The Trade

How about a general thread for discussing the economic aspects of drugs? It seems topical now that Trump is trying to bring the death penalty to your next door dealer. What are your opinion on drug dealers? Are they just awful pushers that will do anything for money even if it means destroying communities? Are they martyrs who sacrifice their freedom and safety to bring precious contraband to the community? Or is it just a job like any other? Isn't the term "dealer" kind of misleading in that aren't most users also occasionally dealing to their friends at least, should they really be villified so much more than the users? Or do you think that users are really the culprit here just having fun at the expense of destabilizing whole countries, aren't after all the dealers just upstart entrepreneurs that are trying to work for the sake of their families and so on? Are your experiences with dealers good or bad so far? Have you dealt yourself? Thread for anything and everything vis a vis dealing except the actual dealing...

Drug dealers are scum and 100% deserve to be Duterte’d, but I really hope he takes on the pharmaceutical corporations and corrupt doctors who are the root of the opioid crisis. That’s the ultimate solution, but until then harsher punishment for street dealers should help.

>>1476 Why are they scum? I agree some dealers are soykafty but many dealers I know offer reasonable prices and just make sure people have access to nice substances. If not for them it'd be so hard to get your hands on drugs. And harsher punishments for them should really not change much I think - there's just too much money to be made from it. They'll sell regardless.

I've met a lot of dealers over the years. I was one myself for a few months. Most are decent people just trying to make their way. A few, usually higher up the chain, really are scum. Career criminal types who'll rob you blind if you give them half a chance. Trying to shut down dealers is the wrong way to go about this. It's just not going to work. 50 years now there's been a "war on drugs" and all they have to show for it is the billions of dollars they've flushed down the drain. Bringing in the death penalty won't help. The big fish are already looking at life if they ever got caught but they don't get caught. They work through proxies and bribe and hide and on the rare occasion they actually go down it just leaves a power vacuum that often sparks violence as their lieutenants fight for their spot. The actual solution to the problem? Legalise it. Suddenly the criminals don't have a market. The billions of dollars wasted playing whack-a-mole becomes billions of dollars in tax revenue and when there's a dispute they'll go and get their lawyers rather than their guns. There's literally no downside. Drugs are readily available anywhere in the country anyway. By legalising them you help ensure that the people selling them are properly regulated. You ensure that they won't be sold to children or contain dangerous adulterants. But that's not how it's going to go down. Politicians are going to keep throwing money at the problem in an attempt to win votes from concerned mother's who's kids can, despite all efforts from the police, easily get hold of drugs that some junkie cooked up in their bathtub anyway. They don't even need a fake ID. Also, I imagine the CIA et al are doing what they can to protect such a nice source of revenue.

To answer this question properly, you have to examine the place of drug dealers in communities, as nodes in a social network. So, I present a few theses: 1. A community is no more than a series of persons and the connections between them. 2. Dealers are pillars of their communities. Because of their work, they come into contact with people from diverse social groups, which enables them to serve as communicators, mediators, and organizers. 3. Few dealers are full-time. Most use dealing to supplement a limited income, and are therefore part of student communities and work communities as well. If all of these are true, I present an additional thesis: 4: Even if all drugs are not socially desirable, imprisoning dealers does worse. Instead of eroding a community by reducing the effectiveness of its members, it literally destroys the community by eliminating important nodes in the network that constitutes social life.

>>1478 i'm coming at this from a "people have the right to fuarrrk themselves up" angle, so my default is "legalize it unless you have a good reason not to". there are cases where i'd take decriminalization over legalization though. black market weed trade keeps money in the local community (at least where i've lived most of the weed production comes from small scale farmers out in the boonies). if it were legal we'd have industrial farms and big investor money ruining everything and leeching cash out of the local economy. independent growers would not be able to compete legally, so they would be forced to operate off the books like they always have. the difference as i see it is that doing so might be more difficult once there is a legal option. right now law enforcement kind of ignores black market weed, because there's not much to be gained from shutting it down. but once it becomes "big marijuana" vs the black market you can bet that those big money interests will do everything they can to get the black market stamped out. if we were talking about MDMA or something the concerns are different. the production scale is higher and poor quality control from lack of regulation is a much bigger problem. i think in this case legalization might be the proper move. obviously i'm making a lot of assumptions here based on the areas i've lived in, but i'm really not trying to say "legalization is bad". my point is that legalization needs to be considered case-by-case based on the area in question. full disclosure: i used to sell club drugs and psyches in college. i like to think i was ethical about it, but there were certainly cases where i sold drugs that i'd never want to habitually use myself (MDMA being a good example). didn't really see it as my place to tell people what they should and shouldn't take. if they wanted it, i'd find it for them.

>What are your opinion on drug dealers? I've met some really soykafty ones, but also some chill ones. It's correlated to what drugs they're selling, chances are someone who sells psychedelics is probably more of a chill hippie type, someone selling club drugs like md and coke is probably really into "club culture" which I think is normally a bad thing but I guess it depends. Someone who sells the more stigmatized or addictive drugs is probably a cunt since they rely on the addiction to draw business rather than good product or customer service. In the end, we're all just trying to make enough money to get by and there's soykafty people in all jobs. Plus if there's a dealer you don't like and you're smart about it you can totally just rob them what are they gonna do call the police? "yes officer someone beat me up and stole all my drugs which I was intending to sell". Not that I would ever advocate violence or any other illegal activities.

Eastern European here. I don't know any dealr personally, but there was a guy at my former high school who sold weed. Never met him (I graduated a few years earlier). But he came from some soykafhole town to study at my school. It was one of the high-ranked schools that sent invitations to students that excelled in national competitions, etc. He sold weed mostly because his family was really poor and he had little money. The school was also expensive, even though it was public (terrible place). From what I've heard from people that knew him, he was really ambitious and hard working. Weed was just a simple way to get some cash. Well, he got caught, because he was stupid enough to store weed in his foom in the boarding part of the school. The police caught him, the headmaster expelled him, tjus ruining his life. It's a shame we live in a world like that.

>>1481 the psychedelic trade in particular is really based around goodwill towards others. People give away their stuff for free, or sell it for very low prices. Mostly to friends. I used to deal in psychs and the only people I ever ripped off were dumb kids who I didn't know. That's not to say there aren't scumbags in it for the money, but with psychs it's wayyyyy less common imo. Weed is increasingly commercialized around here, but to be honest I think at the higher levels it was always a for-profit thing. Your friendly neighborhood dealer gets it from a distributor and they tend to be pretty scummy. The growers are almost always exceedingly chill, though. I have no respect for heroin or meth dealers. That soykaf destroys lives. They deserve whatever comes to them.

Opioid and cocaine dealers deserve full Duterte style punishment, those drugs are the real problem. Reduce punishments for psychedelics and weed, and mercilessly go after the ones selling heroin, coke and untested synthetic soykaf fresh out of the lab.

I personally think drug dealing shouldn't be regarded as a major crime, bosses of murderous organized criminal groups should be in a class of their own and not thought of as just "drug dealers". The best strategy IMO would be to target OCGs with the law but capture the demand with legal alternatives. Promote the good parts of the drug trade and suppress the bad. The huge problem is that admitting that the drug trade has good parts is too much of a contradiction for politician's brains to handle.

>>1484 >>1483 Read: The drugs I like and perceive to be safe are good the ones I don't like and see as unsafe are nasty and evil. Psychedelic (ab)use can be just as dangerous and life-destroying as heroin or meth (ab)use. IMO it isn't very meaningful to say on average my DOC is safer when there are still clear risks of permanent mental/psychological damage. Cars don't kill people, bad drivers do. Drugs don't ruin lives, bad drug users do. This rings especially true for: >untested synthetic soykaf fresh out of the lab C'mon lain, just because it isn't muh acid or muh weed doesn't mean we have to soykaf on it. If someone is lying about what they are selling (ie: fentanyl instead of heroin), then fuarrrk 'em, they should probably do time in prison. Not die though, killing people for nonviolent crimes is pretty soykafty imo. Even if we put ALL of the above aside, "cracking down" on drug trade has historically failed over, and over, and over again. To my knowledge, the most successful method for reducing drug-related deaths and fighting addiction is the Portuguese approach of full-decriminalization for users and jail time for dealers.

>>1484 youre a retarded hippie. keep melting your brain with shrooms and having 'deep' conversations with your 17 year old friends lmao

>>1498 >Read: The drugs I like and perceive to be safe are good the ones I don't like and see as unsafe are nasty and evil. I admit I am biased. I love the culture around psychedelic drugs, especially in comparison with other parts of "drug culture". Some hippies are obnoxious, but many are very intelligent and wise people. >Psychedelic (ab)use can be just as dangerous and life-destroying as heroin or meth (ab)use. but psychedelic abuse is much rarer than opioid abuse, since there are no physical withdrawal symptoms and most people are at least somewhat intimidated by the strength of the hallucinations. Harm reduction is a lot more prevalent among psych users in my experience, as well. >Cars don't kill people, bad drivers do. but some cars are a lot harder to drive safely than others. I do think the dangers of amphetamines are pretty overblown though. They're not any worse than nicotine or alcohol. It's just sad that they get sold to tweekers who really shouldn't have more of that stuff, for their own good. >"cracking down" on drug trade has historically failed over, and over, and over again. agree. Regardless of whether you want <insert drug here> off the streets, cracking down is not effective. >>1500 17 is too young to start psychs imo, for most people at least. Need a stable personality and a strong grip on reality to use them properly.

Most my friends have dealt. It's really not a big deal until suddenly it is and your best friend is facing 10 years in prison. It's something you never really do too willingly, it's real work in that sense. You dread the deals, if you work social media / online you start to feel that paranoia the moment you turn on the TAILS. Each meet you're going to wondering whether you'll get robbed or arrested finally. But there's real demand for it, it helps many more people than it destroys. You always try to maintain proper conduct and not cheat anyone, but you deal with a somewhat unstable customer base that might not offer the same considerations to you and everyone fuarrrks up, especially when running a 2-bit pharmacy operation out of their room. Nobody properly trained you for this. There's different levels to it, you can sell at the lowest rung, where you ask the high price and deal with daily dealing, meeting random people, be at the most risk of violence for (probably) lowest pay (assuming you aren't selling your own drugs). If you do it properly you work as close to the source as possible and deal mostly in bulk to trusted people. There is a very dark side to it for sure and the higher up you go the more it takes a toll on your sanity and all sorts of sociopaths and psychopaths start to be around you, what actual criminal gangs do I know nothing about. I used to work for a kid two years younger than me, he'd been in the scene since his teenage and had a lot of drugs and connections regarding them. I dealt for him and with him in a fairly uneventful way, although I know he was attempted to rob a few times and went through armed car chases and whatnot.

>>1500 The only stuff I've used are caffeine and some dumb adrenaline pads that go under the lip like snus (no clue what it was), once. I said that because I've seen what different drugs do to people, opioids are crippling while shrooms and acid make people argue with me better and give them direction in life. Neither am I underage.

I agree that abusing opioids/opiates is destructive, but they have high demand and it's not because of their destructive potential. It's not just so simple that you can pick and choose some drugs that are good and some that are bad, you need to take a smarter approach to it. The demand for pain relief should be met with measures taken to reduce the risks and harms, you can't just try to limit the supply because that will actually increase the harms and risks. You can't remove the demand any other way than by meeting it, no amount of new commercials about the horrors of addiction is going to remove the demand. No amount of busting of dealers is going to remove the demand. We have to provide the supply for that demand, someone is going to always have to do it and the current strategy of enforcement will only guarantee that whoever that party happens to be is going to be some completely out of control, lean, mean money making machine with no regard for anyone's safety. By the way perfect for this thread is this article that everyone should read to familiarize themselves with the history of this issue: https://fairy.life/pdf/prohibition.pdf

>>1484 >>1504 >dude weed lmao >muh "psychedelics enhance my conciousness brooooo" >never actually done damage to his brain by the drugs he supposedly endorses you're like the kid in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRMTXsNFRVE

>>1507 Does everything in your head revolve around ridiculous archetypes? Keep in mind you have no idea what I'm like, you've only seen two posts about a very specific topic and you're already making far fetched assumptions. My point was that I talk to drug users as someone who's straight edge and I have seen what different substances do to communities, and from what I can see and gather, psychedelics and cannabis are way less harmful than fentanyl and shouldn't be grouped together. I don't know why you're making extremely bitter assumptions about me over this.

>>1508 >Keep in mind you have no idea what I'm like That's what a highly defensive person would say. And no reason to be defensive unless..... omg, I got it... it's almost like archetypes exist for a reason. >My point was that I talk to drug users as someone who's straight edge and I have seen what different substances do to communities >I talk to drug users Why does every shmuch on internet think that their personal experience constitutes objective reality? It's almost like their egos are thethered to that belief. You talking to them gives you little to no priviledge to give your opinion on it, if you can call it an opinion based on what it's formed on. >I don't know why you're making extremely bitter assumptions about me over this. Because you are talking to someone who is more into drug culture than you will ever be. What you have seen on TV/news and what you have heard from your druggie friends is not enough to base your opinion on, or to even pass it on. You should be laughed at every attempt of making discussion about a topic you know soykaf about.

>>1509 >And no reason to be defensive unless..... omg, I got it... it's almost like archetypes exist for a reason. great work, detective Sherlock! Your powers of deduction are unmatched! >Why does every shmuch on internet think that their personal experience constitutes objective reality? >Because you are talking to someone who is more into drug culture than you will ever be. really makes me think.

> discussing the economic aspects of drugs If the above sidetrack is done with... I've been corresponding with a friend in the US who may have to pick up and leave town, burning every trace behind her and hiding somewhere due to stuff she was just a witness to 10-15 years ago. She was explaining some of the ties between the Aryan Nations and the Crips who should be mortal enemies obviously except drugs and money seem to overrule everything. Then she was talking about how Rainbow Gatherings and other hippie events are kept supplied with substances by neo-nazi gangs, maybe not directly but with a degree or two of seperation, also for the same reasons. Seems pretty fcked all around. It's been said, no government can win a war in SE Asia without controlling the drug trade. Drugs seem to be one of the secret cornerstones of the Earth's economy. I wouldn't be shocked if all the cartels were pouring millions into lobbying to keep drugs illegal. Prohibition seems to be keeping them rich.

>>1509 >That's what a highly defensive person would say. And no reason to be defensive unless..... omg, I got it... So because I am defensive over false claims, that means they're true? This soykaf is out of high school man, I'm defensive because you're saying things about me that aren't true (me being some stereotypical suburban boy who goes crazy over 420 and who hates mum) and if I wouldn't have replied like your archetypal badass of a stoic alpha male who never reacts, people who read this thread would have started disregarding my opinions because there's no opposition to what some guy with an unreasonable grudge is saying personally about me. >Why does every shmuch on internet think that their personal experience constitutes objective reality? I never said my opinions are objective, I shared what I had personally experienced. OP asked what I think, and I answered. Do you want everyone to believe the exact opposite of what they believe in the first place, because otherwise they'd think their personal opinions are objective, and thus bad? Talk about slave morality. >What you have seen on TV/news and what you have heard from your druggie friends is not enough to base your opinion on, or to even pass it on. You're making things up again, I never said they boast how great it is, what I tried to say was that I look at how their lives are going outside of "i loved this drug lmao", I observe how their attitudes and behaviours have changed towards the future and the world, and I see a great improvement in people who use acid and weed. You're arguing with me because you simply want to argue with random people, in your head are those holes with geometric shapes for toy blocks, some shapes you like and others you dislike, and you are constantly on the lookout to fit everyone into those few holes. You're so serious about these shapes that you're willing to argue with a person for days to make him admit that he fits into that hole, as if that would be a personal victory for you. For someone who sees narcissism everywhere like a 80s soccer mum associating Satan with everything, it's ironic that you want to feel the rush of narcissistic pleasure of people you argue with admitting that you're right about everything you accuse them of being. My reaction of opposing your bullsoykaf is natural, you being here for two days trying to prove that you're right can only mean you want to feel the immense gratification from people admitting defeat.

For those of you who’ve done drugs, either for pain relief or consciousness expanding etc.: why not just git gud and do yoga or meditation or flower arrangement instead?

>>1518 I once met a guy who had some kind of major experience from meditating. He said he was alone in the house for the day and had been meditating for a while when he had what felt like an out-of-body experience. He said his mind expanded to the point where he could view himself sitting in the room. From there it expanded outward to where he could see the house and the surrounding neighborhood. It sounded to me like he had some kind of self-induced hallucination or psychosis or something. He ultimately gave up meditation, though. I'm not sure why, but he seemed to indicate that it wasn't really giving him what he was looking for, whatever that was.

>>1518

>>1519 Astral projection is close to babby-tier as far as siddhis go. And the point of even the more ebin superpowers is that you’ll get bored of them, and the material world in general. >>1521 >fun things are fun To be satisfied with opiates is a bit like only watching anime with dubs: even a little effort (switching to subs) gives you a much better experience. Sustained effort (learning nip) opens your eyes to a wealth of meaning you can scarcely imagine.

>>1518 why do you need a pogo stick when you have public transportation? Those are all very different things, and it's worth it to do all of them.

IMHO the trade isn't really anything like the movies. The money is pretty bad, the risks are high, it happens through decentralized networks rather than through some central authority. People don't really do it just for the money, at least not everyone. It's often much more political/ideological than is allowed to be portrayed in media. The pop media mafia story about the poor person that decides to hustle his way out of the ghetto is just perpetuating the capitalist appropriation of rebellion into just yet another profit maximizing activity. It might be what mafias and cartels do but they're by and large right-wing organizations with ties to government secret services, but you shouldn't consider the drug trade to be all mafias and cartels. You should consider mafias and cartels more akin to a continuation of the state in areas which the state does not want to take responsibility over and instead sweep under the rug to be policed by mafias and cartels. It's a tired meme that police are the biggest gang but the inverse applies as well that gangs are police in their own territory. We live under an international drug regime that in practice maintains artificial scarcity of high demand commodities to inflate their price and protection is offered to select traders who profit greatly and then funnel the profits into the regime's security apparatus operations. But it's insane to suggest that these protected traders are the whole of the drug trade, when the majority of the traders out there are hard working people like any that benefit from these commodities and want to provide a high demand service to those in need, usually including themselves. The drug trade at it's best is a militant agorist enterprise, the goal ought not be profit but freedom. Don't get lost in the toxic Hollywood mythology.

>>1475 The black market = the free market

>>1586 I think the funniest thing about Black Mass and The Departed wasn't the suggestion that organised crime is in bed with the feds, it's that it's unusual enough to rate commentary.

>>1518 You think you understand but you don't. Your free to think those are equivalent, or feel better by assuming some pleasures are higher or better. I dont think you have ever truly gone anywhere meditating anyways, because if you did you wouldn't have this sort of egotistical narcissistic view on lifes pleasures, and wouldn't speak on things you don't know about. It sounds like your method of avoiding addiction is not doing drugs, as is many. Its a very good idea, however you should know if you did you would find one that would make you completely revoke that statement. One would grip you so powerfully you would change your mind. The way you maintain control is evidence of the weakness. You fail to understand that drugs arent as simple as producing good feelings in your body. Some do that, but even then you ignore what kind of effect that has on your perception, and on what thoughts come from your brain in this state. Many such thoughts are no different from what you see as greater more advanced pleasures. My opinion, this isnt an insult, is that people such as yourself are most likely to succumb to addiction. Its always those who "dont understand" or see themselves as above it, because they underestimate it. All its gonna take is someone in your life you respect to explain a specific drug in a way that makes you willing to try it. Maybe that drug is harmless, its acid or dmt or something. Then youl start to be more open to the idea, realizing your entire idea of what that drug was like was totally wrong, and your probably wrong about others.

>>1586 What you're saying applies or doesn't depending on the drug. In this country, pot is often a pretty small regional operation, grown locally. It's going to be legal this year anyway and then it will (in theory at least) be sold in a similar manner as liquor. Meanwhile where harder drugs are concerned, we do have cartels of a sort, the Hells Angels being the largest. The longer that particular group exists, the more they really do start to resemble some media version of the mafia. They only seem to wear their colours for social events, not while conducting business.

Keep in mind that the high-level drug trade is almost entirely run by the CIA and its proxies. Your average street dealer doesn't have much to do with it, but cocaine and heroin, to this day, are run by the CIA and used to fund clandestine activities.

>>1663 It's known that they have been involved, and the most dire version of the story is that they are responsible for the crack explosion in So.Cal in the 80s which of course spread everywhere else too. To say that they are the main players though... I'm not convinced on that but that isn't to say I'd be shocked either.

>>1664 Who pushed for war in Afghanistan whe n Mujahideen got control of poppy fields? Oh right right right, a couple of towers fell down at free falling speeds which gives them enough excuses for that. What about Contras selling some little bit of blow? Oh fuarrrk man, the communists in Nicaragua, we can't have that What about the opiate crisis? The hippies of the 80s? Don't know about them doing that but just think about controlling the culture and whole blocks of economy through drugs.

>>1665 > just think about controlling the culture and whole blocks of economy through drugs People I know who used to go to Rainbow Gatherings were convinced, the group that organized that were infiltrated at the innermost circle. It's also been suggested that the feds secretly encouraged LSD in the 60s because it made people stare at their navels rather than cause trouble.

I like to note how the rise in heroin deaths seems to start at the same time as the Syrian War.

>>1666 then why was it made so strongly illegal? LSD was and is more illegal and difficult to make than almost any other drug in the US. They might have introduced it to the counterculture via Ken Kesey and others but there is no doubt in my mind that they rapidly regretted their mistake. Being an acidhead doesn't make you inactive at all, if anything it makes you more likely to reject modern society. >>1663 "almost entirely run by" is a very strong word. Sure, they may be exporters of opiates from the middle East and they may have introduced cocaine and LSD into the market but that doesn't mean they have a major hand in all drug trafficking, it's far too diverse and complex of an ecosystem to be that centralized.

>>2343 Also it's not just CIA that participates in the drug trade but intelligence agencies all over the world. CIA initially inherited the drug connections of the French DGSE when taking over Indochina. The DGSE has been very heavily involved for a long time (remember the French Connection?), heroin traffic used to run mainly through Marseille under Corsican syndicate management and DGSE officers were even arrested by Americans during all that. The Corsicans have an ugly history of being used by French fascists, Gestapo and the CIA among others (interesting note that during this period the CIA funded socialists in France as their only option to combat communists). For a 'short synopsis' of opium/heroin/cocaine traffic check this out: http://loota.zc.fi/prohibition.pdf

Also I've read that North Korean intelligence is today very involved in methamphetamine traffic. One can only imagine how involved the Chinese are in eg. RC traffic.

>>1665 Little known fact about the whole Taleban poppy ban is that Taleban traders had up to that point gathered a huge supply of opium stock, the ban was most likely a price gouging play to make a quick buck selling off the stock. They successfully derezzed production but didn't get rid of the supply already there.

>>1518 Obvious retort is that I can do meditation and yoga on multiple drugs. Might as well go as far as possible.

>>1511 Honestly, how do you believe people when they say this stuff? Doesn't the fact they were with the military only exacerbate the likelihood that they are just full of it and trying to act like they know whats good in the hood? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to harp on you or anything.

>>1511 weird, since most people who actually produce psychedelics are hippies(Will Pickard, Nick Sand, etc.) are huge hippies.

People who sell drugs are just like people who sell anything else. Actors who move products according to market demand. The people who work at the low level are mostly just junkies themselves, middle men are middle men in any industry, and the producers tend to be poor users in soykafhole countries without better opportunities. There's not all that much difference between them and other assholes except their markets operate outside of state regulatory markets and thus their deals must be backed up by their own knockoff brand of state violence. I don't think they are any better or worse in general than anyone else. The whole idea of using the death penalty is pretty fuarrrking retarded, though. The junkies who deal on the low level won't care, the middle men probably won't get caught, and the producers already have the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads in the form of gang/firm rivalry. If you actually want to do anything against the supposed ills of drugs, then folding these people into the legitimate market in is one of the only real ways to do it. Because you can't fight the market, not when the entire world has been structured over centuries to enable markets and supply chains to flourish and exist anywhere for anything. Personally I believe that as low skilled labor and other jobs start getting taken by automation, and more and more people become basically useless, that there's going to be a reversal of the whole "Drugs r bad" trend. It's already started with Cannabis being legalized left and right. Good way to keep the rabble content, make sure the proles are too stoned to think about rebelling against their lot. Don't forget to spend your basic income cheques on Bayer brand Soma shots. Soma, it's got what proles crave, it's got OPIOID AGONISTS! >>2410 Depends on what you mean by involved. The North Korean state does trafficking and soykaf because they have so many sanctions on them they can only really operate in black markets. The state practically runs nothing but criminal enterprises like drugs, hacking, blackmail, human trafficking and so on. The Chinese on the other hand operate mainly in the legitimate global marketplace. The Chinese state still has it's fingers in most businesses especially chemical and drug production, and they certainly know about RCs being shipped out, but they probably aren't directly managing it. More likely the just let the market operate by itself for the most part so they can have plausible deniability. I doubt if RCs alone amount to any large percentage of china's Chemical industry GDP.

>>2450 Psychedelics are one thing. Pot on the other hand is a massive industry and produced by a variety of groups, including organized crime on a very large scale. >>2448 > Doesn't the fact they were with the military Did you point to the wrong post by accident? I don't even know how to reply to this.

>>1519 I cant speak for him, but I stopped meditating because it was too time consuming, and although it was nice, and being able to visualize yourself outside of your body is cool and all, i just cant be bothered to spend several hours sitting around when I could be learning something new instead. on a side note, the benefits of meditating are only there if you see a spiritual gain by it. if you already have a good control of your body function (i.e. being able to control you emotions, breathing, and heart rate without meditation) then it really is a pointless exercise unless you like sitting in quiet contemplation. as far as the economics of drugs go, there is a terrible irony in the division of places: dealers are just people, often times trying to make a profit, but their profit in some cases (especially in the heroin/opioid areas) costs people their sanity and lives, which is why there is a general conception of dealers as "bad" Within official markets, Numale dude weed lmao types can make as much as 2500 dollars for a few marijuana seeds because the plants yield a high THC content. there are also multiple forces at work which destabilize drug economies >corporations trying to gain monopoly on the market >illegal profiteers trying to get around tax and regulations (smugglers/illegal mass growers often times) - these often have negative impacts on the environment >people just trying to make a quick buck by selling >users who really dont care as long as they get cheap thrills from drugs the problem is not the use of drugs themselves, it is people with no self control who have their lives consumed buy drugs, and the dealers making profit off of peoples lives spiraling out of control. the inverse is not much better, since companies want to paint their competition as "evil" because they are stealing their legal profit margins. the war on drugs plays a role on this, because counter narcotics agents stop drugs from "reaching the streets" when they apprehend smugglers, yet you can go into pharmacies or drug stores and buy essentially the same product. tl:dr people don't care about one another and want the fastest way to get rich, and the government gives some entities preference by taxing them, but stops the business of others who will not comply.

>>2466 There was this article on Vice about a group of anarchists that promoted the idea of home-made medications. (not natural medicine, but actual pills and remedies). I took this idea by purchasing a small amount of Ethylphenidate. In my country Ethylphenidate is not controlled. I sank it in Methyl alcohol and took it instead of the prescribed Methylphenidate that usually costed me hundreds of dollars more.

at first glance there does not seem to be a problem with that concept, until people botch making pills and end up either destroying homes (via at home chemistry fires/contamination) or ending up in the hospital because they mixed something wrong. on the other hand, you have to worry about unethical individuals selling these drugs for less than companies which creates a lucrative market for amateur pill-makers (who may or may not know what they are doing) or people selling placebos. the risks with amateurs making drugs is that they may not mix them properly, or they may have contaminants in them due to the lack of oversight that companies have. the whole idea of companies having oversight actually is not entirely correct either because of many legal loopholes. but it's your body, it should be your choice. laws just limit your ability to make those decisions because somebody wanted to make a little more money at one point (why there is such a stigma with marijuana, actually used to be officially advertised that "smoking the devils leaf makes niggers rape white women" because the cotton and paper industries did not want hemp to take their profit margins)

>>2468 This, is also completely true. Preparing these tend to be very dangerous. There are some considerations for this idea to work, the first one being having a well-prepared lab with safety measures. The only way in which this could work ever would be if there was a complete switch from the "War on drugs" to Harm Reduction. This way criminals would no longer have an incentive to abuse the democratization of these technologies.

This was written in '92 by Edgelord himself, it's worth a read: A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. The technology for this revolution--and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution--has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies. The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences! https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

>>2467 This is an interesting topic. There is considerable effort going into making machines that are basically computer controlled reconfigurable reaction chambers for drug synthases, which will shift the supply chain for drugs towards decentralization. This will also mean that for reasonable amounts, plus initial reagents, home chemists could make a lot more, potentially even do some experimentation with new compounds. Alternatively a more home made approach is 3D printing reaction vessels which can then be simply automated to carry out step wise synthesis of drugs. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6373/314) >>2468 >he risks with amateurs making drugs is that they may not mix them properly, or they may have contaminants in them due to the lack of oversight that companies have. This can be mitigated by third party verification, it doesn't even have to be government oversight, all you need is third party testers to help regulate those who sell in bulk. If people are only taking their own home made drugs then the only regulation needs to be natural selection and self interest. >" because the cotton and paper industries did not want hemp to take their profit margins) Sorry to be a party pooper, but this is a stoner myth. There are many types of hemp that have little to no psycho-active components that have been used continuously for various product production. However while hemp is versatile is not a particularly good fiber for any use so it's mainly used in niche applications like rope where polymer rope can't be used or wears out faster due to environmental conditions. Cotton is a much, much finer fiber, and therefore always was going to be more valuable. This is the same reason that we still use silk. Hemp never really threatened cotton because it was never a luxury product, and people picked cotton over it any day of the week. Have you ever felt hemp fiber yarn/thread? soykaf's scratchy and uncomfortable as fuarrrk even with major processing. Hemp sort-of kind-of threatened paper early on, but only back in the day when paper was still made largely from textiles. There was an entire industry around poor 'ragpickers'who would take old cloth to be recycled into paper. However once we figured out how to finely pulp wood and bleach it into fine white paper, hemp didn't threaten anything, since wood was again, far, far cheaper and more abundant than hemp.

>>2467 Be careful not ingesting any methanol, it's deadly.

>>1475 Drug dealers are usually no better than pond scum. Serious pieces of soykaf.

>>2479 What's wrong with pond scum?

>>2472 > wood was again, far, far cheaper and more abundant than hemp Maybe when there was more wilderness to harvest from. Farming hemp is far more efficient than farming trees.

>>2480 Fish eat it!

>>2484 >Maybe when there was wilderness to harvest from Yes that is what I meant. There was, and still is, vast reserves of lumber that people are allowed to take cheaply and easily. By the time that changes we probably will have transitioned even further into digital records and better analog alternatives to paper.

>>2489 in the US and Europe most old-growth forest is protected, and lots of second-growth is too. Lumber is actually a pretty restricted resource.

>>2504 >Old growth I was pretty sure that old growth forests practically didn't exist anymore in most first world countries. >Restrictions on secondary growth That's true, but as far as I know, the restrictions aren't strong enough to make alternatives particularly competitive. At least in my state there are relatively weak laws against natural resource consumption. Plus the US imports a lot of pulpwood Canada (who I believe subsidies the lumber industry because it supports a lot of more rural towns). Add on to that the large amounts of scrap lumber and recyclables and the paper industry at least is still reasonably cheap all things considered.

>>2506 the US still has lots of old growth forests. Mostly in national or state parks, and nowhere near as much as it used to be. Maybe 1 mil acres or around there, total. There are still some 2000 year old redwood groves. The thing is that lots of forest is owned by logging companies, and they just farm the trees. So, still a very profitable industry, and probably will be for a long time considering how good paper is as a material.

I'm a drug dealer. I try to not think of myself as such though. I think in part the media gives a very skewed perspective of what dealing is and in part the times have changed for a lot of us. It's true that often dealers become assholes, in part because they're reflecting the myriad of assholes they have to deal with. It's an occupation with a lot magic about it, that is it can go to ones head much more than the objective realities of the job would predict. I personally consider it more of a hobby and I do it primarily for the drugs rather than for the money. Perhaps that makes me a bad dealer, but I'm good in some of the more boring aspects of it that is communication & customer service, organizing and math. A friend of mine once said that it's not just about providing a product but providing experience and I'm kind of bad at that more traditional side of it. I rarely meet people and I'm clumsy with the handiwork, but I know people who handle those. I don't think there's any other aspect of my life that other people appreciate as much as my drug hobby. I consider myself an addict, because of medical conditions I've grown accustomed to taking drugs every day and I don't consider it so great an evil as most seem to. I expect that I'll sit in court over it all someday. I've sat in the audience of friends proceedings and I try to live my life so that one day having it all being played back to me in a court room I can sit there and say "Yes, that's me and I stand behind all of it". But it's hard, I know our courts aren't as merciful as they claim God to be and I know how they bully us independent small timers as much as they can. I'm scared a lot of time, I've gotten robbed twice this year. Lost money to scams. Raided by police. Some friends have died, some are in permanent psychosis, some doing long sentences. They are not victims of drugs because drugs don't have agency to make decisions, the main party to be held responsible for their victimization are the people that decided to persecute them for their decision to be associated with drugs.

>>2726 The governments fear everything that might challenge their power, particularly substances that might change peoples outlook on consumerist life which is how they keep people in check. Their unjust and careless handling of such manners is nothing new and no accident. Its nice people still find niches to have their voice heard like in this place. Most of my friends are or have been druggies and even some deal/dealt. Their really nice people, maybe a bit weird and some had some bad soykaf handled to them but try to deal right with life while still enjoying it. Needless to say lots of them got given stupid bullsoykaf by the man which they didnt deserve. Whatever people think of druggies, when i take a look at the modern world its that which is fuarrrked up and not the people who tried to get away from all that and went terribly astray. Some people just cant imagine why others would take drugs, most often when i look at things sober i cant see why anybody would not want to take drugs. In my opinion, for good or for bad the drug scene is a reflection of mans conflict of our current state of being and his desires that range so much higher than what we are granted,

>>1479 I see the problem as twofold. on the one hand, dealers are a necessary part of a medicated society and supplement the economy in their own ways. The fact that dealers sell to anybody, no questions asked in many cases means that they actually support a number of criminal behaviors, in essence devaluing any so called social benefit as you say. >Many dealers just want a little extra cash, and in a classic entrepreneurial sense, do not discriminate in their clients as long as the money is good. >people who want the product are willing to pay whatever it takes to get it. >drug dependencies (particularly with opioids) produce situations where people commit petty crimes, rob people, break into homes and vehicles to find anything of value to sell in order to finance a drug habit. Though I am sure there are many functional users, the mere effect of drugs being available means people with a craving will damage the lives of others in society for their own gain. This in turn brings the community down, as people no longer trust one another. I used to have sympathy for people who were addicts, but at this point, I recognize that their decisions were often a series of poor choices that led them down an irresponsible path, and they have little chance for redemption. On top of that, most of them are scum who would use anybody just to get a fix. As for the larger issue, people are under the impression that a magic elixir or herb will make problems go away, or they are using it as a form of escape. As pillars of the economy, it is not in corporations interest to solve problems related to drug crime and addiction, because if addiction were to be prevented or stopped, thousands of doctors, and millions of healthcare workers, counselors, and detox professionals would go unemployed. IIRC amazon is now getting into the pharmaceutical field too. dealers who dont discriminate are indirectly responsible for a huge amount of crime in society. harsh penalties for dealers may be effective in lowering crime rates. Pharmaceuticals should also be regulated to find cures rather than copes for addiction (i.e. incentives for curing addictions) instead of profits being the primary driver in drug production

>>2728 >Some people just cant imagine why others would take drugs, most often when i look at things sober i cant see why anybody would not want to take drugs. literally plato's allegory of the cave: is it better to see a harsh reality, or to see a fabricated dream world... just stay in the matrix lainon

>>2726 are you ever afraid someone will take the law into his own hands and try to stop you for dealing or even harming you for it? I am not talking about calling the cops or doxxing you, but like if some "upstanding citizen" sees you and attacks you. I feel like in modern society, you would still be seen as in the wrong, even if you were just dealing.

>>2731 Yes I don't talk about my life (except I guess in some foreign online circles) or go much anywhere most of the time. I live a miserable existence with very little glamour in the eyes of some I guess. If I remember correctly a friend of mine was once attacked by some really drunk person when he was talking about ecstasy, not much of an "upstanding citizen". He wasn't dealing even or anything just talking positively about drugs. I agree with some things with the previous post too. I enable crime just like many tool manufacturers and I should be regulated in some sensible manner. Most dealers don't deal indiscriminately at all but you have a point that they can and many do, dealing should be regulated. I've thought many times that I should be required to at least pass some laborant 101 course before handling materials that are destined for IV injections. I should be required to have some certified proof of what my products contain. I should be required to check for customer age or pay attention to their health. I should relinquish part of my profit for funding the treatment of drug harms. I should, I should, I should... But why don't I? Maybe because at the laborant course I'd get thrown out as a junkie. Certification of products is becoming more possible as this country is finally planning to offer a service of baggie contents identification, but even that is not coming easy, it's a legal nightmare and the police are uppity about the project. When meeting strangers I don't really want to spend extra time in public waiting to get busted asking for ID and there's no way I can know anything about their health condition. As for the last I've occasionally tried donating something somewhere, but could do more I guess.

I sell drugs. I'm picky about what I sell and I don't sell much, but it's enough that I'd go to prison if I got caught. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. My suppliers and the people I sell to and the other drug dealers I've met have always been chill. I guess it depends on what scene you're involved with, I've met some terrible people who are pretty major weed distributors and a guy who sold H that was a real soykafhead.

close friends sell almost everything. My advice is that if you start branching out to people you dont know inevitably you will end up in a situation where someone steals or tries to steal your drugs. One of the friends around the start had this happen actually with a friend and did nothing but go "hey you better give me my stuff back", because he definitely is not tough or commanding. It was as simple as the person asking if he could go fetch some xanax and while he went upstairs he just sacked the house. Obviously you can't call the police, lesson is just that if you aren't a hard dude you need to be fairly selective about who you are selling to. The minute you end up dealing to someone who is a fiend or is bold enough they are going to see your inability to stop them and take your soykaf. Im very kind and loyal and youl just have to trust me on that and there has been moments at the end of a binge where the thought popped into my head that I could just steal my friends soykaf and dip. possibly even get away with it if there is other people at the house. I shut the idea down pretty quickly but the fact that its even there is POWERFUL. its not the end of the world and obviously you wont be selling to them again, but best to avoid it in the first place.

>>2758 This is good advice. I used to just sell psyches and party drugs and I would only deal with people I knew fairly well. If someone had a lot of friends who wanted to buy from me, I'd just cut him a deal so that he could make a little profit as a middle man and I wouldn't have to deal with the increased exposure. I will say it helped that I had close to a monopoly on a lot of the drugs I was selling because this was back in 2012 and I was one of the few people in town who knew how to buy soykaf on the silk road.

Look what I found for anyone interested in the topic: http://www.akha.org/content/drugwar/mccoy/chapters.htm

>>1476 > Drug dealers are scum and 100% deserve to be Duterte’d, What? 90% of the dealers I may or may not know in person are nice people. Of course there are going to be some bad (or really fuarrrking rotten) apples but you can't generalise.

>>3424 To add, it really just depends on what you're selling.

I know many dealers on a lower level, but it was a very odd situation. We had access to almost everything and certain things were bought but not sold outside the circle because it was too risky. One of them I liked very much before she even started dealing to me, she will be leaving to go back to Africa soon. She genuinely wanted to create a place for people to experiment safely and under her watch but people including myself will make our own connections and addictions if we were the type. I see addiction as a challenge to society whether the dealers are there or not. My solution would be to allow sale of drugs in natural forms. Im under no illusion that natural things are not addictive, im aware this would include coca, khat, opium. But I see addiction as inevitable among those who will become such and I would rather they face this obstacle with something comparitively manageable. Especially because the amount purchased can be monitored, someone will have a personally easier time dealing with the opium addiction than prescription drugs they can pop a lot more casually and use at higher rates more quickly. The more addiction becomes not hidden, the more easy and clear it will be to deal with it and instead of having people live forever with an addictive personality that in absence of drugs expresses itself in less obviously or clearly harmful ways, we will learn to collectively move past it as a society. Not that it will never be a problem to anyone, just that its a problem they can move past as an individual more readily. As more move past it the path becomes clearer, and the struggle collectively easier. Someone who has stared their addiction in the face in my opinion has gained something immeasurable while someone always subtly influenced by it and never having to face it is like a prisoner. Before drugs, my addictive personality expressed itself in other ways. If not for me struggling with addiction made clear I would be much worse off and not even know why. Again my only wish is that it was with easier to manage plants that require rituals such as smoking, chewing, making tea, etc. that I could pinpoint. And also that I would not have to see things by going through the more dangerous backdoor channels in the process of dealing with addiction, and that I could have also limited my harm I did to others. And thats why I have this stance on this.