Oddbean

My friend's kid got fat, got the diabeetus, & died of covid. Walmart sold him the spoons, the ice cream, the cups, the soft drinks, the candy, the tv & the video game entertainment system. Walmart is a murderer. Or maybe people should be responsible for their own actions 🤔 nostr:nevent1qqs9946yvm6rvdhz52xfnz7l69h5ft5svahxu008l73gnhd8yfkuhmcppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5pzpsptak45jk5dw03rryh6zcdqhq6ysg05s3rgzxc7sy86ced4sn6fqvzqqqqqqy85884y

People also go to jail for selling drugs when no one gets hurt because the govt's drug policies are insane. Tylenol is a drug, if I sell you tylenol and you overdose & kill yourself is that my fault? The Silk Road had to be taken down & Ross was punished beyond all reason because he embarrassed the govt. He proved that drug markets are not inherently violent & that quality control is possible anywhere that reviews can be made & reputation can be built. It is prohibition that creates violence, reduces quality & makes drugs unsafe.

I'd probably blame that kid's parents. Use of hard drugs is highly correlated with abuse of some kind. For example, Biden is a pedophile & Hunter is a crack head who sends his homemade porn to his dad. Maybe in your friend's case the abuse wasn't sexual, but instead emotional or physical. Or maybe the public school system was the source of abuse. But either way the parents failed their kid. A parent has no higher responsibility than to teach their kid how to deal with the world. Someone who turns to heroin is trying to escape because they can't deal with anything. Whether something is illegal or not really doesn't matter. Making alcohol illegal made societal problems caused by alcohol worse, not better.

There's definitely a parallel here, but the difference is that Walmart selling those things in aggregate with that intent would be evil, but they are not individually so, whereas drugs for recreation are individually evil, let alone in aggregate. That being said, Ross passively facilitated those trades, so his cooperation with that evil was likely remote enough to be inculpable.

Silk Road sold over $1B worth of drugs, and Ross got a piece of the profit from every drug sold. That’s why they prosecuted him under the KingPin statute, conviction could get him 20 years to life. Is it fair? I don’t know. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It is easy to be glib about it when it is not your kid. I know what the kid put his family through and it is hell. So you can pontificate all you want but I know first hand how evil drugs are and how much they can destroy.

I am not being glib. Someone who would say the words "drugs got my kid" is 100% avoiding responsibility. Drugs don't get people. People seek out drugs because they feel trapped or because they can't deal with some sort of trauma or sense of insecurity or whatever. Emotionally stable people who have good relationships with the people around them don't get addicted to hard drugs.

At least with sugar people can sorta be forgiven because there is a mountain of propaganda pushing it on you & a similar amount of propaganda telling people to avoid red meat & foods that are actually healthy & satiating. Not even the biggest idiot thinks heroin is good for them. The person who turns to heroin has already consciously said "fuck life"

The kid's whole community let him down by giving away their autonomy and resiliency etc to a multinational corporation. They gave it all away for convenience and lower prices. This was likely in the 90s when we were at the so called "end of history" and chasing low prices was the most moral thing a person could do because capitalism won.