Why Trump Should Keep His Promise To Free Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht
In addition to many other things he has promised to do on his first day in office, Donald Trump has said he will free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for connecting drug consumers with drug sellers. From a libertarian perspective, it is obvious that no one should go to prison for facilitating peaceful transactions among consenting adults. But Ulbricht’s grossly disproportionate punishment should give pause even to supporters of the war on drugs.
Two weeks before Ulbricht was sentenced, his lawyer sought to dispel the notion that his website, which enabled people around the world to anonymously buy politically disfavored intoxicants with bitcoin via the Tor network, was “a more dangerous version of a traditional drug marketplace.” To the contrary, defense attorney Joshua Dratel said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, Silk Road “was in many respects the most responsible such marketplace in history.”
As became clear at the sentencing hearing on May 29, 2015, Forrest was not impressed by that argument. But it was undeniably true that Silk Road offered consumers several important advantages. Those advantages explain why the site, which Ulbricht launched in February 2011 and ran until his arrest in October 2013, achieved the success that attracted the government’s attention.
Silk Road not only protected consumers against the risks of arrest and black-market violence. It also protected them against rip-offs through an escrow system that delayed payment until shipments were received.
In contrast with the potentially lethal uncertainty regarding drug composition that users typically face as a result of prohibition, Silk Road offered some assurance that buyers were getting what they expected. Vendors who received low ratings from customers tended to lose business and risked removal by the site’s administrators, who were keen to maintain the reputation that made Silk Road attractive.
Anonymous forums, which included input from a Spanish physician and drug expert, allowed buyers to exchange information and advice. As researchers such as Tim Bingham and Monica Barratt observed, Silk Road created a stigma-free, supportive community that enabled drug users to learn from each other and obtain psychoactive substances without the hassles, legal hazards, and threats to personal safety associated with buying drugs on the street.
As Forrest saw it, these benefits magnified Ulbricht’s offenses because Silk Road encouraged drug use by making it less dangerous and more convenient. Even if you are sympathetic to that view, a life sentence for a first-time, nonviolent drug offender is hard to fathom, let alone justify. It was far more severe than the sentences imposed on other Silk Road defendants, including people who actually sold drugs, as opposed to assisting those transactions.
The government claimed Ulbricht was not in fact nonviolent. It averred that he commissioned the murders of people who threatened to reveal confidential information that would have disrupted Silk Road. But there was no evidence these alleged schemes were ever carried out: In the government’s telling, Ulbricht was tricked into paying phony assassins (including a corrupt federal drug agent) who promised to make his problems disappear.
More to the point, the charges that resulted in Ulbricht’s life sentence did not include attempted mur
Article from Reason.com
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