“I’M WAITING for my man / Twenty-six dollars in my hand / Up to Lexington, 125 / Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive.” So sang Lou Reed in 1967, about visiting Harlem to buy heroin. Getting hold of drugs has never been all that easy. Scoring has long meant hanging around scary street corners or dealing with thuggish bouncers at nightclubs, with a high chance of being beaten up or arrested. And if you are successful in buying something, the product may not be what you think it is. Heroin is “stamped on” with baking soda; cocaine is cut with extras such as cattle deworming tablets; ecstasy pills may well turn out to be something more dangerous. Imagine, then, if there were an Amazon.com for drugs. That, roughly, is what the Silk Road, a mail-order drugs service hidden in the dark parts of the internet, tries to be. How does it work?
-The Economist
