Absolute no brainer, he should be celebrated. Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform. Of course if we had less draconian drug policy, it wouldn't be necessary but here we are.
> Countless lives were saved via the harm reduction effect of a peer reviewed, reputation based platform.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs. Most of them were likely "fell off the truck" samples from the original manufacturers being sold by people with an in on the supply, but no otherwise-easy access to an out on the demand.
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
> Anecdotally, Planet Money looked into this years ago and their reporting was that as far as they could tell, drugs on Silk Road weren't less safe than street drugs.
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
You shouldn't assume that all "street transfers" of drugs are peaceful or have a positive outcome for those involved. Harm reduction comes in many forms.
I'm pretty sure my comment says the exact opposite. I'm saying that SR was a massive operation that fueled street traffic, which in turn lacked any of the harm reduction virtues that SR is being assigned.
I'm pointing to the transaction layer. When you get thousands of dollars and product in a room with people you don't know things can get extremely unprofessional very quickly. It's really fun when you discover that most of the currency is counterfeit which happens more than you think.
What you say is also true. So there is a trade here. I'm not claiming it's "worth it," but the alternative without SR at all does seem to be more negative.
The overwhelming majority of drug sales are for personal use. That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
>it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
> It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
No no no, he is right. Its safe because if you receive a bad batch of drugs you can leave a negative review on the page of the drug cartel that has your name and address, no chance of that having any repercussions for you at all.
even if its not perfect for every situation it was a lot better then what existed.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
Yup. Drugs and the accompanying business disputes (there's a reason street dealers are armed or have armed people around) that would be normal in any other industry are sooo many people's (who would other wise not be violent criminals) entry point to violence. Letting parties remain at arms length yet transact successfully is such a huge step forward compared the prior status quo. Anything that gets buyers and sellers (either at the retail or distribution level) in illegal industries farther from each other is a win as far as I care.
As well as online drug marketplaces? Or would running one without legal trouble require a campaign-contribution booster pack?
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
I think most libertarians are against the war on drugs and would happily pardon or commute the sentences of non violent drug offenders, but the DPR probably takes priority for them because of the free trade issue compounded with the popularization of a non state-backed currency.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
If they are actually trying to maximize any kind of public welfare utility function, surely commutations and pardons and decriminalization and harm reduction for hundreds of thousands and millions of people, and body autonomy for hundreds of millions more should mean a wee bit more than this entirely transactional act.
