The same argument is better directed at drug prohibition writ large, and seems intellectually incoherent when focused selectively on individual enforcement actions.
Too, there's something galling about the idea of militating for forbearance for the drug market that serves primarily the wealthiest actors. Before we turn a blind eye to what are in fact gigantic organized criminal conspiracies operated by the kinds of people who will happily slap $70,000 on the barrel for a vanity electric car, maybe we could take a hard look at sentencing laws and early release programs.
Finally: it's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet" traffic solely in substances, as if allowing them to operate unimpeded would have only the effect of getting some of the drug trade off the street.
Finally: it's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet" traffic solely in substances
Absolutely. For example these sites routinely sell guns into parts of the world with strict and popular gun control policies. Ask an average man on the British street if their country is being made safer by sites that let anyone easily buy guns that are delivered to the door, and see what response you get ...
Not that routinely... Guns have developed a reputation for either being scams or the seller getting busted routinely (almost all the BMR busts were related either to poison or guns), never sell well (which is why SR1 shut down its Armory section after a few months - no sales), and around half the markets outright ban sales of them (see my census http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival#data ).
It's only intellectually incoherent from the perspective we hold, on the outside of the bureaucracy. From within, either cognitive biases fill the gap, or there is information which, true or not, fills the gap.
I'm not sure which is scarier, as I find myself often wondering whether our governments are barking mad, or know something we do not - or are just deluded by bog standard cognitive dissonance.
Either way, the problem you describe extends far beyond prohibition, and drives much of the world's woes.
Not so obvious. A lot of the reason power has aggregated in the federal government here in the U.S. is because smaller governmental entities are incapable of addressing "race to the bottom" problems. Whether you're talking about gun control, environmental protection, welfare, health insurance, etc, it's hard to effectuate those laws if they can be easily subverted by moving 100 miles away.
So you're against people having more choice of where to live, and abandoning where they live if they deem fit, because it makes it hard to have effective laws in a country if people can easily move out?
You thirst for power is incredible. If people are moving 100 miles away from a country you think it's great to live in, then why do you care so much?
I will never understand this urge to rule over other people.
It is obvious but completely ignores my question. As an aside, I can't think of many governments that would willingly divest themselves of access to tax revenue/citizens.
I don't have much sympathy for the online drug dealer. The wild west atmosphere of the net is ending (sadly), but all they're doing is providing another pretext for governments and powerful interests to seize more control.
The FBI raids might actually be giving free publicity to these kind of markets. People who had never heard of them have now read news stories about the markets and might now seek them out.
After all, the services that sprang up to take the place of the original silk road soon grew bigger than the original site. Perhaps the same thing will happen now with whatever new services now emerge?
I think that you're right. The FBI has (so far) only managed to take down three of the top six darknet markets[1]. It seems likely that the majority of the sellers from the shutdown sites will move their operations over to the remaining three; bolstering their sizes and attracting more customers.
The FBI is acting as a good litmus test of the security and confidentiality of these sites as well. If they got three but the others are still running, then maybe it means it is harder for them to find out where or who is running those sites.
You would hope eventually we can use this evolutionary process to see completely opaque black markets emerge. Or you may not hope, depending on purview.
You can disagree with current drug laws and desire a change, you can say that the actions the FBI has taken made the situation worse and be correct with that, but you can not blame the FBI for doing so, because they are just doing what they are expected to do given the current laws.
That's not entirely true. The FBI chooses what it wants to focus on, which is determined not by the adverse impact on society or prioritization by laws but by other considerations such as media exposure, general popularity, funding, etc. I am not saying all blame belongs to the FBI and not the system, but they are at least partially to blame.
The FBI allowing Silk Road or Silk Road-alikes to operate unchecked is an admission to the world that Bitcoin/Tor have eroded the sovereignty of the U.S. That's not just an institutional embarrassment, it's a signal that we no longer live in a law-governed society. You don't get to overpower the United States government.
Why do we spend so much time and money chasing fugitives? Why do we risk officers' lives in armed standoffs? Because the government is not a government anymore if you get to win.
The fact that we do not allow crimes on the scale of Silk Road to continue is, in a fairly important sense, what makes the U.S. different from Mexico. Sure, there are lots of small-scale crimes we can't actually enforce, but those don't have the same public visibility, and so don't give the appearance of a government that can't enforce laws anymore. Silk Road does. There is an important sense in which it is the government's job to demonstrate that the rule of law is very much in effect in the large-scale and publicly visible areas where it matters.
Which is, in large part, why the fact that nobody went to jail over the 2008 meltdown is so concerning.
It's really worth thinking about this: why do we prosecute crimes at all? Is it the deterrence effect of the potential for getting caught? In that case, why do we bother prosecuting, e.g. murders that are so circumstance-specific there is little danger of reoffending (e.g. wife killing her abusive husband)?
There are "immoral laws" and there are "immoral laws." Mandatory female genital mutilation is an "immoral law." Making drugs illegal might be bad policy, but I don't think it rises to the level of immorality.
The fact is that drugs have externalized effects, whether you're talking about peer pressure to engage in drug use, crack babies, broken homes, or drug addicts committing crimes to feed their addictions. It's a pretty widely-accepted that society has a right and legitimate interest in policing things that have externalized effects. It may be the case that it's futile to make drugs illegal--that criminalization creates worse societal harms than drug use, but that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms. Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws. They may or may not have the intended effect, but it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
Morality is an aspect of subjective perception. It is not, in fact, entirely clear that these black markets are unhealthy for the world. Are they causing drug epidemics? Are they funding terrorist groups? It's hard to say. Maybe this would remove drug activity from the streets. But the point is, they're pursuing novel problems in the world without actually giving any effort to show us the calculus that went into their decisions, and that is immoral as an agent of justice paid by our taxes.
The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime; the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful utopia overnight if only you could buy crystal meth at your local supermarket doesn't have much evidence to support it.
That's a dramatic shift of the goalposts, isn't it? His argument was that ending prohibition wouldn't immediately make Mexico a safer place. It wasn't that prohibition was itself an intrinsically good idea.
A dramatic shift of goalposts would be equating not having your head chopped off with utopia.
His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime".
This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled argument. Maybe you can help out.
That's a very uncharitable summary of the comment you replied to, and also a stretch, since you're the one introducing "utopia" in the the discussion.
I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than for drugs. Here it is:
Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview.
Usually, competition is benign.
Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices is malignant.
As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in those cases where the competition becomes malignant.
As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their sexual integrity.
We can do that even while understanding that different people have different notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity". The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes on the coercive force of public policy.
In the same sense as there's no intrinsic moral problem with buying a specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and fixing prices, there's no intrinsic moral problem with exchanging money for sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on their willingness to sell sex.
Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen.
It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a dispositive one.
Um, I used a phrasing that was intended to be slightly more interesting and less dry than "the idea that Mexico would not have violent cartels overnight if ...." - but it should have been obvious what I meant.
You're indeed the one who shifted the goal posts there. You suggested that prohibition is the reason reporters get their heads chopped off in Mexico. I pointed out that it's not the case; cartels do more than just drugs trafficking. You then requested I provide a principled argument for prohibition, as if that's a response to me pointing out a flaw in your own argument.
I find it funny you have a problem "coercing" poor women and single mothers (by allowing them the choice to sell a product they have) but you don't have a problem coercing sex workers out of the industry they chose to work in.
> That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Except that the world has several red-light districts and what you're saying would happen never did and never will.
Look, those prostitutes in the Netherlands making pennies for sex, they still have to sit and wait for clients. During that time they can pick up a book and learn other skills. If they're not doing that it's because they don't want to do something else other than have sex for money.
You're looking at it the wrong way. You're taking away the "choice" of a small number of women who would choose to engage in sex work, in return for removing the pressure to do so from a large number of women on the margin.
Or workplace safety laws. You take away the "choice" of people to work for employers who cut-corners in terms of safety, to reduce the pressure on desperate people to take such jobs.
> Making drugs illegal might be bad policy, but I don't think it rises to the level of immorality.
I do. Because we know that it leads to increased detrimental effects of abuse amongst those that abuse drugs, as well as vast amounts of violent crime to support the drug industry.
Personally, I consider legislators that continue to support drug laws no better than mass murderers.
> The fact is that drugs have externalized effects
There is however little to no evidence that outlawing drug use has had a positive effect on these, and a lot of evidence that outlawing drug use is directly causing some of these, such as pushing drug addicts into other crime.
Before these effects were understood I would have agreed that drug laws were not yet immoral. But these effects are known. There's no excuse.
> that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
Since when it is a requirement that a law has not positive effect for it to be immoral?
> Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws.
What massive social harm does gun control laws or liquor laws cause? How many people are left dead because of gun control laws or liquor laws?
> it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
Yes, they are causing a substantial proportion of them.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down for this.
The drug laws kill, they kill more people that take drugs than they help. They also cause collateral damage all over the place, fund organised crime on a massive scale and contribute to the undermining of stable governments across the world.
There is no doubt at all that prohibition is horrifically immoral.
I was probably getting downvoted because I was rather undiplomatic about how I expressed it. E.g. drawing the parallel between voting for keeping drugs illegal and mass murder means I also implicitly accused anyone who belives drugs should remain illegal of sympathising with mass murder. It's harder to ignore that, than if someone "just" claims that drug prohibition kills without connecting the dots.
But I stand by that.
Still, it stands at 0 at this point, which is quite moderate given how harsh I was.
Source for the relative amount of cost versus benefit? What is the avoided cost of kids not feeling social pressure to engage in legal drug use (as they do with legal alcohol abuse)?
There is significant evidence that legalisation doesn't really affect the levels of use, particularly with weed. So that argument doesn't hold a lot of water.
They make those harms demonstrably and measurably worse. They kill. If negligent homicide is immoral then so is the drug legislation and so are the people that prop it up. In fact it goes way beyond negligent.
ahallock asked the right question, but your response is wrong.
Saying there are "immoral laws" and "immoral laws" as if to imply a difference, is intellectually dishonest and violates the law of identity in logic. You're simply trying to weasel in some other definition of "immoral". I'm simply identifying the rhetorical device you're using, and that it doesn't fool everyone as perhaps you wished.
Mandatory genital mutilation is immoral, in the end, because no one ones another person's body, and no one has authority over another person's body.
Making drugs illegal is immoral for the exact same reason.
Drug addicts committing crimes that harm other human beings is also immoral for the exact same reason.
Society has no right to police things because only individuals have rights, not groups. If you think groups have rights I'd love to be convinced of that.
> there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
This is so easy to deny. There are many ways to go about this. We could say caffeine helps society be more productive and so in the end it may be a net benefit. There are other drugs we could argue are helpful, at least for some people, like lithium, aspirin, etc. Moving on, if you don't accept any of the beneficial drugs, I could argue that many instances of drug use result in neutral societal consequences, for instance, every time I use drugs, there is never a societal harm. I'm taking 'societal harm' to mean violations of the rights of any individual in that society. When I take drugs I do not violate any one person's natural rights. So really, there are so many examples of how drug use does not cause societal harm, that for you to say there's no denying that, is frankly delusional.
Whatever our attitude might be towards drug legalization, expecting a government agent to throw their career by taking a principled moral stand against, er, shutting down drug dealing networks, is perhaps going a bit far. There certainly are areas of government or law enforcement work that I would not like to participate in for personal moral reasons, but without going into the specific technicalities of how this particular investigation might have been conducted, this isn't one of them (though I'm a Brit so this particular case doesn't apply to me, but of course we have similar laws and similar investigations).
The war on drugs may be a bad idea, but that doesn't make drug dealers activities OK. They are after all knowingly and directly funding the gangs and cartels that are murdering people all over Mexico and Colombia. Yes, Silk road sold Cocaine and not just domestic American weed. The law enforcement guys busting those people are doing good work, it's just that the reasons they have to do it are bad. That's on us and our elected representatives more than it is on them as government agents.
This is why I have no time for users of hard drugs claiming they're sticking it to the man and it's a libertarian issue. Yes it is, but that's no excuse for voluntarily choosing to fund murderers.
You are voluntarily choosing to fund murderers by merely circulating the US currency, and obviously by paying taxes.
We all weigh these things out. Maybe the cocaine buyer is funding wars, but it's not his fault, just like it's not your fault that there's a war in the Middle East.
This is my problem with policing in general. The drug laws in particular cause so much harm, but there are many bad laws. As a police officer you have to be involved in enforcing them all regardless.
I don't think that scrapping enforcement is a viable or useful option but...
Because those who would hold them accountable either created or support said immoral laws.
Also, you could go the deontological route, and say that by doing their duty they are being moral, for what other measure do you have, in a subjective and self-referential world?
Although frankly I think that you either have to be amazingly naïve or amazingly egoistical (or both) to work in law enforcement and not have moral qualms about your employ.
Harsh! Without police, random thugs would rule. Now you may slander police as thugs, but they follow rules, and those rules can be changed. Where your random thug is just out for himself, and out to get your stuff.
> Now you may slander police as thugs, but they follow rules
They are supposed to follow rules (aka, the law), just like everyone is supposed to.
There are quite reasonable bases for being concerned that they too often don't, and that they are less constrained to do so than others, because they receive preferential treatment from the enforcers of the law, being as how that is their own community.
define "too often." Of the many interactions police offices have with civilians in a calendar year, what percentage of them could be classified as corrupt/evil?
I'm not saying there shouldn't be police - I'm saying that people who want to be police should not be police. The vast majority of police work could be carried out by individuals selected through sortition, not dissimilarly to jury duty. For longer-term roles, which require a higher level of expertise, we have no solution right now other than career law enforcement folks, but soon, AI could fill that gap.
""" More to the point, if you're buying drugs online you're not supporting local drug dealers and the crime and violence that typically accompany open air drug markets, particularly in inner cities. By cutting those sellers out of the equation, you're seeing a net reduction in violence overall.
> How do you actually get your drugs if you buy them on Silk Road? Do you have UPS bring the MDMA to your door?
Yes. Typically it comes in "stealth" packaging to prevent it being detected en route. If it wasn't for tor being so slow it would be basically the same flow as ordering something off amazon
One can only hope that for the coming decades (not years) that those who put such policies in place (and those who continue to enforce them) will be rotting in the ground, and more forward-thinking people will begin to realize the irreversible damage the War on Drugs has caused (and continues to cause), and start to undo such shit policies. Hopefully that wasn't too much of a run-on sentence.
The real "more dangerous" argument is that the next gen sites will be even better, better hidden and more secure. They will evolve. So we will be in a situation where they will have to crack on everyone rights to bust this darkernet (situation I don't like), and with the way the security agencies are acting lately I doubt that they will think twice about it.
I'm a bit confused as to what the alternative is from their perspective. If they infiltrated the site, and it was doing things that are illegal, they'd be horribly negligent to not act on it. It would be the equivalent to the "Fast and Furious" scandal when spun by news agencies. We can disagree with the morality of drug laws (I think they're horribly misguided and incoherent), but what else can they do?
I think the best we can hope for is that they do the job we asked them to through the laws we put in place without violating other laws we put in place to protect civil liberties. If they're doing that (...) then it seems like this was their only ethical* choice.
Assuming they're following the laws protecting civil liberties (...), the decision on whether or not the upside of shutting down a few markets balances the downside of hardening the others is way above their pay grade.
* where ethical is defined as I imagine the individual law enforcement personnel are obligated to view it
If enough investigators and enforcers started to kick up a fuss or outright refuse to enforce the current drug laws I bet we'd see change pretty damn fast.
A lot of them would lose their jobs first, but if they were principled enough to take that stand... we'd be in a better place.
This is likely an erroneous argument with little evidence to support it. Violence between street dealers and drug consumptors is unlikely to be the largest source of drug related violence. After all, if the street dealers started killing their custies than no one would buy from them. It's bad for business.
Instead, most heinous drug violence happens between cartels and gangs at the levels of production and [major] distribution [pipelines]. These darknet markets are usually filled with well off youth buying drugs for themselves and their buddies who alternatively would have been unable to source the drugs or would have texted their neighborhood dealer to meetup in a McDonalds parking lot.
Slightly off topic but did anyone else find it weird/funny that in the first graph showing total listings by drug, alongside more "official" names for substances like MDMA, LSD, and amphetamine, they listed "weed"?
I mean...I understand using common terms that have become de facto names (like "marijuana" instead of "cannabis") but "weed"? That's like making a list with Morphine, Oxycodone, PCP, and Blow.
I dunno...maybe it just tickled my "one of these things is not like the other" sense since the list wasn't all slang terms but rather more accepted labels with a single street/slang name.
This reminds me of back in the 1980's when the government was knee deep in breaking up the mafia.
Several academics suggested it was a bad idea because the Mafia kept a lot of the other gangs and cartels in line since they ruled so much territory. By dismantling the larger mafia families, they were unknowingly giving free reign to a lot of the smaller street gangs who openly advocated violence and couldn't handle all the power they were being given.
None of this is research it's gut feeling spewed by an effected individual. It's easy to say that online marketplaces reduce street violence but with no research to back it up it's meaningless. Prohibition can be detrimental to the society around it but you can't solve the problems with gut instinct.
Just because it's an online website hosted on Tor doesn't make it completely unique. We've had black markets before, and we have research on what black markets do.
I doubt the FBI cares, lets not forget that for a long time they put a blind eye on organized crime (Mafia etc) while spending 100% of their resources looking for communists in every bush.
Not sure I agree. Nobody is putting that genie back into the bottle no matter what they do & by extension this supposed "benefit" is also not affected imo.
Not true - its the content vs the title that's being criticized. Which strikes to the heart of what 'linkbait' means. Or is calling out linkbait considered 'ad hominem' and thus gets a free pass now?
Too, there's something galling about the idea of militating for forbearance for the drug market that serves primarily the wealthiest actors. Before we turn a blind eye to what are in fact gigantic organized criminal conspiracies operated by the kinds of people who will happily slap $70,000 on the barrel for a vanity electric car, maybe we could take a hard look at sentencing laws and early release programs.
Finally: it's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet" traffic solely in substances, as if allowing them to operate unimpeded would have only the effect of getting some of the drug trade off the street.