I really have a hard time taking both the police and the journalists serious. The first for mis-directing all these resources while I believe must they have much more serious crimes not getting any attention, and the latter for not being critical of this in the least bit.
Victimless crime does not exist in my book. Having it in the law books says a lot about the those who wrote it.
I'll answer this as a long time ecstasy user. Pill producers make their pills in a variety of shapes and colors and for them it's mostly about marketing. When I was in high school "rolexes" and "supermans" were some of the most sought after rolls in New York. They were sought after because they had a reputation for being high quality. However if you've been around longer than five minutes you know it's easy for other people to also make pills, possibly of bad quality, in the same shape and color and so producers would change their shapes and colors constantly to try to stay ahead of the fakes.
For users the appeal of corporate branded pills is that it's sort of fun/funny to see something so illicit branded with something so commonplace. It's almost a joke. As if IKEA or Microsoft sold ecstasy.
Neither finds that aspect of the pills incredibly engaging. It's a means of authenticating a batch of pills, while using coded parlance, so that people develop a sense of getting what they paid for, while latching onto a memorable detail, and communicating in slang that flies under the radar.
No one cares about those stupid logos, or infringement or whatever. It's more about shared secrets and awareness of undisclosed details while dropping hints and passing around code words on the sly.
Now that these code words have been leaked in a bust, they'll google some other logos, print them out, mold them into the pill press, and next week's batch will be "Bob's Discount Furniture" and "Facetime" or whatever.
The same reason why brands are desirable in legal markets. Mainly for quality control and the ability for the user to ask for a specific pill that they enjoyed or heard good things about.
That they use well known brands is a side effect of it a being a black market. Why develop a brand of your own that could be taken away at any moment? Reuse well known brands so people will remember them.
One reason is to give dealers and customers a level of plausible deniability about their activities after the fact.
If a text message is asking for Angel Dust or ICE, the defense attorney will have a harder time than if the text message is asking about IKEA or Gorilla Glue.
"We enhanced a fingerprint that was barely legible. He dun it!"
I honestly wonder if they are using some ML-style hallucination algo. Because most non-technical folk don't understand that the details are missing, and any attempt to fill them in usually requires a great deal of liberty.
Anyways, they probably used the weak evidence to get the warrant for the raid. And then he confessed and there was all the evidence in his home. It's common as rain, use faulty evidence in order to secure confessions or actual court-admissable evidence. Egh.
