I'm against prohibition. People should be able to put what they want into their own bodies. I actually think that prohibition should be illegal. I realize this will make the current drug problem worse, people squatting or just doing drugs in the street would be arrested and put into education camps. We could get the money for something like that by selling these drugs to the public.
As for Ross, well Ross knew the consequences of running a public drug distribution network. He got caught and now his life is over. So what I have no remorse for him whatsoever and why should I? Was the trial fair? Who gives a shit, he knew what the laws were and what would happen to him if he did get caught.
Then again, if people can put whatever drugs into their body that they want -- who's going to be footing the bill on their medical treatments and such. I don't think it's fair to force Americans to pay for all of this extra stuff. There's no way in my mind that this is going to be a popular policy.
I think it's completely fair to decriminalize and to only have fines for drugs (at least non-lethal ones) as a way to pay for the medical treatments necessary for drug usage.
Ross should have gotten a fair trial, that's what should be afforded to EVERY single American. Though people shouldn't give him sympathy for his sentence, he ran a drug cartel online that he reaped the rewards from and NOW he must reap the consequences of such acts. I do think that his case should really be looked over again though, as it is still your right to have a fair trial.
I agree, it will affect healthcare. But the drug market is a multi billion dollar market. Tax the drugs sold and use that money to help the addicts. If the government made and sold the drugs themselves then they would reap all of the profit.
As for Ross, I did a bit of research on his trial. Some people say it was unfair, it seems the trial was fair but the investigation was unfair. So what when you have bitcoin wallets that point to silk road there isn't really much one can say in defense of that.
Here is a paragraph from that article.
"The only 11th hour surprise to the defense involved tracking the Bitcoins. Apparently nobody realized that Bitcoins were trivial to trace. After the defenses opening, the prosecution scrambled to analyze the wallet.dat files, not only discovering a huge amount of Bitcoins directly from Silk Road to Ulbricht (apparently Ulbrichts wallets were also the Silk Road cold storage) but even sourcing the hitman payments as coming from Ulbrichts wallet!"
Article here:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/op-ed-ross-ulbricht-got-a-fair-trial-but-not-a-fair-investigation/