You can draw a parallel between how imperialists forced opium on China and how the American state pushed a lot of working-class people to fentanyl first by getting them addicted to pharma opioids and then cutting their legal supply off.

Definitely, I think that's a great point. In both cases we have the initial proliferation of opioids and addiction in pursuit of profit. But in the case of the US, I believe the over prescription of opioids is already over and now we're just dealing with the remaining consequences. The pendulum swung away from pill mills and forcefully towards doctors and pharmacists treating every patient in pain like a criminal. Especially black patients.

Tons of people who legitimately needed opioid painkillers were kicked off their prescription and made to suffer in agony. At the same time, tons of people who didn't initially need their prescription were also cut off, but their resulting chemical dependency presented a legitimate medical need for opioids all the same. Buprenorphine and Methadone maintenance therapy success rates prove that a maintenance dose of an opioid is a valid and effective treatment for opioid use disorder. Some countries are taking this further by prescribing clean Heroin, Morphine, and Hydromorphone in the same capacity as a Methadone clinic, these programs are essentially always successful at reducing overdoses.

Unfortunately in the US, Methadone clinics have strict rules that I believe are designed to deter patients from actually receiving Methadone maintenance therapy. You need to show up every single day to take your dose, and you probably don't live near a clinic unless you live in a big city. Regardless of whether you were addicted to anything other than opioids, using marijuana will also disqualify you from the treatment even in legal states. There are so many hoops to jump through that Methadone is not a viable option for most addicts in the US. Buprenorphine is easier to get prescribed and much harder to abuse, it's how I got clean from full agonist opioids seven years ago, and I still take my maintenance dose to this day. But since it's a partial agonist, it has a dose ceiling at which point taking more of the drug does not have any effects. People who have a huge tolerance to fentanyl will have a much harder time keeping their withdrawals at bay using Buprenorphine than they would using Methadone.

So barring those two maintenance therapy options, people who were kicked off their prescription in the US had no other immediate recourse other than to illegally seek out street opioids. These days, heroin and pharmaceutical grade opioids are increasingly rare on the black market. In some areas Heroin has all but disappeared and been replaced with fentanyl analogues and tranquilizers. You can't get that dangerous shit off the street with more enforcement. Opium requires large tracts of arable land in an appropriate climate to grow whereas fentanyl and its analogues are fully synthetic drugs produced in labs. As I mentioned earlier, these drugs are insanely potent, so it is vastly easier to hide and smuggle them than an equivalent number of opium doses.

In this situation, the more you crackdown on dealers, the more you disproportionately remove safer opioids from the drug supply while fentanyl remains in increasing concentrations. And the more you crackdown, the more you empower the racist, capitalist serving policing institutions in this country.

I can see an argument that a more China-like drug policy could work in the US after a proletarian revolution, but it isn't in our best interest otherwise. So long as the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow lives on in the modern US policing and prison institutions, the only viable goal is for us to push for full legalization while banning all profiteering from the production and/or distribution of addictive drugs. I recommend you take a look at Canada's safe supply program to get an idea of what such a program looks like and how it has been successful in reducing overdoses.

Decriminalisation means that drug profits still end up with organised crime.

Legalising opioids like alcohol is legalised is obviously bad, but government subsidised prescription opioids would allow users to get in the headspace to sort the rest of their lives out while they become more ready to stop using (or not, some people last forever on methadone programs).

rehab programs are well funded and plentiful.

does anyone actually know what this would entail?

I edited this comment for clarity and because I accidentally said something backwards initially:

Hmm, it should be plainly obvious if someone is encrypting their messages to you. Like, what I think you're describing couldn't even work by accident. Other people's keys can't be used. If someone wants to communicate with you, they need your public key to encrypt their message to you and only you can then decrypt that message with your private key. If you then want to respond, you need their public key to encrypt your response, which only they can decrypt.

Example: if a buyer contacts a vendor, the buyer is not using their (the buyer's) own key. The buyer must use the vendor's public key to encrypt a message that the vendor then decrypts locally (which only the vendor can do with their private key). If the buyer used any other key, the vendor couldn't decrypt the message and no transaction could proceed. If the vendor wants to then send a message to the buyer, that's when the vendor uses the buyer's public key to encrypt that message. If the buyer gave the vendor any public key that is not their own, that buyer then couldn't decrypt the message the vendor sent them. There's really no place in this process where the vendor wouldn't know if the buyer was using their own PGP key.

In my past experience, people would put their public keys in their profile. The auto-encryption doesn't even look like encryption, it just looks like sending messages normally, the same way it looks using any encrypted messenger service: you just accept and trust that the service really is encrypting and decrypting at both ends and all you see is the text that someone sends you. There are steps both you and the person you're talking to have to take when doing your own encryption. Even when you're using PGP, you're still sending text over the market messaging system, and the market is encrypting that, but the text you're sending will look like total gibberish to everyone. Not just to the market, but it will look like total gibberish even to you after you encrypted the text locally on your own device, and of course it will also look like total gibberish to the person you're sending it to until they decrypt it locally on their end. There really should be no room for confusing who's public key is being used, not even mistakenly because the decryption wouldn't work. Unless I'm still misunderstanding you, or unless communication methods on the DNMs have so drastically changed in recent years that they're incomparable, but I know that's not the case.

I think it depends a lot on the country you're in, especially the laws, and the size of your city and who you're buying from and what they sell but personally, in the days when I used to do this stuff, it would always be through a friend, and associate, or a friend of one of those. Some of the people were selling to make ends meet but even they were still small-time and so they were definitely more amateurish than someone who is effectively operating a business and it showed in how they managed their affairs.

Do you really think these little "codes" offer any real deniability? Like a dealer would have to be using the same codes for everyone otherwise there would be no way for them to keep track. So their communications if compromised would be easy enough to decypher. I guess it depends on the local jurisprudence but I feel like after many years of cat n mouse this one is probably covered most places.

If you are busted, it isn't going to save you.

But if they're doing dragnet surveillance of the communication that the dealer is engaged in, they might not be assigning a whole lot of resources to the task - it might just be a matter of getting names and identifying the candidates who are the obvious ones but the other minutiae gets overlooked because it isn't considered worth the cops' time investigating every single contact. (This is where the benefit of small-time dealers comes in - they are almost always going to be sloppier with everything they do but if they aren't moving tons of product then the cops are less likely to treat it like they're busting a ring and more likely they're going to take down a couple of people who are the easiest targets before moving on the supplier. In this situation it's a bit like that adage - you don't have to be the fastest runner to get away from a bear, you just have to be faster than the guy next to you.)

Or if it's something where they need to get a judge's signature before they can target you for surveillance or searches then they likely need to at least have a semblance of cause before they will get the go-ahead and simply messaging to ask if someone is free to catch up isn't likely to meet that standard. If it does happen to get the sign off, there's a chance that you'd be able to contest shit in a courtroom if you did get busted but that all depends on your local laws, how corrupt the judiciary is, how much the police think they can get away with when they lie in their testimony and all of that. But cases do get thrown out due to failure to adhere to the correct process often enough that it can be worth taking a shot at it.

Look, I'm no sovereign citizen and I'm not under the impression that you can just utter the correct magical phrase which was taught to you by a more senior constitutional wizard SovCit and that will dispell any charges against you but at the same time maintaining plausible deniability and covering your tracks is always the best practice. Even if it doesn't prevent you from getting charged, depriving the prosecution of evidence and especially the stuff that clearly implicates you will make their job harder and it can lead to reduced charges, lighter sentencing, and better chances at a suspended sentence or getting parole earlier and stuff like that.

If there was one simple trick to this either everyone would know about it or they'd ban it. But most of the time people come unstuck because of the cumulative effect of a series of bad choices and if you can minimise the bad choices then you mitigate the consequences.

(It just occurred to me since I was typing out this comment and thinking about this Discord server - does discord automatically strip metadata from images? Because if not, goddamn that's another massive risk to go exposung yourself to.)

It is illegal, just barely enforced for most prescription drugs

I really feel the market is a bit more segmented than that. Everyone I know who was getting extra legal T (etc) got connected at a gym. It's too niche for the average weed guy to keep on hand or even get it special order because their source also unlikely has it.

Yes that's fair enough. I did a brief stint on Ethinyl when I was totally broke and had fuck all and a Romanian lady was nice to me at a bootleg cigarette kiosk in South London

While I don't think Tor is innately insecure or cryptographically compromised, it has been known for many years that a lot of its network nodes are operated by feds. Just due to the way Tor works, if you happen to control every node being used in a session, then you have full control and can de-anonymize users. Anyone can volunteer to act as a bridge/relay/exit node, and the feds obviously have the resources to pull off targeted attacks this way if they wanted to.

I don't have the book checked out anymore, but once you get to the part about Ross ulbrecht, it's right around there. At bare minimum, you can force someone's identity. 0day exploits have also been given to the intelligence services first.