Murderers get less than that. We are truly an interesting society, aren't we - somehow kids doing LSD, a mostly harmless substance, is causing us more harm, as a society, than, say, violence?
Yes, the Pickard bust[0] was an interesting example of this. A highly productive, extremely smart and insightful researcher was given two(!) life sentences(something even most violent criminals, rapists and murderers don't get) at a high security prison. His crime was manufacturing LSD, which has no recorded overdoses, is not addictive, and reports of it harming users are extremely rare. Here[1] is a brief account of his heartbreaking story, and here[2] is more information about him, also containing links to recent papers that he published.
I suspect that law enforcement's embarrassment over how long it took them to find him also had something to do with it. The equivalent of running from the police in a foot chase, they're going to punish you for it.
A few years ago, David Nutt and other drug experts rated the relative harms of drugs and found LSD was among the least harmful.
These were the evaluation criteria: drug-specific and drug-related mortality, drug-specific and drug-related damage, dependence, drug-specific and drug-related impairment of mental functioning, loss of tangibles, loss of relationships, injury, crime, environmental damage, family adversities, international damage, economic cost, and community harm.
I read the _Illuminatus!_ trilogy, and wondered if AUM could possibly be made real from a combination of already-known drugs. Following my curiosity taught me a great deal about natural and synthetic psychoactive drugs, and some of what I learned was not completely bogus.
As a result of my "research", LSD remains one of the few recreational drugs that I might ever consider trying in the future, given the correct circumstances.
It is certainly less harmful than nicotine, ethanol, and acetaminophen. But now that marijuana is legal in some states, I expect that it will soon displace LSD-25 as the least harmful recreational drug that I know about.
If you are also curious, my conclusion was that LSD-25 is probably present in AUM at a psychoactive, but non-hallucinogenic, dose, mostly as an adjuvant for the other ingredients. It would help bridge the gap between a drug known to have powerful, positive, short-term effects and one known to cause long-term but very unpredictable changes in behavior.
Well yes, you are right. But just the fact that something is difficult to overdose does not imply long-term safety of use. And as far as I know there are know connections between certain psychiatric issues and LSD usage. This is why I do not believe that "LSD is basically harmless".
It is harmless compared to many other substances, including aspirin and acetaminophen. Pretty much everything when taken in excessive quantities is harmful.
You're an idiot. Flashbacks are not a real thing. Pretty much every negative effect of LSD is exaggerated or based on biased reports by the government to justify making anything that gets you high illegal. An LSD 'flashback' is more like deja vu, like "Wow this is really similar to something I've experienced before", not like you just randomly go back into a full on trip. If you're schizophrenic you probably shouldn't take LSD, sure. But if you have heart palpitations you probably shouldn't drink Red Bull. People should be responsible for their own decisions, not you or the government or anyone else.
An idiot is "an intellectually disabled person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way". Does not seem to fit the definition.
How nice of the government to protect me from the minute possibility that a bad acid trip will give me PTSD. If only they cared as much about all the young kids they send over to the Middle East.
He wasn't distinctly charged with it, but according to the document tptacek linked earlier (https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...), the attempted murders for hire were considered to be an element of the criminal enterprise and conspiracy he was running. He was convicted of those charges, so as far as I can tell, he was convicted of something like that.
Drug dealers tend to handle the drugs they are convicted of selling.
Whilst I agree he deliberately set up a website designed for use for criminal transactions, I find it ridiculous that everyone (including the courts) would rather focus on people buying drugs online (if that was their big thing, then many of the major early newsgroup operators would be in prison for life, for having not even concealed names for newsgroups deliberately designed for buying and selling drugs), than on the selling of stolen credit cards and other identity theft sales.
Sure, drugs are bad m'kay, and we have to stomp on people who use, buy and sell them or something, but, how many lives are destroyed by identity theft?
Or do the courts think that is too complicated for people to understand, whilst the "He let drugs be sold on his website" is something even Fox News can communicate.
edit: this is something that vice news [0] reported that is apparently wrong.
> But despite these setbacks, Ulbricht was ultimately convicted in February on a raft of charges, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering, and hiring assassins to take out members of Silk Road.
No, he wasn't. He was never even charged with that; the story of one attempt to hire a hitman was admitted into the trial as evidence that he was running the Silk Road and knew what he was doing, but that was never one of the actual charges against him.
The prosecution sentencing memo rebuts this argument, pointing out that Ulbricht's attempts to procure murder for hire were explicit factual components of one of the charges he faced.
Ulbricht's argument to the effect that he wasn't properly charged with the murder-for-hire scheme was addressed in detail by the court:
> The prosecution sentencing memo rebuts this argument, pointing out that Ulbricht's attempts to procure murder for hire were explicit factual components of one of the charges he faced.
The prosecution memo does not rebut this argument, it rebuts instead the clearly different but related argument that the murder-for-hire scheme was uncharged conduct which could therefore not be considered in sentencing. It was -- as they correctly point out -- charged, as it was one of the overt acts specifically laid out in the Count One narcotics trafficking conspiracy charge.
It is nevertheless inaccurate to say he was convicted of hiring a hitman, since a conspiracy conviction requires (as far as overt acts go) only a finding that the defendant committed at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, there were several overt acts charged in that count, and the verdict form did not direct the jury to return separate findings of fact on each charged overt act.
I'm certainly not saying he was convicted of hiring a hit man. He was convicted of a conspiracy to traffic narcotics, one overt act of which was the attempt to procure a murder for hire.
The argument I'm challenging is the notion that the factual claim of Ulbricht's attempt to hire a hitman wasn't subjected to scrutiny during the trial. It was a specifically introduced factual claim, which Ulbricht's counsel was required to rebut.
That court opinion describes a list of alleged chats that the Feds planned to introduce as evidence. It does not say the court accepted that evidence as true in the form of a finding of fact. (Put another way, that document does not say what you says it does, and we all know there are two sides to every story.)
It seems to me that if the Feds were confident about their murder-for-hire claim, they would have charged Ulbricht accordingly. That they chose not to do so indicates they were less than confident, and we should draw our conclusions accordingly.
For all I know he may well have been involved in murder for hire; I haven't paid close enough attention to the case to have an opinion. But I've followed too many hacker cases to accept unrebutted DOJ allegations as gospel truth.
This is not quite true. While he was not charged in this trial with the most obvious offense that would flow from that (e.g., attempted murder, etc.), this was specifically charged as one of the overt acts of one of the conspiracy charges he was convicted of. But it wasn't the only overt act charged, and the guilty verdict doesn't include a finding on the individual overt acts charged separately. So, its not accurate to say he was convicted of hiring a hitman.
If by "proof" you mean "evidence", there are journal entries from DPR's laptop describing the attempted killings, records of messages between him and the would-be killer, and Bitcoin transaction records of the sizable payments involved. It certainly wasn't invented by the media.
