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Ythan
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


Registered: 08/08/97
Posts: 18,774
Loc: NY/MA/VT Borderlands
Last seen: 52 minutes, 59 seconds
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Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade
#18894020 - 09/26/13 01:26 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade thedailybeast.com
Drugs still may not be legal, but buyers can find an online community vetting and rating dealers and their product. Winston Ross talks to the founder of Silk Road, the go-to site for the ‘good stuff.’
Memo to Miley Cyrus: when you sing about “dancing with Molly,” you’re hyping a drug most of your fans won’t get to experience—at least, not the good stuff.
What you get, how you “roll,” what’s the pure, clean Molly, a.k.a. MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy. You’re rich, and your handlers only buy the best stuff from the best dealers. When you dance with Molly, Miley, you can be pretty sure it’s not going to kill you.
These people, on the other hand, likely got their stash from some random dealer at a party or a concert. It was probably cut with something, probably methylone, a.k.a. bath salts. It’s probably why all those Molly users died in the span of a week, experts say—not from dancing with Molly but getting a bad drug laced with something bad that killed them.
Before you blame Miley for promoting deadly drugs, consider this: it’s very rare to die from the good Molly. And there’s a much safer way to buy the good stuff than from some idiot at an electronic-music show. It’s a place on the Internet called Silk Road.
Silk Road, for the uninitiated, is the eBay of illicit substances, from MDMA to LSD. You can buy legal stuff like computer equipment and jewelry, but that’s not what most people are looking for. Because you have to travel through an encrypted wormhole to get there, and because you have to use a difficult-to-trace, encrypted currency to pay for anything, it’s a relatively safe place to buy drugs. And because not only the sellers but the kinds of drugs the site sells are rated and ranked by hundreds of users, it’s a relatively certain way to ensure that the drugs on offer aren’t cut with crap and aren’t going to kill you—at least, not if you avoid taking too much of them.
All that, say the site’s moderators and drug-policy experts, means Silk Road and other venues like it offer the best available compromise to the ongoing debate about getting high in America. While outright legalization, regulation, and taxation might be the best way to ensure unadulterated drugs are as safe as possible to people who are going to use drugs no matter what the law says, Silk Road is a close second.
“People die from ecstasy because of overdose and low purity,” said Silk Road’s founder, known to the world only as Dread Pirate Roberts, in a rare interview conducted via messages on the site with The Daily Beast. “These people don’t know what they are taking and how much, but it’s the best they can do because of all the damage prohibition has done to the market for drugs. Silk Road is repairing that damage.”
‘Silk Road will exist as long as prohibition is in place, and unfortunately it is safer than flat-out prohibition. It’s an in-between.’
The site, he boasts, has “some of the purest drugs on the planet with well-defined dosages and a community of support for people seeking harm-reduction advice. We have some of the most responsible, dedicated, and brave individuals that make up our community.”
And it really is a community. The site’s long-term vendors have built up their reputations over months and years, accumulating hundreds of positive comments, nicknames like “Queen of Silk Road,” and the kind of public adoration normally reserved for the neighborhood barber. Those who screw customers over, on the other hand, are quickly outed and ostracized.
Silk Road appears to be booming. It now has more than 10,000 listings for drugs, including nearly 2,000 for marijuana, the most popular option. A six-month “crawl” of the site by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Nicholis Christin provides the best educated guess of Silk Road’s numbers. In late 2011 and early 2012, Christin concluded that the site’s operators were pulling in $92,000 a month in commissions, based on $1.2 million in revenue for those selling goods. The total number of those vendors and the number of items sold doubled from when Christin began and finished his research.
Of the various items sold, “weed” made up 13.7 percent, followed by “drugs,” 9 percent, and then “prescription,” 7.4 percent. The U.S. was the most common supplier, with 43 percent of all sales. Most items were listed for less than three weeks, most sellers stayed on the site for about 100 days, and more than 96 percent of them received perfect feedback ratings, a five out of five.
“It appears at first glance that Silk Road sellers are highly reliable,” Christin wrote, though he attributed that in part to the site’s escrow system, wherein buyers don’t release the funds they’ve committed to a purchase until they’ve received (and, if they want, tested) a product. He also noted that Internet users tend to “disproportionately use positive feedback when rating online experiences. In fact, over 99 percent of the feedback (on eBay, in a recent study) was positive.”
The more money flows in, of course, the more likely it becomes that the cops will eventually try to get involved. After Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently criticized Silk Road, DEA sources were telling reporters that they’re “keeping tabs” on the site. Another similar venture, Atlantis, abruptly shut down this week, citing “security concerns” that may well have been a law-enforcement issue.
Silk Road is still alive and well, at least for now.
“Silk Road will exist as long as prohibition is in place, and unfortunately it is safer than flat-out prohibition,” said Neill Franklin, executive director of the nonprofit Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “It’s an in-between.”
That’s why anti-prohibition advocates are cheering the site on, if a little uneasily. The case for Silk Road is exactly the one for outright legalization, says Harvard University economics professor Jeff Miron, Silk Road is fine, he told The Daily Beast—“I have no objection to a Consumer Reports for drugs”—but the site still falls short of what a regulated market could accomplish.
“It’s still an underground market,” Miron says. “And with an underground market, you can’t sue the manufacturer if you get a bad-quality commodity.”
So, yes, legalization is better, if you’re the type who favors legalization. But the problem, acknowledges Miron, is that the United States is a long way away from legalization.
“It’s going to take an ‘allegedly conservative’ second-term Republican president, secretly libertarian, enough of a non-pothead, a stoner who in other ways seems very stable, normal, and middle class” to convince the conservative wing of Americans that prohibition is bad policy, he says. “He’ll have to be conservative on a lot of things, to have enough credibility when he says, ‘This is the wrong way.’”
Legalization may take a complete generational shift, says Franklin. Now that marijuana is legal in Colorado and Washington, he says, he expects to see the movement spread until the ban on weed is lifted nationwide. After that, who knows?
“Once we start seeing the benefits of the policy for marijuana, what if we do something different with cocaine and heroin?” Franklin says. “It’s only a matter of years before young people of today are in positions of influence and power.”
Dread Pirate Roberts says he’d welcome the competition—though not the regulation.
“I wouldn’t stand in the way of the loosening or eliminating of drug laws so that we could all more easily provide the service Silk Road does,” Roberts wrote. “What I AM against is the agents of the state being involved at all. If they had simply left people to their own devices and allowed them the freedom to choose as I have at Silk Road, we’d have an economy so productive and robust it would be generating wealth for centuries to come, with more than enough for everyone.”
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Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,695
Last seen: 16 days, 12 hours
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Ythan]
#18894300 - 09/26/13 02:30 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Silk Road is for pedo's...
every person who has tried to buy shit off there gets jacked...
hands downn gay boy road.
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geazerpleaser
No one



Registered: 02/13/12
Posts: 274
Loc: Ny
Last seen: 2 months, 7 days
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax] 1
#18894493 - 09/26/13 03:14 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: Silk Road is for pedo's...
every person who has tried to buy shit off there gets jacked...
hands downn gay boy road.
lol I've purchased many items from there and I have never once got jacked
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longhair_Bri
everything is aLIE


Registered: 12/09/06
Posts: 118
Loc: Michigan
Last seen: 2 years, 9 months
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax] 2
#18894685 - 09/26/13 03:51 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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your talking out your ass, and what's coming out smells like shit and astro-glide
-------------------- It's not enough....I need more....Nothing seems to satisfy....I don't want it....I just need it....to breathe....to feel....to know I'm alive
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Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,695
Last seen: 16 days, 12 hours
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: longhair_Bri]
#18894746 - 09/26/13 04:03 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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case proved.
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MrMagicMushroom
Lysergic connoisseur


Registered: 06/28/12
Posts: 360
Loc: United states,Fort collin...
Last seen: 10 years, 4 days
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18894819 - 09/26/13 04:22 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: case proved.

i think you mean "proven"
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lessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: MrMagicMushroom]
#18894907 - 09/26/13 04:43 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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I don't mind if I have to use ebay to get drugs or SR
but ebay would be easiest, SR takes 10secs to get on from my phone
would be pretty cool with weed on ebay, now it's legal in many places
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NotTheDevil
Transhuman


Registered: 01/08/13
Posts: 5,436
Loc: US
Last seen: 3 years, 1 month
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax] 1
#18894990 - 09/26/13 05:08 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: Silk Road is for pedo's...
every person who has tried to buy shit off there gets jacked...
hands downn gay boy road.
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Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,695
Last seen: 16 days, 12 hours
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: NotTheDevil]
#18894995 - 09/26/13 05:10 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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lessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: geazerpleaser]
#18895097 - 09/26/13 05:44 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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I know a few people who have ordered there
noone have gotten busted, and the items have been genuine
how would the cops prove it was your package, that is the good question you can always deny it, they will have no case against you, no proof, it was encrypted on tor
anyone can order heroin to my home... must be a mistake, officer, have a nice day ;-)
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Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,695
Last seen: 16 days, 12 hours
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: lessismore]
#18895197 - 09/26/13 06:07 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Not how it works ^^ They intercept the package. Then they replace postal service worker with under cover agent. You sign and receive package: which is admitting guilt. You don't just sign for a drop shipped package unless you were expecting it, then they raid your computers and cell phones. Or they simply just raid your ass after uncovering you.
Paul Leslie Howard used Silk Road to buy and import the illicit drugs on 11 different occasions. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers in Melbourne and Sydney examined mail -- most of which came from the Netherlands and Germany -- destined for his home. They found 46.9 grammes of MDMA and 14.5 grammes of cocaine. The federal police then raided his house in July 2012 and found digital scales, ziplock bags, $2,300 (£2,000) in cash, 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones and a money counter. They also found two working mobile phones, and forensically analysed more than 20,000 text messages. In amongst them were incriminating texts such as "I got five grand worth if you want" and "promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week".
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MrMagicMushroom
Lysergic connoisseur


Registered: 06/28/12
Posts: 360
Loc: United states,Fort collin...
Last seen: 10 years, 4 days
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18895217 - 09/26/13 06:11 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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That right there,is a Dumb ass. Who openly texts about having LSD and shrooms?fuck sake have some common sense.
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Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,695
Last seen: 16 days, 12 hours
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18895273 - 09/26/13 06:24 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Yep, the scariest one is the story recently about the guy ordering a kilo of bath salts and getting a kilo of MDMA instead. That would BLOW!
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Jokeshopbeard
Humble Student


Registered: 11/30/11
Posts: 26,088
Loc: Deep in the system
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18895281 - 09/26/13 06:25 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: Silk Road is for pedo's...
every person who has tried to buy shit off there gets jacked...
hands downn gay boy road.
Why would you intentionally spread such falsities based only on conjecture on a forum so free and open?
That really baffles me.
-------------------- Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not. --Jac O'keeffe
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PsYcHoDoUgHbOy
Connoisseur



Registered: 08/11/08
Posts: 1,481
Last seen: 2 years, 10 months
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Jokeshopbeard]
#18895327 - 09/26/13 06:33 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Actually, the Road is the Craigslist of drugs. Ebay is for auctions, and the Road is not an auction site.
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NotTheDevil
Transhuman


Registered: 01/08/13
Posts: 5,436
Loc: US
Last seen: 3 years, 1 month
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: MrMagicMushroom]
#18895698 - 09/26/13 08:06 PM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
MrMagicMushroom said: That right there,is a Dumb ass. Who openly texts about having LSD and shrooms?fuck sake have some common sense.
'specially since they don't need a warrant to view them
also your not supposed to sign for them
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NWlight
Just look


Registered: 01/12/10
Posts: 18,686
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: NotTheDevil]
#18897185 - 09/27/13 02:02 AM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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what is this "silk road" and why haven't I heard of it?
--------------------

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lessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18897682 - 09/27/13 08:10 AM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: Not how it works ^^ They intercept the package. Then they replace postal service worker with under cover agent. You sign and receive package: which is admitting guilt. You don't just sign for a drop shipped package unless you were expecting it, then they raid your computers and cell phones. Or they simply just raid your ass after uncovering you.
The beauty of a properly set up linux No evidence
and the beauty of TOR, even more anonymous
they can never prove you ordered it, if you use the tor browser it destroys evidence, doesn't save cookies etc.
if you sign for it, they might have some evidence but many packages are not sign for I heard .. :-)
Personally I sign for packages all the time... so I would sign for any package get maybe 3-5 packages each week some weeks , not drugs... hardware stuff so would never guess if someone mailed me some good buds, I never check the sender when I sign for a package, most packages I get are delayed 3-7 weeks ... so could be anything I receive
I wouldn't be worried about ordering from SR even if they got my package, it would be for personal consumption I'm a small fish to catch, would just get a fine, no sentence
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PurpleHaze147



Registered: 04/09/13
Posts: 657
Last seen: 6 years, 2 months
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: Gorlax]
#18897743 - 09/27/13 08:45 AM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Gorlax said: Not how it works ^^ They intercept the package. Then they replace postal service worker with under cover agent. You sign and receive package: which is admitting guilt. You don't just sign for a drop shipped package unless you were expecting it, then they raid your computers and cell phones. Or they simply just raid your ass after uncovering you.
Paul Leslie Howard used Silk Road to buy and import the illicit drugs on 11 different occasions. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers in Melbourne and Sydney examined mail -- most of which came from the Netherlands and Germany -- destined for his home. They found 46.9 grammes of MDMA and 14.5 grammes of cocaine. The federal police then raided his house in July 2012 and found digital scales, ziplock bags, $2,300 (�2,000) in cash, 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones and a money counter. They also found two working mobile phones, and forensically analysed more than 20,000 text messages. In amongst them were incriminating texts such as "I got five grand worth if you want" and "promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week".
Quote:
Gorlax said: Not how it works ^^ They intercept the package. Then they replace postal service worker with under cover agent. You sign and receive package: which is admitting guilt. You don't just sign for a drop shipped package unless you were expecting it, then they raid your computers and cell phones. Or they simply just raid your ass after uncovering you.
Paul Leslie Howard used Silk Road to buy and import the illicit drugs on 11 different occasions. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers in Melbourne and Sydney examined mail -- most of which came from the Netherlands and Germany -- destined for his home. They found 46.9 grammes of MDMA and 14.5 grammes of cocaine. The federal police then raided his house in July 2012 and found digital scales, ziplock bags, $2,300 (�2,000) in cash, 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones and a money counter. They also found two working mobile phones, and forensically analysed more than 20,000 text messages. In amongst them were incriminating texts such as "I got five grand worth if you want" and "promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week".
Quote:
Gorlax said: Not how it works ^^ They intercept the package. Then they replace postal service worker with under cover agent. You sign and receive package: which is admitting guilt. You don't just sign for a drop shipped package unless you were expecting it, then they raid your computers and cell phones. Or they simply just raid your ass after uncovering you.
Paul Leslie Howard used Silk Road to buy and import the illicit drugs on 11 different occasions. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers in Melbourne and Sydney examined mail -- most of which came from the Netherlands and Germany -- destined for his home. They found 46.9 grammes of MDMA and 14.5 grammes of cocaine. The federal police then raided his house in July 2012 and found digital scales, ziplock bags, $2,300 (£2,000) in cash, 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones and a money counter. They also found two working mobile phones, and forensically analysed more than 20,000 text messages. In amongst them were incriminating texts such as "I got five grand worth if you want" and "promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week".
That's because Australian customs r crazy strict and that's a lot of drugs to order in the mail. At least it was legit.
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lessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
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Re: Silk Road Is the eBay of the Online Drug Trade [Re: PurpleHaze147]
#18897764 - 09/27/13 08:52 AM (10 years, 4 months ago) |
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If the fine system allows you up to 99 doses of lsd before you get more than a fine, you order 95
if the fine system allows you up to 100g weed before you get a sentence, you order 95g
:-)
use the system to your advantage, read the law never have more than for personal consumption
scales scan be argued as for personal consumption often, as they are used to measure depending on how many drugs you got
if I had a car I would be driving around with my bong, joint paper on me always, that's legal to have (I quit smoking weed luckily, only smoke salvia;)
some day they will be tired of searching everyone for small personal amounts and the law will be revised
just have to play by their rules and know their rules, to beat the system
the law/fine system for posession is available on google in pdf format
Edited by lessismore (09/27/13 09:03 AM)
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