6 ms·

He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the

He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of. He killed children. - "During the sentencing hearing, Forrest heard from the father of a 25-year-old Boston man who died of a heroin overdose and the mother of a 16-year-old Australian who took a drug designed to mimic LSD at a post-prom party and then jumped off a balcony to his death. Prosecutors said the two victims were among at least six who died after taking drugs that were bought through Silk Road." [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road-mastermind-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-drug-bazaar https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road... ("Silk Road Mastermind Handed Life in Prison for Drug Bazaar" (2015)) It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin*. Most (?) Asian countries *execute* people who sell heroin. Trump himself has proposed, multiple times over the years, executing US heroin dealers[1,2]—which underscores the incredible degree of hypocrisy behind this pardon. *(It's also within some people's Overton windows to contemplate the opposite of this, in a framework of harm minimization. I can't steelman this argument in the specific case of Ulbricht. Is it harm reduction to sell heroin? Is it harm reduction to sell fatal drugs to high-school age kids?) [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43465229 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43465229 ("Trump urges death penalty for drug dealers" (2018)) [2] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1152847242/trump-campaign-execute-drug-dealers-smugglers-traffickers-death-row https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1152847242/trump-campaign-exe... ("Trump wants the death penalty for drug dealers. Here's why that probably won't happen" (2023))

JohnnyLarue 2y ago
Yes, but Ulbricht is a very different case. He's white, you see.
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  [flagged]
- perihelions 2y ago
  Judge Forrest absolute nailed this, in her withering response to one of Ulbricht's appeal attempts: - "“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” she said. “It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did.”" https://www.vice.com/en/article/unsealed-transcript-shows-how-a-judge-justified-ross-ulbrichts-life-sentence/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/unsealed-transcript-shows-ho... ("Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht’s Life Sentence" (2015)) In an increasingly nihilistic world, I'm glad people like Forrest still exist.
  - busymom0 2y ago
    That judge is just wrong. Ulbricht was not selling drugs. Conflating running a market place vs drug dealers on the street is just wrong. Craigslist has tons of illegal stuff. Even FB and Twitter do.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cedws 2y ago
Ulbricht didn't kill those people. Those people took drugs under their own autonomy and died as a result.
- maxlin 2y ago
  This. With taking in to account how much criminal exposure Silk Road removed from the whole equation, saying "he killed them" is like saying Elon Musk kills everyone who dies in an FSD accident even if the system is safer than human drivers by average.
- xyzzy9563 2y ago
  Plus he didn't even sell the drugs. He created a technology platform that facilitates it. I can think of many other communications platforms that also do this, for example Google, email, Verizon, etc.
  - sbarre 2y ago
    So by your logic, a drug kingpin who doesn't actually handle the drug-selling transaction should not be liable for anything, even though the money rolls up to them? Ross directly profited from the sale of those drugs. So, yes, he was "selling the drugs".
    - xyzzy9563 2y ago
      Google and Meta also profit from selling ads to the people who use it to trade drugs. All I'm saying is there's a rough equivalence. Perhaps the Silk Road platform should be banned but he was not a drug dealer himself. Creating a communications platform is not the same thing as being a drug dealer.
      - sbarre 2y ago
        He created/operated a platform with the primary purpose of facilitating the sale of drugs. He profited from those transactions. That makes him a drug dealer. Comparing Meta and Google to Silk Road is a bad faith argument. You might as well compare Silk Road to the phone network at that point.
that_guy_iain 2y ago
> He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of. > He killed children. Nit: People died, who may not have died, because of his actions but he didn't kill them. Very few people are forced to take drugs.
- kerkeslager 2y ago
  It's worth noting that darknet sites have at every point in their history provided higher-purity drugs on average than what was available elsewhere[1]. It's hard to say whether or not more people used drugs because of the Silk Road. But without question, many people who purchased drugs on the Silk Road and survived, would have purchased those drugs elsewhere and died from impurities in the Silk Road's absence. I think there's an argument to be made that Ullbricht saved lives by purveying safer drugs. [1] https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-drug-markets_en https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-dr... EDIT: Added citation for commenter who couldn't be bothered to use a search engine. Link contains links to multiple studies.
  - sulam 2y ago
    Citation needed.
  - that_guy_iain 2y ago
    The purity can also cause overdoses and deaths because they're not used to it being that pure so they took the same amount they would take with a less pure so took a substantially larger dose. Especially with opium based drugs that would be a big problem.
    - kerkeslager 2y ago
      At a systemic level, this is dependent on what "normal" purity is for users. First-time buyers on darknet markets probably are more likely to overdose because they're used to less-pure products, although I don't have any statistics to back up that guess. But if people are buying on the darknet consistently, they'll be unlikely to overdose due to unexpected purity (though they might still overdose for other reasons). I'll admit I haven't done much research on opiates specifically for the simple reason that I have never known any active opiate addicts (though, I did get trained to administer Narcan). However, in my understanding of drugs such as coke, MDMA, or speed/adderall, which are more common in the tech scene, higher purity is unambiguously a net positive. It's been a while since I was actually involved in the overlap of the tech/festival scene but when I was around that more, I made anyone I knew used drugs aware that I had drug test kits and would let you borrow them no questions asked. I can't claim I ever saved a life, but I can say for certain that ~30 people at a festival I went to ended up riding out bad trips in medical tents or being transported to the hospital due to MDMA cut with DOC, and none of the people I let borrow my test kits at that festival did.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin. Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs. I think he is owed some responsibility, but he didn't kill them.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
  Pray tell, what is the difference between operating an electronic market where people can buy drugs and operating a physical one (say, a street corner) where people can do the same?
  - vasilipupkin 2y ago
    huge difference. People can sell drugs on facebook marketplace but that doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a drug dealer. The difference is you bear responsibility for what you do.
    - lucb1e 2y ago
      > People can sell drugs on facebook marketplace but that doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a drug dealer In our legal system, they are in fact partially responsible if they don't disallow it and don't act upon reports. I'm not sure there is a difference whether it's physical or digital
      - vasilipupkin 2y ago
        fine, partially responsible is still a huge difference
        lucb1e 2y ago
        How so? Why would an owner of a market with physical dimensions, held every Saturday or whatever, be any more or less responsible for what changes hands there?
valval 2y ago
He was not the dealer.
- xyzzy9563 2y ago
  True. If he is culpable for other people dealing drugs on his platform, then so is Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for allowing WhatsApp to facilitate drug trades.
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    Nah, that treatment is reserved for Telegram. Zuck does MMA and isn't Russian so he's cool.
    - Fnoord 2y ago
      He does block certain tags 'by accident'.
cheeseomlit 2y ago
"He killed children" is a pretty massive leap- he didn't sell heroin, he sold shrooms. Other vendors on the site sold heroin. And there is the matter of personal responsibility to consider- nobody forced those people to take heroin, and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere. The Sacklers are responsible for far more human misery in that regard, to an almost inconceivable degree, and they never have and never will see the inside of a cell
- perihelions 2y ago
  - "and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere" That's very unlikely to be true in the case of the high-school kid who died buying a synthetic drug off the internet. They almost certainly did not have a dealer connection sophisticated enough to sell that. They almost certainly would have lived, if Silk Road were not available to them at that point in their life. You're advancing an argument about drug markets and personal autonomy in the general case, but it's a very poor fit to the concrete facts in the specific situation we're looking at.
  - cheeseomlit 2y ago
    IMO these are circumstances too far removed from Ulbricht to hold him directly responsible. How many people bought drugs from the Silk Road, used them safely and responsibly, and in doing so avoided contact with violent criminals who they'd otherwise have to buy from, potentially saving them from the violence/misery/blackmail/overdoses that so commonly accompanies association with drug dealers IRL? Though I think this argument is tangential to the point on proportionality- Ross's sentence is an affront to justice when considered in the context of the Sackler's treatment
    - greentxt 2y ago
      "association with drug dealers IRL?" I'd rather get my milk from the corner store than some anonymous reseller on amazon. Real life drug dealers operate in markets too.
ty6853 2y ago
Wait until you hear how many people home swimming pool salesmen kill, and their victims are even younger children. Hell at least illegal drugs can be lifesaving. No one needs a home swimming pool.
- 15155 2y ago
  We should license them by the gallon: assault pools with scary slides will be non-transferable to new owners.
- greentxt 2y ago
  Most pool owners aren't dead? Am i being trolled?
  - wbobeirne 2y ago
    Most drug users are not dead either.
stickfigure 2y ago
This is so stupid. By this standard, automobile manufacturers kill 44,000 people in the US every year, including countless children. 3,500-4,500 people in the US are murdered by swimming pool contractors every year.
busymom0 2y ago
Other than the fact that he was not a drug dealer and other criticism others have already pointed out, Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include: > “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8) > “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12) https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU... 2+ life sentences for a website which sold weed is just outrageous. Also note that since 2012, people have become a LOT softer on weed and even other drugs have been legalized since then. Trump himself has said that he has friends who have benefitted from weed.
butlike 2y ago
Isn't the australian other story _LITERALLY_ the age-old "a friend of a friend's cousin jumped out of a window on LSD because they thought they could fly?" I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.
pointer_pointer 2y ago
[dead]

JohnnyLarue 2y ago

Yes, but Ulbricht is a very different case. He's white, you see.

itsoktocry 2y ago
[flagged]
perihelions 2y ago
Judge Forrest absolute nailed this, in her withering response to one of Ulbricht's appeal attempts: - "“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” she said. “It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did.”" https://www.vice.com/en/article/unsealed-transcript-shows-how-a-judge-justified-ross-ulbrichts-life-sentence/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/unsealed-transcript-shows-ho... ("Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht’s Life Sentence" (2015)) In an increasingly nihilistic world, I'm glad people like Forrest still exist.
- busymom0 2y ago
  That judge is just wrong. Ulbricht was not selling drugs. Conflating running a market place vs drug dealers on the street is just wrong. Craigslist has tons of illegal stuff. Even FB and Twitter do.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

cedws 2y ago

Ulbricht didn't kill those people. Those people took drugs under their own autonomy and died as a result.

maxlin 2y ago
This. With taking in to account how much criminal exposure Silk Road removed from the whole equation, saying "he killed them" is like saying Elon Musk kills everyone who dies in an FSD accident even if the system is safer than human drivers by average.
xyzzy9563 2y ago
Plus he didn't even sell the drugs. He created a technology platform that facilitates it. I can think of many other communications platforms that also do this, for example Google, email, Verizon, etc.
- sbarre 2y ago
  So by your logic, a drug kingpin who doesn't actually handle the drug-selling transaction should not be liable for anything, even though the money rolls up to them? Ross directly profited from the sale of those drugs. So, yes, he was "selling the drugs".
  - xyzzy9563 2y ago
    Google and Meta also profit from selling ads to the people who use it to trade drugs. All I'm saying is there's a rough equivalence. Perhaps the Silk Road platform should be banned but he was not a drug dealer himself. Creating a communications platform is not the same thing as being a drug dealer.
    - sbarre 2y ago
      He created/operated a platform with the primary purpose of facilitating the sale of drugs. He profited from those transactions. That makes him a drug dealer. Comparing Meta and Google to Silk Road is a bad faith argument. You might as well compare Silk Road to the phone network at that point.

that_guy_iain 2y ago

> He did kill people. That factored into his sentencing[0]: the multiple overdose deaths from heroin and other things Ulbricht sold/facilitated/took a cut of the proceeds of. > He killed children. Nit: People died, who may not have died, because of his actions but he didn't kill them. Very few people are forced to take drugs.

kerkeslager 2y ago
It's worth noting that darknet sites have at every point in their history provided higher-purity drugs on average than what was available elsewhere[1]. It's hard to say whether or not more people used drugs because of the Silk Road. But without question, many people who purchased drugs on the Silk Road and survived, would have purchased those drugs elsewhere and died from impurities in the Silk Road's absence. I think there's an argument to be made that Ullbricht saved lives by purveying safer drugs. [1] https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-drug-markets_en https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-dr... EDIT: Added citation for commenter who couldn't be bothered to use a search engine. Link contains links to multiple studies.
- sulam 2y ago
  Citation needed.
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  The purity can also cause overdoses and deaths because they're not used to it being that pure so they took the same amount they would take with a less pure so took a substantially larger dose. Especially with opium based drugs that would be a big problem.
  - kerkeslager 2y ago
    At a systemic level, this is dependent on what "normal" purity is for users. First-time buyers on darknet markets probably are more likely to overdose because they're used to less-pure products, although I don't have any statistics to back up that guess. But if people are buying on the darknet consistently, they'll be unlikely to overdose due to unexpected purity (though they might still overdose for other reasons). I'll admit I haven't done much research on opiates specifically for the simple reason that I have never known any active opiate addicts (though, I did get trained to administer Narcan). However, in my understanding of drugs such as coke, MDMA, or speed/adderall, which are more common in the tech scene, higher purity is unambiguously a net positive. It's been a while since I was actually involved in the overlap of the tech/festival scene but when I was around that more, I made anyone I knew used drugs aware that I had drug test kits and would let you borrow them no questions asked. I can't claim I ever saved a life, but I can say for certain that ~30 people at a festival I went to ended up riding out bad trips in medical tents or being transported to the hospital due to MDMA cut with DOC, and none of the people I let borrow my test kits at that festival did.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin. Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs. I think he is owed some responsibility, but he didn't kill them.

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
Pray tell, what is the difference between operating an electronic market where people can buy drugs and operating a physical one (say, a street corner) where people can do the same?
- vasilipupkin 2y ago
  huge difference. People can sell drugs on facebook marketplace but that doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a drug dealer. The difference is you bear responsibility for what you do.
  - lucb1e 2y ago
    > People can sell drugs on facebook marketplace but that doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a drug dealer In our legal system, they are in fact partially responsible if they don't disallow it and don't act upon reports. I'm not sure there is a difference whether it's physical or digital
    - vasilipupkin 2y ago
      fine, partially responsible is still a huge difference
      - lucb1e 2y ago
        How so? Why would an owner of a market with physical dimensions, held every Saturday or whatever, be any more or less responsible for what changes hands there?

valval 2y ago

He was not the dealer.

xyzzy9563 2y ago
True. If he is culpable for other people dealing drugs on his platform, then so is Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for allowing WhatsApp to facilitate drug trades.
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  Nah, that treatment is reserved for Telegram. Zuck does MMA and isn't Russian so he's cool.
  - Fnoord 2y ago
    He does block certain tags 'by accident'.

cheeseomlit 2y ago

"He killed children" is a pretty massive leap- he didn't sell heroin, he sold shrooms. Other vendors on the site sold heroin. And there is the matter of personal responsibility to consider- nobody forced those people to take heroin, and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere. The Sacklers are responsible for far more human misery in that regard, to an almost inconceivable degree, and they never have and never will see the inside of a cell

perihelions 2y ago
- "and if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere" That's very unlikely to be true in the case of the high-school kid who died buying a synthetic drug off the internet. They almost certainly did not have a dealer connection sophisticated enough to sell that. They almost certainly would have lived, if Silk Road were not available to them at that point in their life. You're advancing an argument about drug markets and personal autonomy in the general case, but it's a very poor fit to the concrete facts in the specific situation we're looking at.
- cheeseomlit 2y ago
  IMO these are circumstances too far removed from Ulbricht to hold him directly responsible. How many people bought drugs from the Silk Road, used them safely and responsibly, and in doing so avoided contact with violent criminals who they'd otherwise have to buy from, potentially saving them from the violence/misery/blackmail/overdoses that so commonly accompanies association with drug dealers IRL? Though I think this argument is tangential to the point on proportionality- Ross's sentence is an affront to justice when considered in the context of the Sackler's treatment
  - greentxt 2y ago
    "association with drug dealers IRL?" I'd rather get my milk from the corner store than some anonymous reseller on amazon. Real life drug dealers operate in markets too.

ty6853 2y ago

Wait until you hear how many people home swimming pool salesmen kill, and their victims are even younger children. Hell at least illegal drugs can be lifesaving. No one needs a home swimming pool.

15155 2y ago
We should license them by the gallon: assault pools with scary slides will be non-transferable to new owners.
greentxt 2y ago
Most pool owners aren't dead? Am i being trolled?
- wbobeirne 2y ago
  Most drug users are not dead either.

stickfigure 2y ago

This is so stupid. By this standard, automobile manufacturers kill 44,000 people in the US every year, including countless children. 3,500-4,500 people in the US are murdered by swimming pool contractors every year.

busymom0 2y ago

Other than the fact that he was not a drug dealer and other criticism others have already pointed out, Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include: > “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8) > “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12) https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU... 2+ life sentences for a website which sold weed is just outrageous. Also note that since 2012, people have become a LOT softer on weed and even other drugs have been legalized since then. Trump himself has said that he has friends who have benefitted from weed.

butlike 2y ago

Isn't the australian other story _LITERALLY_ the age-old "a friend of a friend's cousin jumped out of a window on LSD because they thought they could fly?" I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.

pointer_pointer 2y ago

[dead]