Welcome to DoctorX’s Barcelona lab, where the drugs you bought online are tested for safety and purity. No questions asked.
Standing at a table in a chemistry lab in Barcelona, Cristina Gil Lladanosa tears open a silver, smell-proof protective envelope. She slides out a transparent bag full of crystals. Around her, machines whir and hum, and other researchers mill around in long, white coats.
She is holding the lab’s latest delivery of a drug bought from the “deep web,” the clandestine corner of the internet that isn’t reachable by normal search engines, and is home to some sites that require special software to access. Labeled as MDMA (the street term is ecstasy), this sample has been shipped from Canada. Lladanosa and her colleague Iván Fornís Espinosa have also received drugs, anonymously, from people in China, Australia, Europe and the United States.
“Here we have speed, MDMA, cocaine, pills,” Lladanosa says, pointing to vials full of red, green, blue and clear solutions sitting in labeled boxes.
Cristina Gil Lladanosa, at the Barcelona testing lab | photo by Joan Bardeletti
Since 2011, with the launch of Silk Road, anybody has been able to safely buy illegal drugs from the deep web and have them delivered to their door. Though the FBI shut down that black market in October 2013, other outlets have emerged to fill its role. For the last 10 months the lab at which Lladanosa and Espinosa work has offered a paid testing service of those drugs. By sending in samples for analysis, users can know exactly what it is they are buying, and make a more informed decision about whether to ingest the substance. The group, called Energy Control, which has being running “harm reduction” programs since 1999, is the first to run a testing service explicitly geared towards verifying those purchases from the deep web.
Before joining Energy Control, Lladanosa briefly worked at a pharmacy, whereas Espinosa spent 14 years doing drug analysis. Working at Energy Control is “more gratifying,” and “rewarding” than her previous jobs, Lladanosa told me. They also receive help from a group of volunteers, made up of a mixture of “squatters,” as Espinosa put it, and medical students, who prepare the samples for testing.
After weighing out the crystals, aggressively mixing it with methanol until dissolved, and delicately pouring the liquid into a tiny brown bottle, Lladanosa, a petite woman who is nearly engulfed by her lab coat, is now ready to test the sample. She loads a series of three trays on top of a large white appliance sitting on a table, called a gas chromatograph (GC). A jungle of thick pipes hang from the lab’s ceiling behind it.
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
“Chromatography separates all the substances,” Lladanosa says as she loads the machine with an array of drugs sent from the deep web and local Spanish users. It can tell whether a sample is pure or contaminated, and if the latter, with what.
Rushes of hot air blow across the desk as the gas chromatograph blasts the sample at 280 degrees Celsius. Thirty minutes later the machine’s robotic arm automatically moves over to grip another bottle. The machine will continue cranking through the 150 samples in the trays for most of the work week.
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
To get the drugs to Barcelona, a user mails at least 10 milligrams of a substance to the offices of the Asociación Bienestar y Desarrollo, the non-government organization that oversees Energy Control. The sample then gets delivered to the testing service’s laboratory, at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, a futuristic, seven story building sitting metres away from the beach. Energy Control borrows its lab space from a biomedical research group for free.
The tests cost 50 Euro per sample. Users pay, not surprisingly, with Bitcoin. In the post announcing Energy Control’s service on the deep web, the group promised that “All profits of this service are set aside of maintenance of this project.”
About a week after testing, those results are sent in a PDF to an email address provided by the anonymous client.
“The process is quite boring, because you are in a routine,” Lladanosa says. But one part of the process is consistently surprising: that moment when the results pop up on the screen. “Every time it’s something different.” For instance, one cocaine sample she had tested also contained phenacetin, a painkiller added to increase the product’s weight; lidocaine, an anesthetic that numbs the gums, giving the impression that the user is taking higher quality cocaine; and common caffeine.
The deep web drug lab is the brainchild of Fernando Caudevilla, a Spanish physician who is better known as “DoctorX” on the deep web, a nickname given to him by his Energy Control co-workers because of his earlier writing about the history, risks and recreational culture of MDMA. In the physical world, Caudevilla has worked for over a decade with Energy Control on various harm reduction focused projects, most of which have involved giving Spanish illegal drug users medical guidance, and often writing leaflets about the harms of certain substances.
Fernando Caudevilla, AKA DoctorX. Photo: Joseph Cox
Caudevilla first ventured into Silk Road forums in April 2013. “I would like to contribute to this forum offering professional advice in topics related to drug use and health,” he wrote in an introductory post, using his DoctorX alias. Caudevilla offered to provide answers to questions that a typical doctor is not prepared, or willing, to respond to, at least not without a lecture or a judgment. “This advice cannot replace a complete face-to-face medical evaluation,” he wrote, “but I know how difficult it can be to talk frankly about these things.”
The requests flooded in. A diabetic asked what effect MDMA has on blood sugar; another what the risks of frequent psychedelic use were for a young person. Someone wanted to know whether amphetamine use should be avoided during lactation. In all, Fernando’s thread received over 50,000 visits and 300 questions before the FBI shut down Silk Road.
“He’s amazing. A gift to this community,” one user wrote on the Silk Road 2.0 forum, a site that sprang up after the original. “His knowledge is invaluable, and never comes with any judgment.” Up until recently, Caudevilla answered questions on the marketplace “Evolution.” Last week, however, the administrators of that site pulled a scam, shutting the market down and escaping with an estimated $12 million worth of Bitcoin.
Caudevilla’s transition from dispensing advice to starting up a no-questions-asked drug testing service came as a consequence of his experience on the deep web. He’d wondered whether he could help bring more harm reduction services to a marketplace without controls. The Energy Control project, as part of its mandate of educating drug users and preventing harm, had already been carrying out drug testing for local Spanish users since 2001, at music festivals, night clubs, or through a drop-in service at a lab in Madrid.
“I thought, we are doing this in Spain, why don’t we do an international drug testing service?” Caudevilla told me when I visited the other Energy Control lab, in Madrid. Caudevilla, a stocky character with ear piercings and short, shaved hair, has eyes that light up whenever he discusses the world of the deep web. Later, via email, he elaborated that it was not a hard sell. “It was not too hard to convince them,” he wrote me. Clearly, Energy Control believed that the reputation he had earned as an unbiased medical professional on the deep web might carry over to the drug analysis service, where one needs to establish “credibility, trustworthiness, [and] transparency,” Caudevilla said. “We could not make mistakes,” he added.
Photo: Joseph Cox
While the Energy Control lab in Madrid lab only tests Spanish drugs from various sources, it is the Barcelona location which vets the substances bought in the shadowy recesses of of the deep web. Caudevilla no longer runs it, having handed it over to his colleague Ana Muñoz. She maintains a presence on the deep web forums, answers questions from potential users, and sends back reports when they are ready.
The testing program exists in a legal grey area. The people who own the Barcelona lab are accredited to experiment with and handle drugs, but Energy Control doesn’t have this permission itself, at least not in writing.
“We have a verbal agreement with the police and other authorities. They already know what we are doing,” Lladanosa tells me. It is a pact of mutual benefit. Energy Control provides the police with information on batches of drugs in Spain, whether they’re from the deep web or not, Espinosa says. They also contribute to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s early warning system, a collaboration that attempts to spread information about dangerous drugs as quickly as possible.
By the time of my visit in February, Energy Control had received over 150 samples from the deep web and have been receiving more at a rate of between 4 and 8 a week. Traditional drugs, such as cocaine and MDMA, make up about 70 percent of the samples tested, but the Barcelona lab has also received samples of the prescription pill codeine, research chemicals and synthetic cannabinoids, and even pills of Viagra.
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
So it’s fair to make a tentative judgement on what people are paying for on the deep web. The verdict thus far? Overall, drugs on the deep web appear to be of much higher quality than those found on the street.
“In general, the cocaine is amazing,” says Caudevilla, saying that the samples they’ve seen have purities climbing towards 80 or 90 percent, and some even higher. To get an idea of how unusual this is, take a look at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report 2014, which reports that the average quality of street cocaine in Spain is just over 40 percent, while in the United Kingdom it is closer to 30 percent.“We have found 100 percent [pure] cocaine,” he adds. “That’s really, really strange. That means that, technically, this cocaine has been purified, with clandestine methods.”
Naturally, identifying vendors who sell this top-of-the-range stuff is one of the reasons that people have sent samples to Energy Control. Caudevilla was keen to stress that, officially, Energy Control’s service “is not intended to be a control of drug quality,” meaning a vetting process for identifying the best sellers, but that is exactly how some people have been using it.
As one buyer on the Evolution market, elmo666, wrote to me over the site’s messaging system, “My initial motivations were selfish. My primary motivation was to ensure that I was receiving and continue to receive a high quality product, essentially to keep the vendor honest as far as my interactions with them went.”
Vendors on deep web markets advertise their product just like any other outlet does, using flash sales, gimmicky giveaways and promises of drugs that are superior to those of their competitors. The claims, however, can turn out to be empty: despite the test results that show that deep web cocaine vendors typically sell product that is of a better quality than that found on the street, in plenty of cases, the drugs are nowhere near as pure as advertised.
“You won’t be getting anything CLOSE to what you paid for,” one user complained about the cocaine from ‘Mirkov’, a vendor on Evolution. “He sells 65% not 95%.”
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
Despite the prevalence of people using the service to gauge the quality of what goes up their nose, many users send samples to Energy Control in the spirit of its original mission: keeping themselves alive and healthy. The worst case scenario from drugs purchased on the deep web is, well the worst case. That was the outcome when Patrick McMullen, a 17-year-old Scottish student, ingested half a gram of MDMA and three tabs of LSD, reportedly purchased from the Silk Road. While talking to his friends on Skype, his words became slurred and he passed out. Paramedics could not revive him. The coroner for that case, Sherrif Payne, who deemed the cause of death ecstasy toxicity, told The Independent “You never know the purity of what you are taking and you can easily come unstuck.”
ScreamMyName, a deep web user who has been active since the original Silk Road, wants to alert users to the dangerous chemicals that are often mixed with drugs, and is using Energy Control as a means to do so.
“We’re at a time where some vendors are outright sending people poison. Some do it unknowingly,” ScreamMyName told me in an encrypted message. “Cocaine production in South America is often tainted with either levamisole or phenacetine. Both poison to humans and both with severe side effects.”
In the case of Levamisole, those prescribing it are often not doctors but veterinarians, as Levamisole is commonly used on animals, primarily for the treatment of worms. If ingested by humans it can lead to cases of extreme eruptions of the skin, as documented in a study from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. But Lladanosa has found Levamisole in cocaine samples; dealers use it to increase the product weight, allowing them to stretch their batch further for greater profit — and also, she says, because Levamisole has a strong stimulant effect.
“It got me sick as fuck,” Dr. Feel, an Evolution user, wrote on the site’s forums after consuming cocaine that had been cut with 23 percent Levamisole, and later tested by Energy Control. “I was laid up in bed for several days because of that shit. The first night I did it, I thought I was going to die. I nearly drove myself to the ER.”
“More people die because of tainted drugs than the drugs themselves,” Dr. Feel added. “It’s the cuts and adulterants that are making people sick and killing them.”
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
The particular case of cocaine cut with Levamisole is one of the reasons that ScreamMyName has been pushing for more drug testing on the deep web markets. “I recognize that drug use isn’t exactly healthy, but why exacerbate the problem?” he told me when I contacted him after his post. “[Energy Control] provides a way for users to test the drugs they’ll use and for these very users to know what it is they’re putting in their bodies. Such services are in very short supply.”
After sending a number of Energy Control tests himself, ScreamMyName started a de facto crowd-sourcing campaign to get more drugs sent to the lab, and then shared the results, after throwing in some cash to get the ball rolling. He set up a Bitcoin wallet, with the hope that users might chip in to fund further tests. At the time of writing, the wallet has received a total of 1.81 bitcoins; around $430 at today’s exchange rates.
In posts to the Evolution community, ScreamMyName pitched this project as something that will benefit users and keep drug dealer honest. “When the funds build up to a point where we can purchase an [Energy Control] test fee, we’ll do a US thread poll for a few days and try to cohesively decide on what vendor to test,” he continued.
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
Other members of the community have been helping out, too. PlutoPete, a vendor from the original Silk Road who sold cannabis seeds and other legal items, has provided ScreamMyName with packaging to safely send the samples to Barcelona. “A box of baggies, and a load of different moisture barrier bags,” PlutoPete told me over the phone. “That’s what all the vendors use.”
It’s a modest program so far. ScreamMyName told me that so far he had gotten enough public funding to purchase five different Energy Control tests, in addition to the ten or so he’s sent himself so far. “The program created is still in its infancy and it is growing and changing as we go along but I have a lot of faith in what we’re doing,” he says.
But the spirit is contagious: elmo666, the other deep web user testing cocaine, originally kept the results of the drug tests to himself, but he, too, saw a benefit to distributing the data. “It is clear that it is a useful service to other users, keeping vendors honest and drugs (and their users) safe,” he told me. He started to report his findings to others on the forums, and then created a thread with summaries of the test results, as well as comments from the vendors if they provided it. Other users were soon basing their decisions on what to buy on elmo666‘s tests.
“I’m defo trying the cola based on the incredibly helpful elmo and his energy control results and recommendations,” wrote user jayk1984. On top of this, elmo666 plans to launch an independent site on the deep web that will collate all of these results, which should act as a resource for users of all the marketplaces.
As word of elmo666's efforts spread, he began getting requests from drug dealers who wanted him to use their wares for testing. Clearly, they figured that a positive result from Energy Control would be a fantastic marketing tool to draw more customers. They even offered elmo666 free samples. (He passed.)
Meanwhile, some in the purchasing community are arguing that those running markets on the deep web should be providing quality control themselves. PlutoPete told me over the phone that he had been in discussions about this with Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous owner of the original Silk Road site. “We [had been] talking about that on a more organized basis on Silk Road 1, doing lots of anonymous buys to police each category. But of course they took the thing [Silk Road] down before we got it properly off the ground,” he lamented.
But perhaps it is best that the users, those who are actually consuming the drugs, remain in charge of shaming dealers and warning each other. “It’s our responsibility to police the market based on reviews and feedback,” elmo666 wrote in an Evolution forum post. It seems that in the lawless space of the deep web, where everything from child porn to weapons are sold openly, users have cooperated in an organic display of self-regulation to stamp out those particular batches of drugs that are more likely to harm users.
“That’s always been the case with the deep web,” PlutoPete told me. Indeed, ever since Silk Road, a stable of the drug markets has been the review system, where buyers can leave a rating and feedback for vendors, letting others know about the reliability of the seller. But DoctorX’s lab, rigorously testing the products with scientific instruments, takes it a step further.
Photo by Joan Bardeletti
“In the white market, they have quality control. In the dark market, it should be the same,” Cristina Gil Lladanosa says to me before I leave the Barcelona lab.
A week after I visit the lab, the results of the MDMA arrive in my inbox: it is 85 percent pure, with no indications of other active ingredients. Whoever ordered that sample from the digital shelves of the deep web, and had it shipped to their doorstep in Canada, got hold of some seriously good, and relatively safe drugs. And now they know it.
Alright, so let's just be up-front and honest about this one! Carl's Jr. has seriously been on point this year. A couple of months ago we got to witness Charlotte McKinney eating a burger like the sexy lady boss that she is in their Super Bowl 'AU Natural' commercial. So it shouldn't be a surprise that only a few short months later, the fast food corporation would release yet another whimsical, burger-eating gem starring none other than the beautiful, Victoria's Secret Model Sara Sampaio. All I've got to say is that porn is hot and all, but watching Sara eat a burger is seriously sexy.
The video above doesn't really need an explanation. I mean, sexy is just kind of something that makes sense. Regardless, the commercial was shot to showcase Carl's Jr.'s new El Diablo Thickburger in which Sara Sampaio seems to be enjoying! Good food is one thing, but a hot woman always wins above all! That burger sure does look pretty damn good though, right?
Who knows what kind of wicked sex-charged, burger-induced tricks Carl's Jr. will throw our way next! We'll be waiting patiently though, FYI.
Go ahead and give us all your best shot, Carl's Jr.!
A mother-of-two was watching a History Channel documentary when she saw her photo flashed on the screen. The photo was taken by her former neighbor, Lonnie Franklin Jr., who is believed to be the serial killer called the “Grim Sleeper.”
The woman says that she was shocked to see the photo on the documentary about a serial killer and had never spoken to the Los Angeles Police Department. In fact, she says she had no idea how close she had come to being one of the victims until she saw the photo.
The Daily Mail reports that a woman, who only identified herself as “Mo”, was watching a documentary about the Grim Sleeper when she saw a photo her former neighbor, Lonnie Franklin Jr., had taken of her outside of her home appear in a series of photos of potential Grim Sleeper victims. The photos were taken from the serial killer’s home in 2010. Mo says that Lonnie lived next door to her in a Los Angeles neighborhood. She posed for the photo one day outside of her home.
However, she says she became leery of Lonnie after a strange encounter in his van. Mo says that Lonnie offered her a ride in his van one evening. Lonnie was a photographer, and wanted to show her some photos of women he had photographed in the past. Mo says the photos featured nude women who were laying in strange positions. Mo noted to Lonnie that the women appeared dead, but he said that they weren’t and that it was just the posing. Lonnie pushed for Mo to take photos in the same fashion and she eventually gave in when she noticed a gun in the back of the van.
“When he showed me the pictures I asked him why are they in weird positions, and they look dead. He told me they wasn’t [sic], that’s just how he have them take pictures.”
After the encounter, Mo says she was ashamed of the photos and never spoke of them again. However, when she saw her photo in the series of suspected murder victims, Mo contacted the Los Angeles Police Department to tell them her story. Mo says she knows she is lucky to be alive and could have easily been one of Franklin’s victims.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. has been accused of killing at least 10 women; however, the Los Angeles Police detectives now believe he may be responsible for as many as 230 missing persons and unsolved killings dating back to the mid-1970s.
After months of delays, a controversial bill to ban online gambling received a hearing from a House Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday, pushing it closer to a vote that may divide the GOP and test Republicans' loyalties to one of the party's biggest donors.
The Restore America's Wire Act, or RAWA, would impose a federal ban on all Internet gambling, including online state lotteries and poker. Since it was introduced last year, RAWA has been championed almost singlehandedly outside Congress by casino magnate and GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, whose army of lobbyists have made clear that the bill is a top priority. Adelson, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp., spent about $150 million in 2012 to fund Republican candidates and conservative groups.
Even with Adelson's outsized influence, Wednesday's hearing cast fresh doubts on RAWA's chance of success, as lawmakers from both parties expressed concerns that the bill may force Internet gaming offshore, where shady websites operate with virtually no regulation. Other members worried that RAWA trampled the rights of states to regulate online gaming within their borders.
"States should be allowed to decide this question for themselves, and we should not take any action that would overturn such state laws," said Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. Texas Republican Ted Poe warned that a sweeping ban on Internet gaming could create a black market for online gambling, much like Prohibition created a black market for alcohol.
This isn't the first time RAWA has run afoul of states' rights advocates. In the fall of 2014, vocal opposition to the bill from thelibertarian wing of the GOP eventually forced RAWA's chief backer in the Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to abandon plans for a Senate hearing.
In the House, however, RAWA enjoys the support of top Republicans. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairs the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In January, Adelson personally met with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and members of the Judiciary Committee to lobby for the bill's passage. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is a longtime opponent of expanding legalized gambling.
On Wednesday, Chaffetz and Goodlatte both claimed that RAWA was, in fact, a pro-states' rights bill, because the gambling ban protected the rights of states to prevent any gambling within their borders.
"It's important for states such as Utah and Hawaii, where we have no gaming, to have the ability to protect ourselves from something that we would not like to see within our borders," said Chaffetz, citing the only two U.S. states that prohibit all forms of gambling.
As with many congressional hearings, the experts who testified at the RAWA session did little to sway the members who attended. They included three witnesses who supported RAWA -- John Kindt, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois School of Law; Les Bernal, national director of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation; and Michael Fagan, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law. Two other witnesses -- Andrew Moylan, executive director of the free-market think tank the R Street Institute, and Parry Aftab, executive director of the Internet-safety coalition Wired Safety -- opposed RAWA.
The next steps for Chaffetz and other RAWA supporters are to schedule a markup of the bill, then vote it out of committee and send it to the full House. Unlike the last session of Congress, when RAWA backers faced pressure to insert the ban into a must-pass omnibus spending package before the end of the year, there are no time constraints this time.
Speaking to the industry publication Gambling Compliance earlier this year, Adelson's chief lobbyist Andy Abboud said the relaxed timeline would bode well for RAWA. “It should be somewhat easier with less pressure than [last session] because obviously, it’s a more wide-open timeframe,” Abboud said.
Notorious animal killer Kayla Bourque has been arrested in Vancouver for allegedly breaching the conditions of her probation surrounding her use of the internet.
According to court documents, Bourque was arrested after allegedly accessing social networking sites and possessing a computer or device capable of accessing the internet. Under the terms of her probation, Bourque is only allowed to access the internet to look for work.
The offences are alleged to have occurred between March 10 and 16 this year.
Bourque, now 25, was convicted in November 2012 of causing unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to animals, wilfully and without lawful excuse killing animals, and possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose. She also faced child pornography charges that were stayed.
She was sentenced to one month in jail on each of the charges, but had already spent six months in custody by the time she was sentenced. The judge ordered her to serve an additional two months in custody, in part so probation officials could prepare for her highly supervised release.
The former SFU criminology student has admitted to taking delight in killing animals and fantasizing about shooting homeless people. Several psychologists who interviewed Bourque found she showed no remorse or insight into her crimes.
In January 2013, B.C.'s Ministry of Justice confirmed Bourque was released on probation after serving just over seven months in custody.
"Bourque has an escalating criminal history," said the public notification issued by the ministry. "She has offended violently against both people and animals and is considered high risk to reoffend."
