8 ms·

Trends in the Silk Road 2.0

218 points by dlau1 12y ago

gouggoug 12y ago
The disclaimer is interesting: 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?
- phpnode 12y ago
  what crime would a visitor be committing?
  - tedks 12y ago
    Attempt to traffic narcotics across state lines? 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.
  - baq 12y ago
    a thoughtcrime seems perfectly fine here.
  - Havoc 12y ago
    I'd imagine something along the lines of "knowing about a crime being committed without reporting it".
    - malka 12y ago
      I'm not sure the cops would like it, if each person who ever visited SR out of curiosity gave them a phone call.
      - extempore 12y ago
        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.
tedks 12y ago
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.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  > 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 Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?
  - aganders3 12y ago
    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.
    - Evolved 12y ago
      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.
SchizoDuckie 12y ago
WTF. According to a quick calculation 23% of the whole index of today ships from The Netherlands...
- st0p 12y ago
  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.
  - SchizoDuckie 12y ago
    I am aware of that, I just wasn't aware that you can just ship that stuff worldwide by mail so easily..
    - st0p 12y ago
      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.
      - Havoc 12y ago
        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.
        dobbsbob 12y ago
        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.
underyx 12y ago
>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?
- Havoc 12y ago
  User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.
  - underyx 12y ago
    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?
    - Havoc 12y ago
      You're missing my point. Have a look at what the EFF has to say (with cool test too): https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
      - underyx 12y ago
        I did know about this before, and I suspected that you were referring to this earlier. None of this is applicable to a scraper.
- xj9 12y ago
  Shouldn't he just identify as some recent version of Tor Browser?
misiti3780 12y ago
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?
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  >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.
- gabrielhn 12y ago
  www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets has a list in the sidebar
- slurry 12y ago
  It's on the WIkipedia page.
TheOsiris 12y ago
I have never purchased anything from the site, and I wasn’t presented with any choices to review an item. Suuuuure ;)
dobbsbob 12y ago
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
freework 12y ago
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 https://github.com/priestc/weedprices
baby 12y ago
If there could be some sort of graph for the prices of cocain, heroin, lsd, etc... similar to this one: www.davidwong.fr/ltc/ this would be pretty awesome. I'm also really surprised about the numbers of german sellers in Europe.
imaginenore 12y ago
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.
- Istof 12y ago
  or just add labels on the graph itself and you won't even need colors (bonus for the color blinds)
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
Your report is quite interesting! 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 [0] http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/ http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitc... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 12y ago
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.
SnotJockey 12y ago
Australia, punching well above it's weight here. One 15th of America's population, 1/2 it's sellers and listings.
- alasdair_ 12y ago
  It's almost as if someone sent all the criminals to that one island...
_bdog 12y ago
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.
gwern 12y ago
> 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.)

218 points by dlau1 12y ago

The disclaimer is interesting: 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?

phpnode 12y ago
what crime would a visitor be committing?
- tedks 12y ago
  Attempt to traffic narcotics across state lines? 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.
- baq 12y ago
  a thoughtcrime seems perfectly fine here.
- Havoc 12y ago
  I'd imagine something along the lines of "knowing about a crime being committed without reporting it".
  - malka 12y ago
    I'm not sure the cops would like it, if each person who ever visited SR out of curiosity gave them a phone call.
    - extempore 12y ago
      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.

tedks 12y ago

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.

jimktrains2 12y ago
> 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 Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?
- aganders3 12y ago
  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.
  - Evolved 12y ago
    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.

SchizoDuckie 12y ago

WTF. According to a quick calculation 23% of the whole index of today ships from The Netherlands...

st0p 12y ago
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.
- SchizoDuckie 12y ago
  I am aware of that, I just wasn't aware that you can just ship that stuff worldwide by mail so easily..
  - st0p 12y ago
    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.
    - Havoc 12y ago
      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.
      - dobbsbob 12y ago
        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.

underyx 12y ago

>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?

Havoc 12y ago
User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.
- underyx 12y ago
  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?
  - Havoc 12y ago
    You're missing my point. Have a look at what the EFF has to say (with cool test too): https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
    - underyx 12y ago
      I did know about this before, and I suspected that you were referring to this earlier. None of this is applicable to a scraper.
xj9 12y ago
Shouldn't he just identify as some recent version of Tor Browser?

misiti3780 12y ago

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?

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
>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.
gabrielhn 12y ago
www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets has a list in the sidebar
slurry 12y ago
It's on the WIkipedia page.

TheOsiris 12y ago

I have never purchased anything from the site, and I wasn’t presented with any choices to review an item. Suuuuure ;)

dobbsbob 12y ago

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

freework 12y ago

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 https://github.com/priestc/weedprices

baby 12y ago

If there could be some sort of graph for the prices of cocain, heroin, lsd, etc... similar to this one: www.davidwong.fr/ltc/ this would be pretty awesome. I'm also really surprised about the numbers of german sellers in Europe.

imaginenore 12y ago

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.

Istof 12y ago
or just add labels on the graph itself and you won't even need colors (bonus for the color blinds)

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

Your report is quite interesting! 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 [0] http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/ http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitc... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 12y ago

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.

SnotJockey 12y ago

Australia, punching well above it's weight here. One 15th of America's population, 1/2 it's sellers and listings.

alasdair_ 12y ago
It's almost as if someone sent all the criminals to that one island...

_bdog 12y ago

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.

gwern 12y ago

> 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.)