Navy warns sailors not to buy their LSD on the dark web

These days it’s not the drunken sailors you need to worry about – it’s the ones seeing marmalade skies.

Or at least that’s one conclusion to draw from an odd warning issued by the Navy to sailors last week about the perils of buying LSD on the dark web.

Officials cautioned that the “perceived anonymity” of scoring hallucinogenic drugs through the often illicit online marketplace was in fact misleading: feds have ways to identify buyers and can trace “many cryptocurrency transactions,” according to the message released last Thursday by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

“Recent law enforcement reporting has revealed that an increasing number of people are moving to purchasing illicit substances via the dark web because of the perceived anonymity provided by tools like The Onion Router (TOR),” the NCIS notice reads. “While [it] offers anonymity by obscuring IP addresses, law enforcement use various investigative techniques to identify both purchasers and sellers.”

The admonition also addressed other potentially lethal pitfalls to sorting your stash for the voyage the modern way.

“Drugs purchased via the dark web are often laced with other substances in dangerous combinations that can lead to death,” the notice says. “Additionally, international, federal, state, and local law enforcement are working collectively, using a variety of techniques to infiltrate marketplaces, identify users, and combat the illicit drug threat.”

In other words: if you don’t get sick you’ll get busted.

The Navy stopped testing sailors for LSD use back in 2006, and thus has no authoritative means of establishing whether taking acid is on the rise, according to military news site taskandpurpose.com.

LSD testing was discontinued after three years of urinalysis revealed only four positives among two million samples.

The Navy advisory, based on “recent law enforcement reporting,” follows several concerning LSD-related incidents across the U.S. armed forces in recent years.

In March 2019, a sailor in the nuclear reactor department on the USS Ronald Reagan admitted to “wrongfully” bringing LSD aboard while the aircraft carrier was docked at various ports across Japan.

Ten other sailors from the same department were disciplined in 2018 for possessing and distributing LSD as part of a drug ring aboard the nuclear-powered supercarrier.

Beyond the Navy, 14 Air Force officers tasked with safeguarding nuclear missile silos in Wyoming were disciplined in May 2018 for dropping acid between shifts.

The spate of recent cases, which has been linked to problems such as sleep deprivation and boredom, may well be spurred by the availability of drugs online.

Buyers accessing the dark web to purchase a range of substances use specialized browsers and encryption technology in an effort to protect their identities.