Convicting the Silk Road founder won't stop the booming digital drug trade
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Version 0 of 1. Americans love a good courthouse drama: justice and restitution; order after chaos; good vs evil. The US government has found its alleged criminal mastermind to try for the creation of Silk Road, the anonymous online market that made buying all manner of illicit substances as easy as ordering shoes. Not that its closure in 2013 made a whole lot of difference: just as taking one dealer off a street corner makes no difference to the availability of drugs in a city, shutting Silk Road simply drove users of the site to its replacements. Far from ending the trade in drugs online, the Silk Road bust informed millions of new customers that the web could provide a new, safer and peer-reviewed way of buying drugs. Silk Road has already inspired dozens of copycat sites – today alone, I quickly counted 13 similar services. There are many, many more. Nevertheless, in a New York courthouse right now, an extraordinary trial is taking place; one whose crimes are avant garde and whose purview is unprecedented. That’s not an exaggeration. When did you last hear a high court judge gravely tell the jury at the end of the first week’s proceedings that they must go home and not watch The Princess Bride that weekend? How many alleged anarcho-capitalist cryptography-loving drug dealers have you ever seen on trial? When was digital privacy last so squarely in the public consciousness? Following the trial is like trying to find your way out of a hall of mirrors in handcuffs and dark glasses. Nothing is what it seems; no one is who they say they are. In an email to colleagues in 2012, one witness, undercover Homeland Security investigator Jared Der-Yeghiayan – who himself operated under many aliases on the site and its forums – became so confused over the identities of Silk Road users that he referenced the classic Abbot and Costello sketch: “Sheesh, who’s on first?” The only certainty in the trial is that this witch hunt is a huge waste of taxpayer’s dollars. Ross Ulbricht, a one-time US Eagle scout who later became a gifted physicist and then a shirtless hippy who ran a bookshop, is accused of operating a $1.2bn global drug-dealing network – not from a mountain lair ringed with security, but from a laptop in the sci-fi section of a San Francisco public library: http://t.co/p1VPrT8zcb epicentre of a $1.2bn drug market. At the time of his arrest in October 2013, Ulbricht was, agents say, logged onto the Silk Road website, an anonymous marketplace connecting dealers and users worldwide, selling all manner of illegal narcotics in exchange for Bitcoin. (The decentralised, anonymous cryptocurrency was in its infancy when the site started in early 2011, trading at a few dollars apiece. Today, they are worth around $220, down from a peak of around $1,000 in November 2013.) Ulbricht’s alleged alias, the Dread Pirate Roberts, was derived from a character in The Princess Bride: in the film, DPR is not one man but a sequence of individuals who periodically hand down the name, responsibilities and reputation over to a chosen successor. Ulbricht’s defence argues that Ross followed a similar formula: he set up the site, but he quickly handed it over to his successor as it had become too stressful. When he was arrested, Ulbricht says, he had been tricked into operating the market again by those successors who had smelled a rat – or were simply FBI informants – and knew a bust was imminent. Looking at the aims of the case more broadly exposes a troubling lack of insight on the part of policymakers. It is impossible to legislate away people’s desire to experience altered states of mind. It is impossible, on any moral basis, to defend a law that jails consenting adults for voluntarily inhaling one kind of burning plant but not another. Drug policies in the US have their roots in racism and imperialism and bear no relation to a substance’s inherent harmfulness. They only serve to make an already risky activity – intoxication – riskier still by devolving control of production, supply and distribution to profit-driven gangsters. On Silk Road, customer feedback ensured quality. Users knew what they were buying – unlike the dozens of people who have died in the UK in recent years when they took Ecstasy pills that contained the severely toxic drug PMA. Controlling, regulating and taxing the trade in all drugs would reduce harms overnight. Isn’t that the point of a rational drug policy? The Silk Road was a functional and orderly marketplace that reduced some of the violence associated with the illicit market. Those billions of dollars in turnover that the trial is discussing represent thousands of deals done not in a dark alley between a dealer who could be selling anything, but in a self-regulating marketplace between consenting adults operating along the lines of a site such as Amazon. That’s not to claim that Silk Road ended all the harms associated with contemporary prohibition – after all, the drugs sold there in many cases had a clear heritage traceable back to Mexican cartels and other violent narco groups. But as an intermediate, partial solution to one part of the drug market – the street and retail scene – Silk Road did more to reduce many of the harms associated with an adulterated market and the open-air sale of drugs than many public health initiatives. Some heroin users told me it even helped them keep their habits under control. Vendors offered mainly high-quality products to individuals making their own choices – albeit operating outside laws decreed by a state that many saw as morally and ideologically bankrupt. In long discussion threads on the now-defunct forums, many Silk Road users would say they “came for the drugs, but stayed for the revolution”. They believed their version of decentralised anarcho-capitalism offered wider possibilities for people to self-organise, and to decide for and among themselves what was moral or permissible. It is that utterly impermissible concept that is really standing trial in Manhattan this week. Ross Ulbricht, like DPR himself – whomever he may be – is just a cipher. |