When a jury convicted Ross Ulbricht three months ago of running the Silk Road, it

closed the legal question of whether he was guilty of masterminding that billion-dollar
online black market for drugs. But as Ulbrichts sentencing approaches, his defense is
opening another ethical question that may be far more societally mportant: Did the Silk
Roads smorgasbord of drugs do drug users more good than harm?
In a memo to judge Katherine Forrest filed Friday afternoon, Ulbrichts defense has
asked her to consider the Silk Roads potential for harm reduction when she
determines Ulbrichts sentence in just under two weeks. The memo makes arguments
that the Silk Roads community provided drug users a more reliable way to buy
untainted drugs, that Ulbricht had expressly tried to encourage safer drug use on his
black market site, and that the digital nature of the sites commerce may have protected
users from physical interactions that in the traditional drug trade often lead to violence.
In contrast to the governments portrayal of the Silk Road web site as a more
dangerous version of a traditional drug marketplace, in fact the Silk Road web site was
in many respects the most responsible such marketplace in history, and consciously and
deliberately included recognized harm reduction measures, including access to
physician counseling, writes Ulbrichts lead defense attorney Joshua Dratel in the filing.
In addition, transactions on the Silk Road web site were significantly safer than
traditional illegal drug purchases, and included quality control and accountability
features that made purchasers substantially safer than they were when purchasing
drugs in a conventional manner.
One of the Silk Roads innovations, after all, was to bring an eBay-like system of ratings
and reviews for online drug sales. That system gave buyers a way to quickly weed out
dealers selling lower quality or less pure substances. The site maintained a section of its
user forum devoted to safer drug use, where users could ask each other for advice and
help with health problems. And Ulbrichts defense points to archived messages that
show that he even offered at one point to pay $500 a week to a Spanish doctor,
Fernando Caudevilla, who frequented the forum and answered users questions. He
also asked Caudevilla if hed be willing to chemically test drugs on the site for quality,
though its not clear if that testing scheme was ever put into practice.
Regardless of those good intentions, Ulbricht isnt likely to receive a light sentence. He
was convicted of seven felony charges in February that include conspiracies to traffic in
narcotics and money laundering, as well as a kingpin statute reserved for the leaders

of organized criminal operations, which could add another decade to his prison time. In
all, he faces a minimum of 30 years in prison and a maximum of life. Ulbrichts defense
team has already said it plans to appeal the case.
The prosecution in Ulbrichts case has already revealed that it plans to present at
Ulbrichts sentencing hearing six cases of individuals who died from overdoses of drugs
bought on the Silk Road. But in its Friday filing, the defense addressed each of those
examples. In a grisly section of its memo, it goes through the details of those six deaths,
in each case arguing that the deceased suffered from earlier health conditions and
questioning whether the death-inducing drugs had actually been bought from vendors
on the Silk Road. It is simply impossible for the government to prove that drugs
obtained from Silk Road caused death, and in certain cases, the government cannot
even establish to any degree of certainty that any of the drugs ingested came from Silk
Road, Dratel writes.
To bolster its argument about the societal benefits of the Silk Road, the defense
includes in its filing sworn statements from a series of experts, including Tim Bingham,
the administrator of an addiction-focused non-profit known as the Irish Needle Exchange
Forum, and Meghan Ralston, the former director of harm reduction for the Drug Policy
Alliance. Bingham, for instance, published three studies in the International Journal of
Drug Policy about the Silk Road based on surveys of users. He writes in his statement
that he concluded that Silk Road forumsappeared to act as an information
mechanism for the promotion of safer and more acceptable or responsible forms of
recreational drug use.
BLOCK Silk Roads member subcultures offered a viable means of enmeshing safer
drug use and encouraging hard reduction amongst a very hard to reach and informed
drug-using population. My research revealed a similar ethos among drug vendors. As
with Silk Road buyers, participants in a study of Silk Road vendors described
themselves as possessing a personal interest in the intelligent and responsible use of
drugs. BLOCK
The Drug Policy Alliances Ralston, in her accompanying statement, points to the fact
that drug buyers and sellers were insulated from physical violence thanks to their use of
the Silk Roads anonymity and digital protections:
BLOCK Using Silk Road could be seen as a more responsible approach to drug sales, a

peaceable alterative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with

the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular. None of the
transactions on Silk Road, for instance, resulted in women drug buyers being
sexually assaulted or forced to trade sex for drugs, as remains a possibility in
some street-level drug transactions. Nor did any Silk Road transactions result in
anyone having a gun pulled on them at the moment of purchase, also a danger
present in face-to-face street-level drug transactions. BLOCK
Whether or not you buy her argument about the Silk Roads virtues, Ralston concludes
that taking down the site will almost certainly do little to stem the sale of drugs,
online or off. On that point, theres little doubt: sites like the Silk Road 2,
Evolution, Agora and dozens of others have already sprouted across the Dark
Web to fill the digital drug market vacuum the original Silk Road left behind. Silk
Road is not the only website of its kind and its displaced users will likely either
turn to a competitor site or seek out drugs in other ways, Ralston writes in her
statement. This approach to fighting the war on drugs has never worked and it's
not likely to start working now.