I'll briefly cover two topics here: a lulzy old meme from drug forums, and an unpoular take on one of the most lionized members of the drug culture of the past decade.
(1)
SWIM, or someone who isn't me, is a pseudonym for oneself that is used, among other places, on DrugsForum, under the very stupid theory that it will save someone from legal trouble for talking about drugs online. First off, the feds don't care about your starting to think your dick is shrinking on 5-MeO-DiPT and probably don't even care if you brag about selling drugs online unless you are either already a person of interest or are totally exceptional. People talking about the past, as I am here, almost surely are safe, unless you're talking about some really nasty felony or a case that the cops are really memeing up and want to close some loose ends of. Few people qualify for this. Thinking that you're in danger for what you post is generally a paranoiac exercise in what's fundamentally a sort of egotism. If you really care, then there are ways to write things vaguely that don't implicate you or anyone in particular. "SWIM," however, is fundamentally exceptional. It looks like this (it is grammatical to substitute all pronouns): "SWIM took 1.3 grams of diphenhydramine, and thought a giant black dog was chasing him around and calling him Fausty. SWIM ran through the kitchen, bumped into SWIM's mom, and then proceeded to disrobe, grab a steak knife, and run off onto the highway, burning SWIM's datura plants in a superpowered shamanic ritual to try to banish the wicked spirits of deleriants in favor of the friendly spirits of ayahuasca and pot. Later SWIM was visited by the Green Lady, who proceeded to sex him up while smoking imaginary cigarettes."
Since it's generally higher-watt intellectually than the Other Blue Forum, Bluelight hates this practice and likes to mock people who use it. One of the most entertaining trolling methods on Bluelight was for a mod to edit a post of a "swimmer" to say "I took...", etc. It was amazing how much people spazzed out saying they were being endangered. Erowid also eschews the practice, but it shows up all over the place due to the influence of DF and a couple of other places. Generally though these days (I'm not sure if it's still even enforced in earnest on DF: it probably is, it's as synonymous with D-F as plugging is with bluelight. Plugging, BTW, is shoving drugs up your ass. Became popular in the meth-and-molz subset of the gay rave community. People probably from this community brought the idea to bluelight as an economic and a harm reduction measure: you get more molecules for your money in your bloodstream and allegedly are less likely to vomit, etc. Really it's a meme. Everyone talks about both "swim" and "plugging" in the social forums, but it's a joke. Anyone who plugs is a really an unironic fag and they're doing it for faggy reasons even if they're not gay.)
(2)
Ross Ulbricht or dread pirate roberts (die hipster) of Silk Road fame. People lionize this man as being some sort of autistic warrior for good who got his boots smoked by a biased and ignorant judge and jury. He was actually a dick. I should know. I used to chat with him via OTR (plugin for Pidgin that uses cryptography over various instant messenger stystems; Pidgin, OTR, Tor, a VPN and PGP are the essential toolkit for this sort of thing) all the time, way before the Silk Road was a thing.
For the following to make sense to most people, I'll have to take it back a bit further: the online drug market has basically three antecedents:
(1) the oldschool NROP scene (no-records online pharmacy) which was all about finding such places internationally (or in some rare cases, crooked or semi-crooked doctors who would prescribe shit domestically; this was legit for a while although I think by the time that OxyContin even came out it was forbidden to write scripts for pain pills without, you know, seeing the patient);
(2) the steroid scene (very similar although about importing bulk drugs either as pharmaceuticals or the very interesting practice of making your own, the latter involves getting raw powder steroids and sterile (one hopes) binder, things like grapeseed oil, combining them, filtering it down, and putting it in vails. Some of these operations are extremely professional and are probably almost as safe as doing real pharmaceuticals. Some are shoddy and dangerous.
Counterfeiting is a large problem. It is a large problem for pills, too. Especially after fentanyl took off in a big way (this was kind of Ross's fault, too, I'll touch on this later) they would have fentanyl in it, which is a horrifically dangerous as the ratio of it's efficacy for snorting, shooting, oral, etc. is different than oxycontin, and shooting it can kill you rather readily, especially if one doesn't know it's fent, because another crucial ratio, that between the threshhold of getting high and the threshhold of dying from respiratory depression, is dramatically decreased because fentanyl isn't as fun as heroin: that is to say, to get "high" enough to feel "high" rather than just "well" and not "sick" you have to take much closer to the deadly dose than you woud for heroin.
(3) the research chemical scene. Stemming from Shulgin and then the hive (which bee one of the most based forums ever) and rhodium and the lists that used to circulate of suppliers for precursors to (mostly) MDMA. Some small companies got appropriate licenses to bulk-by shit like 2C-drugs and tryptamines (later a lot more) and sold them under the label "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." one of the more memeable companies from that era was "JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables" (jlfcatalog.com) which sold everything from Bufo toads to 2CB to Amanita mushrooms and various datura ingredients. They got pwnt as did a bunch of others when some kids died from 2CB and some other bad shit happened. Then the scene mostly went underground or to Canada. It became fuckhueg with Mephedrone (a ridiculously euphoric drug, consider it cocaine and MDMA crossed) in the UK and then mostly degenerated into utter me-too cannabinoids and cathinones and that sucked ass. Later, opiates like WIN-over-9000 and various fentanyl analogues (alpha-methyl-fentanyl being an important one) were added. People have said for years that it would be the death of the scene. It sort of was. It was definitely the death of a lot of people.
Anyway, by the late 90s we had something called RCML, "Research Chemical Mailing List" for this purpose, and later on we got private forums. At some point someone decided to start selling actual illegal drugs via email, and some forum admins decided it was OK. Originally they were running in the clear (sometimes even without https) and Tor didn't exist yet or nobody knew what it was. hushmail was popular. It later gave up emails to the authorities in a steroids case. Much later safe-mail, based in that Jew country they have, became popular. For some reason hushmail remained popular, possibly for meme value; people started using PGP more, but still, traffic analysis is a hell of a drug for the authorities. The best thing to do was generally to communicate via PM on the forums, if you trusted the admin, but there were a large number of scam forums, most of whom were run by one guy out of Canada, who's dox basically everyone who was anyone wound up getting, which controlled maybe up to half of the scene at one point. His hallmark was creating great communites and doing long-cons on them generally involving opiates and then shutting up shop with people's money. He was also known for shitposting on Usenet calling his critics paedophiles, as well as RPing as a female online. Weird and very obnoxious guy.
But, 10-15 years ago, the scene had really coalesced into something pretty cool. It was a mixture of well-connected and smart midlevel dealers (well, usually smart, you had guys who posted autobiographical tl;dr shit and pictures of their girlfriends and stuff, plus everyone gossiped worse than a knitting circle) and drug nerds from places like Bluelight. It was a really comfy scene, mostly, if you were in with the right people. Via networking you could get pretty much whatever drug you wanted. If you were known to be cool you might even be able to pay for it via cash in the mail, more likely it was via wire (Western Union and Moneygram), Green Dot, or similar. Different forums had different focuses and were intended for different levels of operator. Often there was a pyramid structure, with peoples more oriented towards selling larger amounts of drugs to dealers on the top ones, and people selling smaller amounts (often the same people or resellers of the former) in the lower end ones. People generally knew each other and vendors would quickly get an appropriately good or bad reputation and scammers were mercilessly chased off. All in all it was pretty based.
Then Ross ruined it all. He fucked up in one big way: he invited everyone. The reason the scene was awesome is that it was just cool people and dumb people would get banned or never invited. You were often responsible for the behavior of people you referred. Inviting anyone who'd heard of the forum was an insane idea and I told Ross the same thing. I told him he was signing himself into prison for a very long time by doing that, as well as signing the death-warrant for the entire scene. I wound up being right. It was Chanology era 4chan plus AOL joining Usenet but instead of ignorant people and shitty forced memes it was people going to prison and having really bad shit happen to them with fentanyls, exotic benzodiazpines, substituted cathinones/beta-ketones, exotic dissociatives (3-MeO-PCP and the like.) It was really bad. I was out of the scene by then but still adjacent enough to see how bad it was. I even had a little corner (hidden forum) I ran on a (non-drug-selling) site called "Cassandra's Place" where I larped as a chick named Cassandra (posting as "cassie") who (obviously) was right all along and cynical about how gay everything had gotten and had formed a support group for people who didn't like it. It was comfy but didn't take off for reasons that in retrospect are pretty obvious. It was about as cool as it sounds, too.
Shit that got gay included stuff getting increasingly corporatized (like legal marijuana did -- I had good friends who used to grow pot, and now cannot make ends meet doing that, so they basically just become sellers for crap that gets drop-shipped from California or wherever), and pandering to the most popular chemicals driving out the sale of interesting chemicals, and vast increases in price (LSD for instance costs seems to cost at least twice what it should across the board whether you're buying 1 dose or 10,000) because a market full of custies will bear it, increased attention by LE due to the proliferation of gaychems among normies (including the availability of fentanyl to dumb niggers who try and make fentadope, which is actually hard to do without killing people, as mixing particles of different sizese is a ctually a big problem in industrial/pharmaceutical materials science, let alone in one's kitchen, as opposed to fentanyl used to be only available to people who'd know how to use it, and the availability of a lotof bullshit that's sold as LSD or MDMA by people who just don't give a fuck as opposed to being sold mostly to people who actually wanted weird drugs.)
So the effects basically sucked. To someone who put in the effort to be a part of the scene there was literally no upside to Silk Road unless you were a drug dealer and willing to work with that level of exposure and with random strangers rather than friends of friends. To random faggots ordering drugs, maybe, but fuck them. It was also the death kneel of an entire class of drug dealers: people who bought drugs through connections online and sold them at places like festivals at huge profits (a $6,000 kilo of ketamine from India sells for 10x that easily...they don't do that anymore) could no longer compete with their customers buying from larger scale suppliers. These people were often really fucking cool so Ross can get fucked for putting them out of work, too.
Now, let me tell you why, beyond his actions having gay effects, Ross was a faggot to begin with. He was a literal cuck (he was traumatized by the end of a relationship in his late teens, years later) BTW if anyone wants to meme that up but it's actually sort of relevant because it shows his level of social exceptionality. This, as so often happens, lead him to develop autistic poplitical beliefs. In his case it was an extreme libertarian sect called "Agorism", lead by one S.E. Konkin, which holds a rather strange but fairly simple thesis: hey guys, lets overthrow the government by doing illegal shit and then having enough resources by making money on it to challenge the legitimacy of the State. This is what Ross actually believed. Together with the "cypherpunk" shit left over from the 90s crypto wars. Giving this kind of faggot access to Tor and Bitcoin is a disaster because they are by nature optimists who look at those tools and think they make them invincible. By the fate of Ross, obviously this isn't so. More cucky behavior: he had ~$7 million in BTC when they popped him (the story of the corrupt DEA agents that tried to steal it is gold btw but off topic here) and he had basically used none of it (he was living in some shithole with 4 other people he didn't even know!) Weird motherfucker.
So basically what he did is sell out his friends in order to make an autistic political and techno-optimist point, later pwning himself into prison. If he had one redeeming quality he was not a liar or a scammer as many of his avowed successors are. But he was still an enormous faggot.
Notable quotable: "The only vulnerable points of the scene are getting cash and drugs physically!" (Read that again. That would be "all the points that matter," not "the only vulnerable points," and they are more than a little vulnerable.)
