On the campaign trail on May 25, 2024, Donald J. Trump became the first president in American history, current or former, to address that tiny political enclave once loathed by both Democrats and Republicans: the Libertarian National Convention. His invitation to the event was met with both joy and derision. Instead of strutting out to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” he walked out to a flurry of boos and jeers from the audience of limited-government enthusiasts. The address started out as a typical stump speech: Trump lambasted the Biden regime on economic policy and the southern border crisis and touted his prospective administration’s deregulatory mission. But then Trump—desirous of libertarian support and fully aware that many true believers in the group still harbored reservations about him—suggested a deal. In exchange for their support at the ballot box, Trump said, “On day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht!” The offer was met with a loud uproar from the audience. And on January 20th, on day one of his second term, Trump did what he promised. But who is Ross Ulbricht, and why were libertarians so eager to see him set free?
Ross Ulbricht is an All-American radical. On paper, his childhood makes him sound like a wholesome, homespun Texas kid. He was a Boy Scout—heck, even an Eagle Scout. But in college, Ulbricht became a committed libertarian. He read the economic works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. He expressed admiration for politicians like Ron Paul. His LinkedIn page – miraculously still available online –describes his then-wish to use “economic theory to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.” Ulbricht then aimed to realize his libertarian ideals in the real world through his computer savvy. Under the alias of “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the former Eagle Scout started Silk Road, a “digital bazaar” for illegal drugs.
Silk Road operated on the dark web, a hidden section of the Internet that can only be accessed using special browsers (like Tor), which encrypt your data for the purpose of maintaining anonymity. Although illegal (and dangerous) drugs like MDMA and LSD were sold on Silk Road, drug sales on the site often involved more transparency and trust than the same transactions in the real world. Silk Road featured fora for promoting healthy consumption habits. A Spanish physician and drug expert even provided guidance to users. Independent researchers who studied the marketplace and the motivations of its users concluded that Silk Road created a stigma-free, supportive environment with high-level communication networks that curbed legal hazards and threats to personal safety. Ross’ libertarian fantasies came to fruition. Until it all came crashing down.
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced in 2015 to double life in prison on drug trafficking and related fraud, hacking, and money laundering charges. Ulbricht’s case was mired with procedural challenges and possible prosecutorial improprieties (he was first arrested in 2013). For instance, the U.S. government accused Ulbricht of soliciting murder for hire, but the prosecutors never brought such charges to the trial, and the evidence was not struck. Ulbricht’s case became a cause célèbre for libertarians, who thought they detected an anti-libertarian bias in the 2nd Circuit Court judges. According to one judge, Ulbricht thought that “his personal views about the propriety of the drug laws and the paramount role of individual liberty entitled him to violate democratically enacted criminal prohibitions.” Although there was obviously no anti-libertarian bias—judges have to make decisions based on the laws on the books, regardless of whether or not they agree with them, so it would actually be a bias for the judge to treat someone who openly violates these laws, even in the name of a political creed, more favorably—some judges indicated concern about the efficacy of federal drug policy. Judge Gerald Lynch of the 2nd Circuit Court, who was on the panel presiding over Ulbricht’s case, had a painful self-awareness regarding Ulbricht’s actions where he admits,” It is very possible that, at some future point, we will come to regard these policies as tragic mistakes,” while condoning the status quo by stating, “the democratically elected representatives of the people have opted for a policy of prohibition, backed by severe punishment.”
Ulbricht’s direct opposition to the destructive drug policies of the United States made him dangerous, but he was no Al Capone. He was not a gangster drawn to criminality for the sake of criminality. He did not take special pleasure in wrongdoing. Nor was he an Icarus, “drawn by the desire for the heavens.” Ulbricht’s hubris was not to get rich quickly. He was a genuine ideologue: a free-market enthusiast aiming to change the way society consumes drugs, and he was willing to risk breaking the law to do so. So why do people continue to think Silk Road was “terribly destructive to our social fabric,” as Judge Katherine Forrest insists? Based on the court’s sentencing and treatment of Ulbricht, he would appear to be one of the most irredeemable criminals in the world, on par with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. But history reveals a different story.
I tell Ross Ulbricht’s story to highlight the elephant-in-the-room too rarely mentioned in policy discussion spaces: drugs. Perhaps appropriately, drugs have long induced psychosis in legislators who adopt a wholly utilitarian perspective premised on the belief that the government has a right to intervene within the free market when it sees fit. Of course, this goes against Ulbricht’s libertarian ideology, which emphasizes that individual liberty and voluntary exchange are the crux of society, not governmental influence. Despite contemporary wisdom peddling government incursion as a benevolent force, the War on Drugs and the legacy of Prohibition revealed how disastrous policymaking and distrust of markets have and continue to upend Americans’ health and the free market. Although laws on substance criminalization have ostensibly moral intentions, the racialization of drug laws and their harmful implementation serves as a lesson about how disastrous the effects of Prohibition and the War on Drugs were on America’s health and the free market.
Federal drug policy has long featured mismatched solutions to intractable problems. For instance, pill-pushing doctors were not the only cause of the opiate craze in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, proponents of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 argued vociferously that the crisis could only be ended if the federal government stopped greedy doctors from overprescribing deadly opiates such as morphine and cocaine. The reality was much more complicated: during the 1870s and 1880s, with few therapeutic alternatives, many vulnerable Americans, including traumatized Civil War veterans, turned to narcotic-laced medications and morphine injections for chronic pain, tripling the rate of opiate consumption. The Harrison Act addressed none of these underlying psychological and sociological challenges.
On the flip side, free-market and local or state-level approaches contributed to immense reductions in drug overdoses and opiate consumption more broadly. Progressive physicians and pharmacists lobbied at the local and state levels for new laws tackling these problems. Additionally, scientific journals stressed the dangers of narcotics, and stores started stigmatizing overprescriptions well before 1914. In 1888, 14.5% of prescriptions filled in Boston drugstores contained opiates. In 1908, the comparable figure for California was 3.6%, according to historian David T. Courtwright. The free market, alongside local and state governments, managed to resolve the issue generations before the introduction of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. After the Harrison Narcotics Act, the government’s misguided laws unintentionally exacerbated drug abuse and restricted civil liberties. After the legislation was enacted, it restricted access to narcotics and cocaine by establishing taxes and registration requirements. The codification of drug prohibition further assaulted civil liberties: addiction clinics were shut down and physicians were hunted down by Progressive Era bureaucrats, deeply concerned with the moral ills of alcohol and drug abuse but sometimes overzealous in their targeting of social evils.
Prohibition continued the story of policy misadventure. The fundamental economic logic against that legislation is simple: researchers Leo Beletsky and Corey S. Davis say that “imposing substantial barriers and costs to the illicit drug [including alcohol] supply chain creates direct pressure to minimize volume while maximizing profit.” In 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act, enforcing the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol. The criminal networks that emerged to produce, transport, and sell illegal alcohol were notoriously violent and far-reaching (homicide rates increased by 78% to 10 per 100,000 during the 1920s). Additionally, throughout Prohibition, the consumption and sale of spirits and more potent liquors rose threefold compared to beer—as a result, the national death toll from poisoned liquors was 4,154 compared to 1,064 in 1920. The American ethos of temperance survived past the 21st Amendment by finding a new target: drugs.
The anti-drug ethos rippled through federal policy in the 20th century in the form of Draconian and racist laws that still have deleterious effects today. The controversial “gateway drug” theory exaggerated marijuana and cocaine usage and fueled Washington’s “warfare on drugs,” as Henry Anslinger, the father of the War on Drugs, stated. Under the guise of “safety,” Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency, a descendant of the earlier Federal Bureau of Narcotics. At the time, Nixon’s made an emotional appeal to conservative voters, using fears about the prevalence of drugs and crime sweeping the nation to unite the Republican Party against two public enemies: “the anti-war left and Black people,” according to Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman.
The success of the political assault on illicit drugs kept Nixon in the Oval Office. It ensured that War on Drugs was not merely a concrete enactment of policies but an ideological fervor following the Nixon era. Reagan’s 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill only reaffirmed Ehrlichman’s sentiments. These policies only implemented harsher mandatory minimum sentencing and criminal penalties to punish consumption, fueling mass incarceration. The punitive measures in American policymaking not only failed to tackle the complex root causes of substance abuse but emboldened black markets to clandestinely lace products with fentanyl en masse, causing a surge in opioid deaths.
With that context in mind, why do we blame Ross Ulbricht, whose unregulated free-market regime for the safer sale and consumption of illegal drugs was meant to be an alternative path that would avoid the failures of interventionist federal drug policy? By seeing Ross Ulbricht’s ostensibly radical perspective through this new lens, his motives now seem to be guided by a sense of morality instead of a perverse sense of exploiting the justice system. Ulbricht’s libertarian ideology was correct in asserting that a false premise of collective rights guided decades of misguided drug policy deleterious to American citizens. As fentanyl becomes the new boogeyman for government regulation, Ulbricht’s fervent skepticism should be a model for American citizens to question whether government intervention will lead to greater good or irreparable harm.
By Alejandro Nina Duran
