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Comment by Lawtonfogle | Hacker News Reader

>While other sites followed the original Silk Road’s ethos of selling only victimless contraband

While human sacrifices may not be a literal ingredient of drugs, calling it victimless ignores a whole lot of problems caused by drugs. Buying pot from your friend who grows it is victimless. But fueling any black market, even one that avoids identity theft, means you are supporting the marketplace that provides service to drug traffickers of the sort that kill people or that delivers highly addictive drugs that ruin far more than just their user's own life. Yes, bad government laws have made these problems much worse and are preventing truly safe victimless market places that uses locally grown and produced drugs sold in moderation, but the black market is not victimless.

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We're talking victimless, not harmless. With drugs, there is no victim, because the person making the purchase is making a conscious choice to buy something to put into their body. They are well aware of the effects and risks.

Contrarily, identity theft is clearly not victimless. A person's credit card or social security number is taken from them without their knowledge or consent so that it can be sold.

To go on an anti-drug tirade here when your pedantry isn't even correct does no one any good. All you're doing is parroting and reinforcing negative drug stereotypes. You wouldn't be doing so if those sentiments weren't pushed on you since before you could even comprehend them.

Using drugs is victimless, but given that a lot of drug manufacture and cultivation is directly linked to organized crime, buying drugs is only victimless if you know for a fact that your drugs are ethically grown, fair trade, etc. Which you don't.

By that logic, there's a good chance you're a perpetrator of slavery due to the labor that put your computer and/or its constituent parts together...

For me, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that both you and the parent are right.

But it's easier to pretend that they are both wrong.

I would agree that buying a computer who uses conflict minerals is not a victimless act. I find that a lot of what we do in modern society is not victimless even though we like to pretend it is.

>They are well aware of the effects and risks.

First, many are not aware.

Second, there are other parties who are hurt directly or indirectly by the drug use (granted, this only applies to some drugs).

Third, there are victims in getting the drugs to the person (once again, not in all cases, but with the black market, you can't be sure which case you fall under).

Finally, much like with alcohol, just because I do not consider it victimless does not mean I am against it being legalized. In fact I think that legalization would greatly reduce the number of victims.

The drug cartels brutally murder thousands and commit many other crimes -- they are as brutal as ISIS in many ways -- they undermine and oppress entire countries and ruin large parts of American cities. Many organizations such as the Taliban and Hezbollah fund themselves via the drug trade.

Some people boycott companies over political issues; how many of them still buy drugs? Every user I know, to whom I've mentioned this issue, insists their drugs come from a friend who produces it at home. But somehow the drug cartels earn billions and have worldwide distribution networks.

Prohibition laws created the drug cartels. You don't see distillers killing each others in turf wars, quite simply because it would be highly destructive to their possibility of operating on the right side of the law.

To end the "wars" regarding drugs, you must end the war on drugs. Legalize everything. It won't eliminate drug abuse, just like legalizing alcohol didn't eradicate alcohol abuse, but it removes all the compounding effects caused by the substances being illegal by themselves.

Besides, legalizing is, from a moral perspective, the only right way to act.

Agreed. And then deal with it the same way you do with tobacco and alcohol, with social campaigns to raise awareness of the issues of addiction. We have a working model here for legal drugs that are just as bad or worse.

Working model? LOL.

I have never heard someone claim their heroin and cocaine were "homegrown".

I believe the equivalent for these would be sourced from non-cartel family farms. Fair trade drugs if you will. You can't really grow these in a 'home' because it takes lots of land.

This is another argument in support of legalisation. The 'war on drugs' is lost, and can never be won. Far better drugs are legalised, can be produced safely and with known purities. Governments can tax their sale (as per alcohol), and direct some funds into treatment programs for addiction.

See also: the diamond trade…

Applying your logic, purchasing anything from US, Saudia Arabia or Russian companies is "supporting the marketplace that provides service to" government officials and politicians "of the sort that kill", abuse and torture people.

Do you agree?

If you cast your logic-net wide enough, you can make all sorts of connections & correlations. Anything and everything indirectly funds anything and everything else.

You can't decide to shutdown all USA companies; or if you did you'd cause a lot more problems than you'd solve. But you can shutdown a website selling illegal drugs. And that would arguably solve more problems than it would cause.... arguably, maybe. I could cast the logic net even wider. The whole earth would be better off without humans probably. Do we want to have that debate? No. Humans, for better or worse, are here. The USA and its companies/corps are here and exist. That's gonna be a thing for the foreseeable future. A drug website is more reasonable to talk about if it should exist or not.

It is not reasonable to talk about the existence of black markets. They existed, they exist, they will exist. I am nearly sure that as an economic and social constructs digital black markets will outlive companies/corporations.

Also your reductio ad absurdum about humans is well, absurd.

And the scope of "purchasing anything from US, Saudia Arabia or Russian companies" ...is reasonable?

Indeed, a quite reasonable response to demonstrate the futility of the "drug users are financing cartels" argument.

Yes. Depending upon which candy bar I buy, I am indirectly supporting child slavery. Sadly almost nothing in our modern day society is victimless even though most pretend (or believe) otherwise.

I think a better argument is that the SR guys were not above selling things like malware and (via The Armory) RPG launchers. The whole "victimless crimes" trope was pretty thin even at the start.

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