A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like to Sell Drugs Online
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- Heroin addictions are incredibly expensive in monetary terms, at $3,500 a week the price reduction would have to be huge before any legal drug wouldn't continue to create acquisitive crime to fund it
- Heroin addictions are incredibly expensive in terms of destroyed careers and relationships. Sure some users function normally, but you cannot know whether you're going to succumb or not before embarking - and that is the problem.
Most of the time when people talk about drug legalization, they mean things like marijuana, LSD, or ecstasy.
The modern equivalent is spending hours watching reality TV and eating fast food.
Not trying to be snarky. I mean it.
Can you see Corona dealers fighting with Coors dealers for a territory to sell beer? Why not? This is the EXACT reality of 1920s in this country.
I don't care if some idiots are going to kill themselves. As if we didn't have enough economic issues and ways to spend money, to spend so much on prisons, police force and all this other BS to deal with somebody's addiction.
I will tell you what will happen. As 1929 crash forced us to legalize alcohol, the same way 2008 forced us to legalize weed. Hopefully next crash will force us to legalize rest of it and start making money on it to find education vs. taking money from education to keep juvenile institutions staffed with guards.
Being a heroin addict should be treated as a social/medical problem and people given all the help they can to get clean, but we absolutely shouldn't be encouraging people to take it up. Especially heroin which is responsible for a very high percentage of all drug related deaths.
This either because they don't know the purity of the substance, or they have tried to get clean on their own and are relapsing.
The latter is particularly insidious, as the person will set up the dosage based on habit while their body has lost its resistance to the drug.
That isn't a true statement even now, but it's the mindset people bring to discussions about decriminalization.
Legalization does not need to mean "encouraging people to take it up." If we want to end the war on drugs, we need to all accept responsibility for determining what is safe for ourselves. The government's role should be in providing information and support.
Beer, weed, ecstacy, etc don't have that same steep addictive power, so aren't dangerous in that way. So it can't be so easily compared to alcohol since alcohol has a much more gradual addiction curve whereas heroin is much much steeper.
I heard exactly the same form school teacher about marijuana. I heard the same about alcohol and native American Indians. This is all BS. Give me science, solid proofs, not scary stories for 6 year olds.
And then again. Even if it is true. How is that your business? Somebody hurting themselves and you decide it is illegal for them at the same time buying a gun that can hurt others and you. This all complete nonsense, not based on our freedoms , Constitution, tradition, but some middle ages hysteria witch a bunch of ladies screaming delegalize alcohol because it is destroying my family.
We had it, this is BS, this doesnt work and first of all is none of your business what chemicals other people take in their time using their money. Unless you have a vested interest in keeping it illegal, like you are in a gang, you are a dealer or law enforcement. There is no logical reason to support drugs delegalization except for these two: dealing it or catching dealers. Because dealing and catching would be extinct without proginition the same way you don't buy Corona on a corner of a street from armed gangster.
The issue is probably mostly that many of the people at a point where the first dose seems like a good idea are going to also think the second dose is a good idea.
Entirely incorrect. You'll need to take it daily for at least a month or so for withdrawals to even begin to effect you.
There are good arguments against heroin. We don't need to use propaganda and falsehoods to do so, in my opinion.
All bullshit. The vast majority of people who try heroin (even multiple times) do not get addicted.
every single addiction takes effort and time to develope, even heroin. anyway, google 'heroin + medical use' and be very suprised.
Both in your nose and in your mouth the drug is absorbed into the bloodstream via a mucous membrane. The reason you don't see a lot of people putting large doses of cocaine on their gums is largely practical... same thing for mdma for example, just the other way around.
/edit The coke-numbs-your-gums part is supposed to be a test for the quality of the product, easily faked though.
>Both in your nose and in your mouth the drug is absorbed into the bloodstream via a mucous membrane. The reason you don't see a lot of people putting large doses of cocaine on their gums is largely practical... same thing for mdma for example, just the other way around.
It's more practical to put it in your gums though - you don't need to lay it out, crush it up, line it up into lines, find/roll a tube etc. You just stick your finger into the packet and rub it on your gums. Do a little research - snorting affects you in a more intense way.
> /edit The coke-numbs-your-gums part is supposed to be a test for the quality of the product, easily faked though.
Cocaine was used by dentists to numb gums. It acts as an anaesthetic. Drug dealers play on this and add numbing agents to other drugs and pass it off as coke.
In terms of addictive potential for any given drug:
smoking > injecting > snorting > eating > topical
If you were to actually compare drinking crack with drinking coffee, the addictiveness of both would be identical.
I did find 1 interesting paper on occasional and controlled heroin use: http://www.jrf.org.uk/system/files/1859354254.pdf
In other words, thousands of people around the world received that 'one shot' today and if you didn't tell them, probably wouldn't even know they just had a hit of h (and none of them suddenly loses their ability for rational thought or their life's goals).
"One shot" is an exaggeration, apologies. My point was that heroin and it's analogues are highly addictive substances, in an aggressive way that beer weed and ecstacy aren't. You can't directly compare and equate beer with heroin for the sake of argument for legalization. Drugs aren't equal and the addictive properties of one are different from another. They have to be considered on a case by case basis.
You have kids in high school who are injured in sports, are prescribed painkillers by their doctors which eventually gets them on heroin. The addicts didn't wake up one day thinking, "You know what? I think I'm going to try heroin today." It was legal pharmaceuticals with falsely advertised addiction rates that got them onto it.
Not knowing much about this, could I ask why?
Most of heroin's issues arise because of its illegality, coupled with its price. I was spending $400 a day. It's nearly impossible to keep afloat with that sort of outgoing expense. Heroin also makes me grumpier than I typically am, and I wouldn't wish the withdrawals on my worst enemy.
But on the other hand, it has few negative physical effects in the long term, which I find amazingly curious. I've been clean for three years now, and if I didn't tell you you'd never know what I'd done. That's odd, in my opinion, considering its reputation. If I'd drunk the equivalent amount of alcohol every day for six years, I'd doubt that would be the case.
Like any drug, being illegal distorts the market and causes issues that wouldn't exist with it legal, however I would never want to see it legal the same way alcohol is. It's simply dangerous above and beyond things like weed. I'm truly not sure how i feel about it, to be honest. I just know that I would never use it again, regardless of its legal status.
But, the key reason? I didn't want to take it any more. A well known fact among addict circles, is that there will come a time when you're done taking it. The problem is, unless you were lucky to live in a country like mine, doing so without the support of society when it is so stigmatized is supremely difficult. It's an interesting problem.
It changes my view on whether it is useful to help somebody. Do you have any references for this?
I don't feel great about posting non-throway, but hey.
My anecdata (10 > N < 20) are that most opiate users generally work out OK (<10% problem rate). Like most habits though, it's not a great thing to be stuck with. Worse than being a smoker although the smart ones will be quick to point out it's biologically better.
It's a thing you can actually grow out of, too. The people who don't usually have other problems.
Heres an interesting fact. About 23% of people who use heroin (not opiates in general, heroin specifically) become addicts[0]. I've always found that rather interesting, and matches up perfectly with my anecdotal experience. I'm one of the 23% unfortunately.
Edit: As I said in a comment above, no-one wants to remain on heroin forever. You truly will want to stop at some point, even if it causes no issues in your life (good luck with that!) -- every addict I've known has hit that point eventually. I did. I was just lucky my government and society supported me in getting clean. Others in other countries aren't so lucky, and I think that's a shame.
I find it very unfortunate that society hasn't caught up with this way of thinking and mostly still regards addiction as a moral vice, rather than a lifelong illness.
Very normal, in itself healthy social interaction could bring one to alcoholism for example, and nobody, including the addict, will be aware of the problem for a long time.
I believe a more interesting claim would be to say 'social issues involving a significant other'. It's easy to hide problems of various kinds from your friends; it's much harder to do so with a partner, especially living together.
I'm not saying having such a partner prevents addiction, but I do think that it makes it harder to maintain without ramifications. I suspect a significant part of addicts either lack in a significant other, or have one who suffers from 'compatible' issues.
Personally I've found that partners and flatmates (family or otherwise) are a primary reason for not spiraling into bad habits (or addictions). With friends it's too easy to 'manage' yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
If you prefer the graphic novel:
I infer from this statement that you believe that, in the case of legalization, the price would still be high enough to require crime. Do you have any reason to believe that heroin is inherently more expensive to manufacture than, say, aspirin?
Also, unless heroin addiction skews towards the top five-percenters, $3500 per week is a distant outlier.
You're assuming that in the case of legalisation there wouldn't be sin taxes, which given alcohol and cigarettes (and indeed weed) would be incredibly unlikely.
The problem with heroin is that once you are abusing it you need more and more but it starts to destroy your ability to earn the funds to pay for it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-cost-of...
My experience is that "those" crimes are caused by trauma and mental illness, but I guess the drug use is the easy thing to blame. It correlates super high at that point.
My experience with most of this is second-hand.
"Duch also described how the Silk Road’s customer base allowed him to reach buyers who he believed wouldn’t have otherwise had access to his product. "
ergo, one of their arguments is going to be that SR created a drug market, and made addicts of innocent children who were looking for my little pony pictures and got tricked into taking smack.
Doesn't that seem reasonable? Not in the extreme form you've taken at least, but in a milder form. It seems reasonable to me that a number of people who otherwise would not try heroin due to lack of access might try it if getting it becomes convenient enough.
It's naive to assume that just because getting drugs is relatively easy that making it easier won't increase the number of people who decide to use drugs. Just as it is wrong for prosecutors to bend reality to fit their interpretation of the facts, it is wrong of those in favor of drug reform to bend reality to fit their interpretation. I would love to see more reasonable drug laws, and I'm probably far more libertarian than most in what changes I'd like to see, however, I recognize that by improving access to drugs you probably will also increase the number of people who do drugs, all else remaining constant.
The only things which certainly proliferated more readily as a result of SR would be RCs (Research Chemicals), which your shady park dealer does not usually carry.
Either way, I reckon that this argument will be pivotal in their case, and they will, over the course of the trial, present hockey-stick graphs showing that SR has turned the entire planet into heroin users.
So - I don't reckon this will have increased the number of people taking drugs. I would rather think that it may have encouraged people to experiment more than they otherwise would have due to increased access, but only in the case of people who are prior users of recreational substances - and as above, if anything, it reduced consumption in areas where a "street" supply already existed.
Now in a better world, the opioid addicts would have quit and the government would have mitigated the issue by giving them methadone for free. But regardless of whether this is the case, he did cause harm to his clients and society as a whole by hooking up to a more dangerous drug while they were at a vulnerable state.
Folks bought from SR not because of increased availability, but due to decreased risk. Less interaction with dealers, less chance of law enforcement involvement, and you know what you're buying.
Heroin isn't something that people just one day wake up and decide to do. It spreads socially - the vast, vast, VAST majority of users ended up so because someone they know uses.
I live in a small, conservative, "safe" city - and I could pop out and come back with a sack of MDMA, weed/hash and heroin, if I so chose - but I don't.
I promise you, this shit is everywhere. You just don't see it unless you either go looking or it's shown to you.
This is an interesting part for me. "Exposing" it, actually brought more customers.
That bulk mail envelope scanning program sure must've came handy for tracking the origin of his shipments.
Seems to me a moment where a lawyer in the movies would shout 'objection, relevancy' or something.
I would have asked the witness the source of the $3,500 before he had access to Silk Road. But it doesn't seem just an arbitrary emotional trick.
Wow. What a stupendous flaw in logic and reasoning. I guess I'm glad that the fool who wrote this isn't in charge of building bridges or something, where his astonishing stupidity could directly get people killed. He'll just have to settle for indirectly getting people killed by parroting state propaganda and perpetuating the war on drugs.
Obviously, the fact that different people were dealing the drugs on the Silk Road, than on the street, does not in any way serve as evidence that Silk Road did not reduce the risk to both dealers and especially users, in buying drugs.
I mean, it seems like Ulbricht really did put out hits on some people - or at least the state is pressing ahead with the charges anyway, and if that's the case he is a danger to society and needs to be locked up. But in terms of harm reduction Silk Road was pretty awesome (fwiw, I never used the service). Not only did it derisk buying and selling drugs, in many cases it would have taken money directly out of the pockets of large drug cartels (i.e. in cases where they didn't control the supply anyway, only the distribution). That's a cause everyone should get behind.
The whole ordeal here just drives the point home, that the drug war is not at all about harm reduction for anybody, not users, certainly not dealers, and not even society at large. I'm not sure the drug war is about anything at this point. It's just a self-perpetuating relic of the past, and it needs to be put down ASAFP.
I would assume Drug production is a commodity market (also within US borders)
It's not perfect, because if they still control supply they can still exert pressure on distribution. And, while Silk Road may be anonymous, obviously buying drugs in bulk from the cartels is not. But it's a step in the right direction, however small.
The cartels are absolutely still the people being funded by this activity. Or in the case of heroin organisations like the Taliban.
There is a substantial difference between growing a bit of weed to sell and the industrial scale production required to sell the amounts of narcotics that SR is talking about. Cartels still violently control the means of production and entry into the United States, increasing demand for their products increases their profit and motive for violence.
Anyway, this [0] Quora answer, specifically pointing out the New York/New Jersey market, states that most heroin in the US comes from South America. I suspect that the CIA played a big part in creating these cartels in the first place, and if it reverted to individual buyers getting their supply directly from the producers via the Silk Road or another bitcoin/Tor market, the cartels wouldn't need to exist at all.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-the-heroin-imported-into-t...
I'm not saying a single farmer could vertically integrate from opium to heroin, but aren't small businesses possible? They would certainly benefit from flexibility and being under-the-radar in a way that could offset the negatives of not having an economy of scale.
And on your last point, I didn't mean that the CIA went in and set up shop, first "creating" the cartel. But a single buyer (possible), or at least one who allows specific individuals to operate (almost definite), certainly helps in the creation, so to speak, of the larger criminal organization by giving their suppliers or smugglers a hand up on those who have to worry about running afoul of the DEA and other authorities.
I don't see how it follows that derisking drug sales necessarily didn't increase harm. Yes, if you were selling drugs on Silk Road you were less likely to get into a violent confrontation with a client. Yes, if you were buying drugs on Silk Road you were less likely to get into a violent confrontation with the dealer. But the claim here is that Silk Road also dramatically reduced barriers to entry for both buyers and sellers for very serious drugs.
Heroin is no joke and no amount of pseudo-libertarian drug legalization arguments make it any safer. If Silk Road made it available to a dramatically broader audience that otherwise wouldn't have been able to get it, the harm to society, on balance, must have been enormous.
> The whole ordeal here just drives the point home, that the drug war is not at all about harm reduction for anybody, not users, certainly not dealers, and not even society at large.
Heroin isn't weed. It destroys lives of its users and certainly harms the society at large. To say otherwise is preposterous, at best.
Also I don't understand the use of "pseudo-libertarian" here? Drug usage is a personal decision and it's none of state's business. That is the very definition of libertarianism.
It has nothing to do with Silk Road but since you brought it up, legalising drug usage is for the greater good. You see the real danger does not originate from violent confrontations but the circles the the usage drags you in. If it was legally available, there wouldn't be need for an individual to get involved for their recreational needs.
On a medical perspective, it is common not to help out a friend having adverse reactions to a drug used simply because it is incriminating if you call the hospital and then stay with him/her.
And as if this wasn't enough, people just don't seem to get that the war on drugs has been lost in every continent. It will just go on and on and on. You can make it safer, peaceful and prevent it to be a source of revenue for actual crimes, or just don't give a crap and be irresponsible.
Not unless the drug has been empirically found to have a high probability of harming the individual and a high probability of spreading through communities. Then it's very much state's business because it becomes a matter of social preservation.
> I don't understand the use of "pseudo-libertarian".
"Pseudo-libertarian" is the kind of libertarian that doesn't account of empirical evidence in their arguments.
I agree with this up to the point where drug use becomes drug addiction. Of course this doesn't happen to everyone who uses drugs recreationally, but if it does, then it's not so much a decision but a relentless compulsion that thoroughly decimates one's freedom to choose.
Whether it's the state's business or not, I suppose that depends on whether one feels the state has some responsibility towards the mental and physical health of its citizens. I'm very much in favour of harm reduction programmes for drug addicts, rather than the prevailing trend of terribly harsh punishment. Some may feel that this sort of thing is too paternalistic and interfering but it's certainly better than imprisonment.
Well, no more than any other addiction to opiates. The issue with heroin addiction is that 1) it's illegal; (in many places) 2) it's expensive as hell. Clean Heroin by itself has no majorly bad side effects that aren't associated with other (legal and regularly used/abused) opiates like oxy/hydrocodene. Constipation and cotton mouth are about all that comes to mind. The risks are the same as any other street drugs; bad batches, reusing needles, dirty needles, and unmonitored usage.
I'm not saying heroin is good, by any means, but it's not as bad as it's sold as.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index
[2] http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/2006451...
I get what you're saying, but if you're talking about overdosing, then I think it's fair to say Heroin is absolutely lethal. But if used responsibly (I know, I know) it's safe.
deciplex didn't say it wasn't. Read the phrase again.
In fact, it's exactly because heroin is harmful that an approach that actually has a chance of reducing its use - unlike the aforementioned drug war - is in dire need.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965411
Also a sibling comment maccard. Also google "krokodil".
In short it's not heroin that destroys lives, it's idiotic policy which makes heroin (or other opiates) very expensive (destroying users' careers and relationships) or unavailable (destroying users' health via them trying to substitute it with something much worse).
The only real threat of opiates is overdosing, which comes from increasing tolerance and uncertain quality of a drug. Making opiates legal and quality-checked and allowing to develop substances that would reduce possibility of increasing tolerance would make opiates just as safe as weed, and certainly safer than alcohol.
But that wouldn't work, because... what? I'm curious.
For example in the UK, needle exchanges - places where you can get clean needles and other paraphenalia - have been well established since the late 1980s to help protect people who inject drugs against the infection risks of needle sharing. It's been credited with greatly reducing the prevalence of HIV and hepatitis viruses amongst that population.
Similarly, heroin addicts are often prescribed synthetic opiates such as methadone and buprenorphine, to prevent their reliance on dealers. This doesn't much reduce deaths from overdose, but does seem to prevent societal harm. Indeed if you are charged with theft or robbery and it turns out that it was to help feed your opiate addiction, it's not uncommon for the judge to offer access to a treatment programme in lieu of a custodial sentence.
There is however a problem with user compliance. Some recent research over the past decade or so has been in 'contingency management', where addicts are offered financial rewards to attend or comply with such treatments. It's very controversial and so far has had mixed results, but the idea is that the overall cost to the state will be reduced, in that a small 'bribe' can put people on the right path, hopefully leading to feeling more intrinsically rewarded by the success of the treatment, and that is less expensive than medical treatment later on.
But despite all this, as you imply, it does need the political will behind it to have any good effect.
How is it your business if someone's injecting heroin? Is this your business? By the Constituion? By comparison to alcohol or weed? None of your business. The same way like guns. I can buy gun to hurt you, and that's fine, but can't get some chemicals to hurt myself? Where is logic here brother?
There is none. Just emotional BS. Get over it. As crash in 1929 legalized alcohol and we don't have beer dealers shooting each other (we used to have them!!!). As crash in 2008 legalized weed in large parts of the country, the same way next crash will legalize rest of it.
In this economy I don't have so much money to spend on somebody's else life. Sorry. And now start your emotional cry.