SILK ROAD: DRUGS, DEATH AND THE DARK WEB, BBC4, 10pm
SILK Road was a website which sold drugs on the so-called “dark web”. It had 20,000 new users every month, made millions of dollars, and was the modern and easy way to buy illegal products.
It was “a new kind of black market,” run by a man calling himself Dread Pirate Roberts.
The site sold every kind of drug, from common prescription pills to heroin and ecstasy. A customer would simply go online and click on what they wanted – “just like going on Amazon”. The drugs were then delivered to your door, disguised as ordinary online shopping, with the substances tucked inside chocolate bars, jewellery boxes and lipsticks.
This massive and successful rogue site was described as “the first big “f**k you” to the war on drugs”, where “every transaction was meant to be a blow against the whole idea of government”.
DANGEROUS BORDERS, A JOURNEY ACROSS INDIA & PAKISTAN, BBC2, 9pm
WITH everyone going on, or having been on their summer holidays, it’s great to have a TV travel series pop up which can offer an antidote to all those identical Facebook posts of Tenerife and Malaga.
At the weekend, Channel 4 kicked off a new series about rugged, adventurous travel through Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and across the Caucasus mountains into Iran.
Tonight, BBC2 continues its own gutsy equivalent with the second episode of Dangerous Borders, in which the team journeys through the volatile border regions of Pakistan and India.
Tonight we are in the Punjab area where we see a huge park devoted to solar energy. This will be a shock to anyone, like me, who thought this region was empty and desolate. Quaid-E-Azam Solar Park is in Pakistan and funded by the Chinese, with whom the Indian government have a strained relationship.
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