Party Vibe

the equivalent penalty for this in the UK and most of Europe is around 5-10 years. In NL dealers only get prison if their MDMA contains bad stuff that poisons people. Even in Europe a different higher court (called Crown Court in UK) would hear a case at this level.

A kilo of MDMA or any other party drug is a very large amount; although I’ve never been a dealer (UK cops did once think I was; simply because I bought a bulk quantity to store and use over a month) I’ve known a fair few over the years and never seen anyone with that amount (and the sort of kids who act like plastic gangsters and would inform on people would not be trusted with it anyway).

Unless the USA has become a worse banana republic than some third world states; it would be very hard to prove that someone who has already spent a good part of this year in jail is able to set up deals at that level. The whole thing sounds like lazy cops trying to improve their statistics (they used to try stuff like this in Britain until it had got to the stage where there were so many dealers and not enough prison capacity they would be let out early anyway…)

This might sound like some idea from a movie script but can you get in touch with any young lawyers perhaps from minority groups/low income backgrounds who might take on this case?

I supposed the difference between USA and Europe then is the authorities adding up the total of a number of small deals and/or letting things get that far – in Europe (at least for “party drugs”) they just nick the younger dealers much earlier on to scare them a bit (they get much lower sentences) and to disrupt/limit the supply for a few weeks or so; often its triggered by monitoring how many emergency hospital admissions / ambulances are called out from suspected overdoses.

round here those who get caught/sent down for trying to import kilos at a time are my age and in many cases far older. To get any significant sentence in Europe you have to be also involved with violent crime/guns or creating anti social behaviour. Not sure what the USA courts do but sentencing here can only reflect what is actually found after the labs have checked it; 50g of MDMA + 50g of chalk can only result in a conviction for 50g, not 100g…

There are similar cases to yours going through Courts in Northern Europe – mostly intelligent young men using the “dark net” to obtain bulk supplies and overestimating the security it provides (encryption does not prevent the locations of signals being traced).

Often these lads are also selling them at street level with footsoldiers in more than one country. its illegal for me to write in detail about them for a variety of reasons (sub judice and privacy laws) but those who have not got involved in anything to do with unlicensed sales of guns or fraud/blackmail/ID theft as well as drugs are extremely unlikely to get much more than 6 months to a year extra time than a “dumb” drug dealer (who did not use any computers / encryption). In many European nations outside the UK these short sentences aren’t even reported in the papers because of the privacy laws.

Someone below age 40 without previous for violent crime or other bad behaviour rarely gets any more than 5 years even for regular class A dealing of the harder/worse substances; of which around 18 months to 2.5 years is actually served in prison, the amount that results in prison has slowly edged upwards in the last 20 years; though it gets to a point where it doesn’t matter if its 100g or a kilo; the sentence remains the same. I remember a friend of mine being pulled up in the 1990s on intent to supply (UK equivalent of the offence you have been done for) for as few as 5 pills and having to go to Crown Court (he was really worried he would get prison) but in the end it was a suspended sentence/probation.

These days thats often classed as small posession and results in a caution.

I tried to work out if at the height of the rave scene in my former town (an affluent suburban town called Reading, very similar to a British version of Seattle) it was even possible for all the ravers I knew to have obtained and/or consumed a whole kilo of MDMA or powder based drugs in a year. It wasn’t; there were always periodic shortages due to busts higher up the chain; and even the higher level dealers did not carry such large amounts in one go.