I don't see how it follows that derisking drug sales necessarily didn't increase harm. Yes, if you were selling drugs on Silk Road you were less likely to get into a violent confrontation with a client. Yes, if you were buying drugs on Silk Road you were less likely to get into a violent confrontation with the dealer. But the claim here is that Silk Road also dramatically reduced barriers to entry for both buyers and sellers for very serious drugs.

Heroin is no joke and no amount of pseudo-libertarian drug legalization arguments make it any safer. If Silk Road made it available to a dramatically broader audience that otherwise wouldn't have been able to get it, the harm to society, on balance, must have been enormous.

> The whole ordeal here just drives the point home, that the drug war is not at all about harm reduction for anybody, not users, certainly not dealers, and not even society at large.

Heroin isn't weed. It destroys lives of its users and certainly harms the society at large. To say otherwise is preposterous, at best.