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posted by martyb on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the weeding-out-illegal-transactions dept.

IT pros indicted after arranging credit card payments for weed startup:

On March 9, 2020, a German IT consultant named Ruben Weigand had a layover in Los Angeles as he traveled from Switzerland to Costa Rica. He never made it to his destination because US authorities arrested him as he was changing planes.

The feds say Weigand and a co-conspirator, Hamid "Ray" Akhavan, were the masterminds behind a multimillion-dollar bank-fraud scheme. The supposed fraud? Tricking US banks into processing more than $100 million in marijuana transactions that went contrary to the banks' rules. According to a March indictment, the pair disguised marijuana transactions as purchases of dog toys, carbonated drinks, diving gear, and other products unrelated to cannabis.

Lawyers for the two men say this is ludicrous because the alleged bank fraud had no victims. The customers knew exactly what they were paying for. The banks involved suffered no losses—in fact, they made money from transaction fees.

Moreover, marijuana is legal under state law in California and Oregon, where the transactions occurred. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, but since 2014, a rule called the Rohrabacher Amendment has prohibited the feds from interfering with state medical marijuana laws. In a recent motion seeking dismissal of the case, Akhavan's lawyers portray the prosecution as an attempted end-run around this restriction.

Extraterritoriality in the Internet Age?


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday July 10 2020, @10:21PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday July 10 2020, @10:21PM (#1019249) Journal

    I should be allowed to sell highly addictive drugs. You know the ones that decimate families, communities, and entire neighborhoods. The drugs that kill people. Because it is obviously moral and correct and it is my choice. Thanks.

    Yes, you should. Aside from the fact that you have no right whatsoever to make choices for others that fall into the category of informed personal or consensual choice (just as they have no right to force such choices upon you), because:

    The alternative is a drug war that kills people, creates dangerous black markets, internecine violence, destroys families, jobs, careers, puts drug manufacture into the unregulated space where it often turns out to be poisonous or otherwise toxic... yes, your "cure" is far, far worse than the problem. That is not a guess. This is what people like yourself have put into play, and those are the exact results of those policies.

    And do you know why all these problems arrive consequent to your drug war? I'll tell you: People will engage in behavior they consider to be their personal choice regardless of if there is a law against it, or not. This is because if they have two wet brain cells to rub together, they know those laws land precisely in the category of those spoken of by Aquinas all those years ago:

    ...in so far as [law] deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.

        Thomas Aquinas

    All your drug war does is add collateral damage. Lots and lots of collateral damage.

    Don't confuse "right" with "power": The government has power to intervene in informed personal and consensual choice. It does not have the right. There is no way for it to obtain a right that can never exist. Repression of informed personal/consensual choice is abuse of power. No more, no less.

    The drugs that kill people

    There are only two reasons a drug would kill someone.

    The first reason you and people like you created: Unregulated and uncontrolled manufacture of toxic and uncontrolled dosages, often combined with unsafe environments, where people end up doing themselves in without intending to. That's your responsibility. You and the drug warriors you support created that circumstance by creating an unregulated black market and imposing an incredibly hostile environment for drug manufacture, sale, use, and experience to occur in.

    Next, if people know what they are taking, and in fact that is what they are taking, and they understand the consequences thereof, then the drug isn't likely to kill them unless they choose to overdose. The second reason, however, is often pre-empted by the first: you, and people like you, have created circumstances where what is in a drug is unknown to the person taking it. There's no certainty to it. Just as bathtub gin created many casualties in the early part of the 1900's, so too do toxic, unregulated drugs to this day, and for the same reason: Because you, and people like you, have failed in society's responsibility to ensure a known, level playing field for all food, drugs and medical care for everyone.

    Lastly to your point there about "drugs killing people", presuming the ready availability of regulated, accurate doses (which the drug war prevents, mind you), if someone wants to kill themselves, then the responsibility is theirs, not the drugs, any more than it is the rocks' fault, or gravity's fault, if you jump off a cliff and smash yourself to death on the rocks.

    --
    The three Functional Retardations:
    traditional, jingoistic, and religious.

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