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.

Comments

America's War On Drugs is a Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:America's War On Drugs is a Failure

[g0bshiTe]

While I agree it's time to end it, I don't think those in power will want to give up their stranglehold on the cash cow it's become.

Re: America's War On Drugs is a Failure

[AuMatar]

Its not possible to stop murder. So we should get rid of the laws against it, why bother if it's not possible?

Just because perfection can't be achieved doesn't mean something isn't worth doing.

Re:America's War On Drugs is a Failure

[Zero__Kelvin]

ROTFLMAO. I think it is both hilarious and sad when people talk about how they "put" someone in office as if the choice was an open one. That ignores the fact that your choices were already dwindled down to almost nothing up front. When you vote for a politician these days you pretty much have a choice of which half of the shit sandwich you want. I don't really call that freedom of choice myself. I can think of 100 people off the top of my head that would make a better president than Obama and Bush, but they were never an option.

Once again:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Once again:

[Opportunist]

Most voters are idiots. Easily swayed by the fear of the unknown and a rather diffuse urge to "protect their children", of anything and nothing. Control their children would be more apt, in most cases, but I don't even want to go there.

People are afraid of change in their life, and they are afraid of things (and people) they do not know. The more conservative and the less contact wanted with "the others", the more fear.

Alcohol was something they knew. And they knew that it ain't bad. They even had a drink or two themselves and did they die from it? No. Of course not. Did they go insane? No, again, of course not. And so the support for the ban was very low outside the overzealous self-proclaimed warriors of moral. It was even "cool" to break that law.

Not just among teenagers.

As you correctly identified, the main reason for the fear of drugs (and yes, I mean fear, it's not just rejection, it is fear) is that drugs are "the unknown", and that we've been told time and again that drugs are bad, bad, bad things. It doesn't have to be as hilarious as "Reefer Madness", but we've all had our share of "drug awareness".

Do you think it's a coincidence that the discussion of the legalization of Marijuana happens now that the "generation of love", the Hippies, are about to reach the age that just so happens to be about the age most top level politicians are in? The generation of politicians that is now in power is the same generation that smoked pot heavily during their teen years, and they learned that it's not really as their parents taught them, that it's not leading to the fall of humanity and civilization.

In other words, we'll probably see the legalization of Ecstacy around 2030.

It depends on how you measure failure

[rsilvergun]

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.