19 ms·

You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? How much could we generate in taxes? Do these people really

You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? How much could we generate in taxes? Do these people really belong behind bars?" A few questions I have: * How many schools and hospitals could we fund from taxes? * Could we redirect these users to hospitals or treatment facilities, and if we can't, so what? * Could these agents be considered adrenaline junkies? This cat and mouse game will have no end until they can tap into your brain stem and prevent you from committing these 'crimes' or modify your brain chemistry in a way that will make you not yearn for altering your conciousness. Either way, that's not a world I want to live in. How can we get the government to respect our right to put anything in our body that we want to? As long as it does not hurt others through the production or the consumption or harm the environment, I really don't understand the moral hard on people get from telling a group of people what they can and can't do. I'm kind of rambling, but this is what comes to mind when I see these types of articles.

zepolen 10y ago
Weapons in USA are a legal market, and there is some fallout as a result of that since guns will be more accessible to the wrong hands.
- atom_enger 10y ago
  Sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm talking about substance use and abuse.
  - zepolen 10y ago
    Ah, okay, the article referenced all categories of darknet markets.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  I'm genuinely curious what your thoughts are on the argument that criminals will break the law and obtain firearms illegally, regardless of the law.
  - atom_enger 10y ago
    Yeah we solved that problem in Chicago </s>. We learned that criminals don't obey the law and the law abiding citizens have a difficult time obtaining the proper tools they need to protect themselves.
    - baby 10y ago
      When you have weapons in every city/states around you, and an already large amount of weapons sold, you will have a problem.
  - na85 10y ago
    And yet if you compare the US with the next umpteen countries combined, totalling the same number of people, gun deaths in the US are vastly more common. Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or is it perhaps because Canada, England, Japan, et al have gun control laws?
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      Cat's out of the bag though. How are you going to get all of those guns off of the street at this point?
      - baby 10y ago
        By forbidding them and waiting years.
        TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        That might not work, guns last fairly indefinitely if looked after.
        baby 10y ago
        Of course the longer you wait, the less practical this solution becomes. In some years the only solution will be to wear a body armor at all time.
chinese_donald 10y ago
"This cat and mouse game will have no end until they can tap into your brain stem and prevent you from committing these 'crimes' or modify your brain chemistry in a way that will make you not yearn for altering your conciousness" As someone that doesn't do any drugs, I'm all for drug legalization. However, there needs to be limits. I should be able to fire someone that is high on the job, for instance. Driving a motor vehicle while under the influence should also be illegal. 'altering your conciousness' can directly harm the people around you and they have the right to not be harmed by your personal choices. "How can we get the government to respect our right to put anything in our body that we want to?" Another issue is health care: Should the government continue to pour tons of money into allowing you to kill yourself with drugs? "I'm kind of rambling, but this is what comes to mind when I see these types of articles." You never mention firearms, which is another primary business on the dark web. Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time?
- FELEG 10y ago
  Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time? Yes.
- atom_enger 10y ago
  > 'altering your conciousness' can directly harm the people around you and they have the right to not be harmed by your personal choices. I stated clearly "As long as it(drug use) does not hurt others through the production or the consumption or harm the environment". > However, there needs to be limits. I should be able to fire someone that is high on the job, for instance. Driving a motor vehicle while under the influence should also be illegal. If you are the employer, you should absolutely have the right to fire someone for being under the influence during their hours of employment. Driving is the same -- you're putting other people at risk. Not acceptable. > Should the government continue to pour tons of money into allowing you to kill yourself with drugs? The government pours tons of money into fighting the wrong fight at the moment, they're treating the symptom, not the problem. They're inflating law enforcement budgets and eroding our rights every which way to "fight" this battle. I say if they could take that exact same amount of money they're using to "fight" this battle and put it towards healthcare and treatment, then yeah, they should pour tons of money into it. Our current solution isn't working. > You never mention firearms, which is another primary business on the dark web. Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time? I'm not talking at all about firearms. I'm naive in the sense that I dream about a world without them but I recognize they can be useful tools in certain situations.
RachelF 10y ago
>You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? If you are working for law enforcement, making this a legal market would mean less crime and could cost you your job. If you are running a prison, the more people behind bars, the better it is for you.
- atom_enger 10y ago
  I know that's the reality, but isn't this fucked up? Shouldn't _this_ be illegal?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TaylorAlexander 10y ago
    You mean having conflicts of interest? Don't want to make a straw man, but whatever you meant we ran in to this problem (black markets) precisely because we kept thinking we should make all kinds of things illegal. To solve this problem, make fewer things illegal not more.
    - wheelerwj 10y ago
      We make things illegal for a reason. Often times, a very good reason. And there will continue to be very good reasons to ban things from society. But just because we made it illegal once doesn't mean it should stay illegal.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        >>We make things illegal for a reason. Often times, a very good reason. So? We also often make things illegal for a very bad reason. Just because something has been made illegal doesn't mean it's bad or harmful. Often times, someone powerful simply made people believe that it is because they stood to gain from that decision.
      - 10y ago
sporkologist 10y ago
> How can we get the government to respect our right to put anything in our body that we want to? Sounds simple in principle, but too many people making too much money off stuff being illegal.
sfifs 10y ago
Normally you ban things that have significant negative externalities to others. Hard drug addiction tends to be a negative externality because addicts tend to be easily manipulated to commit crime due to their dependency and also tend to have skewed judgements for being good at regular jobs. Weapons tend to be a negative externality because ready weapon availability lets random ordinary people under stress or influenced by propaganda to shoot up other people and makes it more dangerous for police to operate. Gambling tends to be restricted for a similar reason to reduce availability since there are too many instances of families ruined by someone's gambling addiction.
- cheald 10y ago
  To play devil's advocate, there are too many instances of families ruined by alcoholism and heart disease, but you can still buy beer and cheeseburgers. We clearly will tolerate negative externalities to some degree; a good or service having a negative externality shouldn't be justification enough for banning it.
  - sfifs 10y ago
    Well either you ban it or put frictional controls that make it more difficult or expensive to access (steep taxes etc). It's a continuum based on how negative an externality does a community judge something to be and how much opposition do they think it would stir up. You'll find provinces in India and many countries outside of US/Europe do ban alcohol even today. In US and Europe, the problem is alcohol is too entwined in popular culture to outright ban. However in some places, sale of hard liquor is controlled through government monopoly shops which amounts to another form of control or frictional control. For instance, I recall seeing government liqor shops when visiting Sweden (Systembolaget). Similar restrictions are applied to tobacco practically everywhere.
    - auxym 10y ago
      No need to look as far as Sweden, in most Canadian provinces, alcohol is controlled through a Gov-monopoly. In some of them, you can buy beer&wine at the grocery store (or convenience stores), but even they have to buy it from the official government supplier and sell at the fixed price.
Veratyr 10y ago
> You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? How much could we generate in taxes? Do these people really belong behind bars?" When you look purely at the drug section, yeah, that makes sense. Keep in mind though that the market also facilitates less morally ambiguous things that involve (from TFA): - child sexual exploitation - chemical, biological, and radiological materials and knowledge - stolen goods - counterfeit goods Legalising drug use would only remove one class of product from these marketplaces. They're still going to need to be shut down.
- delegate 10y ago
  > Legalising drug use would only remove one class of product from these marketplaces. They're still going to need to be shut down. Operators who allow these kinds of products on their markets are assholes. 99% of the visitors come for the drugs and these markets are exposing them to all kinds of bullshit crap, like guns, stolen credit card numbers or child porn. I think there would be a lot less 'public' support for markets that sell this crap if drugs were legalised. If legalisation is too complicated politically, then they should at least allow one or several "honest", drugs-only markets to exist peacefully. This way the 'asshole' markets would loose all their traffic - both vendors and clients - making them unprofitable.
  - Galaxeblaffer 10y ago
    Exactly this ! It's really the same out in the real society, i think many gangs and irresponsible pushers etc. would not be tolerated where it not for the drugs. If drug use is as widespread as it seems, many people would have "good"/selfish reasons to hold their hand over people as these people are their only source for mind altering substances. IMO it will be much easier and acceptable to weed out the bad apples once we get our shit together and legalize it all.. At least it will be much harder for criminals to thrive if you remove their financial foundation.
  - kjs3 10y ago
    > 99% of the visitors come for the drugs You have no objective proof that this is true. "Because of a number I pulled out of my ass" isn't a good basis for policy.
marcoperaza 10y ago
Someone addicted to heroin or cocaine has lost their agency, lost their ability to make rational decisions. We should do everything we can to remove these drugs from our society and protect our fellow man from these horrors.
- chillacy 10y ago
  To what extent does society need to be the paternalistic caretakers of us all? Research seems to hint that opioid addiction is as much a side effect of a poor life than a cause for it. Opioids are definitely a slippery slope, but imprisoning users seems like the wrong way to treat the epidemic.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    I don't advocate for imprisoning users. But we should punish manufacturers, traffickers, and dealers harshly. >To what extent does society need to be the paternalistic caretakers of us all? Tough line to draw, but heroin is firmly on the "protect us" side.
    - Shengbo 10y ago
      >I don't advocate for imprisoning users. But we should punish manufacturers, traffickers, and dealers harshly. It should be obvious by now that this method doesn't work and we can't just erase the habit of using recreational drugs from human history. Humanity is a species obsessed with experimentation and exploration. We take mind-altering substances for a wide variety of reasons. Solving problems, winding down at the end of the day, trying to get a boost of creativity, having a spiritual experience or just getting fucked up for the sake of it. If the lawmakers really have our best interest in mind, they should concentrate on education, harm reduction and making sure the drugs people consume do not contain any other, potentially very dangerous substances. We don't need our governments to protect us from ourselves. We need them to make sure these substances are clean, people are aware of the risks and that they have somewhere to go if they need help.
      - 10y ago
pizza 10y ago
Implantable “Neural Dust” Enables Precise Wireless Recording of Nerve Activity [0] BOO! Did I scare ya? ;) [0] http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-08-03 http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-08-03
collyw 10y ago
I consider myself pretty open minded, but when I first logged onto Tor I was kind of shocked. Assasins for hire amongst other things, do you really think that should be legal?
- mcbits 10y ago
  Tor et al. should be just as legal as speaking or passing notes without an omnipresent camera and microphone. Using one's faculty of communication to plot murder should not. It's reasonable for law enforcement, with a valid warrant, to install a hidden microphone in a suspect's basement to record evidence of a crime, yet sometimes that's literally not possible. The solution is not to install microphones in everyone's basement, just in case. But law enforcement is continually lobbying for digital equivalents of that solution, and it's really getting tiresome.
  - collyw 10y ago
    I am not saying Tor should be illegal, far from it. Assassins for hire is what shocked me.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Isn't it largely the case they're all scam artists.
  - collyw 10y ago
    I hope so.

zepolen 10y ago

Weapons in USA are a legal market, and there is some fallout as a result of that since guns will be more accessible to the wrong hands.

atom_enger 10y ago
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm talking about substance use and abuse.
- zepolen 10y ago
  Ah, okay, the article referenced all categories of darknet markets.
leesalminen 10y ago
I'm genuinely curious what your thoughts are on the argument that criminals will break the law and obtain firearms illegally, regardless of the law.
- atom_enger 10y ago
  Yeah we solved that problem in Chicago </s>. We learned that criminals don't obey the law and the law abiding citizens have a difficult time obtaining the proper tools they need to protect themselves.
  - baby 10y ago
    When you have weapons in every city/states around you, and an already large amount of weapons sold, you will have a problem.
- na85 10y ago
  And yet if you compare the US with the next umpteen countries combined, totalling the same number of people, gun deaths in the US are vastly more common. Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or is it perhaps because Canada, England, Japan, et al have gun control laws?
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    Cat's out of the bag though. How are you going to get all of those guns off of the street at this point?
    - baby 10y ago
      By forbidding them and waiting years.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        That might not work, guns last fairly indefinitely if looked after.
        baby 10y ago
        Of course the longer you wait, the less practical this solution becomes. In some years the only solution will be to wear a body armor at all time.

chinese_donald 10y ago

"This cat and mouse game will have no end until they can tap into your brain stem and prevent you from committing these 'crimes' or modify your brain chemistry in a way that will make you not yearn for altering your conciousness" As someone that doesn't do any drugs, I'm all for drug legalization. However, there needs to be limits. I should be able to fire someone that is high on the job, for instance. Driving a motor vehicle while under the influence should also be illegal. 'altering your conciousness' can directly harm the people around you and they have the right to not be harmed by your personal choices. "How can we get the government to respect our right to put anything in our body that we want to?" Another issue is health care: Should the government continue to pour tons of money into allowing you to kill yourself with drugs? "I'm kind of rambling, but this is what comes to mind when I see these types of articles." You never mention firearms, which is another primary business on the dark web. Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time?

FELEG 10y ago
Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time? Yes.
atom_enger 10y ago
> 'altering your conciousness' can directly harm the people around you and they have the right to not be harmed by your personal choices. I stated clearly "As long as it(drug use) does not hurt others through the production or the consumption or harm the environment". > However, there needs to be limits. I should be able to fire someone that is high on the job, for instance. Driving a motor vehicle while under the influence should also be illegal. If you are the employer, you should absolutely have the right to fire someone for being under the influence during their hours of employment. Driving is the same -- you're putting other people at risk. Not acceptable. > Should the government continue to pour tons of money into allowing you to kill yourself with drugs? The government pours tons of money into fighting the wrong fight at the moment, they're treating the symptom, not the problem. They're inflating law enforcement budgets and eroding our rights every which way to "fight" this battle. I say if they could take that exact same amount of money they're using to "fight" this battle and put it towards healthcare and treatment, then yeah, they should pour tons of money into it. Our current solution isn't working. > You never mention firearms, which is another primary business on the dark web. Are you also fine with anyone being able to buy a weapon at any time? I'm not talking at all about firearms. I'm naive in the sense that I dream about a world without them but I recognize they can be useful tools in certain situations.

RachelF 10y ago

>You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? If you are working for law enforcement, making this a legal market would mean less crime and could cost you your job. If you are running a prison, the more people behind bars, the better it is for you.

atom_enger 10y ago
I know that's the reality, but isn't this fucked up? Shouldn't _this_ be illegal?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  You mean having conflicts of interest? Don't want to make a straw man, but whatever you meant we ran in to this problem (black markets) precisely because we kept thinking we should make all kinds of things illegal. To solve this problem, make fewer things illegal not more.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    We make things illegal for a reason. Often times, a very good reason. And there will continue to be very good reasons to ban things from society. But just because we made it illegal once doesn't mean it should stay illegal.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>We make things illegal for a reason. Often times, a very good reason. So? We also often make things illegal for a very bad reason. Just because something has been made illegal doesn't mean it's bad or harmful. Often times, someone powerful simply made people believe that it is because they stood to gain from that decision.
    - 10y ago

sporkologist 10y ago

> How can we get the government to respect our right to put anything in our body that we want to? Sounds simple in principle, but too many people making too much money off stuff being illegal.

sfifs 10y ago

Normally you ban things that have significant negative externalities to others. Hard drug addiction tends to be a negative externality because addicts tend to be easily manipulated to commit crime due to their dependency and also tend to have skewed judgements for being good at regular jobs. Weapons tend to be a negative externality because ready weapon availability lets random ordinary people under stress or influenced by propaganda to shoot up other people and makes it more dangerous for police to operate. Gambling tends to be restricted for a similar reason to reduce availability since there are too many instances of families ruined by someone's gambling addiction.

cheald 10y ago
To play devil's advocate, there are too many instances of families ruined by alcoholism and heart disease, but you can still buy beer and cheeseburgers. We clearly will tolerate negative externalities to some degree; a good or service having a negative externality shouldn't be justification enough for banning it.
- sfifs 10y ago
  Well either you ban it or put frictional controls that make it more difficult or expensive to access (steep taxes etc). It's a continuum based on how negative an externality does a community judge something to be and how much opposition do they think it would stir up. You'll find provinces in India and many countries outside of US/Europe do ban alcohol even today. In US and Europe, the problem is alcohol is too entwined in popular culture to outright ban. However in some places, sale of hard liquor is controlled through government monopoly shops which amounts to another form of control or frictional control. For instance, I recall seeing government liqor shops when visiting Sweden (Systembolaget). Similar restrictions are applied to tobacco practically everywhere.
  - auxym 10y ago
    No need to look as far as Sweden, in most Canadian provinces, alcohol is controlled through a Gov-monopoly. In some of them, you can buy beer&wine at the grocery store (or convenience stores), but even they have to buy it from the official government supplier and sell at the fixed price.

Veratyr 10y ago

> You'd think someone in the chain of command would say, "what would this look like as a legal market? How much could we generate in taxes? Do these people really belong behind bars?" When you look purely at the drug section, yeah, that makes sense. Keep in mind though that the market also facilitates less morally ambiguous things that involve (from TFA): - child sexual exploitation - chemical, biological, and radiological materials and knowledge - stolen goods - counterfeit goods Legalising drug use would only remove one class of product from these marketplaces. They're still going to need to be shut down.

delegate 10y ago
> Legalising drug use would only remove one class of product from these marketplaces. They're still going to need to be shut down. Operators who allow these kinds of products on their markets are assholes. 99% of the visitors come for the drugs and these markets are exposing them to all kinds of bullshit crap, like guns, stolen credit card numbers or child porn. I think there would be a lot less 'public' support for markets that sell this crap if drugs were legalised. If legalisation is too complicated politically, then they should at least allow one or several "honest", drugs-only markets to exist peacefully. This way the 'asshole' markets would loose all their traffic - both vendors and clients - making them unprofitable.
- Galaxeblaffer 10y ago
  Exactly this ! It's really the same out in the real society, i think many gangs and irresponsible pushers etc. would not be tolerated where it not for the drugs. If drug use is as widespread as it seems, many people would have "good"/selfish reasons to hold their hand over people as these people are their only source for mind altering substances. IMO it will be much easier and acceptable to weed out the bad apples once we get our shit together and legalize it all.. At least it will be much harder for criminals to thrive if you remove their financial foundation.
- kjs3 10y ago
  > 99% of the visitors come for the drugs You have no objective proof that this is true. "Because of a number I pulled out of my ass" isn't a good basis for policy.

marcoperaza 10y ago

Someone addicted to heroin or cocaine has lost their agency, lost their ability to make rational decisions. We should do everything we can to remove these drugs from our society and protect our fellow man from these horrors.

chillacy 10y ago
To what extent does society need to be the paternalistic caretakers of us all? Research seems to hint that opioid addiction is as much a side effect of a poor life than a cause for it. Opioids are definitely a slippery slope, but imprisoning users seems like the wrong way to treat the epidemic.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  I don't advocate for imprisoning users. But we should punish manufacturers, traffickers, and dealers harshly. >To what extent does society need to be the paternalistic caretakers of us all? Tough line to draw, but heroin is firmly on the "protect us" side.
  - Shengbo 10y ago
    >I don't advocate for imprisoning users. But we should punish manufacturers, traffickers, and dealers harshly. It should be obvious by now that this method doesn't work and we can't just erase the habit of using recreational drugs from human history. Humanity is a species obsessed with experimentation and exploration. We take mind-altering substances for a wide variety of reasons. Solving problems, winding down at the end of the day, trying to get a boost of creativity, having a spiritual experience or just getting fucked up for the sake of it. If the lawmakers really have our best interest in mind, they should concentrate on education, harm reduction and making sure the drugs people consume do not contain any other, potentially very dangerous substances. We don't need our governments to protect us from ourselves. We need them to make sure these substances are clean, people are aware of the risks and that they have somewhere to go if they need help.
    - 10y ago

pizza 10y ago

Implantable “Neural Dust” Enables Precise Wireless Recording of Nerve Activity [0] BOO! Did I scare ya? ;) [0] http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-08-03 http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-08-03

collyw 10y ago

I consider myself pretty open minded, but when I first logged onto Tor I was kind of shocked. Assasins for hire amongst other things, do you really think that should be legal?

mcbits 10y ago
Tor et al. should be just as legal as speaking or passing notes without an omnipresent camera and microphone. Using one's faculty of communication to plot murder should not. It's reasonable for law enforcement, with a valid warrant, to install a hidden microphone in a suspect's basement to record evidence of a crime, yet sometimes that's literally not possible. The solution is not to install microphones in everyone's basement, just in case. But law enforcement is continually lobbying for digital equivalents of that solution, and it's really getting tiresome.
- collyw 10y ago
  I am not saying Tor should be illegal, far from it. Assassins for hire is what shocked me.
intoverflow2 10y ago
Isn't it largely the case they're all scam artists.
- collyw 10y ago
  I hope so.