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American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

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Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#71

Post by adventured »

KMag wrote: post #67
3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

I'm all for legalization and harm reduction, but declaring people enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation. Shutting down the conversation locks in the status quo.

It's the with us or against us, ally or enemy, model that is so popular with the faux-woke crowd that is presently ripping the US apart culturally.

It's the furthest you can go with virtue signaling, to act militant, aggressive, threatening and to draw up literal enemy lists (those that must be destroyed). This strain/style of virtue signaling is pretty much everywhere on social media now.

It also means our current woke party nationally has jumped the shark and is about to run into its first serious cultural pushback (which has already begun, people are overwhelmingly sick of it at a mainstream level).

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#72

Post by ithkuil »

remarkEon wrote: post #59
arcticbull wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is your regular reminder that Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and usage did not go up but the health effects and negative societal effects of drug use all but vanished [1]. They went from worst in the EU to among the best in the EU in the decade that followed on pretty much every metric. Addiction has a huge situational component. 20% of US GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. When they returned hom…

This is your regular reminder that extrapolating an outcome from a country like Portugal (an outcome we should all be happy about, by the way) to a country like the United States is unwise. I've never been to Portugal, but have friends that live in both Spain and Portugal and I'm pretty envious of the kind of community and shared identity they describe. I image that probably has something to do with the outcome seen…

> and they returned home to a country where the drug was illegal.

They also returned to their families and loved ones, trying re-introduce themselves to civil society and many figured out that heroin was not helping (illegal or not)

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#73

Post by moksly »

adventured wrote: post #71
KMag wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for legalization and harm reduction, but declaring people enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation. Shutting down the conversation locks in the status quo.

It's the with us or against us, ally or enemy, model that is so popular with the faux-woke crowd that is presently ripping the US apart culturally. It's the furthest you can go with virtue signaling, to act militant, aggressive, threatening and to draw up literal enemy lists (those that must be destroyed). This strain/style of virtue signaling is pretty much everywhere on social media now. It also means our current w…

I’m not sure you can point the blame in just one direction. You see it in any form of radicalisation, once you go too far away from the middle, you start to see others as “the enemy“.

I do think that in the terms of the War on Drugs it’s more of a “you support a trillion dollar criminal enterprise” type them vs the rest of society rather than a left vs right issue. If changing political regimes can’t even keep drugs out of prisons, and you see more and more devastation to society and more and more money in the hands of organised crime, then there really isn’t a way around legalisation that isn’t sticking your head in the ground.

I get that there is a lot of money, and therefore political incentive, to keep spending money on the parts of organised society that combat drugs, but at some point you gotta ask yourself how much money you want to burn on an enterprise that has never once succeeded in its mission, even if you’re the most tough on crime person out there.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#74

Post by remarkEon »

ithkuil wrote: post #72
remarkEon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is your regular reminder that extrapolating an outcome from a country like Portugal (an outcome we should all be happy about, by the way) to a country like the United States is unwise. I've never been to Portugal, but have friends that live in both Spain and Portugal and I'm pretty envious of the kind of community and shared identity they describe. I image that probably has something to do with the outcome seen…

> and they returned home to a country where the drug was illegal. They also returned to their families and loved ones, trying re-introduce themselves to civil society and many figured out that heroin was not helping (illegal or not)

You (and others in this thread) are helping to make my point for me, which is that personal social structures are paramount for killing drug addiction.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#75

Post by cgriswald »

3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

You both reject any responsibility for swaying others to your way of thinking and put up road blocks for anyone who might otherwise have a change of heart and join your cause.

You show no compassion or empathy to those who disagree with you so your compassion towards those suffering due to the war on drugs rings false.

I’m pro-legalization and have been for decades; but I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t build guillotines and dare each other to use them.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#76

Post by m0zg »

3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#77

Post by svara »

aunty_helen wrote: post #60
maerF0x0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly naive about the details of BTC, but couldnt the network decide to either 1) quarantine those blocks/addresses or 2) Agree to a signature that assigns the value to another wallet?

The problem here (by design) is jurisdiction, the US DOJ doesn't stretch as far as the bitcoin network. As an example, why would someone in Russia stop processing coins because the US DOJ said so? Virtual currencies aren't the battleground for the US's war on drugs.

... because any wallet downstream of the tainted wallet in the transaction graph could be considered tainted as well. This would be a highly effective attack on Bitcoin as an illegal payment method - the onus would be on every Bitcoin user to ensure that they have provably done everything they could to avoid obtaining "illegal bitcoins".

Therefore, the person in Russia in your example would have an interest in not dealing with tainted coins, because they couldn't be sold for the same price anymore.

It would basically split Bitcoin into white (provably legit), grey (unsure) and black (illegal) coins.

Yes, this would probably also destroy Bitcoin, but that's a mechanism by which states could obtain extraterritorial power over what people do with Bitcoin.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#78

Post by akiselev »

KMag wrote: post #67
3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

I'm all for legalization and harm reduction, but declaring people enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation. Shutting down the conversation locks in the status quo.

> I'm all for ending slavery, but declaring plantation owners enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation.

Thanks to the 13th Amendment, this is not an exaggeration. Thanks to the war on drugs, hundreds of thousands are slaves that wouldn't be otherwise. Manufacturing your license plates, freezing your Big Macs, and picking up your litter by the side of the highway.

At some point, history has to pick a side.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#79

Post by AniseAbyss »

m0zg wrote: post #76
3131s wrote: post #57

It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy. It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be…

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

Look at the reason why people use drugs. I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Large scale substance abuse is IMO an indication something went very wrong in society.

Re: American darknet vendor and Costa Rican pharmacist charged

#80

Post by m0zg »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #79
m0zg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

Look at the reason why people use drugs. I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted. Large scale substance abuse is IMO an indication something went very wrong in society.

Irrespective of the reason, I argue there is a qualitative difference between e.g. marijuana (which should absolutely be legal), and e.g. fentanyl. To suggest otherwise is to be disingenuous and willfully obtuse.
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