDMA from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating, you can be reasonably certain you're getting quality product (comparable to old pressed pills you can hear aging ravers wax nostalgic about) at a fair price.
I expect marijuana legalization will eat away at darknet marketplace weed sales, leaving MDMA and LSD as the top two. Which is exactly how it should be. They can be made in large quantities by moderately-skilled chemists to a high degree of purity and safety, and the Silk Road allows them to be distributed without any violence. It'd be impossible to bulk-search the mail for them. MDMA could be packaged as any white powder and LSD is literally paper.
I hope that this safe availability of MDMA and LSD quenches the misinformation campaigns that have so horribly marred their reputation for the public. Both of them have incredible potential for therapeutic and recreational use.
Potentially, but death is still pretty rare with impure MDMA and the effects can be felt. It's also a social drug, so I would imagine most buyers purchasing ~tens of pills and sharing them with friends. One would probably leave a bad review if a friend died.
Testing kits and services are also available so you could review the quality without even taking the drug.
Be forewarned: A lot of these kits only test for the presence of, not quality/purity of, MDMA and other forms of E. That being said, someone would definitely pipe up and say "this killed my friend" if something were to go wrong.
A test I learned in jail from petty computer trespassing charges when I was a kid is to light a small amount of powder on fire sitting on foil, if the residue is cherry red it's mainly mdma and not piperazines. Once again prison is criminal university.
If regeant testing a pill break it in half and test the inside too since often the outside is coated in mdma and the inside is shitty pipes
The Marquis reagent is commonly used to test MDMA. It will readily distinguish MDMA from cathinones (aka 'bath salts') which is a common adulterant or substitute. Operations like Dance Safe have popularized this, and the demographic using the deep web seems to be particularly aware of this test and its value.
Marquis, Mandolin, Mecke and Simon are all sold on DanceSafe and are used to determine only whether a substance contains MDMA (or other similarly desired chemicals) and whether or not it contains PMA and PMMA (undesirable and toxic chemicals). It does not ascertain the quality of such substances nor does it establish concentrations beyond trace amounts. Thank you for your input.
> With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.
I guess that it depends on how easy it is to test it. If it requires a chemistry degree and a lab I am guessing they won't test even if they are otherwise smart.
Holy flippin' mark-up! $65 for four bottles that contains maybe $1-2 worth of chemicals?
Anyways, as someone stated above, these kits test for the presence of MDMA, not necessarily all adulterants. There is the issue of cross-reactivity as well.
It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure I would trust a drug that hadn't been run through an HPLC.
Think about it quantitatively. MDMA has always been tops in the rankings (not just this one, but DARCs and others), implying it's been sold to at least tens of thousands of customers. If the worst MDMA would rank 1 and normal MDMA 5 and half the MDMA sold is bad (to maximize the possible impact on the rating), then you'd have to have thousands of people croaking after taking the bad MDMA in order to produce an average of 4.9 (to pull down the average by .1 using ratings of 1). In contrast, I've seen media reports of maybe 2 deaths clearly linked to drugs bought off the black-markets (psychedelics which were RCs and led to fatal accidents).
The Silk Road (and presumably the darknet markets that followed it) let any user contest the charge and get their money automatically, which they almost certainly would do if they got MDMA that tested badly.
Further, if this happens too many times, the marketplace will just seize the account. Vendor accounts are expensive, so it doesn't make economic sense to sell bad shit.
There exist readily available test kits to check the purity. No consumption necessary. And of course it's just as important to look at the number of ratings. But you're probably being tongue in cheek.
Ketamine will be popular. Right now they have ongoing medical studies trying to determine it's efficacy. You
need to infuse the drug, so it's a hard core drug, but
in terms of preventing someone from committing suicide
the drug shows promise. (I'm not condoning it, just passing
along what Psychaiary is talking about amount themselfs--other than stock picks.)
You don't need to inject it. I use ketamine for management of depression, though I've thankfully been doing well and haven't needed it for the past 6-8 months. The fast relief getting you back to being able to function and care for yourself day to day is soooo helpful.
Did you need to go into the k-hole to achieve results?
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lumpypua 41 days ago
Definitely not, but you are going to get weird for 45 minutes.
The study in that forbes article used 50mg intranasally (basically snorted). The earlier study backing ketamine's efficacy[1] used "0.5 mg/kg diluted in saline, administered over 40 minutes by IV pump". Works out to 35mg for a 70kg guy with a drug delivery rate in the ballpark of snorting it.
Redosing protocol is up to you, I'd read both papers, track your mood, and decide something reasonable. [1] dumps a fair amount of K into their volunteers in one part. Basically the 35mg every two to three days. When depression hits hard I do 35mg every one or two weeks, and go up to 3 weeks as I'm feeling better.
I like dissociatives but maaan 35-50mg is pretty much the least pleasant dose. You're not near k-holing but reality is still pretty bent for about 45 minutes. Normal social interaction is totally out of the question for me and my thinking is warped. What works best for me to handle it is putting on an album I can play all the way through, lying down and meditating on the music until I sober up.
Legalized weed might eat away, but if the market is anything like Colorado, it's too expensive vs dark weed. It's so bad in fact that there are projected budget shortfalls because there are few consumers in the space.
Is this fundamental attribution error? Perhaps the reason it is more expensive is because it presents much less of a risk to purchase vs. on the street? It could also be that there is not a lot of competition selling legal weed. Maybe it is because street prices have dropped considerably due to the introduction of legal weed?
Furthermore, it should be noted that Colorado's laws also permit growing and gifting marijuana legally. Why buy it when you can grow it yourself or get it for free from someone who grows it? Sure you can only gift/receive/travel with up to 1 ounce legally and one could also make 16 separate visits (pun intended) to a friends house as well.
Perhaps any or all of these are factors in the price or maybe it is overtaxed to the point that people are still willing to obtain theirs the old-fashioned way.
It's worse in Washington. Legal weed is 3x the cost of medical and 6x the cost of street. It still brings in a vast amount of new consumers who won't pursue other methods, but the other methods will not die off until the price is more competitive.
I think it depends more on the federal government officially deferring to state drug laws (unlikely) or taking action to de-schedule marijuana specifically (slightly less unlikely).
Right now the only people who can grow cannabis openly and "legally" with any degree of safety are the states themselves, which kind of puts a damper on market competition.
I would guess the market pricing for personal quantities of Silk Road weed (including shipping) is more in line with legal/medical prices rather than local black market prices.
Even with safe MDMA, the risk of possession carries a far greater weight in a lot of the country than something like weed. So people tend to take more risks, and thus the price is higher. If you could somehow subvert this cost by buying in bulk through a trusted vendor on the Internet, you stand to make some money for your troubles. This is, in my opinion, the most likely reason why SR has large quantities of MDMA and LSD.
I would hazard a guess and say that DMT is probably pretty high on the best seller list. The common theme is that there is a huge market for things that fall under the catch all of the label drugs that are being used for very different reasons than what a stereotypical addict is chasing.
Precisely for this reason there are actually places in Holland where people can have their ecstasy pills tested, so that they know exactly how much MDMA and what other stuff is inside.
I'm not that aware of how Silk Road 2.0 works, but with all the anonymity involved, would it be very difficult for a seller to complete transactions to herself with dummy accounts to pump up their ratings? This was very common in the Amazon and Ebay world when I was around those several years ago.
It would not. Of course, they still have to pay the SR2 commission on all the turnover. There have been a lot of complaints on the SR2 forums over the past year that a lot of feedback is untrustworthy compared to SR1, among many other complaints about the poor operator performance.
I don't know first hand, but several articles about SR (2.0? 1.5? no clue) said that the admins are very good at weeding out fake reviews. Though it wasn't mentioned how they do it.
1. This is irrelevant to what I was discussing. No MDMA dealer is committing any violence. The fact that Ross Ulbricht's opsec was allegedly bad enough that he could be blackmailed isn't a general fact about darknet markets.
2. That entire exchange is totally trumped up. This is the exchange the complaint alleges occurs:
BLACKMAILER: Pay me $X. I need it to pay DEBTOR.
DPR: Let me speak to DEBTOR.
DEBTOR: Hello, this is DEBTOR.
DPR: I will pay you $X/4 to kill BLACKMAILER.
DEBTOR: We want $X/3.
DPR: I have had men killed for $X/5, but I will pay you $X/3.
DEBTOR: It's done. Nice doing business with you.
DPR: Likewise.
As far as I'm aware, no actual murder victim has ever turned up, and none of the parties except Ross have been arrested. The exchange sounds much more like a negotiation tactic than an actual contract killing, and is much more reasonable if you read it as such.
But of course this is irrelevant to people who want to use it to horns-effect anything within an arms reach of the greatest project in harm reduction the world has ever seen. To put it another way, people died this last year, this summer, this week probably, from bad drugs. There is no reason why the modern world cannot supply these drugs safely, and darknet markets seem to do a better job than anything else.
But go ahead and parrot the DEA line. Just remember that those who aren't on the right side of history are inevitably on the wrong side of it.
It wasn't dropped, I wish people would stop parroting that line. He was indicted in two separate jurisdictions, NY and Maryland. Maryland indicted him for 'Planned Violence' which includes one count of murder for hire. The NY charges are the ones that he's currently facing, the Maryland charges are still in the wings.
A few months ago I had the idea of creating a project to scrape Silk Road. The idea was to parse all listings, determine the quantity, divide by the price, and then average it through the entire site. The end result would be an average price for weed/lsd/mdma,etc. Sort of like the Winkdex, except for drugs prices. Shortly after I got it running, Silk Road 1.0 got shut down. Then the darknet market "scene" became really fragmented into like 10 different sites. Writing scraping code is tedious, so I abandoned the project. The code is here: https://github.com/priestc/weedprices
The following information is for educational purposes only, I have no affiliation with the Silk Road 2.0, nor have I ever purchased anything off the site. As far as I know, visiting the site and writing about it with no intention to buy (commit a crime) is perfectly legal.
Any lawyers could confirm the last part of the disclaimer?
Seems certainly enough for an unfightable civil forfeiture case.
It doesn't really matter if you're committing a crime. The police will trash your life anyway if you look at them funny. If you're a black man they'll shoot you in the back while you're on the ground. There's nothing stopping them.
The purpose of criminalizing such activity is not to discourage people from engaging in it. It is to guarantee that everyone is a criminal, thereby ensuring that leverage is always available.
> I somehow doubt this guy has sold half a million dollars worth of MDMA at $1.5k a pop in such a huge quantity, but the price seems to be in line with other sellers for an equivalent amount.
Actually quite possible: the Dutch seller SuperTrips sold into the millions range, so half a million for the top seller is possible.
> I’m not entirely sure what the rules are regarding who can give feedback, but there seem to be people buying huge quantites if a user must buy a product to be able to review it. I have never purchased anything from the site, and I wasn’t presented with any choices to review an item.
You can only review a listing if you have ordered it & paid for it (SR2 no longer does escrow); but you are also allowed to review a listing before your order arrives, which means scraping feedback can be very biased given that most users who are scammed will never go back to update their feedback. (That is, suppose a well-regarded seller has decided to quit selling; they put up a bunch of listings, accept orders & payment, withdraw all the money since there is no longer escrow on SR2, and continue until they're banned. The buyer will leave item feedback like '5 stars: Trusted vendor, waiting eagerly for package' and when it dawns on them that they've been scammed, never switch it to '1 stars: got scammed'. So anyone who scrapes the feedback of this seller will see a sterling 5-star-average profile.)
A single price index/ticker doesn't really work since every country has a different price. A lot of buyers on these sites are importing cheap MDMA from Canada and Europe where it's plentiful to their city where it fetches 3x the price. For example right now cocaine price in Canada is 2.5x what it costs in the US, and at least 4x more in Australia. Reason I know this because every week there's been shootings here of gangsters jacking each other to get their hands on high priced product. Before it wasn't worth it to them to risk a shooting but now the payoff is $80k per kilo so the streets are a warzone.
When weed is fully legalized guess we will see it as a traded commodity on the NYSE. Invest in a dope portfolio, freedom 35 retirement plan
I only wish you had performed it on one of the more popular darknetmarkets as Silkroad 2.0 has been publicly labeled a scam (they managed to lose everybody's funds and have paid ~80% of the smallest losers back so far [0]) and is thus nowhere near as popular as places like Evolution according to the good people on /r/DarkNetMarkets
That's not surprising. The Netherlands have a long history of producing quality XTC / MDMA and are one of the biggest XTC exporting countries worldwide. Furthermore, given the relaxed weed legislation a lot of marijuana is produced here.
A 99 euro vacuum food saver will get you a long way in sending drugs worldwide. Combine that with some clever packaging and the chances of it getting caught at customs are pretty small.
Heard the same from friends - they were sending meat products that were a little on the grey side of import rules across a border. Vacuum packing + bleaching it overnight seems to keep the sniffer dogs away. Whether that works for drugs I can't say though.
Dealers use moisture barrier bags that are heat sealed now as apparently dogs can detect vacuum sealed bags though unclear if it's outside contamination, like somebody putting together a package in a room full of weed shavings or smoke.
Both heat sealed and vacuum sealed are air-tight, so that difference should be a non-issue. Its the stuff sticking to the outside of the bag that might be an issue. For meat I'd imagine bleach should do the trick...no idea what you'd need to remove drug traces though. Not a skillset I plan on deploying anytime soon so didn't research it.
Is that reliable though? I'd imagine the DEA is more likely to investigate a dealer declaring their location as Washington DC than one declaring Netherlands. So their is a definite incentive to falsify this.
But a buyer from the US is far less likely to order from the Netherlands since international mail goes through customs and there's no 4th amendment protection on them at all.
The majority of the buyer are going to buy on feedback. And a US supplier using fake Netherlands location is likely to get good feedback based on fast shipping (seeing how its fake Netherlands) and gain the benefit of the "positive" Netherlands connotations (Hollywood's view of the Netherlands in the average person's eyes).
4th amendment - true but not relevant to an environment dominated by non-lawyers and buyer's reviews I think.
Drugs are a fascinating topic in my opinion, because they have affected humankind and it's decisions since ever and more than anyone wants to admit. It's a topic that is everywhere, and that simultaneously nobody has a clue about (a bit like climate change or high finance). People don't know which drugs there are, how they work, how dangerous they are, how much they are used etc.
I talked to many people who are affected by the topic: teachers, psychologists, doctors, concerned relatives. I keep telling them: Even in this rich city Vienna, drugs aren't something that pops up in dark alleys behind trainstations, drugs are everywhere and used by functioning people you had no idea about. And they use massive amounts.
There are doctors who say that they tell their clients, that it's ok to smoke one or two cannabis-joints a week. What they don't realize is that a regular smoker (which might be a 13-year-old) doesn't smoke one per week, but more like 5 joints a day.
This is a point which get's more important now that states around the world are legalizing cannabis. It really isn't very hazarous, in the sense that it kills you or makes you unable to function, so people can get used to smoking excessive amounts. But: every psychoactive substance you take constantly will, by definition, change you. When usage-patterns get to the "all the time"-category most points doctors and legalization advocates make become invalid, because now it's not about side-effects of a drug you take now and then, but about the effects of a permanently altered state-of-mind you "cultivate".
I regulary ask sellers at highway petrol stations which cigarettes and smoking-utilities they sell the most. There was not only one time where their answer was: long rolling-papers and the lightest tobacco = ingredients for a joint.
LSD isn't just something out of a Beatles song, some people told be they had tried it with 15, because they could get it at their (noble high-society)-school. There were hooligans at a big local football/"soccer"-stadion charged with possession of it.
The issue/problem of cocaine is interesting, because (like cannabis) it is one of the few drugs that permeates all of society from blue-collar-workers to high-society.
I once helped a completely confused guy in a smoking to get a taxi home, who stuttered that he lost his purse while getting high on cocaine on some actor's party. He is a painter and a director at one of the famous theatres here, and gifted me a painting he had with him for the taxi-fare I paid.
I once saw two truck-drivers delivering goods to the local supermarket around the corner, snorting something of a magazine at 6.30 a.m.
It's a bit hard to get data about mass of cocaine consumption in the US, but estimations are about 200 tons (400k pounds, please adopt the metric system!) per year. They regularly find unmanned submarines who can transport tons of cocaine. Some of them are sophisticated enough that they might be able to cross the atlantic. Think of the R&D involved there, that cartels have the money to buy.
One of the problems in the vietnam-war was that Vietnam was and is a big platform in international drug-trafficking and many US-soldiers got addicted to heroin while trying to "get away" from the war. Estimations are that more than 40.000 soldiers were addicted. Many of them probably still are, no matter what some people say, it's close to impossible to get away from heroin/opiates. The only easy way to deal with the poor addicts is provide them with their stuff until the end of their lives.
Afghanistan was (still is?) the largest Opium and Cannabis-exporter in the world. Since they don't have many other goods than that, in the 90ies the US more or less allowed or tolerated the drug-business there, so the warlords ("afghan resistance") could buy weapons to hold back Soviet Russia.
So, in the war since 2001 US-money flows to both sides of the conflict. US-soldiers are paid to fight against warlords who get their money from selling their heroin in the US (and in the rest of the world). Isn't that ridiculous?
[..insert many more anecdotes and hair-raising numbers..]
To sum it up:
* Drug use is way more excessive than society is comfortable with.
* Drugs aren't mostly used while sitting on the sofa, they are used while working, while riding vehicles, while doing anything really.
* Almost everything people know about drugs (from names to numbers) is incorrect (if they know anything at all).
Disclaimer:
* Numbers above might be inaccurate, because I don't have time for proper references, but the magnitudes should be correct.
* This is not an opinion about how to work with the situation (i wouldn't call it problem, since drug-use has been always there, it's a property/corner-stone of human existence), I have opinions about that, but it's a very complicated matter. There's also a difference in advising addicted individuals and their relatives, which is (depending on the drug) relatively easy, and finding rules/laws for society at large.
In general, liked the post, and generally agree that drugs have completely permeated our society, and we mostly need to accept, and deal with, the fact that they're here.
Oddly though, I disagree with the summary points, although they're almost impossible to prove.
For example, I think the large majority of Americans can tell you a decent amount about marijuana. Maybe not purchasing info, but general effects, and good guesses on how much folks smoke. I would also guess that if its being legalized in places, than it can't be much more excessive than they're comfortable with. I do agree that they probably can't tell you much more. LSD, Ecstasy, Heroin, Cocaine - they're probably all mysteries to the vast majority of folks.
I would also guess that the vast majority of drug use still happens on a sofa. Obviously, there are people like you say, who use drugs while they're driving or out on the job. Heck, I'm sure a lot of the fast food industry is constantly out of it (see American Beauty). But drugs are still a disorienting state change for many folks, which means a lot of them want to be in a comfortable, safe place when they use them - namely at home on a sofa.
@Mostly sofa use: This probably depends on the drug, I guess it's true for cannabis, but not for cocaine.
@Knowledge: What fascinated me is that regular users I asked (at a drug-checking-station at clubs for example) also didn't know much more than the name of the stuff they're putting in their body. On the other hand most drinkers also don't know the biochemical/medical stuff, just how to handle the situation (more or less).
I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't investigate prescription drug sales. Google 'XanaxKing' if you'd like to understand something about how lucrative this trade is, and how popular it is on the deep web. These are professional operations moving significant quantities, so we're missing a major part of the market.
I would also have liked to see some indication of how the data was cleaned or some quality control measures, but understand that this was a quick experiment. More interesting data should surely follow in the second post that analyzes changes over time.
Cool data, but your charts are absolutely horrible
1) Try to pick more different colors. Choosing two different shades of pink, of grey and of cyan to represent unrelated things makes zero sense.
2) The sellers-by-country map is completely unreadable, it's just very slight variations of the shades of pink. Italy looks almost as pink as Canada, but it's 16 times less active.
>Crawling through tor already obfuscates your identity to a certain degree, so we don’t really have to do anything other than cycling User-Agent strings to look different from any other client.
Why is that necessary, though? If Silk Road has any checks in place that protects against scraping, why are those in place?
User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.
He can specify his own User-Agent string. If he sends the user agent 'silkroadparserbot v0.0.1' with every request, that is going to provide no information at all.
Even if this wasn't, did you think that after one change of UA he would be getting more 'uniquely identifiable' with each new request sent?
i know this is a dumb question but im new to tor - how does one go about finding the addresses of hidden tor services like silk road? is it just word-of-mouth?
For the most part, yes. You can find directories on Tor (but you have to find the onion for the listings, too). You can get started by searching the clearweb.
I expect marijuana legalization will eat away at darknet marketplace weed sales, leaving MDMA and LSD as the top two. Which is exactly how it should be. They can be made in large quantities by moderately-skilled chemists to a high degree of purity and safety, and the Silk Road allows them to be distributed without any violence. It'd be impossible to bulk-search the mail for them. MDMA could be packaged as any white powder and LSD is literally paper.
I hope that this safe availability of MDMA and LSD quenches the misinformation campaigns that have so horribly marred their reputation for the public. Both of them have incredible potential for therapeutic and recreational use.