On March 10th, several days after Incognito Market was assumed to be shut down or no longer be processing transactions, the site posted a message to its homepage that reads as follows:
”Expecting to hear the last of us yet? We got one final little nasty suprise for y'all. We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction info and order details over the years. You'll be surprised at the number of people that relied on our "auto-encrypt" functionality. And by the way, your messages and transaction IDs were never actually deleted after the "expiry"...”
”SURPRISE SURPRISE !!! Anyway, if anything were to leak to law enforcement, I guess nobody never slipped up. We'll be publishing the entire dump of 557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs at the end of May, whether or not you and your customers' info is on that list is totally up to you. And yes... YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION !!! As for the buyers, we'll be opening up a whitelist portal for them to remove their records as well in a few weeks.”
”Thank you all for doing business with Incognito Market”
Exit scams are not uncommon on dark web markets, but this one is particularly large and openly threatening compared to most. Incognito Market requires the loading of cryptocurrency to a site-based wallet, which can then be used for in-house transactions only. All cryptocurrency on the site was seized from user’s wallets, estimated to be anywhere from $10 million to $75 million. After seizing the cryptocurrency wallets of all of the marketplace’s users, the site now openly explains that it will publish transactions and chat logs of users who refuse to pay an extortion fee. The fee ranges from $100 to $20,000, a volume based 5 tier buyer/seller classification.
Incognito Market also now has a Payment Status tab, which states ”you can see which vendors care about their customers below.” and lists the some of the market’s largest sellers. Sellers which have allegedly paid the extortion fee to not have their transaction records released are displayed in green, while those who have not yet paid are displayed in red.
Additionally, in a few weeks the site claims it will have a “whitelist portal” which would allow buyers to wipe their transactions and re-encrypt chat records.
Whoever is behind the website must be extremely, extremely confident in their anonymity, already working with government agencies, or both, because a bounty on this person is likely worth millions.
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.
As you mention, criminalization of drugs is being used as an oppression tool. But the solution to that is not necessarily legalization, because decriminalization may suffice. I believe that the best solution is not to attempt to regulate but to limit the incoming supply and attack the many roots of the problem: the pharma opioid epidemic, the unemployment and poverty ravaging former industrial centers, etc. All of this while the drugs are decriminalized and rehab programs are well funded and plentiful.
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.
I don't really follow your argument. I understand how the opioid crisis in the US came to be, but just because synthetic opioids are a thing now doesn't mean that we have to accept them and fully legalize them. If someone made a dedicated effort to smuggle fentanyl to China (or produce it there) and they were successful in addicting a not-negligible part of the population (or even some cities), does that mean that the CCP would have no choice but to legalize opioids? It doesn't make sense to me.
I also want to raise two more points. First, I'm glad that you and other people have successfully battled opioid addiction with maintenance therapy, even if you're planning to be on maintenance indefinitely. However, I'm critical of the indefinite part, because pharma companies are incentivized to push for treatments like that, even though people may be able to completely ditch the maintenance dose.
Also, while reducing overdoses is a goal we should aim for, one must ask if the safe supply program has other consequences, such as more people being addicted in the long term.
My argument is that these potent synthetic opioids are killing people in large numbers, drug enforcement has done nothing to mitigate that, only having served to further terrorize marginalized communities and enslave racial minorities, and, as enforcement cracks down harder, we observe the situation getting worse as less potent opioids are replaced with fentanyl in the drug supply.
Clearly drug enforcement in the US isn't capable of dealing with opioid addiction, and that's not going to change until we've fully abolished the existing capitalist police and prison system. On the other hand, safe supply programs have not increased addiction rates in places where they have been implemented, they have only reduced overdoses and massively increased the quality of life for addicts. No one actually wants to use fentanyl, most people using it are doing so unknowingly or because it's the only option. If any regulated supply of pharmaceutical opioids existed for these people, fentanyl would absolutely disappear overnight.
Then why not argue for changing how drug enforcing is being handled, instead of trying to work around it and solve the issue with safe supply programs?
It’s not that synthetic opiods should be legalised. Heroin should be legalised on prescription, in the same manner as methadone. And an equivalent stimulant for stimulant addicts.
In combination with available rehab and mental health treatment this leads to significantly less drug users and a change in the cultural attitude to drugs.
If the aim is simply to eradicate drug use to the maximum extent, that can also be achieved via state violence. That would carry greater dangers, costs and ethical concerns, so that the cure would turn out to be worse than the disease.
Mao’s success was achieved within the context of a revolutionary society. Drug reform is possible without even needing to take on the status quo, other than relatively minor vested interests like the police. And in some theoretical revolutionary context, it’s obviously not desirable to inflict unnecessary violence, indeed that’s one of the reasons that China, the USSR and other communist states ended up becoming revisionist, because of an excess of needless revolutionary violence.
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does anyone actually know what this would entail?
As a SUD counselor it would probably start with
actually funding residential treatment programs and nationalize healthcare so that you dont have to shop around for a program that takes your specific insurance private or public. In LA county, which is the county with the most amount of treatment programs in the country there are roughly about 100 open beds at any given moment for a speculative population of 120,000 people from the streets and prisons.
simplify the process of opening a residential treatment program, the average time it takes for a new house to open from proposal to the city to accepting Patients is six years
Fast track higher education for medical personal, especially SUD Counselors, Clinicians, Psychiatrists the latter of which is a greying field. We lack staff all the goddamn time.
Actual Reentry Programs. The highest reason for relapse for almost all my patients center around a lack of reentry resources that ensure their material circumstances being stable.
Why would someone not know? Rehab programs are already a thing and they do help people, but they can be understaffed, which more funding can solve. They also need to be constantly educated on novel drugs (like research chemicals) which isn't happening at most places -- plenty of posts in research chemical subs where people go to a hospital or rehab and they don't even know the substances they're taking.