[DoItToMe81]

I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment, but this trial was a farce. The media ran ceaseless stories making it sound like he was selling guns to terrorists and child abuse material. There's no way he could have been fairly judged by a jury with how prevalent that type of reporting was.

[ryan_j_naughton]

> I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment

Alcohol is undeniably a hard drug. It:

1) is extremely physically addictive

2) causes many overdoses and deaths. More than opiates or cocaine.

At the same time, there is tons of compelling evidence that:

A) making alcohol illegal in the 20s/30s didn't decrease consumption at all and simply increased the danger of consuming tainted alcohol.

B) that prohibition fueled the rise of organized crime in the US

C) that countries with decriminalized drugs and harm reduction policies actually have reduced drug consumption, like Portugal.

Thus, your statement seems entirely incorrect. It actually seems that punishing those who sell hard drugs actually makes it worse for everyone.

[xboxnolifes]

You conveniently redefined what most anyone would consider not a hard drug as a hard drug to make your point.

[pennaMan]

Alcohol is at the top of the list of objective harm to self and others, right up there with heroin. What "most anyone would consider" is irrelevant to the actual pharmacology of the durg.

[smcl]

Warning - potentially bad take incoming: To me this is actually an argument in favour of the legalization of "hard drugs" more than it is an argument against alcohol. In alcohol we have an addictive, harmful substance that is relatively inexpensive, widely available, heavily advertised and yet most people are able to either abstain or use it in moderation.

[xboxnolifes]

citation needed

[pennaMan]

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/4/e000774

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7649209/

I could go on and on but I think I gave you a good starting point for your own research

[0xy]

65% of domestic violence involves alcohol. [1] Unless you believe beating women is not social harm then alcohol is undoubtedly a hard drug.

[1] https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/links-between-alcohol-...

[5e92cb50239222b]

Does it really matter what "most" think? From the medical point of view, ethanol is a hard drug. It was actually defined as one in an old USSR government standard, but that definition was dropped later (in the 1970s or thereabouts IIRC).

[hnlmorg]

Yourself and others are missing the point. US law here isn’t “what was considered a hard drug in pre-1970s USSR”. And regardless of what the medical point of view might be, alcohol isn’t classed as a hard drug in US law.

Frankly though, even this straw man argument is moot because it is illegal to sell alcohol without a license too. So regardless of what substance was on sale, this market place was facilitating illegal transactions.

As for whether 40 years is a bit harsh, that’s a lot more subjective. But it doesn’t further the conversation to shift definitions of substances when they’re already legally defined.

[ryan_j_naughton]

No, you're missing the point. We are making a normative claim of what SHOULD be illegal or legal.

The definition of a hard drug has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not. Alcohol is a hard drug by the definition of addictiveness and propensity for harm. When it was made illegal, it didn't reduce use and only increased harms. We learned our lesson and made that hard drug legal in order mitigate the harms of organized crime benefiting from selling it.

Similarly all other illegal drugs should be made legal to reduce the harms of them being illegal and facilitating organized crime that increases violence in communities.

In that regard, the silk road was actually a net good. It reduced gang violence by preventing gangs from competing for physical territory. The US postal service delivering the darknet drugs prevented the gangs from being able to enshrine their Monopoly through violence. This was unequivocally good. Similarly reviews by customers increased quality and purity and reduced tainted drugs, reducing harm to the users. Thus, the silk road was a net social good when measured from a social welfare costs and benefits.

[hnlmorg]

> The definition of a hard drug has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not.

I agree. But there is also a legal definition and we are taking about the law. You can bitch and moan about whether the law is just or not but that’s a different topic.

Which is why you’re missing the point and I wasn’t.

You can argue to you’re blue in the face about what the law should be, but that doesn’t make the law so.

[tanseydavid]

>> You conveniently redefined what most anyone would consider not a hard drug as a hard drug to make your point.

That's because alcohol use has been normalized for a very long time.

There's no redefinition happening, you are just comparing a 'normalized' view of alcohol to one that is more realistic about it.

Alcohol positively destroys some people and most of them lost the ability to have any self control over it at some point.

[leggomuhgreggo]

Hoping it's not too much of an imposition, I'd like to pose a series of rhetorical questions about criminological policy, which may not be new territory, but I hope will, nonetheless, elevate the discussion

What does 'deserve' mean?

How do you distinguish it from vengeance?

If the idea is that it has deterrent value, how do we measure that?

Also why are we trying to deter? What's the social cost of the behavior his platform helped facilitate?

How much did his being a party to that behavior contribute to its prevalence? Is there any evidence suggesting the behavior wouldn't have been enacted through alternative intermediaries?

Most importantly: Is there any unintended secondary cost to society, as a result of bringing punitive repercussions on intermediaries that are incidentally party to an undesired behavior?

In Policy Analysis one often sees a pattern where punitive policies exacerbate either the undesired behavior or associated antisocial behaviors

It's counter-intuitive but the correlation between criminalization and increased antisocial activity — and indeed net social cost — is quite strong.

In my view the only sensible approach to criminology is "consequentialism" with all punishments being informed by therapeutic approaches to reduce future harm — or "Harm Reduction"

When we allow ourselves to be guided by "scale balancing" rationales, it's just too easy for that to turn into sadism and worse "mob" sadism — where any view of proportionality (vague and aspirational to begin with) is abandoned until some "Lord of the Flies" moment of cruelty provokes social reflection.

Anyway thanks for considering my perspective.

[P_I_Staker]

Nope it's the institutions that trample on people and violate their civil rights that should be suffering punishment. The government, medical, and mental health community are highly discriminatory and don't respect freedom of religion.

It's created a perfect storm of death in destruction in the USA. The system needs to be reboot and built to protect citizens, not abusive / incompetent doctors, insurance companies.

Drug addicts are people that deserve to be respected, not spit on and turned away. Even if you aren't a drug addict, you can really quickly have your rights stripped away. Drug use, even repeated, isn't always addiction. Drugs are often a critical component of our health.

I've become increasingly aware of the role the medical industry is playing in exacerbating drug abuse and suicide. So many people are driven away from care and into a suicide/jail or other health problems like morbid obesity.

[achenet]

> I think people who facilitate the sale of community destroying hard drugs deserve punishment

I'd argue Instagram has done more damage to human relationships and communities than MDMA, despite the former being around for much longer.

Really, when we look at the forces "destroying our communities", it's not so much the drugs as the the reasons people take them - alienation caused by post-modern industrial capitalism, face-to-face interaction replaced by screen time, a society that values "success" over happiness, health and connection... the drugs are a symptom.

If you take morphine because you have a broken bone, the issue is the broken bone.

If people drink themselves to death because they are lonely, the issue is the loneliness.

[froh]

oh yes, the dual tongues!

to add, how many of the domestic terrorists killing children in schools with guns did buy them legally? vs illegally? and how many homicides were done with legal guns? vs illegal guns? and suicides?