Marijuana.com

Buzzby

I really don't think there's much to worry about in that regard. Production and distribution of marijuana is so decentralized that taking out one piece is not likely to affect much of the rest. It's kind of like the Internet in that regard.

My guess is that the big commercial growers have so many levels of disconnect between themselves and their suppliers that if will be very difficult if not impossible to unravel them. That's what I'd do and if it's that obvious to a total amateur like myself the guys who are making millions could figure it out too.

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DaDornta

MJ is a "trickle down" product. Maybe the huge growers that flood the US with "BC Bud" will be hit very lightly, but it'll still be felt. Local growers will have a higher demand...in turn means it'll be harder to find, prices will go up a little bit...

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Buzzby

It's estimated that BC Bud represents about 5% of the marijuana used in the United States.

sixx

i didnt think that og logged ip adresses?

rick

I've made another detailed blog post highliting the ip logging features of vBulletin and how to completely disable loggin. Not as easy as one botton, im sorry to say.

Here's the link to my blog entry

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Buzzby

So far there has been no mention I could find of the seizure of these sites in any of the mainstream news outlets. I find this almost as disturbing as the seizures themselves. The press seems to be in collusion with the Canadian government in not publishing anything about these intrusions on free speech. I think a lot of people, non-marijuana people, would be outraged if they knew about it.

Stephanie S.

Potheads show you’re not anonymous online
By Leif M. Wright
Phoenix Staff Writer


GreenThum43215: Hey, are you the Phoenix guy?
LeifMWright: Yes. Who’s this?
GreenThum43215: You interested in an internet story?
LeifMWright: I’m all ears.
GreenThum43215: Have you ever heard of overgrow.com?

That Internet chat began the weirdest column I’ve ever undertaken, one full of international intrigue, secret marijuana gardens, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, a shady character with an Armenian name, a former movie actor turned marijuana seed dealer and tens of thousands of freaked-out potheads who started what I call the Marijuana Bean Field Wars.

Overgrow.com was the world’s largest marijuana cultivation Web site, and possibly the largest single marketplace of illegal ideas in the history of the world. The site taught growers the ins and outs of the plant and how to increase their yields and ostensibly increase the THC content. THC is the chemical believed to cause the “high” of marijuana.

At its peak before Jan. 31, Overgrow.com had more than 100,000 active members — a massive amount for all but the largest web sites, and certainly for one that exchanged information that is illegal in most places.

Jan. 31, the site disappeared. Poof. Up in smoke, you might say.
It had warned users a couple of days earlier that it would be undergoing server upgrades, so expect some outages. So no one panicked.

A day later, the site was still gone. Potheads, who are notoriously paranoid already, began to wig out.

What if the site had been busted? Would members be subject to prosecution based on the information they had shared on the site? Had authorities been watching the whole time, building up information so they could attack?

The war begins

GreenThum43215: A lot of people around here are freaking out.

Probably an understatement.

I started searching the Internet for information about Overgrow.com. I found a slew of forums and dozens of sites repeating the same news: Overgrow.com and its parent site, Heaven’s Stairway, had been shut down, their Canadian owner arrested, his house raided and his family jailed.

Heaven’s Stairway was a seed distribution company. Marijuana growers call the seeds “beans.” Heaven’s Stairway, according to Canadian pot activist Marc Emery, had to be the largest seed merchant in North America, selling cannabis seeds all across Canada and the United States, and probably to other countries, too.

The stories on the Internet didn’t answer some key questions. Were the Web sites shut down by Canadian authorities, or were they, as Emery’s own bust nine months earlier, done in cooperation with the DEA?

Who was the mysterious owner of the sites, and what happened to him? Was he in jail? Was he out? Was he even alive?

What happened to the records of his seed business and the logs on his site that could possibly lead police to those who frequented the site?

Internet forums were atwitter with the details — or lack of them.

It seems the sites were owned by a Richard Calrisian in Montreal.
But later, it seemed “Calrisian” had been an alias. His real name was Richard Baghdadlian. And later, it seemed “Richard” was an alias, too. His real name, they asserted, was Hratch Baghdadlian.

No one seemed to be able to find any official records of his arrest, or even of an investigation.

That, the growers seemed unified in believing, was even more ominous. If the cops had busted Baghdadlian but hadn’t arrested him, it could be that they were still investigating — or worse, Baghdadlian was cooperating with them, singing like a canary, selling out seed customers, seed merchants and growers all over the continent.

I called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa.

“We don’t confirm or deny if there is an ongoing investigation,” said Sgt. Nathalie Dechenes, spokesman for the RCMP. “So we wouldn’t tell you either way. I don’t know if we even have authority to shut down Web sites.”

So I called Emery, who was busted nine months ago and is facing extradition to the United States on charges of selling marijuana seeds in the U.S.

“I’m facing 31 years in a maximum security federal prison,” Emery said. “It seems to me if Baghdadlian was facing the same thing, he might have started cooperating if they offered to drop the investigation in the U.S. and keep him in Canada.”

Emery had run a seed company in competition with Heaven’s Stairway. When he was busted, his computers were seized (“Nothing was on them,” he said), and his clients in the United States started receiving blue sheets of paper asking them to confirm orders they had placed with his company.

“It was essentially an effort to try to get them to incriminate themselves,” he said. “But most were smart enough to hit my Web site and find out it was the DEA and not us sending those notices out.”

Meanwhile, several cannabis-related sites were breaking out into full civil war over the Overgrow debacle.

On one side was a fomer movie actor who had had a bit part in a Jean-Claude VanDamme flick and now was calling himself “Gypsy Nirvana.” He claimed to have spoken with “RC,” which was a pseudonym for Baghdadlian (growers seem to be big on initials and acronyms).

RC, Nirvana assured everyone, had been arrested, but he was out on bail and he had shut down the servers when he learned of the impending raid — everyone’s information was safe.

Dissenters began to surface, however, saying Nirvana had a profit motive in mind; he wanted Heaven’s Stairway’s seed business.

On the other side was someone calling himself “Plural of Mongoose,” who apparently commanded great respect in the growing community. He also claimed to have spoken with RC, who had told him several lies, some of which, combined with a friend being busted, led him to believe RC was cooperating with the authorities.

Caught in the middle was Emery, whose own case had generated a lot of publicity, and who is loved by about half the growing community and violently hated by the other half. Emery’s initial statement on the matter had been that Baghdadlian, tired of the seed business, had decided it was time to bail, so he shut up shop and took off to greener pastures, no pun intended.

The battle raged on in Internet boards with Nirvana accusing Emery of being a jerk for revealing Baghdadlian’s name and phone number on his own site.

Others said Baghdadlian was the jerk for leaving his business partners high and dry, wondering if they could be busted at any time based on information from his servers.

No bust, no investigation, mom says
I called a number given on one site for Baghdadlian. A woman answered and gave her name as “Mrs. Baghdadlian.”

She confirmed that Hratch is her son and that he was the proprietor of Heaven’s Stairway and Overgrow.com.

“Nothing has happened, there is nothing right now,” she said in an Armenian accent. “He has not been arrested. There is no investigation.”

I asked her if Baghdadlian had shut the servers down himself. She started stuttering.

“Um,” she said. “I don’t think I can say anything more than this.”

I asked if she knew where I could reach him to talk to him. She said she did not.

“Wow,” Emery said when I told him about the conversation. “That sure lends credence to the idea that he took the money and ran.”

It’s possible that Baghdadlian had noticed an increased amount of government servers hitting his sites, saw the writing on the wall and bailed. Emery agreed it was possible.

“Before I was raided, about six weeks before, there was a huge Department of Justice focus on our Web site,” he said. “Our server logs revealed their IP addresses and we were able to do a whois on them and find out where the hits were coming from.”

Taking the money and running would explain Baghdadlian’s silence — and the silence of law enforcement, which had thrown a big media party when they busted Emery, patting themselves very publicly on the back for such a large takedown.

What does it mean to you?
The bottom line is those who were doing business with Baghdadlian and Emery were breaking the law if they were doing it in the United States — they took a tremendous risk to break the law, and they are likely wise to be worried.

Doing that business over the Internet may have given people a false sense of security, since the Internet allows people to feel “anonymous.”

In the marijuana growing community, the disappearance of Overgrow has made them rudely aware that Internet anonymity is an illusion.

For law enforcement, if there was no bust, they may still benefit from Baghdadlian’s disappearance. Growers all over the Internet were proclaiming that they were done — they were shutting their operations down for fear “LEO” would come get them based on information obtained from Baghdadlian’s debacle.

The net gain for law enforcement is a new paranoia in the cannabis-growing world — and fewer people growing, which means shorter supply and less headache for “LEO.”

The average, law-abiding citizen can take a good message away from the mess, too, though. The message:

“You’re never anonymous,” Emery said. “It’s impossible. Governments are investing huge amounts of money to monitor what’s going on on the Internet. If they’re interested in knowing something, they’ll get it.”

Protecting yourself over the Internet — even in legitimate business — should take top priority. You may never have thought about breaking a law yourself, but your information is scattered all over the Internet, and those with less scruples than you can easily gain access to it and use it to defraud you.

Be careful. The Internet is still a rough new frontier, much like Oklahoma was in the Land Run years. You may not be facing droughts and maurading bandits, but you face less-than-honest people who will take your information and use it to hurt you.

“Never do business with anyone who won’t give you a real name,” Emery said.

More importantly, never do online business with a company you haven’t thoroughly seen to be trustworthy. Even big companies suffer from “phishing,” where people will pretend to be the big companies and request personal information from you, which is later used to defraud you.

For those doing illegal business over the Internet, my advice is this: Just don’t.

You can reach Leif M. Wright at 684-2906 or lmwright@muskogeephoenix.com. If you’re “LEO,” you already know that.


Originally published February 17, 2006

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"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio)

nerphroll

Very interesting story. It certainly does make a strong circumstantial case for Baghdadian just jetting the scene, but can't say for sure. I think this is definitely a reality-check for most of us who are not terribly computer savvy, since it reinforces the immensely unknown and vast world of the internet, where people a lot more smart and techy could have a probe up my butt at their slightest whim, with me none the wiser. This is starting to sound a littel paranoid:
Though I still did not appreciate that mischaracterization...


This is what I mean by basic stuff that I just do not know. Can I see which IP addresses are hitting me at home? (Or does that not make any sense because my home computer isn't a server?) And what's this WHOIS command?

Though I think many of us know this, we don't always like to admit it.

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HELP ME IVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR OVER 13 YEARS!!!!!!!!!!
PURIFY ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Buzzby

In the US and Canada, ideas can't be illegal. We don't have thought police. Yet.


Again, ideas can't be illegal. In the US and Canada it's not illegal to disseminate growing information. You can walk into most bookstores or surf over to Amazon.com and get a whole bookshelf of tomes on how to grow pot.


Are you "paranoid" if people are really out to get you?


Internet users (not just growers) are big on reducing the amount of typing they need to do. If the author doesn't know this he must be an online newbie.


If this person was actually RC's mother, wouldn't she say whatever was in her son's best interests?


If he believes that to be true, why was he endangering all of his US customers by doing business with them over the internet? (Follow the money?)

johnnyd

What I'd be afraid of is a conspiracy charge. I know its a long shot but the DEA and their brothers in law might just be willing to go for it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained says the DEA.