1) The article mentions the drop locations need to be places where another person stumbling upon them will be super unlikely, and which also haven't been used before (not regular, recurring locations as I assumed).
3) There is still likely a fair bit of risk to the buyer, but the writer seems to believe they can plead innocence
4) Addressed in the same as 1, and with drop locations being new every time, making more involved drops may not be as much of an issue
(2) still begs the question, people making lots of drops seem to have a lot of risk; if many controlled buys are taking place, officials can crossreference the lists of people who have been near that location. Once they identify people who make the drops they can then watch the people who are seen in many of the locations, subpoena location information from Google, etc. until they catch them in the act of making a drop or gather enough evidence to indite them. These people could then face very serious charges of conspiracy. It's not unlikely that these people could then be turned informant. Get enough surveillance on, or cooperation of the people making the drops and you can then use the same techniques to suss out the sales layer. Rinse and repeat.
- How is collection of the product verified. In other words, a customer can say they went to the drop location and nothing was there. The seller has no way of knowing if the customer was lying or if the product was "intercepted" by chance or federal officials
- How can people making the drop be confident that authorities making controlled buys won't be able to trace them via CCTV (if there is a camera recording in that area, their identity can be determined) I suspect the normalization of face masks has helped make this somewhat easier to evade, but in normal times, the government could go to 100 drop zones used by the same seller, compile a list of all the people who have been seen near those zones in the last 6 months with facial recognition, then dig into people who have been seen in more than one of those zones. I assume these are obscure enough locations that random people won't find the drops, so a person appearing in more than one is enough to flag them as likely to be involved. But in the event these are just really good hiding places in more public locations, someone being near 3 or more of these locations is still enough to suggest involvement.
- Most of the risk still seems to be the buyer's burden; if a government official impersonates the seller, they can just wait for the person to show up to collect their package, and they'd be caught "red-handed" so to speak. I suppose the person can claim ignorance, but I don't know how good of a defense this would be.
- Sellers would be taking massive risks with bulk orders being found by the wrong party (I assume bulk orders are most of their profits). Additionally, they wouldn't really have the ability to tailor the amount to the customer for complicated orders