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))
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.
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 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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
[1] 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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-po...
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.
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.
- "“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-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.
I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.
> “‘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...
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.
Hell at least illegal drugs can be lifesaving. No one needs a home swimming pool.