
Feds: 6 died as a result of overdosing from Silk Road-purchased drugs - aburan28
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/25/feds-6-died-as-a-result-of-overdosing-from-silk-road-purchased-drugs/
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ryan_j_naughton
If the government wants to get into the actual harms of online drug sales,
then the defense should go into the benefits to society of the Silk Road.

Ulbricht and the defense should get people from the Spanish drug testing lab
to testify: [https://medium.com/backchannel/inside-the-deep-web-drug-
lab-...](https://medium.com/backchannel/inside-the-deep-web-drug-
lab-9718cd0fe504)

Their results show that drug quality is much higher from darknet sales and has
fewer impurities that cause health risks. Given that the original Silk Road
did $1.2 Billion in drug trades, the total number of people who died from
their drugs is substantially lower than if those people had bought their drugs
from the streets (e.g. if cocaine in Spain is only 30% pure, and the other
chemicals raise the probability of overdose by 5% per use compared to purer
cocaine, then 5% increase times the expected amount of cocaine sales from the
SR should amount to a decent estimate on how many fewer people were actually
harmed).

Similarly, how many fewer people were robbed or killed due to SR vs
traditional gang based drug sales?

~~~
jacquesm
Sometime purity _is_ a health risk.

