War on Drugs, Say Hello to Silk Road: the Amazon.com of Illegal Drugs

On a day when a number of former and current leaders from around the world are calling to end the failed War on Drugs, Gawker has a story about a website where you can readily purchase illegal drugs and have them shipped right to your doorstep.

The site is called Silk Road, but finding it is not as simple as typing the name into Google and clicking:

The URL seems made to be forgotten...It's only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

 How can you trust what you buy there?

Once you're there, it's hard to believe that Silk Road isn't simply a scam. Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake "online pharmacies" that dupe the dumb and flaccid. There's no sly, Craigslist-style code names here.

Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer wrote on his profile: "Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived exactly as described." They gave the transaction five points out of five.

And here's what's available for purchase: 

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of "sour 13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.

Transactions are conducted with a semi-anonymous online currency known as Bitcoins:

Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders' computers. (The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.

Although...

Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says...that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users. 

Whether or not Silk Road succeeds in remaining in business, it does point out yet another difficulty of enforcing illegal drug laws.

In many states, like California, prison costs have overtaken funding for higher education due to the internment of people associated with the War on Drugs. We need to reverse this trend.

There must be a better policy than the one we currently have. It's time to fundamentally rethink the War on Drugs.