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Comment by nullymcnull | Hacker News Reader

> This includes the thousands of people who are beheaded each year by the Mexican/Colombian cartels, which, if you look at it this way, can be blamed on the US government's 'criminalization of victimless drug use'.

Why should it not be blamed on the criminalization of victimless drug use? Where would the cartels get the immense capital with which to terrorize whole provinces and take on state actors, if not for those highly lucrative drugs - their profitably grossly inflated by their illegality? If our societies would stop burying their heads in the sand over the issue of drugs and the immense demand for them (which remains remarkably static no matter how many billions are spent on 'war' against them), the cartels wouldn't have much left to fight over.

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I'm not doubting that US drug policy remains the driving force. It pushes people who would consume drugs legally or illegally into a black market where they inevitably do business with some extension of these powerful criminal organizations. I agree with all that - and it needs to change.

But too often I see people using the stupidity of US drug policy as an excuse for all sorts of morally reprehensible deeds. Case in point: when asked, Ross Ulbricht trotted out all sorts of high-minded rhetoric about freedom and libertarianism and the gross injustice of prohibition, but in private he was ordering hits on his own users, and as far as he knew and was concerned, the murders were carried out successfully. Is that in the spirit of libertarian ideology? Is that about protesting US drug policy or is it just Ullbricht's greed?

People will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to rationalize their personal appetites. In the end the consumers of drugs have to know that they are buying from people who either engage in violence themselves or work for someone who does, and because they are participating in this marketplace they are in some way partially responsible for the violence that occurs because of it. It may be unrealistic to think that they will realize that - but we should not relax our personal criticism of them just because its convenient for our political position.

What you say feels right intuitively, but I can't figure out the logic behind it. Does participating in a marketplace automatically make one partially responsible for the crimes of others who participate in it? That doesn't seem quite right. There's a lot of violence in poor inner city areas, is it morally wrong to own a gun shop in such an area? Are we morally responsible for the actions of the corporations we buy from? What about our nation's foreign policy? To take an extreme example if you sell food to enough people, you know that eventually you'll feed a murderer. But intuitively there's a big difference between selling food and money laundering. I don't know.

The Ross Ulbricht case doesn't really help. Ordering hits is morally wrong whatever the context, so that doesn't help in figuring out whether his other actions were wrong.

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