The Silk Road I’m talking about is not the historical trade route between Europe and China, but instead the Amazon of illegal drugs. It was the biggest market online to purchase illegal substances and because of that, was shutdown by the FBI (although tbh I thinks it was more to do with the tax evasion). Ross Ulbricht was the guy named as founder of this alternate Amazon. It was founded apparently, with a utopian idea that it could make getting Class A drugs easier, but also safer: better purity, cleaner cut with 5 star reviews and ratings of the dealers on the site. People will always find a way to get their hands on what ever it is they need to get through the night, so why not do it on a clean website, instead of a dingy alleyway? Unless you’re one of the mega rich; buying drugs will probably mean associating with underhanded dealers, so why not make it clean and accessible for all? But if Class A drugs aren’t your thing, then according to the FBI, this place was also a one-stop shop for fake ID’s, passports, hacked Netflix accounts and more… It was also legally more safe by going through Tor and paying in bitcoin (ask the guys at Data Science and Knowledge Engineering). This view stemmed from the libertarian values that Ulbricht apparently wrote about on the site and believed that the Silk Road could be the site to spark actual social change. For instance, Airbnb has changed the way people book accommodation globally and has meant hotels and hostels are no longer the first place to go. Maybe he hoped in someway, drug laws could globally change if enough people got behind his marketplace. He said, “the best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.”
And I agree… now the Silk road has gone, a vacuum has opened up and as I said earlier, people will always find a way. Since Ulbricht was arrested in late 2013 the dark web has been in a state of ethical decline . Without his utopian views to oversee such a website, the ones that have replaced it are more fragmented, less ethical, and far less trusted, with more scams and in general becoming closer to the back alley dealings the Silk Road tried so hard to get away from. In 2001, Portugal decriminalised all drugs and now the most you get is a fine or a referral to a clinic (depending on the amount) as drug addiction is treated as a health issue, not a criminal offence. This liberalisation of the market seems to be having a good effect with only 3 deaths caused by drug overdoses for every million citizens. Where as in the Netherlands, its on average 10 per million or 45 per million in the UK, with the EU average being 17 per million. Ulbricht may have been going a different way around it but the statistics do seem to back up his beliefs. Governments all over the world have allowed Multinational corporations to avoid tax in exchange for employment for its citizens. I’m not suggesting that they should ignore or allow dark web sites offering almost anything illegal to think of to go un-policed but, cooperation between the two sectors could lead to an administration improving statistics whilst providing good business for the suppliers.
