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."
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?)
"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
- "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.
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
if they hadn't gotten it from the silk road they'd have gotten it elsewhere
"If I don't do it, someone else will" - I suppose this is a convenient excuse that can be applied to anything unsavory, from the little guy selling shrooms at the street corner to nation states making nasty biological and chemical weapons?
Not saying there isn't truth to it, just wondering how as a society we seem to accept that doing unsavory things is a necessity because others are doing it (or they will be doing it soon, so we better be the first)
I say that less to justify Ulbricht's conduct and moreso to hold people responsible for their own actions. "If I don't do it someone else will" is a pretty flimsy moral justification for anything. But accusing someone of murder because they facilitated a transaction between two other parties they never met is a bridge too far, and IMO ignores the responsibility and agency of those parties who willingly participated in the transaction
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.
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".
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.
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.
I’m generally lasseiz-faire when it comes to most drugs, although I do think some drugs like opioids are rather objectively a cancer to society and anybody in that pipeline needs to be punished.
So. Comparisons to Google, Verizon, etc?
While his actions aren’t equivalent to a “direct” old-fashioned drug dealer selling fentanyl, they’re clearly also not equivalent to providers like Google or Verizon.
They provide truly general purpose communications networks. Common carriers. That’s different from a marketplace explicitly designed to facilitate a particular thing like selling drugs.
I mean, you can upload non-porn videos to PornHub, or attempt to met platonic knitting circle buddies on there. But let’s not sit around and pretend the entire operation isn’t designed around the explicit purpose of selling porn.
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.
> Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs.
Let's say I "build a network" of mules, planes, trucks, trafficking routes, and people who handle the distribution of drugs. I provide all the logistics to make the drugs go from supplier to end user.
So, a marketplace of sorts... in the real world, not on the Internet.
But, I don't actually sell the drugs to the end user on the street corner. That's someone else.
But a cut of each of those sales rolls up to me, and without me, those sales aren't happening (sure they could happen via someone else, but this particular network exists because I built it and I run it)..
I am what is referred to as a "drug lord".
How am I not responsible for heroin getting into the hands of vulnerable addicts?
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?
Operating a street corner? You mean like in the capacity of a city municipality, providing sidewalk, road, drainage infrastructure, perhaps some street lighting.
What does it mean to be "operating an electronic market"? Are you under the impression he was physically intermediating these transactions in some way? That the drugs passed through his hands?
> What does it mean to be "operating an electronic market"?
Ask Ross Ulbricht
> Are you under the impression [...] That the drugs passed through his hands?
They never said that, and it doesn't have to for being partially responsible. The Pirate Bay didn't host any copyrighted material, but the founders "were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine." Hosting the website where the issue is rampant is sufficient; no infringing material (drugs or movies) have to pass through your hands
But I think we might be in agreement here since you said above that Ross had some responsibility. I also don't think it's the same as handing out the drugs yourself
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.
> 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
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?
if the owner of a market isn't actually dealing drugs, whether the market is physical or electronic, that is different than if the "owner" of a street corner is either dealing himself or actively supervising those who are dealing for him
Isn't scale a difference? How much damage can one guy do from a street corner VS the other guy operating a large marketplace where anyone can buy anything from anywhere?
> 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 kinda do see your point, but I think I reach the opposite conclusion. If you are one person on a street corner it's one thing, if you enable a whole electronic marketplace you have a much larger effect.
Then again we should decide whether it's a bad thing to sell drugs, but if it is I would see him as more culpable than a random street dealer.
Yeah, that’s the part the legal system has a hard time with. We don’t have definitions or suitable penalties for these things
I mean, I’m not sure Pablo Escobar ever sold drugs or murdered anybody with his own hands. Metaphorically though there was a ton of blood on his hands. Charles Manson allegedly never killed anybody himself either. But we generally agree these guys were bad for society.
I’m generally lasseiz-faire about drugs, and I generally put the onus of responsibility on the person choosing to ingest them.
But there are some drugs, like opioids, that kind of transcend that. They cannot reasonably be safely used in a recreational manner, and are objectively a cancer to society.
I don't see the difference between building a marketplace in which people freely buy drugs from you and building a marketplace in which people freely buy drugs from people who aren't you.
> 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.
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.
- "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."
But how's that different from arguing that every crack dealer who doesn't cut their crack product is a utilitarian, net-positive life-saver?
Alice sells pure crack. Bob one street down adds fentanyl for the extra kick. It's a reasonable inference that Alice's clients, deprived of Alice, would switch to Bob and promptly off themselves. Does it therefore follow, that Alice-who-sells-crack is an upstanding, lifesaving even, member of society, who should be left free to sell more crack? If not, then what's the differentiation between Alice-who-sells-crack and Ross Ulbricht—what innovation has that cryptocurrency startup innovated, that makes it it a substantively different moral scenario?
Certainly, no crack dealer has ever, in the history of the US, tried to advance this specific utilitarian argument, which Ulbricht attached himself to (as Judge Forrest pointed out—it's a privileged argument of a privileged person).
> Certainly, no crack dealer has ever, in the history of the US, tried to advance this specific utilitarian argument, which Ulbricht attached himself to (as Judge Forrest pointed out—it's a privileged argument of a privileged person).
Tell me more about how a judge is calling people privileged.
I mean, do you have any discussion of the idea at hand, or are you just going to appeal to how we feel about hypothetical people who might have said the idea? Either the idea is correct or it's not, it doesn't matter if it's a crack dealer, a darknet market administrator, or a judge who makes it.
- "Tell me more about how a judge is calling people privileged"
ok
- "The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Katherine was 12. They were homeless for six months. "I came from nothing," Forrest said. "I came from a father who made no money. He was a playwright and then a writer, and even though he published a lot of books, I was a complete scholarship student all the way through."
Yeah, I read that before I said that, and I said it anyway, because that in no way changes anything. The accusation against Ullbricht was uttered by an adult Federal Judge with net worth in the millions, not a 12-year-old on food stamps. Just because she started out underprivileged, does not make her underprivileged now.
And look, I don't even agree with the narrative of "privilege". I think if you see someone being treated badly, the solution to that is to treat that person better, not to adamantly insist that people who are treated better are privileged. Calling someone privileged is pretty much always an ad-hominem argument to discard what they have to say.
I disagree with Forrest, not because she's privileged, although she IS privileged. I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht. I don't care who says an idea, I care whether the idea is true or not.
Do you have any actual refutation of that claim, or are you going to continue to insist that who said it is more important than whether it's true or not?
EDIT: Ironically, the argument Forrest is making here is actually a particularly offensive appeal to privileged (read: racist) misinformation. She references "crack dealers" specifically because crack has a reputation as the worst of the worst of drugs, when in fact crack is extremely similar to regular cocaine. The difference is that crack is used by poor, often black users, whereas cocaine is used by rich, often white, users. But criminal charges for crack vs. cocaine are still drastically different, although this has improved[1]. This is part of a larger pattern where drugs are prosecuted with more severity if they're used by poor black people than if they are used by middle class white people. For example, PCP is a whole schedule higher than, although these are chemically similar drugs with similar effects and harms in any of the scientific literature I can find.
> Just because she started out underprivileged, does not make her underprivileged now.
No, but it does mean that she knows what privilege is and is able to make assertions about it. And being in a good position such as being worth millions and being a judge isn't a privilege if you've earned it.
> I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht.
Purer drugs can kill more people as I pointed out about tolerance levels. Even then, it's not like Ullbricht knew or cared about the quality of the products being sold on his site. He just cared he got his cut.
> Purer drugs can kill more people as I pointed out about tolerance levels. Even then, it's not like Ullbricht knew or cared about the quality of the products being sold on his site. He just cared he got his cut.
At least you're engaging with the topic at hand instead of making ad hominem attacks now.
And... I partly agree with you! If you look at my comment upthread, you'll note I tried to make it clear that there's some ambiguity in whether the Silk Road, and the rise of darknet markets as a whole, has been a good thing. I'm certainly not holding up Ullbricht as some moral hero--that's entirely perihelions' hallucination.
The question in my mind, is whether what Ullbricht did is worth putting a 30 year old in prison for the rest of his life. I fundamentally disagree with two things which were involved in this sentencing:
1. Accusations that Ullbricht paid for murders should have no bearing on the court system. From what I've read, it seems like those accusations are probably true, but in the United States of America, we don't sentence people on "probably true" for crimes that weren't even prosecuted. If we're at all committed to the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, we can't be allowing prosecutors to convict for a crime, vaguely insinuate that a worse crime was committed, and get a sentence based on that worse crime's severity. If Ross Ullbricht was being sentenced for murder, he needed to be convicted of murder.
2. Making an example of someone isn't justice for that person. Our court system should not be engaged in sacrificing individuals for political goals, no matter how noble those political goals might be.
In my mind, it's pretty hard to justify a life sentence without accusing Ullbricht of murder or saying we should make an example of him. Everything he was accused of was a nonviolent offense for which he was a first-time offender. The only argument I can see for a harsher sentence is the scale of his operation--but when we compare to SEC cases for example with similar scales, we're still not seeing this severity of sentences.
Ullbricht served 11 years in prison before he was pardoned, and I don't think anything our current justice system does is "fair", I think that's about as fair as we can expect given what he did.
> Ullbricht served 11 years in prison before he was pardoned, and I don't think anything our current justice system does is "fair", I think that's about as fair as we can expect given what he did.
I would say he deserved about 20-25 years. He engaged in a large-scale drug operation. He explicitly set out to start a drug operation. He operated a drug operation that was larger than most could even imagine. And the fact he tried to put hits out on people really seals the deal, while it doesn't matter legally it does matter when we think about how much time did he really deserve.
> And the fact he tried to put hits out on people really seals the deal, while it doesn't matter legally it does matter when we think about how much time did he really deserve.
Do you believe in the presumption of innocence or not? This isn't an ambiguous thing.
This isn't about what he legally should have gotten but what he deserves. Rapist even if found not guilty still DESERVES to go to jail. They shouldn't legally. But however, they did not get what they deserved.
Furthermore, they had the evidence, they just dropped the charges because he had multiple life sentences.
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.
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.
My knowledge is mostly from living in an area where most addicts were heroin or other downer drugs. While there were a few who had problems with coke and speed most of the junkies I knew were on heroin. And when a strong package is released to the street people start dropping. There are even signs in prisons telling people to be careful when released because the stuff on the street is stronger than in prison.
If you look at who generally dies from drug overdoses it's largely opiate-based drug users. I once listened to two junkies who hadn't seen each other for quite a while talking and letting each other know about who died. They were mostly talking about overdoses, the conversation went on for about 30 minutes non-stop with different names non-stop. None of the cokeheads, eckyheads (MDMA), or speed freaks I knew ever had conversations like that.
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.”"
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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... ("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 ("Trump urges death penalty for drug dealers" (2018))
[2] 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))