8 ms·

This is the key point. He is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, pretty much, for running a website. Not for hurting anyone, not for even threatening

by zanny 11y ago

This is the key point. He is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, pretty much, for running a website. Not for hurting anyone, not for even threatening to kill anyone - those charges weren't a part of his conviction - but simply by enabling the exchange of drugs he apparently should be locked away forever. Go Team 'Murica....

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
He didn't just "enable the exchange of drugs". He knowingly hid that he did so, and made bucketloads of money off it.
- psykovsky 11y ago
  What are those bucketloads worth when the only time you get to spend them are when you buy assassinations from dirty undercover DEA agents?
tzs 11y ago
Are you implying drugs don't hurt anyone? Even the most ardent proponent of full legalization usually acknowledges that many drugs are very harmful--they just believe the people should be free to do things even if they are harmful to themselves. I generally support decriminalization or even legalization, but I would be reluctant to allow internet sales. I'd require sales to be through licensed dealers and in person, so that an addict cannot completely cut themselves off from human contact. Internet sales make drugs too easy.
- fleitz 11y ago
  No more than water does. Even as a proponent of full legalization I know that as little as a few minutes spent in water can kill someone, and often does. Why people are allowed to casually dive into this toxic substance is beyond me. No licenses, no regulations, practically any body of water you can find you're allowed to jump into totally unsupervised. Most places don't even have signs warning people of the danger, and worst yet, many children practice a dangerous activity called 'swimming' in this substance often daring each other as to who can drop the highest from a rope into a potentially fatal body of water. Also, once you start drinking it you need to find at least 4 litres of this a day to keep from going into water withdrawl, commonly known as dehydration, this can happen in as little as 3 days with out your daily fix.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health. It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place. But that's all beside the point. Laws and rules do not exist in vacuum, and humans are not spherical cows of uniform density. Time and again history has proven that most people can handle exposure to water safely, while they can't handle being exposed to hard drugs. You can blame this on individual stupidity, but people don't have perfectly free will, and if this stupidity predictably touches big fractions of a population, it's time to mitigate it.
    - itistoday2 11y ago
      > There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health. Neither do most drugs, especially most illegal drugs. Many legal drugs do (the most addictive of all being nicotine), but that also doesn't matter and is besides the point. These are health issues, not criminal issues.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - fleitz 11y ago
      Also, can you please avoid drinking water for the next 4 days... I think you might be addicted, if you're not addicted you won't show any signs of withdrawl. Addicts suffering from water withdrawl often drink amounts that are unsafe for their health which is why marathon runners have to be given water adulterated with mind altering metals like sodium and highly toxic chlorine to make it safe for them to drink. It's kind of insane that water addiction would drive people to ingest water in such vast amounts that you'd have to add chlorine and sodium to make it safer. If you think places unsafe for swimming are marked I would hazard a guess that you haven't spent much time in the outdoors.
- civilian 11y ago
  Licensed & regulated dealers (aka pharmacies) would be great. In regards to the harm from drugs-- I'd add the obvious point that prohibition comes with a really high cost. I recently did dry-january and I was really happy with the results of cutting back on my drinking. I wake up more rested, and had more energy in the evenings. I've been thinking that going totally dry might be a good thing to do in my life. But would I make alcohol, one of the top killers in america, illegal? (ref: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm ) Absolutely not. If you went to US high school you know why--- alcohol-dealing gangs took over. People turned to bad products (wood alcohol, that potentially included methanol) to get their alcohol fix. I imagine we needlessly jailed a lot of alcohol drinkers and pushers. A more indepth analysis of alcohol prohibition: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition??
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Not sure why people and especially lawmakers keep separating alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol is a drug and one of the more dangerous and addictive ones at that. If that is legal than so should a lot of other drugs be. And trying to make it illegal, as you say does not work; it makes it things worse.
  - krylon 11y ago
    > Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition?? Because they have been told by the media, over and over, for decades. At least that's my theory. Consider how often the phrase "drugs and alcohol" is used in the general context of substance-based addiction. Because it is socially accepted. Being a connoisseur of fine wines or whiskey is something many people consider sophisticated. Being a connoisseur of, say psychedelics or stimulants is, apparently a criminal offense.
    - jensen123 11y ago
      My theory is that the media tells people what they want to hear, in order to sell the most papers, page impressions etc. If they told stuff that the general public disagreed with, then they would probably lose readers/viewers. Alcohol has a long tradition in the western civilization, so people feel somewhat comfortable with that. Other drugs probably seem very new and scary to the average guy.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  > Are you implying drugs don't hurt anyone? Drugs, like spoons, hurt people. Some other items that kill people include: Cars. Motorcycles. Trees. Water. Too much air. Too little air. People. Dogs. Sticks. Bath tubs. Guns. In the end, drugs are no more inherently harmful than any of the items listed above. What usually kills people, however, is not drugs, but things associated with drugs that exist only because we have decided they should exist: - Drug gangs and cartels and the violence associated with them are the product of US government policy, not drugs. - Drug overdoses are the product of US government policy, not drugs (in most cases), because especially with illegal drugs people don't know what they're getting or how much of it or how to use it. It is primarily we that kill people. Look around you. If you see a face that supports the drug war, that person is partially guilty in all drug related deaths. The irony of this case is that Judge Katherine Forrest is now much more responsible for the drug-related deaths she is trying to prevent.
  - mpyne 11y ago
    Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies.
  - pkinsky 11y ago
    >Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies. Maple syrup may not have been a good example http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics
    - itistoday2 11y ago
      I think you meant to reply to mpyne, but that is a very amusing observation. :)
    - vacri 11y ago
      Nice rejoinder to 'Canadians overdose on maple syrup' - a page about a generic disease that never mentions maple syrup nor Canadians, nor dosage. Here is an in-kind rebuttal to your link: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-like-turtles http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-like-turtles
- homulilly 11y ago
  Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those. I agree that drug sales should be regulated but that doesn't in any way make sentencing someone to life in prison for running a website any less fucked up.
  - timsally 11y ago
    > Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those. The following applies only to the US. Since 1968 you need a license granted by the federal government to sell guns (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firearms-license-ffl https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firea...). The law allowing you to carry a firearm was passed in 1791. Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one. When thinking about this issue, I've found the following thought experiments useful: (1) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar illegal gun operation get life in prison, even though unlike drugs, the right to own firearms is explicitly protected by the Constitution? (2) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar website selling only weed in legal venues (Colorado, etc) be convicted of any crime, never-mind sentenced to life in prison, even though it is against federal law? Personally I answer (1) as YES and (2) as NO, and place Ulbricht's conduct significantly closer to (1) than to (2).
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      That dichotomy is clever, almost convincing, and plainly obvious in its manipulative structure.
      - Zancarius 11y ago
        I'd greatly appreciate if you could elaborate, because I'm finding myself confused as to what you're getting at, and I have no idea which point you're addressing. I think I follow, but I'm not convinced my interpretation is correct. Honestly, I can't tell if this block is because I'm conflating the context of the greater discussion (the Ulbricht trial) with the more nuanced points of timsally's comment. Thanks!
      - 11y ago
- timsally 11y ago
  Do you apply this logic to alcohol as well? It's a drug and there are many addicts, so similar to other drugs I don't think it should be sold online. Where do you come down on that? I only ask because many people implicitly omit alcohol when discussing drugs, even though it is one.
  - tzs 11y ago
    I'd be reluctant to allow it, just like with other drugs. As with other drugs, if it can be shown that a particular drug is not overly addicting, then I'd be fine with that drug being sold online (but only from licensed and regulated dealers, with enforced quality standards). So, online beer would probably turn out to be OK, as would online marijuana. Cigarettes are an interesting case. Nicotine is pretty high up on the addicting list, but experimentally even heavy smokers don't seem to consumer so much that they ruin their lives the way, say, a heroin addict might. Probably because cigarettes don't really impair your functionality. So probably they should be allowed online.
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  If drugs hurt people, it should be treated as a medical issue and not a criminal issue.
- mkramlich 11y ago
  from the historical record I'm pretty sure that the USA gov has caused/allowed more drugs/chemicals/radiation/weapons to cause more harm/deaths to innocent/civilian people than Ross ever has. I don't see any US President or Senator, etc., in jail, because of that. example: drop tons of Agent Orange on the lands/people of Vietnam? Just an oopsie! and they move on, wipe their hands clean. People dead and children deformed. Oopsie! Our mistake. Next meeting.
  - iyn 11y ago
    Exactly. What about "There must be no doubt that no one is above the law"? Every time I learn more about history, politics etc I'm more and more frustrated. The system/law doesn't work the way it is presented and people/institutions that are "in charge" have an incentive to left it the way it is (otherwise 50% of them should be in jail). Any ideas what can we do? I like projects that try to give more power to the people (like DemocracyOS), but I think it's rather kind of a bugfix for a badly designed system - it's important to try to improve it to keep it somehow working in the short term, yet (IMO) the whole architecture is broken and won't work in the long term when everything changes so fast...
- vegedor 11y ago
  Guns don't kill people, people do. The place wasn't only used for drugs, but mostly, sure. The drugs aren't harmful, harm is an abstract term for a process that hurts. The process in question is the abuse of drugs. The selling of drugs by itself doesn't cause direct harm.
- baddox 11y ago
  Drugs don't do anywhere near as much harm as drug prohibition.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago
Give me a break. I also think the punishment was excessively harsh (the murder-for-hire stuff likely played a role even though he was not convicted on that), but saying he is getting life in prison for "running a website" is a huge oversimplification of the ruling. That being said, I think this is the federal government showing, through the courts, how terrified they are of people running things they cannot control. Bitcoin terrifies them. They want to send a very clear message.

by zanny 11y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

He didn't just "enable the exchange of drugs". He knowingly hid that he did so, and made bucketloads of money off it.

psykovsky 11y ago
What are those bucketloads worth when the only time you get to spend them are when you buy assassinations from dirty undercover DEA agents?

tzs 11y ago

Are you implying drugs don't hurt anyone? Even the most ardent proponent of full legalization usually acknowledges that many drugs are very harmful--they just believe the people should be free to do things even if they are harmful to themselves. I generally support decriminalization or even legalization, but I would be reluctant to allow internet sales. I'd require sales to be through licensed dealers and in person, so that an addict cannot completely cut themselves off from human contact. Internet sales make drugs too easy.

fleitz 11y ago
No more than water does. Even as a proponent of full legalization I know that as little as a few minutes spent in water can kill someone, and often does. Why people are allowed to casually dive into this toxic substance is beyond me. No licenses, no regulations, practically any body of water you can find you're allowed to jump into totally unsupervised. Most places don't even have signs warning people of the danger, and worst yet, many children practice a dangerous activity called 'swimming' in this substance often daring each other as to who can drop the highest from a rope into a potentially fatal body of water. Also, once you start drinking it you need to find at least 4 litres of this a day to keep from going into water withdrawl, commonly known as dehydration, this can happen in as little as 3 days with out your daily fix.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health. It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place. But that's all beside the point. Laws and rules do not exist in vacuum, and humans are not spherical cows of uniform density. Time and again history has proven that most people can handle exposure to water safely, while they can't handle being exposed to hard drugs. You can blame this on individual stupidity, but people don't have perfectly free will, and if this stupidity predictably touches big fractions of a population, it's time to mitigate it.
  - itistoday2 11y ago
    > There's a difference in degree and in kind. Water does not create addiction that forces you to consume it in amounts that are seriously harmful to your health. Neither do most drugs, especially most illegal drugs. Many legal drugs do (the most addictive of all being nicotine), but that also doesn't matter and is besides the point. These are health issues, not criminal issues.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - fleitz 11y ago
    Also, can you please avoid drinking water for the next 4 days... I think you might be addicted, if you're not addicted you won't show any signs of withdrawl. Addicts suffering from water withdrawl often drink amounts that are unsafe for their health which is why marathon runners have to be given water adulterated with mind altering metals like sodium and highly toxic chlorine to make it safe for them to drink. It's kind of insane that water addiction would drive people to ingest water in such vast amounts that you'd have to add chlorine and sodium to make it safer. If you think places unsafe for swimming are marked I would hazard a guess that you haven't spent much time in the outdoors.
civilian 11y ago
Licensed & regulated dealers (aka pharmacies) would be great. In regards to the harm from drugs-- I'd add the obvious point that prohibition comes with a really high cost. I recently did dry-january and I was really happy with the results of cutting back on my drinking. I wake up more rested, and had more energy in the evenings. I've been thinking that going totally dry might be a good thing to do in my life. But would I make alcohol, one of the top killers in america, illegal? (ref: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm ) Absolutely not. If you went to US high school you know why--- alcohol-dealing gangs took over. People turned to bad products (wood alcohol, that potentially included methanol) to get their alcohol fix. I imagine we needlessly jailed a lot of alcohol drinkers and pushers. A more indepth analysis of alcohol prohibition: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition??
- tluyben2 11y ago
  Not sure why people and especially lawmakers keep separating alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol is a drug and one of the more dangerous and addictive ones at that. If that is legal than so should a lot of other drugs be. And trying to make it illegal, as you say does not work; it makes it things worse.
- krylon 11y ago
  > Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition?? Because they have been told by the media, over and over, for decades. At least that's my theory. Consider how often the phrase "drugs and alcohol" is used in the general context of substance-based addiction. Because it is socially accepted. Being a connoisseur of fine wines or whiskey is something many people consider sophisticated. Being a connoisseur of, say psychedelics or stimulants is, apparently a criminal offense.
  - jensen123 11y ago
    My theory is that the media tells people what they want to hear, in order to sell the most papers, page impressions etc. If they told stuff that the general public disagreed with, then they would probably lose readers/viewers. Alcohol has a long tradition in the western civilization, so people feel somewhat comfortable with that. Other drugs probably seem very new and scary to the average guy.
itistoday2 11y ago
> Are you implying drugs don't hurt anyone? Drugs, like spoons, hurt people. Some other items that kill people include: Cars. Motorcycles. Trees. Water. Too much air. Too little air. People. Dogs. Sticks. Bath tubs. Guns. In the end, drugs are no more inherently harmful than any of the items listed above. What usually kills people, however, is not drugs, but things associated with drugs that exist only because we have decided they should exist: - Drug gangs and cartels and the violence associated with them are the product of US government policy, not drugs. - Drug overdoses are the product of US government policy, not drugs (in most cases), because especially with illegal drugs people don't know what they're getting or how much of it or how to use it. It is primarily we that kill people. Look around you. If you see a face that supports the drug war, that person is partially guilty in all drug related deaths. The irony of this case is that Judge Katherine Forrest is now much more responsible for the drug-related deaths she is trying to prevent.
- mpyne 11y ago
  Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies.
- pkinsky 11y ago
  >Yeah, I remember reading news stories all the time about how Canadians overdose on maple syrup or how Egyptians overdose on water. Truly, all drugs are just as innocuous as air and puppies. Maple syrup may not have been a good example http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics
  - itistoday2 11y ago
    I think you meant to reply to mpyne, but that is a very amusing observation. :)
  - vacri 11y ago
    Nice rejoinder to 'Canadians overdose on maple syrup' - a page about a generic disease that never mentions maple syrup nor Canadians, nor dosage. Here is an in-kind rebuttal to your link: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-like-turtles http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-like-turtles
homulilly 11y ago
Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those. I agree that drug sales should be regulated but that doesn't in any way make sentencing someone to life in prison for running a website any less fucked up.
- timsally 11y ago
  > Cars and guns also hurt people but pretty much anyone can sell those. The following applies only to the US. Since 1968 you need a license granted by the federal government to sell guns (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firearms-license-ffl https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firea...). The law allowing you to carry a firearm was passed in 1791. Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one. When thinking about this issue, I've found the following thought experiments useful: (1) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar illegal gun operation get life in prison, even though unlike drugs, the right to own firearms is explicitly protected by the Constitution? (2) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar website selling only weed in legal venues (Colorado, etc) be convicted of any crime, never-mind sentenced to life in prison, even though it is against federal law? Personally I answer (1) as YES and (2) as NO, and place Ulbricht's conduct significantly closer to (1) than to (2).
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    That dichotomy is clever, almost convincing, and plainly obvious in its manipulative structure.
    - Zancarius 11y ago
      I'd greatly appreciate if you could elaborate, because I'm finding myself confused as to what you're getting at, and I have no idea which point you're addressing. I think I follow, but I'm not convinced my interpretation is correct. Honestly, I can't tell if this block is because I'm conflating the context of the greater discussion (the Ulbricht trial) with the more nuanced points of timsally's comment. Thanks!
    - 11y ago
timsally 11y ago
Do you apply this logic to alcohol as well? It's a drug and there are many addicts, so similar to other drugs I don't think it should be sold online. Where do you come down on that? I only ask because many people implicitly omit alcohol when discussing drugs, even though it is one.
- tzs 11y ago
  I'd be reluctant to allow it, just like with other drugs. As with other drugs, if it can be shown that a particular drug is not overly addicting, then I'd be fine with that drug being sold online (but only from licensed and regulated dealers, with enforced quality standards). So, online beer would probably turn out to be OK, as would online marijuana. Cigarettes are an interesting case. Nicotine is pretty high up on the addicting list, but experimentally even heavy smokers don't seem to consumer so much that they ruin their lives the way, say, a heroin addict might. Probably because cigarettes don't really impair your functionality. So probably they should be allowed online.
akshatpradhan 11y ago
If drugs hurt people, it should be treated as a medical issue and not a criminal issue.
mkramlich 11y ago
from the historical record I'm pretty sure that the USA gov has caused/allowed more drugs/chemicals/radiation/weapons to cause more harm/deaths to innocent/civilian people than Ross ever has. I don't see any US President or Senator, etc., in jail, because of that. example: drop tons of Agent Orange on the lands/people of Vietnam? Just an oopsie! and they move on, wipe their hands clean. People dead and children deformed. Oopsie! Our mistake. Next meeting.
- iyn 11y ago
  Exactly. What about "There must be no doubt that no one is above the law"? Every time I learn more about history, politics etc I'm more and more frustrated. The system/law doesn't work the way it is presented and people/institutions that are "in charge" have an incentive to left it the way it is (otherwise 50% of them should be in jail). Any ideas what can we do? I like projects that try to give more power to the people (like DemocracyOS), but I think it's rather kind of a bugfix for a badly designed system - it's important to try to improve it to keep it somehow working in the short term, yet (IMO) the whole architecture is broken and won't work in the long term when everything changes so fast...
vegedor 11y ago
Guns don't kill people, people do. The place wasn't only used for drugs, but mostly, sure. The drugs aren't harmful, harm is an abstract term for a process that hurts. The process in question is the abuse of drugs. The selling of drugs by itself doesn't cause direct harm.
baddox 11y ago
Drugs don't do anywhere near as much harm as drug prohibition.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago

Give me a break. I also think the punishment was excessively harsh (the murder-for-hire stuff likely played a role even though he was not convicted on that), but saying he is getting life in prison for "running a website" is a huge oversimplification of the ruling. That being said, I think this is the federal government showing, through the courts, how terrified they are of people running things they cannot control. Bitcoin terrifies them. They want to send a very clear message.