I am a long time user of RAMP - Russian Anonymous Market Place. I sometimes see mentions of RAMP in comments here in DNM, normally claiming you can order fake IDs. This is not true. The only non-drug items, other than bitcoin exchange services, I have ever seen in the last 4 years are shoes with secret compartments and super 133t sim cards or something that let you be invisible or some shit.
The thing that makes RAMP so cool/awful is how deliveries are made. While there are bulk mailers that ship domestically and some dealers shipping from aboard to Russia/Ukraine, the majority of the deliveries are done though a game of geocaching. So if you are located in any major city and in Russia or Ukraine, you can go on to the online store, choose your product, pay, then you get instructions on where to find your stuff which is already laying and waiting for you.
The ease of find of finding your drugs is really dependent on the amount of drugs taken by the guy setting them out, marking the coordinates, and providing instructions on how to get there. Sometimes you will very clear instructions with several photos and gps coordinates. Other times you will get something like "So go across the street near building 73 and you will some brown things sticking out the ground and you kinda need to go left of them and after about 100 steps (completely made up figure) you will see a tree. Dig near there." Also, until recently, when you made an order you could only choose the city. So if you bought 3 grams of hash in Moscow, the location of your shit could have been anywhere in a city of 15 million+ people. Now luckily, you can search by neighborhood or district in most cities.
I remember going on my first hunt. It was back in the day where there was only a forum and few hundred members. There were only three dealers in my city at time, now there are about 150. The purchase included about 2 days of research on how to properly set up the pgp email message on this private email server to then get bitcoins, which at the time was much much more difficult than now. All of this was to first get MDMA which I had always wanted to try. I ended up going back the location three times, which was an hour's drive from my house one way because I couldn't figure out what the guy meant in his instructions, and I was too afraid to ask him for clarity. Eventually I found the thin tape wrapped packet hidden with a magnet underneath some power box to an electric gate. I didn't care that had wasted so much time, I got to try MDMA for the first time and I had fun visiting a near part of the city, I had never seen.
Over the last 4 years, I have been to every single neighborhood in Moscow, which is the largest city in Europe in all sorts of weather conditions, digging holes, sticking my hands up drain pipes, getting covered in mud, freezing your ass off digging hopelessly in a meter of snow and a temperature of -25C for hash that probably was there somewhere. I have got burned so many fucking times. However, having done this for such a long time, you get a feeling for where you might find other hidden goodies. I know it's wrong, but there was a period where many of the deals on RAMP were scams and you got burned a lot. Also, some the people set out the drugs in stupid spots that get stolen by a random passerby or child. Currently there is an insurance system that kind of works, though generally the dealers are very professional.
That fact that you can go to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Kiev and get a healthy spectrum of drugs that can be right outside your house (has happened to me!). Weed, Hash, amphetamine powder,coke, MDMA, mephedrone, LSD can be had 24 hours a day, in sometimes under 30 minutes if things work out well. The other less popular drugs, DMT, salvia, peyote, etc. can be found but generally are pre-order and you have to wait at most 24 hours. Interestingly, heroin almost non-existent on the site or any other opiate for that matter. I don't know of any rules that limit the sale, but nonetheless you can find very little of it, despite the high rates of use in some areas of the country among the poorest of society - thus "krokodil" appeared.
This ability to get nearly instant gratification of your every drug desire without having to call anyone, wait for some dude in a sketchy place, give them an address and name, etc. can be troublesome. However, I find it most awesome that I can now get a chance to take a walk in the park with my young son during the day (looks less conspicuous than being alone with a flashlight in the middle of the night with a shovel) and pretend we are pirates. I tell him to look for treasure over there while I quickly swipe the vacuum packed bag of weed that hidden somewhere.
TL,DR
I dunno what I just wrote, I am stoned as fuck right now. I am going to eat some cereal now.
This is delightful! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Have you ever heard of anyone getting robbed or arrested at a pick-up spot?