Comment on Do you have what it takes to become a geologist?
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 months agoJust get the research chems they are cleaner than 100% of anything on a dark web market anyway.
That’s not bad advice in general, but why do you think dark web drug market traders wouldn’t have an incentive to sell quality goods?
If you sell something adulterated, you’re gonna get extremely bad reviews. Some modern recreational drugs users (especially ones who go so far to use dark web markets) are extremely savy about their own drugs. Testing kits and even proper lab testing is pretty common. If you live in continental Europe, it’s no problem. More in some countries, less in others. But basically you can mail a sample to a lab from anywhere, for a fee. But in a lot of countries in Europe they’re just available for free, for harm reduction.
You’d be kind of silly to think people who have a site who sell “novel research chemicals” haven’t dabbled with illicit substances at some point or another. Having already the capacity to manufacture lysergemide analogues, they would have no trouble making a batch of LSD. And that’s worth a bit more. It’s just harder to get rid of sometimes, being illegal and whatnot. These legal substances pay less, but have much less risk, being technically legal (until the laws catch up basically).
I’m not trying to sound like a dick here, just it’s a subject near to my heart. The illegal drug markets are so fucking vast that it’s insane we as a society pretend that prohibition prevents people from getting and using drugs that we just forfeit all the money that could be made from taxing that as a trade, globally.
If I had the powers of a genie and could snap my fingers and the world just changed so that all drug purchases would have taxes on them, the amount of money gained with even a 10% tax could solve world hunger (if utilised properly.)
“With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion. Given the conservative bias in some of the estimates for individual substances, a turnover of around $400 billion per annum is considered realistic.”
Back in July of 2021, U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told us it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
wfpusa.org/…/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-…
And personally I’m of the opinion that the global drug trade value is severely underestimated. And 10% tax would be nothing. Compare for example to European alcohol tax rates, which are around 25-30%. The tax on tobacco here in Finland is around 50%.
Huuuge rant from one offhanded comment you made it. Don’t take it personally lol I just like writing shit to distract myself.
BobGnarley@lemm.ee 2 months ago
If you’re in Europe yes you will most likely get quality psychedelics. If you are a customer in USA and not getting international shipments (which is risky) you aren’t going to get the best quality available. I’d say that’s most likely true for cocaine too.
It just isn’t going to happen because anyone with quality crystal L in the USA isn’t going to just give it to anyone. What they would sell on the markets would be Champagne or lower quality I’d bet.
Sure you’ll find people who say its needlepoint or Czech25 (lol) but it just doesn’t make it true.
Also, have you ever ordered something from a vendor and it was absolutely shit but yet had glowing reviews? Its very easy to make tons of accounts and give yourself good ratings. The very nature of the sites make them anonymous. People do it to amazon reviews all the time and those can actually be traced back to a person but the market ones allegedly can not.
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But you can get international shipping from anywhere, because the sellers don’t care as much. They just have personal preferences pretty much. Some have packaging methods which get through certain customs reliably, others don’t. The only thing that can happen for them really is that the customer says that they didn’t receive the package and contests the escrow. Depending on the store, they’ll solve it some way. For instance if you have a customer account with a lot of actions and one you contest, they’re more likely to believe it. And some shopkeepers just send as long as you resolve escrow as soon as it is sent, so “with your own risk”, basically.
So yeah, you can get quality drugs literally anywhere in the world. Honestly, customs catch a tiny amount of all the shipments made.
These online stores work quite differently. The trades you can see, the purchases, are actual purchases. Unlike in the real world, the cut for the marketplace is not in-significant, because they’re the one taking the largest risk (since they’re the ones who will get raided if law enforcement manages to crack the marketplace), so the trader creating fake reviews for himself would actually have to pay quite a lot, seeing as drug orders are usually quite a lot more valuable than, idk, clothing/trinkets from Asia.
In regular online stores, yeah. On drug markets? Never. Because I filtered my traders so that they had hundreds and hundreds of reviews. Because the trade is massive. Could they fake that? Sure? Do they need to? No. Would they, seeing how little it would profit since it would be caught pretty fast, as unlike with some Temu shopkeepers who send some garbage, the customers actually put in detailed reviews of the shit they received. And if there was like a dozen reviews and even two said shit, I would never trust a trader like that.
Traders create sales by… having sales. Introductory offers. It’s always a bit of a gamble, especially in the dark web, but there are people willing to do that gamble, because again, the trade is massive and people can send packages all around the world, so some people will look at some dirt cheap coke that’s an introductory offer and actually receive prime quality blow. Ofc he will then put a good review. Someone else will be even more likely to gamble the same thing. Once he has a few reviews, he reigns in the offers, and is somewhat reliable, and once you’ve hundred(s) of reviews, you can have “regular” prices. Which still often were quite a bit lower than street prices. But that’s because drugs in Finland are somewhat expensive.
As I say, people really underestimate the drug trade. It’s well established and there’s no putting the technology back in the box. Drug trade used to be facilitated almost purely through cartels, but now the lower level people don’t have to be connected to those people at all, since online distributors are anonymous, you never meet them, and they’re the ones getting bricks from importers (or importing it themselves.)
Yeah. Isn’t it ironic, then, that most of the time (aside from the shops closing/getting raided, which is a minority, but still a part of it), they’re the more reliable ones? People know that anyone could be anyone, so the reviews are more significant. Which is why all those paragraphs earlier sort of explain that.