In a brazen attempt to become the coolest kid on his hall floor, an Otago student has attempted to buy ecstasy over the Internet. The 18-year-old appeared in Dunedin District Court last Tuesday, and admitted procuring the Class B drug. His lawyer has asked for an adjournment to allow for an application for a discharge without conviction.
The Court was told that the student organised for a friend to order the pills off a TradeMe-style website that sells drugs, and to have them sent directly to his Dunedin address. The 165 pills were then intercepted in transit by the NZ Customs Service’s International Mail Centre in Auckland. When police spoke to the student he said that he planned to sell the pills in order to fund a 12-month exchange to Canada.
The student accessed the pills from a website found via TOR, or “The Onion Router”, a routing network originally designed by the US Navy, which bounces communications through multiple servers around the world to avoid detection. The website sells a wide range of illegal substances for shipping around the world, with customers paying using “Bitcoin”, a digital currency that allows for near total anonymity for both buyer and seller.
Critic spoke to one student who had regularly couriered drugs from Auckland to Dunedin: “It’s pretty easy really. You get someone you know up in Auckland to purchase some pills, chuck them in a courier bag and send them down. Most of them are sold before they’ve even arrived.” However, the purchase of stock from overseas allows authorities to more easily pick up on the couriering of illegal substances through border control measures.
A police officer that Critic spoke to said that the student in question was very lucky to be charged with procuring the drug. If he had instead been charged with the importing of a class B controlled substance, he could be facing a maximum 14-year jail sentence.
The student has been remanded without conviction until June 5.
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