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Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

nytimes.com

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Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#571

Post by wclax04 »

movetola wrote: post #505
civilian wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licensed & regulated dealers (aka pharmacies) would be great. In regards to the harm from drugs-- I'd add the obvious point that prohibition comes with a really high cost. I recently did dry-january and I was really happy with the results of cutting back on my drinking. I wake up more rested, and had more energy in the evenings. I've been thinking that going totally dry might be a good thing to do in my life. But wou…

Alcohol dealing gangs? We didn't have those at my high school, we'd just give a homeless guy extra cash to buy us a few 40s or a bottle of Jameson.

I think he meant if you studied at a US a high school you would have learned about prohibition and the associated organized crime.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#572

Post by Retra »

brandon272 wrote: post #39
brotoss wrote: post #7

Fuck the war on drugs

It saddens me that acknowledging the war on drugs as being corrosive and detrimental is seen as extreme by mainstream modern society. Few seem to question extreme punishments for crimes related to the manufacture or distribution of drugs.

It's not that extreme of an opinion. What is extreme is thinking the Ross Ulbricht is somehow a champion against the war on drugs, or that his conviction should be considered as representative of a pattern.

Either way, people don't question these punishments because they don't fear them. And the don't fear them because they don't aspire to be drug lords or murderers.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#573

Post by arbuge »

As an aside, since this is HN, I thought some portion of the audience here might be interested to know that the code for the Silk Road marketplace appears to have been in PHP, using CodeIgniter as the framework:

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-...

"In any case, I decided to rewrite the site in an mvc framework as suggested by my benevolent hacker adviser. So, while still manually processing transactions and responding to a bigger and bigger message load, I learned to use codeigniter and began rewriting the site."

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#575

Post by swombat »

ebspelman wrote: post #297
hebdo wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of rationalizations may ruin your entire life one day. You cannot and do not know where will any experimentation with drugs bring you to. Remember that the first step of the twelve steps is "admitting that one cannot control one's alcoholism, addiction or compulsion". Finding reasons why you are more privileged than others makes this step even harder.

I really appreciate this comment, even though I personally don't agree with it. You can't take drugs 100% safely, but their safety level does vary, and it definitely varies with wealth. Amphetamines, for example. Rich Americans get prescriptions for Adderall. Poor Americans make meth. Or take opiates. Vicodin vs. heroin.

> You can't take drugs 100% safely

I guess this depends on your definition of "100% safely", and probably also on your definition of "drugs". Let's assume that "drugs" means "psychoactive drugs". In that case, I'd suggest that you can take a cup of coffee pretty much as close to 100% safely as is achievable for anything in the world that you can ingest. And coffee is psychoactive. So, it is possible to take drugs 100% safely.

Even alcohol can be taken safely: so long as you keep the dose low, and you're not someone with a special sensitivity to it (e.g. an alcoholic), you can have a glass of red wine with pretty much zero chance of anything bad happening.

That also applies to all the other psychoactive drugs in between: speed, cocaine, LSD, heroin, mushrooms, peyote, MDMA, whatever. They can all be taken 100% safely. The key in all cases is always the same: good education and moderation.

All of these drugs can also be abused. You can kill yourself with caffeine too (though unlikely in coffee form - you'd need about 50-100 espresso shots). I recall a story of someone who ate a whole pack of caffeinated candy, thinking it was normal candy, and died.

Shit happens.

Shit happens more often without good research, education and clear guidelines.

Shit happens even more often without good research, education and clear guidelines, and with dodgy suppliers who may or may not be selling you the thing you think you're buying because they're all criminals.

The real culprit in every drug death? The three branches of the government, who have failed to do the right thing on this topic for 50+ years now.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#576

Post by srdev »

copsarebastards wrote: post #553
srdev wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed? Yes. That was literally a critical piece of evidence at the trial. The defense tried to claim that it wasn't Ulbricht's and failed. Take a look at the post I'm responding to here. A lot of people in this thread are acting like the murder for hire thing is…

I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to. In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking , the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor. The murder-for-hire case is a separate case, which remains untried. The evidence in the murder-for-hire case is probably compelling, otherwise the government probably wouldn't bring the case. But that's utterly unr…

> I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to

You do because that's the context of the point I am making. Right now you're having an argument with some point I didn't make, and it's coming off as a bit silly.

>In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor.

First of all, I'm talking about HN here and the persistent need for posters to pretend like the specific evidence we have of Ross being violent was shaky. It's not. We have very good evidence that Ross was a violent person. I wasn't making claims about whether that should have been used in sentencing, so the fact that you keep harping on that is weird.

Second, the fact that he tried to hire murderers was material to the criminal conspiracy charges. So it's not just "a crazy rumor" from the courts point of view. The current way sentencing works is that evidence introduced in the trial can be used for sentencing as long as it meets some burden of proof , and this evidence was there and met that burden.

My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint, but I don't have background in law to understand why the rules are the way they are.

At the same time I'm not going to rally behind a guy who incompetently tried to murder people as a way to express my distaste for the American justice system and the drug war. There is such a thing as picking your battles and this is not the hill I want to die on. I am aggrevated that people who share these views seem to be stuck on Ross and are trying to retconn away the evidence rather than pick a better battle to fight. There are myriads of drug war victims and avenues of tackling the problem, but we're going to try to bang a square peg into a round hole here because the guy is a white upper-middle class programmer and we think Bitcoins and Dark Webs are cool? Right.

The strongest statement I will make is that the life sentence is clearly unjust. People should be given second chances with very very few exceptions. Ross should be one of these people.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#577

Post by JoeAltmaier »

swombat wrote: post #575
ebspelman wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate this comment, even though I personally don't agree with it. You can't take drugs 100% safely, but their safety level does vary, and it definitely varies with wealth. Amphetamines, for example. Rich Americans get prescriptions for Adderall. Poor Americans make meth. Or take opiates. Vicodin vs. heroin.

> You can't take drugs 100% safely I guess this depends on your definition of "100% safely", and probably also on your definition of "drugs". Let's assume that "drugs" means "psychoactive drugs". In that case, I'd suggest that you can take a cup of coffee pretty much as close to 100% safely as is achievable for anything in the world that you can ingest. And coffee is psychoactive. So, it is possible to take drugs 100…

Fooling yourself about safety. There's more to it than moderation and education. Look in the news for evidence: how many deaths related to meth overdoses, vs caffeine overdoses.

More powerful psychoactives can make education and moderation moot. Then the addictive qualities can drive the user down a well-trodden road. Ignore this at your peril.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#578

Post by maxerickson »

swombat wrote: post #575
ebspelman wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate this comment, even though I personally don't agree with it. You can't take drugs 100% safely, but their safety level does vary, and it definitely varies with wealth. Amphetamines, for example. Rich Americans get prescriptions for Adderall. Poor Americans make meth. Or take opiates. Vicodin vs. heroin.

> You can't take drugs 100% safely I guess this depends on your definition of "100% safely", and probably also on your definition of "drugs". Let's assume that "drugs" means "psychoactive drugs". In that case, I'd suggest that you can take a cup of coffee pretty much as close to 100% safely as is achievable for anything in the world that you can ingest. And coffee is psychoactive. So, it is possible to take drugs 100…

There's some kind of phrasing problem when you exclude a sensitive group of people in order to state that something is 100% safe.

I think that"100% safe" is an exaggeration intended to emphasize that the risk is manageable and it would be more polite to simply state that many substances can be ingested with minimal risk.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#579

Post by JoeAltmaier »

wz1000 wrote: post #534
hebdo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of prescription opioids being sold in the US is insane, this is my opinion on the subject. It cannot end well in the long run. There are already millions of Americans that started their opioid adventure with oxycodone or hydrocodone, often coming from the "upper spheres". Addiction does not discriminate. Changing the name from amphetamine to Adderal will not give you more control over your addiction. You w…

If you have a decent income, it is possible to live with a oxycodone addiction. You know that the substance is free of adulterants and is consistently dosed. Pure oxycodone should have limited side effects. However, if you are not in such a good financial position, a heroin addiction will almost certainly ruin your life. From the financial burden of the substance itself, to side effects from adulterants and the impre…

I'm not convinced that heroin ruins your life only because the dose is unpredictable. There's much more to it than that. Lets not pretend a heroin addiction could be a safe and normal way to live.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#580

Post by sillygoose »

smhenderson wrote: post #13

That seems way too harsh to me. I have strong opinions on the US War on Drugs and it's failure to meaningful deal with drug use/abuse in the USA. And I feel even worse about how it's spilling out into the rest of the world as we go "global" with everything. I can't say I know every detail of the case but I don't recall anyone getting killed or even hurt by Mr. Ulbricht so in my mind the punishment does not fit the cr…

Of course it's way too harsh. They're making an example out of him. The message here is: "don't even dream of circumventing the monetary system we control".

This is just a part of the American police state's burgeoning.

People will take drugs regardless of whether there's a Silk Road or not. Well, at least as long as we're still mercifully allowed to use cash, which is not for long if the masses can be successfully conditioned to accept banning it.

What's the difference between banning cannabis and banning cash? Both are just orders not to use something, backed by the threat of punishment for disobeying.

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