I hear you and glad you agree the punishment was (way) too severe.
As for the law, that’s a tough one .. may have more easily agreed with you in the past, but more and more I see the ‘law’ being used and abused to the point that it has little real meaning to me anymore, in the sense that it is applied so randomly and *not* applied so extensively.


All that aside, and bringing it back to this particular situation, there are so many nuances.. not the least of them being that I have heard people who used Silk Road say that for the first time they were able to buy drugs ‘safely’, both by getting reviews to verify purity and also by not having to go to dangerous areas to buy them, which they had and would have continued to do..
So from that angle one could argue that Ross was providing a much needed service..

Also it is highly likely that if a kid starts doing drugs, they would have done so regardless of the ‘point of sale’.. kids experiment and the drug epidemic is massive and all the kids I ever knew who did hard drugs didn’t buy them on Silk Road..

So I guess the question really is, do you think that drugs with an addictive nature should be banned, controlled and it made punishable to sell them at all?
.. this would include all narcotic pain killers, anti-anxiety meds etc, which are widely prescribed way beyond necessity and without any proper guidance or support wrt their use.

Like where is the line, and who gets to decide?
What ‘should’ the punishment be, and who gets to decide?

Our politics and courts are so beyond corrupted at this point, I guess my trust level is lower than I ever thought it could go …
and I have always questioned authority, and I pretty much hate addictive, synthetic recreational drugs, so to be clear I am 100% not trying to advocate for them per se… just questioning how do we best govern ourselves and our communities?