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Silk Road's Leader Paid a Doctor To Help Keep Customers Safe
An anonymous reader writes: Two years after the fall of Silk Road, new facts about the saga are still emerging all the time. The latest revelation is that Dread Pirate Roberts, the leader of Silk Road, paid a doctor $500 per week to offer public and private counseling to customers of the site. DoctorX, also known as Dr. Fernando Caudevilla, became famous for his free work on the site. The fact that he was eventually paid a salary is being used by lawyers for Ross Ulbricht to argue that Silk Road emphasized harm reduction and was, on the whole, a huge improvement in safety for drug users.
Only true if said doctor kicked back a portion of his fees to DPR
Billions of taxpayer dollars every year that could be allocated to education, repairing roads/bridges and other infrastructure (rail, anyone?) are instead spent on keeping substances illegal and locking up addicts.
Millions of dollars worth of taxpayers' legitimate cash and bank account balances are stolen by the government every year through nebulous civil forfeiture laws. If you get pulled over on your way home from Las Vegas and you have a few thousand bucks cash in your car, consider that money gone, and probably your car too, all owned by the government now as part of the War on Drugs. They don't have to prove you guilty of any crime, or even accuse you of a crime!
How many people, innocent or guilty, have been outright executed by police since the 70s using "OMG illegal narcotics" as a justification? How many tens of thousands of American citizens are in prison right now because they were caught carrying a plant that grows in the ground?
Wake the fuck up and let's put an end to this nonsense.
Is that a new Mega Man boss?
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But wasn't the defense claiming that Mark Karpeles was running the site at this point? Why should that get Ulbricht leniency if he wasn't running the site at that point? Does this mean his defense has finally given up on that ridiculous conspiracy theory?
...Shadowrun as fuck.
Me: "Dr Boombatz, it hurts when I do this..."
Dr Vinnie Boombatz: "Here's a scrip for Oxycontin. Go in peace, my son."
You are welcome on my lawn.
The "war on drugs" results in increased violence which increases the risk for everyone, not just the drug users. If the government was really concerned about the safety of drug users they could legalize and regulate everything and make it much safer. So far that hasn't happened.
I'm impressed that Dread Pirate Roberts paid a doctor to counsel people, I just don't think that the government will be.
Here in Canada the federal government tried to shut down a safe injection site in Vancouver. The site operated by the provincial government provided IV drug users with a safe place to shoot up. Everything need, except the drugs, was available there.. There were nurses present to offer help and advice, and to deal with any overdoses. The end result was (provably) fewer deaths among IV drug users. That made no difference to the federal government, they still wanted to shut the site down. Fortunately when they took the province to court, they lost - since there was proof of fewer deaths it was considered a health care issue, which is completely up to the province
95% of the horrible things caused by "drugs" are in fact caused by the drug warriors turning a medical problem (addictive personality, self-medication for other problems) into a criminal problem. See also: prostitution.
When you declare it - whatever it is - "illegal" you strip anyone who touches it from the protection of the legitimate legal/medical system. Especially if you have something essentially harmless like pot (Oh noes, a poor person might smoke a doob and be happy with their life for a night) that a lot of people will want to try, the result is that you'll eventually reach a critical density of people in areas who can't access the legal/medical system and as a result, society there goes to hell in a handbasket.
Basically no matter how horrible the drug is - seriously, fuck meth - prohibitionism is guaranteed to make matters worse. It doesn't resolve the fundamental problem that most drugs are medically bad for you (Unless you're stupid enough to buy into "just say no!" which works about as well as the other well known form of abstinence-only education). It prevents anyone/everyone involved from having access to a legitimate, peaceful legal system to resolve disputes. It prevents government regulation regarding quality control. The moralizing/stigmatization actively prevents people with a medical issue from seeking medical assistance. If you want to reduce the harm done to society by drugs, you couldn't get much further from a useful solution than prohibition.
But on the other hand, prohibitionism *does* go straight to the only honest impulse in all of religious fundamentalism: The hatred of anyone who seeks happiness in this life, doubly so if they are poor.
Will win in the end. We're only washing up naked on the shores of consciousness. In almost all regards, everything is better than it used to be. There are some obstacles, but they are just the songs that the old world sings as it dies.
It's been a massive success at keeping the lower classes in their place. Here in Arizona we've got multi-million dollar homes right next to slums. You can't do that without a good solid pretext to go in and bust heads whenever the poors spill over. Drugs are great for that. If you're poor chances are good you're taking some form of drugs to cope with the effects of poverty. If nothing else it's the closest to medical care you can get. Now, think about what happens when a few of those poors wander into the wealthy neighborhoods. Maybe they're there to use a park, or take a kid to one of the nicer schools. But odds are good one of 'em has a joint or two. And with our drug laws being what they are you're pretty much guilty by association. If you get a chance look up _why_ marijuana is illegal some time (hint: Migrant farm workers smoked it).
Then there's our whole private prison thing. As always, follow the money.
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if you're going to go that route you also have to take aim at the underlining cause of drug abuse (poverty). Let's face it, when we talk about the war on drugs hurting people for whom it's a medical condition we mean poor people. If you're even upper middle class and you're busted for drugs you can get into a treatment program in no time. It's the poors that go to jail for using.
.5% sales tax raise gets voted into oblivion. Then there's jobs, or the lack thereof. Without education they only thing they're suited for is factory work, but that's all in China. Then there's fast food, but after 30 years of wage stagnation + inflation it doesn't pay enough to keep one adult alive let alone a family.
But the thing is, what do you do with the massive underclass we have? They're uneducated and likely to stay that way because their schools are underfunded. If you try to raise taxes to pay for better schools even a
So what then? We don't want to pay 'em, we won't give 'em birth control until they die out ( a good 30% of our country is opposed on religious grounds ). We cordon them office and they wallow in their own misery. Every now and then a few spill over and the cops come down on them like a ton of bricks and we all dance around like the church woman from SNL acting like this doesn't happen every day...
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Wow, it's only been like three months since Vice published an article about and an interview with this doctor. I see slashdot is still following its fine tradition of publishing articles in a timely manner. keep up the good work!
Silk Road paid a doctor, to the tune of $500 per week, to keep its visitors safe, and Slashdot?
Nada!
Hollysheet!! Silk Road is actually better than Slashdot!!
...but if I was, he's not really a bad guy.
Too bad he also paid to have people killed. Otherwise, he'd be an okay guy, and I'd petition for his release. Womp womp. Yes, I know nobody actually died, but he didn't, at the time. Still paid to have people murdered, reluctantly or no.
Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl. --Rob Pike