[saulrh]

So I went looking at this number to see how it stacks up to existing drug distribution.

The US market for illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin was just over $100B in 2010. This lines up well with estimates that legal marijuana in Colorado was around $1B. If we're going to look at how big this guy was in absolute terms, his global market was the size of a single illicit drug in a single state.

This is where I run out of data. What's the usual sentence for single-state single-drug distributors? My impression was always that it took huge infiltration operations to get the management with more than a few years on technicalities, and the only way to get more than that was to hit them with charges like murder, bribery, or conspiracy.

[bluetwo]

The minimum sentence for the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Statute is 20 years, but pretty much everyone gets life, once all the other charges are added on.

Saying he only had 1% of the US market is a ridiculous way to look at it. I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_Criminal_Enterprise

[saulrh]

Thanks for the legal link. I'd gone googling for "kingpin law" and hadn't found it. That explains that, and why my guess was wrong: I'd been looking at cases from before its introduction.

> I'm sorry but I can't muster any sympathy for this guy.

If we're really going to get into this discussion...

The marketplace was inherently driven by "customers find and buy" rather than "suppliers market and sell" and the supply chain had tighter feedback loops, meaning that there were few mechanisms or motivations for suppliers to worsen their customers' habits. Additionally, the use of mail, cryptocurrency, and a website reduced the possibility for Things To Go Wrong, eliminated threats of force, disallowed predatory loans and bartering, and I presume provided conflict-resolution protocols that didn't involve "busting a cap in yo ass". Finally, doing it by internet and mail reduced or eliminated suppliers' ability to interact each other, forcing them to compete by attracting customers The Way Smith and Young Intended and wiping out entire classes of harm relating to organized crime and bad product.

This guy was not a saint, he did something bad, the lesser of two evils should not get off. But I hold the position that the silk road was the economic equivalent of a safe injection site, unquestionably a better harm-reducer than the War on Drugs, and that a rational approach to harm reduction supports it.

[bluetwo]

I can agree to a point here. Black markets will pop up anytime something is banned, and this was just a novel way for that to happen. The activities that come along with black markets aren't necessarily the fault of the thing being sold.

The war on drugs has failed to stop drugs, but has created a very profitable war on drugs machine, that includes extra police, equipment, for-profit prisons, etc. We all pay for that.

However, this guy made choices. And he knew exactly what he was doing, and consciously contributed to every single one of these problems, and did it solely for the profit. I know he held to a strong libertarian philosophy, but how is that helping him now? It's not.

If you want to fix these problems, make people aware. Make them campaign issues. Donate to candidates who support good solutions. Vote. Protest. Use jury nullification. Fix the broken DEA schedule system. But don't sell 1.2 billion dollars of drugs and call yourself a hero.