by Power, Mike
That Hollywood stars, who have ready access to the purest and most exclusive drugs on the market, are choking down damiana and dried sage sprayed with John William Huffman’s cannabinoids demonstrates beyond doubt that the research chemical market has penetrated areas of society unthinkable a decade ago. While it is true that the new drugs scene has in many cases been caused by a scarcity of a preferred product, it is also true that for many drug users, a new kick is always welcome.
And while many drug users are avoiding the law by making or taking drugs that lie outside international control, a high-tech anarchist cadre has built an online market in traditional narcotics that may very well be untouchable, and which represents a major new battlefield in the war on drugs.
Notes
1. Joan Miro, ‘Thankful that I’m alive: experience with Bromo-dragonFLY (sold as 2C-B-Fly) (ID 81677)’, 12 October 2009, erowid.org/exp/81677
2. Matthew A. Parker, Danuta Marona-Lewicka, Virginia L. Lucaites, David L. Nelson and David E. Nichols, ‘A Novel (Benzodifuranyl)aminoalkane with Extremely Potent Activity at the 5-HT2A Receptor’, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Vol. 41, 1998, pp. 5148–5149; www.unc.edu/~dlinz/Papers/A%20 Novel%20(Benzodifuranyl)aminoalkane.pdf
3. http://media.carnegieinst.se/2012/04/NilsBejerot
_inlaga_OK.pdf
4. http://ewsd.wiv-isp.be/Main/5-IT%20deaths%20in%20Sweden.aspx
5. www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/274696-Describe-your-worst-psychedelic-experience(s)!?p=8658607#post8658607
6. www.flashback.org/sp27563892
7. www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/home/2012/
march/15/hugo_wenn.aspx
8. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-17007766
9. http://metro.co.uk/2012/03/14/body-found-in-chingford-canal-believed-to-be-missing-partygoer-andrew-cooke-29-357437/
10. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121565/Will-learn-Mrs-Speaker-sparks-ANOTHER-storm-claiming-shes-tempted-try-Mexxy-drug-outlawed.html
11. www.startribune.com/local/north/135800088
.html
12. www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/01/cdc-denies-zombies-existence_n_1562141.html?ref=tw
13. blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/05/31/drug-panics-bath-salts-and-face-eating-zombies/
14. www.huffingtonpost.com/subhash-kateel/its-bigger-than-bath-salts_b_1562014.html
15. Edward Huntington Williams MD, ‘Negro cocaine fiends are a new southern menace’, New York Times, 8 February 1914
16. Russell Russo, Noah Marks, Katy Morris, Heather King, Angelle Gelvin and Ronald Rooney, ‘Life-threatening Necrotizing Fasciitis Due to “Bath Salts” Injection’, Orthopedics, Vol. 35,·Issue 1, January 2012
17. http://abcnewsradioonline.com/health-news/tag/bath-salts
18. www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/us/states-adding-drug-test-as-hurdle-for-welfare.html?pagewanted=all
19. www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QgX4ICh1wQc
Your Crack’s in the Post
The first time you see the Silk Road website there’s a creaking disconnect between your eyes and all the evidence they deliver, and your preconceptions up to that point. There’s a strange smile, mixing recognition, revelation and confusion, playing on your lips. It all looks familiar to anyone who regularly shops online, but is in some way uncannily different. It can’t be real, can it? Yes, it is. You can buy any drug you want right now on the web. Every drug you can think of, and a dizzying few dozen more, are on open sale on the site, from old-style illegal Class A drugs such as crack, heroin and LSD, to research chemicals of every hue, including Shulgin’s creations, Nichols’ work, Karl’s ketamine variants and Kinetic’s mephedrone. If there’s a drug missing that you really want, you can always ask for it to be offered, imported or synthesized. And if you’re a chemist yourself, there are syntheses and precursors for sale too.
Rather than waiting for the drug laws to change, activists, dealers and users have declared an independent state online where all commerce, within certain boundaries, is permitted by the site’s mysterious owner. Its guide to vendors is pretty laissez-faire: ‘Do not list anything who’s [sic] purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia [sic].’
The site has Norwegians selling Cambodian mushrooms, Canadians selling Afghan heroin, and Brits selling concentrated cannabis tinctures from ancient Nepalese cannabis landraces grown under artificial sunlight in lofts that may well be in Basildon. Appropriately for a site named after a trade route that first brought these drugs to the West, there are also opiates, including opium, prescription morphine, and white and brown heroin from Afghanistan. Most of the products are illegal, but whether you want a quarter gram of heroin or a gram of glittering Peruvian escama de pescado cocaine, you’re in the right place, and there’s not a great deal the police or customs can do to stop you.
The Silk Road is a cyberpunk dreamland – except it’s happening today, in dozens of countries, not in some dystopian future in a William Gibson novel. For all that, it’s a website like any other, if web design skills were locked down in the ancient pre-Google, pre-Amazon days. You almost expect each page to be soundtracked by the screaming of a modem while the bits crackle slowly down the phone lines. But instead of books or household goods, there, in the most stark and simple language possible, advertisers lay out the drugs they offer and their prices. In a neat left-hand navigation bar there’s a list of different categories. Psychedelics are well represented, along with research chemicals and standard options such as LSD and an abundance of mushrooms. There are 2C-B, 2C-I and a few other Shulgin-created delicacies for the chemical cognoscenti. There’s DMT – the drug William Burroughs travelled months in the Amazon to find. One vendor, Seakong, has a gram of the more hallucinogenic cousin of MDMA, MDA, for sale, synthesized, he says, by an aspiring chemist friend. At just 12, it’s an absolute steal for such a rarely seen drug. The symbol stands for bitcoin, the mysterious currency whose use is compulsory in this online market, of which more later.
There are tranquillizers, such as Valium, lots of crystal MDMA and Ecstasy pills, dissociatives such as ketamine, and stimulants, including crack, ice and other amphetamines. There’s high-grade kush marijuana, with enthusiastic recommendations from satisfied customers for one particular vendor, detailing how he vacuum-sealed and wrapped and triple-packed the highly fragrant goods into an envelope small enough to be posted through most standard letterboxes, negating the need to sign for the packets – or for the raising of any red flags at customs. That the strain is one of the world’s oldest and earliest genetic examples of the plant, brought to Europe and thence to the US along traditional trading routes, is an irony probably not lost on the Silk Road’s intelligently combative and articulate owner, who operates under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts.
Buying is a simple matter of adding the goods to your shopping cart, and paying for them. The money is held in an escrow account hosted at the site, and although you have to supply a delivery address, this can be encrypted, and is deleted as soon as you have received the goods. The site also gives detailed information on how to receive packages safely:
Use a different, unrelated address than the one where your item will be kept, such as a friend’s house or P.O. box. Once the item arrives, transport it discreetly to its final destination. Avoid abandoned buildings or any place where it would be suspicious to have mail delivered. Do not sign for your package. If you are expecting a package from us, do not answer the door for the postman, let him [deliver it] and then transport it as described above. Do not use your real name. This tactic doesn’t work in some places because deliveries won’t be made to names not registered with the address. If you think this is a problem, send yourself a test letter with the fake name and see if it arrives. If you follow these guidelines, your chances of being detected are minimal. In the event that you are detected, deny requesting the package. Anyone can send
anyone else anything in the mail.
Initially the Silk Road also had a weapons trading area, but many users were uneasy about the influx of arms dealers and a new subsite, the Armory, was launched in February 2012. It was closed in August 2012 due to a lack of interest.
The Silk Road’s turnover reached US$22 million a year within its first year of operation, according to security researcher Nicolas Christin, who scraped the site’s data by deploying software agents under multiple user accounts that recorded customer activity via the public feedback system and showed how many transactions had taken place. He crunched that data in the middle of 2012 to calculate the market’s size.1 The site’s owners take a commission on each sale of around six per cent – or US$143,000 per month at current rates.
The Silk Road has a very busy forum area, too, with over 100,000 posts, 9,000 topics and 11,000 users in the bustling community pages. The conversations there weave around the site’s holy trinity: drugs, smuggling and cryptography. There was once even a post purportedly by a Canadian postal official who claimed to have become addicted to opiates following an accident, in which he gave instructions on how to avoid detection. It was, he said, his thanks to the site for enabling him to manage his pain and addiction, since he could not obtain his medicines any other way. It was either a fantastically subversive act or a cunning black-ops move. It read like both, just to complicate the matter.
The Silk Road is the most popular of the growing hidden network of drug dealers who use Tor, or The Onion Router network, an alternative web-like space that swarms with users in virtual tunnels beneath the everyday web. One drug-dealing site found there, the General Store, is even more bare-bones than the Silk Road, but still delivers the goods it offers: ketamine, DMT, MDMA. Another site, Black Market Reloaded, operates on similar principles and offers the same drugs and services as the Silk Road, though it’s far less busy. The value of the service provided by the Silk Road is proportional to the numbers of people using it, and the site is quickly growing.
How does such a service as the Silk Road even continue to exist, when it is breaking the law in such a flagrant manner? In order for its customers to be completely untraceable, and therefore invulnerable to legal prosecution, the Silk Road is hosted on a hidden service, buried away on the Dark Web, far from the reach of Google. Sites on this network have randomly generated addresses, made up of a string of meaningless characters, and ending in .onion rather than.com. Its owner and its users – both the dealers and the customers – have complete anonymity. The location of the server that hosts the site is unknown, and unknowable. And, extraordinarily, the American Navy is, in some small and unintended way, partially responsible for this state of affairs.
The Silk Road is hosted on the Tor network, which allows users to browse access sites known as ‘hidden services’ anonymously, via a layered network of volunteer servers that encrypt traffic. As the Torproject.org website describes it, ‘Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend yourself against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.’
Information activist Andrew Lewman lives between the US and Iceland, and is the mouthpiece of the Tor organization. He laughs as he recalls conversations he has had at conferences in the last eighteen months since the Silk Road began to become populated. ‘People have come up to me and said: “Wow, thanks for the Silk Road!” I’ve been like, “Woah! Assume we’re being recorded here! We don’t host Silk Road – it’s just an address. [Tor hidden services] are just an algorithm that provides an address.”
The Tor software and network was created in 2001 by two computer science graduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They took a piece of undeployed software, which had been written by the American Navy in 1995 to enable simple, anonymous internet use, and released their own version of it online, with the Navy’s permission. ‘The Navy had this project called Onion Routing, and it’s still going today,’ explains Lewman. ‘Its goal is to defeat network traffic analysis, which is the ability to know who you are, who you’re talking to, and how much data you send and receive. If you think of envelope data from your postal system, that’s the basis of intelligence gathering. For whatever reason, the Navy wanted this technology – they started the project [in-house] but they didn’t have any intention of releasing it publicly,’ Lewman explains. ‘So Paul Syverson, a mathematician who’s still the core researcher for onion routing for the Navy, met grad student Roger Dingledine at a conference. Roger said, “Have you ever thought of putting this on the internet?” At the time the Navy had no plans for deployment. But Paul said sure. So the first problem to solve was that if the Navy were to release this code online – to release it to the world – they had to give up their anonymity,’ said Lewman. The impossibility of having an anonymous network owned by the Navy was a comical catch-22. ‘You can’t have a Navy anonymity network, because no matter what individual soldier you are, your adversary will still know you are the navy and will still treat you as such,’ he said.
If an anonymizing service is used by just one specific category of people then it’s easy for observers to tell who they are. For example, if no one had white cars except the police, every time you saw a white car, you’d know it was the police. You wouldn’t know which individual policeman it was, but you’d know they were a policeman, and would be able to see where they were going, and how often. The more people who used the system the better – the crowd offers greater cover.
The original aim of the grad students, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, was to give users control over their data when they went online. This was during the first dotcom boom, and many companies were giving away services for free – or rather, in exchange for your data and your browsing habits, which they would then sell on to third parties. Information activists rejected that business model and wanted to offer an alternative, and so Dingeldine and Mathewson created a variant on the Navy protocol, calling it Tor. The way Tor works is best described in simple terms. When you type a web address into a standard browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, your connection to the internet originates from and returns to a unique address, known as your Internet Protocol, or IP, address. This information is included inside the packet of data that you send when you press enter. The request, or packet, is then sent via the quickest possible route to the address you have specified, and then the request is delivered in the same way, but in reverse. The request for the information, and the data you receive, is stored by your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, and can be observed at many points along the entire transaction. Your ISP assigns you an IP address, which is a string of digits separated by decimal points. The address may be temporary; in some places it changes every day, in others it is active until you lose power for more than eight hours. Your IP address is the way your information requests and responses route through the network, and it can be thought of as your digital home address.
When a British net user does a Google search, the ISP routes it to a Google server, for the sake of illustration, in the US. The traffic goes across the ocean to Google and it sends all your data back to your IP address. Google now knows where you are, because of where those addresses are assigned. There are geographic IP databases that will map your IP down to a street in many cases, or at least a neighbourhood – something not desired by people who want to buy and sell pounds of hashish online. Your ISP gets to see all of your traffic and everything you do across it, along with everyone else between you and your destination, which in this case is Google, which gets to see where you live in the world so it can target ads at you.
‘My IP address at home maps me down to my street,’ says Lewman. ‘They know exactly where I am and where I live, what street and they can probably guess what house would be mine.’ Once you download and install Tor, he explains, a browser window like any other opens, and you type in addresses. It then creates a virtual tunn
el from point to point, and hides each piece of data inside a series of encrypted layers, like the rings of an onion.
‘What Tor does is build a tunnel which connects through three different relays in the world, so though you may physically be in the UK, your first connection may be to Hong Kong, your second may be to Argentina, your third will be in Japan. If you think of driving a car into a tunnel – in Tor you enter the tunnel in the UK, and then pop out in Japan. In order to watch what you’re doing on the net authorities would have to watch the entire internet,’ says Lewman.
The network and the software, which is distributed free at Torproject.org, grew with the help of funding from Voice of America, a trusted global American news site. The service approached the Tor project in 2006 and said they had noticed that users from all over the world in repressive regimes were using the Tor software to connect to their web pages. They asked the Tor volunteers to form a company, in order to make the service and the network more widely available, which they did. ‘At the time we were still independent contractors with the EFF [the online freedom of speech group, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, set up by .alt newsgroup creator John Gilmore] and the American Department of Defence at the same time, which made for some strange meetings!’ says Lewman.
Tor is not just used by those engaged in illicit activity. The vast majority of Tor users are simply people who want privacy when they go online, as the information gathered on us by search engines and social media grows daily. When researching sensitive or medical matters, some users don’t want Facebook or Google searches sending unsettlingly accurate adverts back at them. There were thirty-six million downloads of the software last year, though that does not necessarily translate to daily users, of which there are around one million. And in repressive regimes such as Iran, Tor users can access sites that are blocked by the government. ‘In Iran, between 60,000 and 100,000 people use Tor daily, for the most part [for] looking up innocuous stuff such as celebrity gossip – [but it is also used by] political activists looking to get their messages out of the tightly controlled netspace of the repressive regime. Iran’s citizenry have a long history of circumventing censorship, from back in the 1960s when shortwave was banned and they figured out a way to get around it. Then it was satellite TV, but you had to get the state broadcast; Iran jams other signals. People have got good at hiding their illegal dishes, or have made them portable so they can watch TV and take it down quickly,’ says Lewman. He continued, ‘Now the net is just another way. And as more people go online, and get their news online, and their life is online, the government of Iran is trying to block that to maintain their censorship regime, but the Iranians are well trained in circumventing that.’ The Tor software is smuggled into the country and distributed samizdat among users, by the so-called ‘sneakernet’ of friends walking between houses with the code on USB flash drives, disguised in encrypted files on camera cards, or buried between the etched grooves of an officially allowed CD-Rom.
