If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.

Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.

Ironically silk road had much safer drugs than whatever pills you would get on the corner.

The Silk Road was "the corner." Do you think it would be any safer if it was running today? That makes 0 sense.

Sellers had ratings and reputations. It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out.

Drug producers want pure products. It's almost entirely middlemen who cut drugs with whatever random chemicals they have on hand.

> It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out

Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?

Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.

For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.

What if they contain pure ethanol, and people end up dying from drinking said ethanol?

Why not incarcerate all car makers and doctors then too?

You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

You look lost to me because you equate law and morality at a deep level.

Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.

There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.

Look maybe I’m just stupid, but I still can’t tell what you’re trying to say. If you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, I apologize.

>Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.

There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.

And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.

Nobody cares.

Also alcohol = drug = substance = molecule. IT all depends on how you morally frame it.

Law is based on a common consensus of morality (at least in theory) so they are, in fact deeply intertwined.

I don’t think that’s true. Maybe in its infancy law really looks like that, but as societies grow their law books get more complex and can very easily become separated from majority perception of morality. Does morality explain zoning laws, or is it more about the equilibrium point of a pluralist conflict, everyone looking out for their interests, etc.

Roughly. But always read between the lines and follow the money. We didn't selectively ban Tiktok because government finally woke up to the dangers of social media.

You understand that incarcerating liquor store owners was the absurdity part of the argument, yes?

Doctors can be arrested for malpractice. I sure do wish we could arrest some of these car makers for telling staff to skimp on details and taking "recalls" as a cost of doing business, but that's an issue for another time.

> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.

There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?

Yeah, that also seems plausibly consistent with zanek's simplistic argument.

The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.

SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.

These are not comparable institutions.

You're right. Ross should have been granted a drug selling license, analogous to a liquor license, and it should have been revoked if he failed to check ID before allowing people to make purchases on his marketplace.

Teenagers routinely drink alcohol and sometimes die.

And businesses that knowingly sell alcohol to minors are charged with a crime.

Sure, but the crime isn’t murder. And they aren’t getting life for it.

If their business sold alcohol to as many teenagers as the Silk Road has sold drugs, then yes, they would get life.

Then why isn't the CEO of anheiser-busch given two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years?

AB-InBev does not sell directly to consumers. They have a distributor model of operation.

You mean how Silk Road didn’t actually sell anything but was only a marketplace?

Doing business in, or running, a marketplace without established legal regulations opens you up to undefined consequences. Without laws to bind you, there are no laws to protect you.

Do they get multiple life sentences?