Bitcoin Black Market Competition Heats Up

I'm not going to rehash my recently made above comment, but you should check it out. [1] Tylenol kills 500 people a year, so I guess that means we should make it illegal, huh?

Drugs are mostly destroying people and communities because they are illegal. Maybe if your dad went to prison for an ounce of weed, you would have a different sentiment.

When a drug can be produced in a sterile environment, you can yield greater purity and an overall safer product. Not to mention when drugs are legal people who are addicted are more apt to seek treatment. You might be surprised to hear several countries are treating heroine addictions via making heroine available under a controlled environment where addicts can seek help. They're seeing great results. [2] Also make sure to look at [1] to see how much HIV rates have dropped in Portugal because of decriminalization of drugs like heroine.

Do you want to ban alcohol, tobacco, stairs, cars, and swimming pools in the name of people you deem incapable of making wise decisions? You have no right to tell someone what they can put in their body or do to their body. Give people unbiased information and let them make their own decisions.

Stop making the assumption that people aren't going to do drugs if they're illegal. That's not true. Lower-classes, particularly poorer African-Americans have been devastated by the drug war. See the book the New Jim Crow laws for more information regarding this. If you're a young black kid with an ounce of weed you're probably going to jail, where as if you're a wealthy white executive who lives in a private gated community and happen to have a few grams of coke and you get caught, you'll get a fine and a slap on the wrist.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951290

[2] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1926160,00.ht...

> SR claims to have suffered from ‘DDoS’ attacks, which is very unlikely due to the way Tor hidden services are designed.

This is wrong; Tor hidden services are quite easy to DDoS for someone familiar with Tor. In fact, the attack was described on the Tor blog [1] shortly before it was executed against Silk Road, so this is likely where the attacker got the idea.

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-l...

Oops. Thank you so much. I've corrected the error(s). I got so excited that I was bashing away on the keyboard and must have misspelled heroin and it autocorrected to heroine. I think I need to relearn how to type with Mavis Beacon, haha.

Why would anyone still be using (street) crack when the pure and safe alternative is there to use when drugs are no longer illegal?

People don't need to be protected against themselves. That's exactly what makes people not being able to care for themselves. Prohibition usually means no awareness is being raised about the risks or effects of a certain drug.

We get raised with the idea that drugs are bad and awful, that all of them are highly addictive and super deadly. Except for alcohol of course, please drink as much as you like, it's safe. This scare campaign works for most of us, but not for the lucky few who are curious and try it anyway. Guess what? They find out it's not bad, awful, deadly or addictive at all, but of course most of them are, still ignorant of all the other details of the drugs they used. So this first time drug user tells his friends that drugs aren't so bad at all. Some friends will probably try it as well.

If this concerns weed or mdma, this is not really a problem. These are safe to use, hard to overdose, make you a social human being and they are not (physically) addictive, but it might just as easy be cocaine, speed (meth), lsd or shrooms. The first two are addictive, bad for your body and brain and cocaine changes most people into irritating macho men while prolonged use of speed can make one paranoid. The latter two are psychedelics. These can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. These drugs open your mind, makes you realize things you never really thought about before and confronts you with unprocessed experiences or trauma's you may have, which can be quite scary, especially if you don't expect it.

Imagine your friend had a super duper happy lsd trip and recommends this to his depressed friend. Chances are high that he will go 'bad' resulting in psychosis. On the other hand, he might suddenly see the light and find out how he can get out of his depression.

If drugs were legal and awareness about their pro's, cons and dangers is being raised, more people will be encouraged to do some reading before they use something or at least the friend who brings the drugs knows what he's carrying and what the effects are.

People only need to be protected for misinformation, by informing them with facts instead of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Informed people make less (stupid) mistakes, and no one should be protected against themselves. If you die because of ignorance in an informed society, it's your own effing fault.

Drugs don't destroy people and communities, misinformation and ignorance does.

Most of your argument revolves around comparing different substances, while I made a point specifically about crack, though I will allow heroin in the same category. Nobody with a little worldly experience would compare crack or heroin with tobacco or even alcohol. We don't have to be all binary about it, "if we ban one addictive substance then they should all be banned!" It's okay to look at things on a case by case basis.

I've been as close to hard drugs as you can probably get without actually being an addict. It destroys lives, families and communities, far beyond the addicts themselves, and it happens in a very nefarious way where addicts gradually lose control, without ever intending to go that route. I have seen some of the smartest and most sensible people turn into zombies who would and did sell themselves, their kids' toys and baby's diapers for drugs. This is not the choice they thought they made when they started on drugs. A lot of people aren't capable of making this choice, they can't fathom the consequences, and those consequences affect many others than just themselves. That makes it a societal matter, not just about individual freedom.

The fact that underground markets exist with all their associated ills is neither here nor there, this is the case for anything illegal.