You Can Buy Drugs On The Internet Now?

13 years ago view-show 925,551

drugsstory

Gawker did this really interesting story on how you can pretty much buy illegal drugs on the internet using this website called Silk Road.  Ironically I did a post yesterday on how a lot of big wigs are coming together to end the war on drugs.

Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.
About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark’s door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. “If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t have even noticed,” Mark told us in a phone interview.

Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit “check out.” He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins—untraceable digital currency—worth around $150. Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house.

I highly recommend that you read the whole article because it’s pretty interesting.  One point I found especially intriguing is that there is now a digital currency called Bitcoins.

Bitcoins have been called a “crypto-currency,” the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders’ computers. (The name “Bitcoin” is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.

To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That’s probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.

Gawker makes the point that it’s probably only a matter of time before the DEA or another bureaucratic federal agency infiltrates the site, and shuts it down.  However if more and more sites like this pop up it could get to the point that the government would not have enough resources to really do anything to stop the phenomena.  Much like the war on drugs in general.

Comments

  1. Have you been living under a rock? This has been happening for years. LOL “recorces” that's horrid. BTW Proofread is one word.

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