[caption id=”attachment_134392″ align=”aligncenter” width=”2514″] In this courtroom sketch, Ross William Ulbricht is seated in court and awaits sentencing Friday, May 29, 2015 in New York. The San Francisco man who created the online drug-selling site Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison by a judge who cited six deaths that resulted from drugs bought on his website and five people he tried to have killed. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams)
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On Friday, May 29, in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Katherine B. Forrest sentenced Ross W. Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, to life in prison.
According to The New York Times, Ulbricht stood there emotionless as Forrest threw down her ruling.
“What you did was unprecedented,” Forrest said, making an example of him for future drug dealers who consider using the internet to conduct their business. “… And without equivocation that if you break the law this way, there will be very serious consequences.”
His mother, Lyn Ulbricht, sat in the courtroom wearing a brown sweater and leopard print scarf, just feet away from two parents whose children had purchased drugs from Silk Road and died from overdoses.
Ulbricht’s online store for illegal drugs launched in February of 2011 and during its three years in business, thousands of dealers made more than 1.5 million drug transactions to over 100,000 users.
One of those users, Murray, now a recovering heroin addict, sat in his bedroom in New England as he heard the sentence.
Murray, a pseudonym of his choosing, agreed to speak with Red Alert Politics under the condition of anonymity about his experiences using Silk Road for more than a year. Murray acknowledges that his heroin habit destroyed his life — but he doesn’t think ending Silk Road and throwing Ulbricht behind bars would have fixed his addiction.
“I found Silk Road because I saw something online that said it was possible now to get drugs now on the internet, and it was legitimate. There had always been fake companies advertised where people would send money to India and get fake pills,” Murray said. “I knew Silk Road was real because they used Tor, which added legitimacy to it because no one knew where I was, and it was anonymous.”
Tor is an internet browser that changes your search engine IP address to a foreign country, making it nearly impossible for anyone to track information or movement online and allowing you access to the Dark Web.
At the time Murray started his heroin use, he was already abusing Oxycodone, which doctors had prescribed to him after multiple back surgeries.
“I started using Oxycodone intravenously, and like most drug addicts in that situation I moved to heroin because it’s cheaper and, in most cases, easier to get,” Murray said.
Murray explained that Silk Road operated like Amazon.com for drugs.
Drug buyers would fill their purse with Bitcoins, log in to the website, find the top dealers for their drug of choice, and once they placed the order, their money was held in escrow until the drugs came to the user’s house via the U.S. Post Office. Many times, it was mailed to your house the very next day to avoid staying in the postal system for too long.
“When I got the very first shipment I was terrified, dude. It’s in the mail, with your address and your name on it and it’s U.S. Post Office. But after a while you get use to it, and then you become ballsy about it. One time the U.S. Postal Office lost my package and I flipped,” Murray said.
But he said those early encounters getting high on heroin led him to some of his deepest lows.
“I realized on heroin that nothing was ever going to make me that happy again, except for that drug, and that’s a traumatizing experience,” Murray said.
“I felt shame in it. When you’re addict, you have to feel shame because that’s all you have, and all you live for is that. All your relationships fail, you can’t love someone when your life is falling apart. You don’t feel normal emotions, like your sick, mentally sick.”
His boyfriend at the time occasionally partook in heroin, but never became a full-fledged addict like Murray. When they met, Murray was taking Oxycodone as prescribed by his doctors, but as he abused the drug and moved on to heroin his boyfriend helped finance his addiction.
“He used to help pay for it. I used to threaten Michael and say if you don’t buy me dope, I’ll be sick (in withdrawals) this whole weekend so it won’t even be fun. … My boyfriend was enabling me for sure, he wasn’t that smart and didn’t want me to go through withdrawals,” Murray said.
“I didn’t steal from him, but if I could have I would. A lot of times I was sick and just couldn’t move, some addicts get sick and have energy, those are the dangerous addicts that will rob stores to feed their addiction. When I got sick though, I couldn’t move until I got my next fix.”
Murray said he never tried to buy any other types of drugs from Silk Road except heroin.
However, his need for the drug was so great that he began selling his Oxycodone to get it. Dealers’ pages on Silk Road even sometimes offered deals like, “Buy a bag of heroin, get a free gram of coke,” Murray said.
Ultimately, Murray’s health began to fade from the addiction and the sickness of withdrawals plagued him.
On Easter 2013, after being sick the entire winter, he confided in his sister about his addiction. Up to that point, only his boyfriend knew about the grim reality.
“I told my sister because it was Easter, and I just survived the winter and it was fucking hell. I thought, I have to do something, I was so sick, I hadn’t used heroin in a week and my relationship with my family was just shit,” Murray said.
He knew then that he was at his breaking point.
“A person can only get off drugs if they want to, and I really wanted to. I used to say, I’m a total junkie, but then after a while I realized it was true, I was totally powerless over this drug,” Murray said.
His sister and mother rallied to find him a rehab center, which he explained is extremely difficult. Very few rehab facilities have open beds.
None of the patients recovering at the rehab center had heard of Silk Road at the time, and many didn’t believe him when he explained how it worked. Still, others who knew they were going to relapse asked Murray how they could access it once they left the center.
Just a few weeks after Murray left the halfway house and returned home, Ulbricht was arrested.
While his family was happy to hear that Ulbricht received life in prison, Murray got no pleasure out of it.
“They have misdirected anger. They shouldn’t be angry at Ross [Ulbricht], they should be angry at me,” he said. “I’m a grown man. I made those choices.”
He saw the sentencing as extreme and hypocritical. He said he was angry that the justice system used Ulbricht as a symbol rather than a person.
“We live in a society based on laws, blah, blah, blah — I agree with that to an extent [but] there are exceptions for people in places of very high power who don’t get the same type of prosecution,” Murray said. “Our drug laws are insane and they need to be changed. They got him on so many charges. People were extorting him and taking money off of him, did they get life charges?”
Murray alleged that people other than Ulbricht profited from the website, but never received the harsh punishment of life in prison.
Murray doesn’t even fault Ulbricht for setting up the website that gave him easy access to heroin.
“You can get anything, anywhere, and if you really want to, you can get it,” he said. “Anyone who wants drugs is going to find a way to get them, maybe not right when they want it, but they’re going to get it. What it did though was it made it easier and safer, I didn’t have to go meet someone.”
Now at the age of 25, Murray is clean and sober and working. He credits Suboxone, a drug used to treat opiate addiction, with helping him get and stay off heroin and he stays clear of practicing addicts.
But his own win in his personal battle with drugs taught him a lot about the way the country treats drug addicts and its own “War On Drugs.”
Murray said bluntly that this so-called War had failed.
“Drugs aren’t a country you can fight. You can always find a new drug to alter the mind. Look at alcohol, that destroys people,” he said. “[Winning a war on drugs] has to come from the individual themselves. The best thing to get clean is to work. It’s to have some value in your life.”
