I know this might come across as crass, but for real, that would've happened regardless. DarknetMarkets exist independently of intention. That's like blaming the corner store for selling cigarettes because you smoked way too much and got lung cancer. It just doesn't make sense... the supply meets the demand, not the other way around. The whole thing about the war on drugs is that it is a miserable failure... for real. It is not working. Everything should be legal, and then drug issues should be treated as health issues. The parents of the people who died, the two who testified against Ross... I mean this in the nicest way possible, but Ross didn't make that one kid jump off of a roof. He could've performed that stupidity in killing himself after a 6 pack for fucks sake. The other kid who OD'd on heroin - if that had been from a street dealer, how would it be any different?
Look - I'm sorry that people die. It sucks. I'm going to die someday too, and I hope it isn't from something stupid. It is the nature of our existence. Waaayyyyyy more poeple will die this year from alcohol use. Seriously. The only message that my Government is sending me is that my freedoms are limited because they said so, and instead of legalizing not just pot but EVERYTHING and enjoying tax revenue from it, they want to pretend like it isn't in human nature to say that this demand isn't real.
The only reason there is a criminal element to any of this is because the government allows there to be one.
Thoughts?
Cause and effect are complex chains of events.
It is guaranteed that people died specifically because of SR1. One of the parents said that her son wouldn't have tried heroin if he had to get it from a street dealer. That's plausible. (No idea if true in that particular case)
Read /r/drugs and you see people doing all kinds of insanely stupid things with drugs that they were easily able to get off the darknet. Many of those would never have the balls to go to a street dealer and some of stuff on the darknet is probably not even available from ANY street dealer. (thinking of weird stuff like DOM)
Of course, some people are alive because of SR too, because they got cleaner stuff than they can get on the street.
But at the end of the day all that matters is that making drugs illegal does WAY more harm than good. It encourages organized crime, it ruins lives through aggressive law enforcement and it makes it difficult to know the purity of anything. And it doesn't really stop drug use hardly at all.
Decriminalization of drugs would probably have saved that lady's son because he could have gotten pure stuff in a controlled setting. Decriminalization would save more lives than 100 Silk Roads.