#FreeRossUlbrich, January 6, and Law and Order.
President Trump’s troubling permissiveness towards recreational drug abuse sends the wrong message to America's children.
Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht is free. Strange to me it was by Republican President Donald Trump’s hand—the Party of Family Values that America used to know was stringently anti-drug. “Just Say No” was their motto, and they put DARE officers and dog1 mascots in schools and made very creative Public Service Announcements, such as President Herbert Walker Bush’s “Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue”:
They seemed serious about the subject and the dangers posed to children. So, I was surprised when Mr. Trump issued a pardon for Mr. Ulbricht, who had received two life sentences for pioneering the Darkweb drug market genre and hiring imaginary hitmen.
This is not very Law and Order. (I have never watched the television show; I am referencing instead Mr. Trump’s “I will be the Law-and-Order President” nonsense.)
I enjoyed Nick Bilton’s “American Kingpin,” a biography of Mr. Ulbricht chronicling the rise and fall of his Silk Road. 4.41 stars on Goodreads, for sure. I found Mr. Ulbricht a fascinating character. He experienced the same profound moral corruption as any crime lord, but he never left his computer—at some point, he thought he was having people who crossed him executed while he was wearing shorts at home.
I believe the downstream effects of his Silk Road marketplace have been horrendous—mail-order drugs are responsible for some of the addiction problems in many American small towns, where it revolutionized the ways desolate young men could buy narcotics like Amazon did my equivalent vice, Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time novel series. Because of Mr. Ulbricht’s brilliant, simple idea, a place online where anyone can anonymously buy any drug with a sketchy digital currency, Americans are dead who otherwise would be alive.
Mr. Ulbrich made money but spent it humbly, which is appealing in a crime book; still, by the end, he was LARPing with an FBI agent who he thought was his hitman.
I have known many libertarians who admired Mr. Ulbricht, and called him their favorite “digital gangster.” At the least, I thought he should not have to die behind bars, and that he should have been allowed his old age. A commutation would have been more appropriate than a pardon, but I am not unhappy about this result.
I find it odd this President, who insisted he would “get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers” and “end the opioid crisis” seems so ambivalent towards drugs and drug users on a personal level.
Despite rhetoric about airstrikes on Mexican drug cartels, Mr. Trump has been associated with Elon Musk, who “therapeutically” uses ketamine and once smoked a blunt on camera, Matt Gaetz, who was fond of using “molly,” Joe Rogan, who tells his drug stories on a podcast, Theo Von told him frankly he had used cocaine, and JD Vance had an r/drugs poster on his staff (hopefully still has—I think a guy who hangs out in online drug markets has a much better grasp on policy around them than a puritan who only watched an episode of 60 Minutes.)
I want to be clear that while I am accusing Republicans of an attitude too permissive of personal and recreational drug use, I do not doubt that I, too, have fallen victim to this normalization of vice—only recently, I suggested that each new Democratic congressman should have a Republican friend that they get high with—but the principle of the thing is the children. Is nobody modeling the “good” behavior for them anymore? Has anybody thought of them, before having an American President sitting on camera and asking, grinning, about the positive attributes of cocaine? Has this orange clown given serious thought to the young men, for whom he might be a role model?2
The President should have used this occasion when he was returning freedom to a convicted kingpin to address the country with a compelling case for this mercy and a vision for how drug policy ought to be enforced in a way that does not devastate communities, jeopardize civil liberties, or inadvertently make the “drug game” more violent.
I have seen The Wire many times. I have been to the Tenderloin. If Mr. Trump wants to create a “Hamsterdam,” a place where recreational drugs are federally tolerated and ignored, he ought to say that. If we are simultaneously going to bomb our closest neighbor’s cocaine factory while teaching people of podcast-listening age that “cocaine is badass,” that you should smoke blunts, and that you should try DMT, our Nation will not only look like hypocrites, we will look stoned stupid on marijuana.
There are very sensible drug policy reforms on the table. The cannabis industry, in some form, is legal in nearly every cool state, and they are begging to pay federal taxes and have their banking regulated so that they do not have to protect big, armored trucks full of cash.
Traditionally, Republican politicians have ignored requests from the weed lobby because they want to demonstrate sanctimony. Mr. Trump could bring about great change if he demanded that Congress remove marijuana from the Schedule 1 substance list and get that tax money.
Mr. Trump has also complained about the FBI opening his safe and subpoenaing his security tapes. Well, most “dealers” could tell you that they do that shit to everybody. Typically, if someone owns a safe and sells drugs, it is where they keep their guns and money. So perhaps he could advocate stricter Fourth Amendment protections for persons accused of crimes, specific restrictions on what police can or cannot search based on what causes. This would anger some police who love ambiguity, although many will appreciate the clarification and obey any new law to the letter.
Instead, the President is not thinking about the Law, or fairness to any other American. He is thinking about his hatred of “the cops,” who he suggests might be bastards. He said of Ulbricht:
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
When asked to justify releasing J6 rioters convicted of savagely beating Capitol Police with weapons, Mr. Trump lamely explained that there were anarchists in Portland who were not convicted, so it was only fair his thugs be also loosed on America’s streets.
In fact, attorney David Clements suggested that “Capitol Insurrectionist” be made federally a protected class and those anti-government militiamen be given reparations in order to avoid being rejected by society.3[iii]
I strongly urge Democrats and Republicans alike in the Congress to seriously set about pardon reform. Republicans, do whatever you want with anybody Joe Biden pardoned—I do not care—but we cannot allow incoming or outgoing presidents this much free reign to dispel the Law. I find one Wall Street Journal letter to be intriguing: “barring pardons between Election Day and Inauguration Day” as a start, and recommend then bundling with it: “no pre-emptive pardons,” “you cannot pardon someone you told to do a crime,” and “you cannot pardon your mob of MAGA orcs so that you can reclaim them for your next siege.”
I think if Mr. Trump wants to be a pro-drug, Ron Paul libertarian type on this, he should say so, and then do the things that set of people would want. Simply hanging out with guys who are high and then advocating having their dealers executed or sending troops into fucking Mexico, is not serious. It is insulting to America’s parents, who do not want their teenagers on drugs, and also the college students, who would like to be on drugs. It also exposes a total disinterest in the very topics that Mr. Trump defined himself with: the opioid and addiction crises and Law-and-Order. A complete farce. Law-and-Order, Law-and-Order, how many times did we hear him say it? Like a cursed metronome.
My favorite headline of all time is: “McGruff the Crime Dog Actor Jailed for Pot, Grenade Launchers.”
Perhaps he should have brought a strong message to young Theo: “Nobody should be doing cocaine. I understand you have ‘used’ in the past, but you must never again. You have a bright, successful future waiting for you, but if you fall into addiction, you may not get there. You must say no!”
I fear recidivism is likely with the January 6 rioters. Jailing so many J6ers together, allowing them to form a choir, giving them weekly congressional delegations calling them heroes and hostages, and having a President praise them for actual, violent crime—this is simply not how you convince them it was wrong to assault people, break things, or shit on the Capitol floor.