[tedks]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.

[dobbsbob]

A test I learned in jail from petty computer trespassing charges when I was a kid is to light a small amount of powder on fire sitting on foil, if the residue is cherry red it's mainly mdma and not piperazines. Once again prison is criminal university.

If regeant testing a pill break it in half and test the inside too since often the outside is coated in mdma and the inside is shitty pipes

[SnotJockey]

Drugs are social, most people who buy from SR will have at least one friend who know where they got them and would go out of their way to warn others.

MDMA almost never kills people, it's far safer than alcohol or most other drugs. The chance of serious selection bias is unlikely.

More likely there is bias because sellers can edit listings without losing the existing rating.

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

The Marquis reagent is commonly used to test MDMA. It will readily distinguish MDMA from cathinones (aka 'bath salts') which is a common adulterant or substitute. Operations like Dance Safe have popularized this, and the demographic using the deep web seems to be particularly aware of this test and its value.

[Evolved]

Marquis, Mandolin, Mecke and Simon are all sold on DanceSafe and are used to determine only whether a substance contains MDMA (or other similarly desired chemicals) and whether or not it contains PMA and PMMA (undesirable and toxic chemicals). It does not ascertain the quality of such substances nor does it establish concentrations beyond trace amounts. Thank you for your input.

[trose]

You can test it without ingesting it. With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

[xamolxix]

> With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

I guess that it depends on how easy it is to test it. If it requires a chemistry degree and a lab I am guessing they won't test even if they are otherwise smart.

[spudlyo]

Testing is actually pretty easy, you can get a fairly comprehensive test kit from dancesafe.org[0] for $65.00.

[0]: http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant-screen...

[refurb]

Holy flippin' mark-up! $65 for four bottles that contains maybe $1-2 worth of chemicals?

Anyways, as someone stated above, these kits test for the presence of MDMA, not necessarily all adulterants. There is the issue of cross-reactivity as well.

It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure I would trust a drug that hadn't been run through an HPLC.

[Nyr]

There are professional labs offering free testing in The Netherlands, Spain and other European countries.

[malka]

Still illegal in France, IIRC. We really have an outdated policy regarding drugs...

[cubancigar11]

France has a severe NIH syndrome.

[rich90usa]

There are simple reagent test kits that are reasonably accurate and affordable.

[ecnahc515]

Not to mention how simple/easy it is to test any of these common drugs.

[gwern]

Think about it quantitatively. MDMA has always been tops in the rankings (not just this one, but DARCs and others), implying it's been sold to at least tens of thousands of customers. If the worst MDMA would rank 1 and normal MDMA 5 and half the MDMA sold is bad (to maximize the possible impact on the rating), then you'd have to have thousands of people croaking after taking the bad MDMA in order to produce an average of 4.9 (to pull down the average by .1 using ratings of 1). In contrast, I've seen media reports of maybe 2 deaths clearly linked to drugs bought off the black-markets (psychedelics which were RCs and led to fatal accidents).

[tedks]

Test kits are cheap, ~$25 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/NIK-Drug-Test-Kit-Methamphetamine/dp/B...

The Silk Road (and presumably the darknet markets that followed it) let any user contest the charge and get their money automatically, which they almost certainly would do if they got MDMA that tested badly.

Further, if this happens too many times, the marketplace will just seize the account. Vendor accounts are expensive, so it doesn't make economic sense to sell bad shit.

[_pmf_]

These test the presence of substances; they don't test the absence of toxins.

[hammock]

There exist readily available test kits to check the purity. No consumption necessary. And of course it's just as important to look at the number of ratings. But you're probably being tongue in cheek.

[marincounty]

Ketamine will be popular. Right now they have ongoing medical studies trying to determine it's efficacy. You need to infuse the drug, so it's a hard core drug, but in terms of preventing someone from committing suicide the drug shows promise. (I'm not condoning it, just passing along what Psychaiary is talking about amount themselfs--other than stock picks.)

[lumpypua]

You don't need to inject it. I use ketamine for management of depression, though I've thankfully been doing well and haven't needed it for the past 6-8 months. The fast relief getting you back to being able to function and care for yourself day to day is soooo helpful.

From a prior post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170989

pstuart 47 days ago

Did you need to go into the k-hole to achieve results?

---

lumpypua 41 days ago

Definitely not, but you are going to get weird for 45 minutes.

The study in that forbes article used 50mg intranasally (basically snorted). The earlier study backing ketamine's efficacy[1] used "0.5 mg/kg diluted in saline, administered over 40 minutes by IV pump". Works out to 35mg for a 70kg guy with a drug delivery rate in the ballpark of snorting it.

Redosing protocol is up to you, I'd read both papers, track your mood, and decide something reasonable. [1] dumps a fair amount of K into their volunteers in one part. Basically the 35mg every two to three days. When depression hits hard I do 35mg every one or two weeks, and go up to 3 weeks as I'm feeling better.

I like dissociatives but maaan 35-50mg is pretty much the least pleasant dose. You're not near k-holing but reality is still pretty bent for about 45 minutes. Normal social interaction is totally out of the question for me and my thinking is warped. What works best for me to handle it is putting on an album I can play all the way through, lying down and meditating on the music until I sober up.

Cheers!

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935847/

[virmundi]

Legalized weed might eat away, but if the market is anything like Colorado, it's too expensive vs dark weed. It's so bad in fact that there are projected budget shortfalls because there are few consumers in the space.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/high-times/marijuana-prices-co... http://khon2.com/2014/04/09/colorado-tax-revenue-on-recreati...

[Evolved]

Is this fundamental attribution error? Perhaps the reason it is more expensive is because it presents much less of a risk to purchase vs. on the street? It could also be that there is not a lot of competition selling legal weed. Maybe it is because street prices have dropped considerably due to the introduction of legal weed?

Furthermore, it should be noted that Colorado's laws also permit growing and gifting marijuana legally. Why buy it when you can grow it yourself or get it for free from someone who grows it? Sure you can only gift/receive/travel with up to 1 ounce legally and one could also make 16 separate visits (pun intended) to a friends house as well.

Perhaps any or all of these are factors in the price or maybe it is overtaxed to the point that people are still willing to obtain theirs the old-fashioned way.

[tekromancr]

I spent way too long reading this comment. What was the pun? I don't get it.

[ajcarpy2005]

There are 16 oz in a lb.

[meritt]

It's worse in Washington. Legal weed is 3x the cost of medical and 6x the cost of street. It still brings in a vast amount of new consumers who won't pursue other methods, but the other methods will not die off until the price is more competitive.

[cnp]

I'd like to point out here that, at least in Seattle, there's only one shop and so prices are going to rise accordingly.

[aaronbrethorst]

Two as of tomorrow: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/09/seattles-second-i-...

[Hytosys]

Just speculation, but won't the legalized price drop as other states become legal as well?

[neurobro]

I think it depends more on the federal government officially deferring to state drug laws (unlikely) or taking action to de-schedule marijuana specifically (slightly less unlikely).

Right now the only people who can grow cannabis openly and "legally" with any degree of safety are the states themselves, which kind of puts a damper on market competition.

[pokpokpok]

depends on how regulated and taxed it is

[aganders3]

I would guess the market pricing for personal quantities of Silk Road weed (including shipping) is more in line with legal/medical prices rather than local black market prices.

[tomphoolery]

Even with safe MDMA, the risk of possession carries a far greater weight in a lot of the country than something like weed. So people tend to take more risks, and thus the price is higher. If you could somehow subvert this cost by buying in bulk through a trusted vendor on the Internet, you stand to make some money for your troubles. This is, in my opinion, the most likely reason why SR has large quantities of MDMA and LSD.

[icpmacdo]

I would hazard a guess and say that DMT is probably pretty high on the best seller list. The common theme is that there is a huge market for things that fall under the catch all of the label drugs that are being used for very different reasons than what a stereotypical addict is chasing.

[ma2rten]

Precisely for this reason there are actually places in Holland where people can have their ecstasy pills tested, so that they know exactly how much MDMA and what other stuff is inside.

[fubu]

I'm not that aware of how Silk Road 2.0 works, but with all the anonymity involved, would it be very difficult for a seller to complete transactions to herself with dummy accounts to pump up their ratings? This was very common in the Amazon and Ebay world when I was around those several years ago.

[gwern]

It would not. Of course, they still have to pay the SR2 commission on all the turnover. There have been a lot of complaints on the SR2 forums over the past year that a lot of feedback is untrustworthy compared to SR1, among many other complaints about the poor operator performance.

[Semaphor]

I don't know first hand, but several articles about SR (2.0? 1.5? no clue) said that the admins are very good at weeding out fake reviews. Though it wasn't mentioned how they do it.

[xorcist]

> Silk Road allows them to be distributed without any violence.

Yeah, what's a few contract killings among friends...

[tedks]

1. This is irrelevant to what I was discussing. No MDMA dealer is committing any violence. The fact that Ross Ulbricht's opsec was allegedly bad enough that he could be blackmailed isn't a general fact about darknet markets.

2. That entire exchange is totally trumped up. This is the exchange the complaint alleges occurs:

BLACKMAILER: Pay me $X. I need it to pay DEBTOR.

DPR: Let me speak to DEBTOR.

DEBTOR: Hello, this is DEBTOR.

DPR: I will pay you $X/4 to kill BLACKMAILER.

DEBTOR: We want $X/3.

DPR: I have had men killed for $X/5, but I will pay you $X/3.

DEBTOR: It's done. Nice doing business with you.

DPR: Likewise.

As far as I'm aware, no actual murder victim has ever turned up, and none of the parties except Ross have been arrested. The exchange sounds much more like a negotiation tactic than an actual contract killing, and is much more reasonable if you read it as such.

But of course this is irrelevant to people who want to use it to horns-effect anything within an arms reach of the greatest project in harm reduction the world has ever seen. To put it another way, people died this last year, this summer, this week probably, from bad drugs. There is no reason why the modern world cannot supply these drugs safely, and darknet markets seem to do a better job than anything else.

But go ahead and parrot the DEA line. Just remember that those who aren't on the right side of history are inevitably on the wrong side of it.

[refurb]

Didn't the FBI actually fake the person's death and send DPR photo of the "body"? That would suggest this was an actual murder for hire.

[Energy1]

Any examples?

[vidarh]

He's presumably referring to the contract killings Ross Ulbricht is alleged to have tried to arrange.

[programmarchy]

This charge was dropped.

In my opinion, it was a baseless charge in the first place, meant to poison the well against Ross.

[mikeyouse]

It wasn't dropped, I wish people would stop parroting that line. He was indicted in two separate jurisdictions, NY and Maryland. Maryland indicted him for 'Planned Violence' which includes one count of murder for hire. The NY charges are the ones that he's currently facing, the Maryland charges are still in the wings.

http://freeross.org/correction-of-our-report-on-the-indictme...

[dmix]

And he is innocent until proven guilty. So people should stick to that angle.

[s0uthPaw88]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/21/alleged...