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U.S. busts Tor drug market, arrests eight (reuters.com)
66 points by cypherpunks01 on April 17, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 85 comments



That's a shame. These guys' lives are going to be seriously messed up by this, and from the drug list, it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff; according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana".


> it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff; according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana"

"Fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine, with 100 micrograms of fentanyl approximately equivalent to 10 mg of morphine and 75 mg of pethidine (meperidine) in analgesic activity."[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl


Okay, that's an exception. Scary stuff. (My sympathy is still with the guys running this service, but my estimate of their virtue went down.)


The entrepreneur in me really feels for them. They're true entreppies. Risking literally everything. Sure we risk our life savings and sacrifice having a normal life but they risk losing all that AND the chance at being thrown in jail for the rest of their lives.

Every time you hear a new drug commercial on TV, pay close attention to its side effects: permanent lung damage, eye damage, brain damage, death, heart attack, stroke, birth defects, etc... Notice how a drug that damaging is perfectly legal. Then look at how weed and lsd are criminalized. Sadly, I guess we'll have to wait till the older congress retires little by little and gets replaced with new lawmakers.


You know...I have always hoped that as the older lawmakers died off, drugs would be decriminalized. However, I've since accepted that the huge amount of propaganda being shoved down our throats on a daily basis and the willingness of much of the population to not question what they're told/shown means the system will just recreate itself when that happens. Most voters are simply network repeaters...they happily echo messages/misinformation created by various sources who have a vested interest in seeing us continue to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and eat unhealthy foods. And the moment any of these repeaters get out of line, the sources simply need to throw up a "it's killing our helpless children" argument to get them back on track.

It's tiring and sad to watch. All of us came into this world on equal footing, in that we opened our eyes and had to learn about what life really means. The fact that we allow a controlling entity to tell us what we can and can't do with our own bodies is ridiculous and honestly downright scary. Why should they know better than I what's right for my own body? And I say this as someone who has a family, loves his children, and doesn't do drugs, but respects and values what I consider a basic human right. What you do with your body, as long as it doesn't impact others, should be your business.


Hear, hear. I think it's important to acknowledge that the drug war persists for the same reason the TSA does: that there are large-scale industries, with hundreds of thousands of employees, which would be painfully disrupted by a change in policy. The fear-mongering is how they defend their continued existence, it is not the reason for it.

Liquor companies; prison guard unions; police units who self-fund from drug raids; even semi-legal MMJ growers who oppose full legalization. All of these entities, and others, have a strong incentive to perpetuate the persecution of millions of Americans for the crime of questionable health choices.


Ecstasy is horribly nasty stuff. People rarely OD, but it can vary quickly do significant and permanent brain damage with heavy use. The real problem is when the symptoms show up they are basically permanent. Honestly, prolonged heroin use is significantly less harmful, the only good thing about ecstasy is the unpleasant side effects and fairly long high limit how much people take.


There are two major misconceptions around MDMA, both funded by flawed government studies. The first misconception is that MDMA causes "holes in your brain" but this study was debunked. The original claim was based on the notion that MDMA "destroys up to 80% of your serotonin neurotransmitters irreversibly." This was shown to not be true for two reasons: a much larger study (the largest study ever conducted on MDMA use) showed that it's only possible for MDMA to affect up to 5% of your serotonin levels, and it's reversible after a period of weeks or months of nonuse.

The second major misconception is that MDMA causes Parkinson's. The original study was retracted because the drug manufacturer mislabeled the MDMA bottle as Methamphetamine, a completely different drug. They gave the Methamphetamine to monkeys instead of MDMA.

I would recommend checking this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvNCijeYlI

Skip to part 3 if you're wanting to get to the scientific studies.


> the drug manufacturer mislabeled the MDMA bottle as Methamphetamine, a much more damaging drug

It's not even so much that (comparing two drugs like that doesn't really make sense). It's that the dosage administered was far more than what would be comparable for methamphetamine. 6 mg/kg of one drug is not necessarily comparable to 6 mg/kg of another drug... 300 mg of methamphetamine for a ~110 lb. person over 9 hours is absurd - the maximum prescribed dose of Adderall (d-amphetamine) is generally 40-60mg per day, and that's only for individuals with high tolerance (or very severe problems such as narcolepsy). These are oral dosages, mind you, whereas the study used subcutaneous injection, which amplifies the effect of the drug further. Then account for the fact that methamphetamine crosses the blood-brain barrier more easily than its cousin that lacks the methyl group, and you start to wonder why only one of the five monkeys died.

Even before they realized the drug mixup, the Ricaurte, et. al. study is so flawed that it's almost laughable that it was published in the first place. Your study is intended to simulate the environment of a club/rave? 20% of your subjects died after what you considered to be a moderate dose, and you didn't think that was cause to question your methods? Raves may not be the healthiest places in the world, but if real life were anything close to what those data suggest, the morning after a concert or rave you would find the floor literally covered in dead bodies.

I won't even get into the absurd conclusions that they draw from their measurements themselves, since this is HN, not a neuroscience forum, but suffice to say that any college freshman in an introductory neuroscience class should have known better. It's as if they copied and pasted the analysis from another study and inserted their own data into it - that's how nonsensical it is.

The retraction for Ricaurte, et. al.: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ls39/peer_review/Ricaurte_retra...

(The original study is linked from the retraction page; I'd emphasize again that the study itself had enough other flaws in it that it should never have been published in the first place, even if the drug mixup had never been discovered).


I edited my comment to be more neutral towards Methamphetamine; I wasn't aware of the significant dosing differences and that's important.

The real problem is the way the studies were conducted. They didn't test hair samples to verify whether the participants used MDMA, much less control the environment it was taken in. The largest study I referred to that was done by Harvard Medical was done on people who had never tried the drug before, were not at raves taking drugs which could not be verified for purity (amongst other problems like dehydration and hyperthermia), and they verified their study through hair samples.


I gave a little more detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850923 But, while the holes in the brain and Parkinson's where not accurate there is significant evidence that MDMA causes issues and it's not old enough for a lot of long term issues to show up.

PS: My mother has a PHD in neurology with a focus on brain development and MDMA is the drug she was most frightened of. Not that that actually means much in the grand scheme of things, but she has done a lot more literature review of MDMA than I or I suspect anyone on HN has done.


Nobody knows what happens to long term chronic users of MDMA. But we do know that the propaganda that was spread by US government funded studies has been debunked. Scare tactics should be treated with strong skepticism. Before club users got their hands on it and it got banned in 1985 (against a federal judge's recommendation nonetheless), MDMA was a perfectly acceptable drug used by monks, priests and therapists for couples therapy.

Edit: can you please link up the studies you're referring to?


Fear is not equal to facts. I'm sure your mother is a fine scientist, but just because she is afraid of something doesn't equate to facts. Link to a published study of hers? I doubt such exists though. I'd gladly accept a scientific consensus, if one existed, saying that MDMA was harmful, however there is no such consensus. All you are doing is spreading FUD.


MDMA (if that is what you mean, as street 'Ecstasy' can contain any number of other ingredients) is by most metrics one of the safer recreational drugs out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210


MDMA isn't -that- harmful. You're assuming when you buy Ecstasy you're being solid pure MDMA, which often is not the case.


E.g. "Police link 25 deaths and counting from tainted Canadian ecstasy"

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/can...

"12th death linked to tainted ecstasy in Alberta, B.C."

http://www.vancouversun.com/12th+death+linked+tainted+ecstas...

"8 Alberta deaths linked to ecstasy-like drug"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/01/31/calga...


It's not fair to call tainted ecstasy deaths a result of drug use. Despite the fact tainted ecstasy is technically not ecstasy, if the industry was regulated it wouldn't happen.


"A cholesterol-lowering drug taken by 700,000 Americans — Bayer Pharmaceutical's Baycol — was pulled off the market Wednesday because of muscle destruction linked to 31 U.S. deaths and at least nine more fatalities abroad" http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-1788794.html


A larger number of Canadians also died from tainted pork from maple Leaf bacon

This is especially surprising since God explicitly told you not to eat pork almost 3000years ago.

Remember kids, pork and shellfish are evil - just so no.


MDMA is not old enough to show it's long term effects the way smoking or drinking has.

One study of 52 users that where hand selected out of 1500 that showed no cognitive impairment. http://www.addictionjournal.org/viewpressrelease.asp?pr=147 Others studies both before and after have demonstrated issues. The problem is it's hard to find good data on individuals before they started heavy use, and sleep deprivation and dehydration are linked to long term cognitive impairment.

However, if you look at the existing literature there is no large scale and long term study's demonstrating it's safety. And a lot of evidence that MDMA is dangerous.


You keep repeating "MDMA is not old enough..." but MDMA has been around since 1912, and used recreationally since the 60s. While there are certainly risks (mostly due to sourcing issues), negative effects are certainly subtle enough that after 40+ years of fairly widespread use, we haven't seen major epidemiological issues.

Furthermore, these risks must be balanced against the very tangible and easily observable psychological benefits. There's a reason psychotherapists used this drug.


You know what we're sure will ruin your future chances of holding down a job, will stunt your development, and might well lead to severe harm or even death?

Going to prison.

Putting people in prison for harming themselves is the height of absurdity.


This right here is bullshit. long term MDMA use does not cause brain damage and is certainly not worse than long term heroin use.



5,200 orders valued, in total, at $1M. Over a ~2 year period. That's it? Hardly seems like much of a story. Particularly since Tor is of limited use when your system depends on electronic payment systems.


$1m / 5200 = $192 average order.

With a conservative estimate of 3x markup on product (seems way high, especially if these guys were just middle men), $20 shipping (national, Fedex) and 0 hosting costs they're making 192-(64+20) = $108 per order.

$108 * 5200 = 561,600 / 2 / 8 = $35,000 per person per year, or $16 an hour if it was a full-time job.

Considering that anyone with the skills to set up an anonymized marketplace site should be able to find work that pays far more than $16/hr this seems like more an ideological exercise or hobby than a money-making cartel.

Whether or not you consider it to be worth spending probably $3m+ on investigating, trying and imprisoning these 8 people is another ideological question...


I believe they were using bitcoins to anonymize some transactions.

The hardest thing for a regular consumer I would think would be finding a drop point. Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a consumer who could then be charged for possession.


I don't think these guys used bitcoin, I think you're thinking of silkroad (another tor based drug network that wired wrote about a while back). As far as I know silkroad is still operating - although I don't have tor set up so don't know.


> Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a consumer

Yeah, how?


Assuming they found them in the mail during transit using xray or some other method since they were in canada, shipping to US goes through customs which has special rules allowing that, then they can look at who is receiving the package and then they get them to squeal on who the dealer was.


I don't think they x-ray every single package, that's just impossible, and who would look at all the x-rays.

So even if they do it,

1) your chances of getting caught are extremely low

2) i don't think you're liable for receiving a package (though you may be for keeping and not reporting it).


Yea it's certainly a complicated situation for both you and the police to figure out. The problem is I don't think I'd trust them to not try to strong arm you into confessing and saying who it was, assuming you did order them even if they couldn't prove it.


I'm curious how they attacked this network -- I'd assume the payment side is still the easiest, and they could look for some patterns and then set up physical surveillance at WU or other locations to catch cash transactions.


> accepting payment through PayPal

Uh. How did they expect to remain anonymous with a PayPal account?


hahaha...seriously? with PayPal? i suppose it could (maybe) be done with prepaid credit cards, but still.


Use forged documents for everything (including your bank accounts), and keep really small balances. Maybe also do business accounts, ideally also with forged info (particularly for US businesses, people don't check the documents very well). I assume PayPal does lazy checking, and will not check a low balance account as much.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.


When I first heard about this, I heard they anonymized their payments through bitcoins.

PayPal seems a bit of a move to widen their market


No, that's the Silk Road.


If these guys were using e-gold or some other alternative payment system, the Feds would raid the currency operator's offices as well and seize servers (as they have done in the past). Not so with PayPal and Western Union (I'm not disagreeing with the lack of such action).


When I saw the title, I immediately assumed it was Silk Road. That would have surprised me, as the operators have no part in the actual business, and all trades are conducted with bitcoins. If Silk Road went down, that would be news, as they really embrace strong crypto and opsec.


8x life in prison for $1M in drug trafficking?


Costing society probably $100K/yr/each to imprison them.


Nope. It costs close to $30K/year to imprison somebody in the US. So make that $250K/year to imprison this sorry bunch.


In California it was $50,000 for the 08-09 year. But if you read the footnote it states "since 2000-01, the average annual cost has increased by about $19,500." Almost a $20 thousand increase in 8 years, I'd hate to see what it is now or worse in another 7 years.

We have to add in the cost of Correctional Officer salaries and the Wardens who can easily make over $220,000 a year.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...


Don't forget the opportunity losses. These people could have contributed to society and the economy further.


That's maximum life in prison.


So were they actually selling the drugs or were they just operating a marketplace similar to Silk Road?

Also, why the hell would they use PayPal?! At least SR uses bitcoins.


Reuters.com pulled it off.


Web page is dead.

Was this silk road? I've been meaning to scrape prices from there as a pet economics project.


No, the project was called The Farmer's Market. While it operated on Tor, they accepted payments over PayPal which completely breaks the anonymity chain. Silk Road is still operational and uses other security mechanisms (in addition to a decentralized, digital anonymous currency) to further anonymize transactions, running all payments through a tumbler.


Someone should write up a tour guide to the deep dark web.

I doubly wish I was indexing silkroad's prices, so we could see the price impact this event has.


Looks like this is a working link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/17/net-us-usa-drugs-i...

The new url has "net-" in it.


It doesn't appear that I can edit the URL anymore :(


Why on earth would an online drug marketplace use traceable currency? Silk road got it right using BC.


Looks like Hushmail was their weak point. Feds got court order from Canada based on treaty and it flowed from there.

But yeah, between advertising, shipping, getting paid and moving money around it's hard to stay anon .


Hushmail has been known to be open to law enforcement for years, they even talk about it in "Kingpin", http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/hushmail-to-war/

Amazing they would choose to communicate over it.


I never understand why people have such a fundamentally difficult time grasping the concept of plaintext and/or subpoenas. If someone knows enough to trade drugs on Tor, they definitely should be using strong encryption on anything and everything pertaining to it, including email.

Month after month handfuls of new stories come out about someone outed and/or owned by emails or other plaintext communication that was not encrypted or cryptographically signed. You'd think it'd sink through after a while.

You have no reasonable expectation of security for anything that is not fully encrypted with vetted, real-world strong encryption. While you may want something to stay under wraps, you're just leaving it there for the taking unless it is stored on permanent storage only in encrypted form.


My theory is that only idiots get caught. If you read the article, it was a tiny operation considering the global illegal drug market. They only sold $1M worth of drugs in three years, that's silly.

They didn't catch some big fish criminals, they caught some idiot kids who thought they could easily make money.


Big criminals arrange for 120 tons to be shipped to San Diego, but the last mile has to sell it. When you make a few dollars at a time in profit, you need new customers, over and over again. Thee big dealer can also get lucky once and retire, not so for the small fish.

Acting as a user wanting to buy drugs online is the easiest thing for an undercover DEA agent. And then they can use full power of the US Government to find out the rest.

Bottom line: do not sell drugs online day in and day out, you will get caught.


"My theory is that only idiots get caught"

No, only idiots do this to begin with.


As much as I agree, do you realize how big the active drug trade is? There are a lot of very smart people out there.


It's about half the size of the legal (pharmaceutical) drug trade, which is big.

Taking out a group with $1 million revenue is like taking out a local pharmacy.


Maybe there's value in the fact that this was an Onion service that was targeted specifically -- are the Feds trying to send a message about Tor? Was this whole operation hinged on the PR or was there some strategic value to taking out the group (assuming your analogy to a local pharmacy holds true, which I don't necessarily believe)? Perhaps the Feds were scared because Tor was involved and wanted to strike before the defendants wised up and went totally dark with more anonymous payment schemes (anyone using PayPal obviously has no reasonable expectation of anonymity), knowing that PayPal et al only keep records so long?


No way, "high-end marijuana". Crazy. Extremely dangerous!


It's dangerous to compete with state-protected real drug cartels.

In all seriousness... does anyone think the present-day prohibition racket isn't just as corrupt as what was going on in the 1920s? Drug Enforcement Agency... who do you think they're enforcing for?

It's almost impossible that it wouldn't be that corrupt. There is just too much freaking money involved, the stakes too high, for massive numbers of people to not be on the take.


State-protected real drug cartels and prohibition rackets... can you expand? These drugs aren't just illegal here, are similar drug cartels running countries around the world?


The money goes from the tobacco, and alcohol manufacturers to the lobbyists to the reelection campaigns for the politicians that eliminate their competition. Pretty decent racket. There are similar rackets for Hollywood movies, petroleum, automobiles....

As api points out, there are also drug rackets and cartels that sell the nominally illegal stuff. Those guys can bend cops to eliminate their competition as well.


Yeah, that's a whole other issue...

Having seen people who smoke a lot of marijuana and people who drink a lot of alcohol, I can say with absolute certainty that alcohol is a far more dangerous drug. Ever known a hard-core alcoholic? That stuff eats your soul. It's at least on par with heroin.


It's not just the user it's the cost to society.

Look at the Stanley cup riots last year - can you imagine the carnage if they had all been out of their skulls on BC-bud rather than beer.


"Dude, they lost... that totally sucks, man. Hey, is there a pizza joint around here?"


I'm pretty sure that smoking a joint instantly turns you into a crack addicted prostitute with greasy hair and spots - while drinking alcohol makes you a suave and sophisticated cool dude.

Then I stopped watching TV commercials.


They don't "run countries," but there is massive corruption.

Prohibition is basically a price-fixing scheme, and makes illegal drugs obscenely profitable. Years ago I knew a friend who got into it, and he made over $20,000 in one weekend by simply driving a car across the border once. (He ended up getting in trouble unfortunately, though he's much better now and no longer involved.)

If a person is willing to put up with the risk, there are few more profitable businesses.

I've heard recent figures around $400 billion per year globally. So you've probably got cartels that were they legitimate businesses would be on the Fortune 500.

With profits like that, large-scale operations have a lot of money to throw around to bribe cops, judges, government officials, etc. So as a result, the large cartels end up with a privileged position. Smaller operations that cannot afford to have such people on their payroll get targeted preferentially.

Look into the history of bootlegging in Chicago in the 20s. It's the same kind of thing.

The horrible thing about prohibition is that it's such a potent force for institutional corruption. The naiveté of the soccer moms that support it is disgusting. They all need to be beaten with a reality stick.


> They don't "run countries,"

Look at Mexico. They might not run the country yet, but they're giving it a go for sure.


So you think that all countries decided that xyz drugs could be "banned" which would then open up a huge opportunity to sell them illegally? And countries around the world decided this independently?

What about the theory that these countries actually believed that banning these substances could increase the health of the country? For example, the christian women and Henry Ford were against alcohol and actually weren't corrupt bootleggers trying to make money by selling moonshine.

I'm not saying corruption isn't there, of course there's corruption - police are people too. There is corruption. It doesn't make everyone corrupt and it doesn't mean the _reason_ drugs are illegal is because of corruption. That's silly.


> They don't "run countries,"

Why would they want to? It is easier just to pay to get politicians elected and then own them for life. See Mexico for an example.

Its the same reason Apple does not want to own music labels. A lot of work with poor returns.


But of course you have ZERO evidence of US cops, judges, officials being involved in large scale drug trafficking.

And how exactly does a corrupt judge work given the appellate process?



Mexico drug plane used for US 'rendition' flights: report (AFP) – Sep 4, 2008 MEXICO CITY (AFP) —

A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine had previously been used for CIA "rendition" flights, a newspaper report said here Thursday, citing documents from the United States and the European Parliament.

The plane was carrying Colombian drugs for the fugitive leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, when it crash-landed in the Yucatan peninsula on September 24, El Universal reported.

The daily said it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which "show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects."

It said the European Parliament was investigating the private Grumman Gulfstream II, registered by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.

It also said the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) logbook registered that the plane had traveled between US territory and the US military base in Guantanamo.

It said the FAA registered its last owner as Clyde O'Connor in Pompano Beach, Florida. Extraordinary rendition has been harshly criticized since it began in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

link - http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql-xUcQE...


>And how exactly does a corrupt judge work given the appellate process?

Seriously? I can think of a handful of cases, let alone methods, without even resorting to Google.


Seriously. Why don't you just wake up and get a grip.

The majority of the countries on this planet have similar drug policies to the US. They aren't all corrupt and in many countries the policies are quite effective. So to rant on like a crazy person about corruption and conspiracies just makes you sound unstable. There are many practical areas that the US can focus on like better border controls rather than opening up the can of worms that is legalising all drugs.


There are quite a few studies that show the correlation between legalizing drugs and domestic crime - Portugal being one of the most cited - and it's been shown that legalizing drugs actually decreases crime. We should be sending drug addicts to rehabilitation centers... Not prison, where drugs are rampant and only further increases the drug addicts dependence on narcotics.


Nitpick: Portugal didn't legalized drugs; "we" just decriminalized the possession of small quantities. It's still a crime to grow, cook, distribute and sell them.


Which countries have policies like the U.S. that are quite effective?

I only know of Singapore, where drugs carry a death penalty, and that's far less ethical than any kind of drug trafficking.

Also: I find it kind of amazing that there are still people naive enough to call me a paranoid conspiracy nut or "unstable" for suggesting that... gasp... there might be corruption in the world.

A paranoid conspiracy nut is someone who thinks that the world's leaders are shape shifting reptiles or that everything is run by a secret cabal linked to some kind of ancient secret society. I'm just suggesting that a large-scale illegal business with profits in the hundreds of billions and cash flow probably near $1 trillion might have an interest in putting a few people on the payroll.


Of course corruption exists, no one claimed different. The blanket statements are what make you seem like a crazy. Such as "Who do you think the DEA is enforcing for?". Come on, really?

Corruption was not the reason drugs became illegal and it's not the reason drugs are still illegal.


And here I thought ending drug prohibition was about putting the worms back into the can.




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