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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.
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