When a jury convicted Ross Ulbricht three months ago of running the Silk Road, it closed the legal question of whether he was guilty of masterminding that billion-dollar online black market for drugs. But as Ulbrichts sentencing approaches, his defense is opening another ethical question that may be far more societally mportant: Did the Silk Roads smorgasbord of drugs do drug users more good than harm?In a memo to judge Katherine Forrest filed Friday afternoon, Ulbrichts defense has asked her to consider the Silk Roads potential for harm reduction when she determines Ulbrichts sentence in just under two weeks. The memo makes arguments that the Silk Roads community provided drug users a more reliable way to buy untainted drugs, that Ulbricht had expressly tried to encourage safer drug use on his black market site, and that the digital nature of the sites commerce may have protected users from physical interactions that in the traditional drug trade often lead to violence. In contrast to the governments portrayal of the Silk Road web site as a more dangerous version of a traditional drug marketplace, in fact the Silk Road web site was in many respects the most responsible such marketplace in history, and consciously and deliberately included recognized harm reduction measures, including access to physician counseling, writes Ulbrichts lead defense attorney Joshua Dratel in the filing. In addition, transactions on the Silk Road web site were significantly safer than traditional illegal drug purchases, and included quality control and accountability features that made purchasers substantially safer than they were when purchasing drugs in a conventional manner.One of the Silk Roads innovations, after all, was to bring an eBay-like system of ratings and reviews for online drug sales. That system gave buyers a way to quickly weed out dealers selling lower quality or less pure substances. The site maintained a section of its user forum devoted to safer drug use, where users could ask each other for advice and help with health problems. And Ulbrichts defense points to archived messages that show that he even offered at one point to pay $500 a week to a Spanish doctor, Fernando Caudevilla, who frequented the forum and answered users questions. He also asked Caudevilla if hed be willing to chemically test drugs on the site for quality, though its not clear if that testing scheme was ever put into practice.Regardless of those good intentions, Ulbricht isnt likely to receive a light sentence. He was convicted of seven felony charges in February that include conspiracies to traffic in narcotics and money laundering, as well as a kingpin statute reserved for the leaders of organized criminal operations, which could add another decade to his prison time. In all, he faces a minimum of 30 years in prison and a maximum of life. Ulbrichts defense team has already said it plans to appeal the case.The prosecution in Ulbrichts case has already revealed that it plans to present at Ulbrichts sentencing hearing six cases of individuals who died from overdoses of drugs bought on the Silk Road. But in its Friday filing, the defense addressed each of those examples. In a grisly section of its memo, it goes through the details of those six deaths, in each case arguing that the deceased suffered from earlier health conditions and questioning whether the death-inducing drugs had actually been bought from vendors on the Silk Road. It is simply impossible for the government to prove that drugs obtained from Silk Road caused death, and in certain cases, the government cannot even establish to any degree of certainty that any of the drugs ingested came from Silk Road, Dratel writes.To bolster its argument about the societal benefits of the Silk Road, the defense includes in its filing sworn statements from a series of experts, including Tim Bingham, the administrator of an addiction-focused non-profit known as the Irish Needle Exchange Forum, and Meghan Ralston, the former director of harm reduction for the Drug Policy Alliance. Bingham, for instance, published three studies in the International Journal of Drug Policy about the Silk Road based on surveys of users. He writes in his statement that he concluded that Silk Road forumsappeared to act as an information mechanism for the promotion of safer and more acceptable or responsible forms of recreational drug use.BLOCK Silk Roads member subcultures offered a viable means of enmeshing safer drug use and encouraging hard reduction amongst a very hard to reach and informed drug-using population. My research revealed a similar ethos among drug vendors. As with Silk Road buyers, participants in a study of Silk Road vendors described themselves as possessing a personal interest in the intelligent and responsible use of drugs. BLOCKThe Drug Policy Alliances Ralston, in her accompanying statement, points to the fact that drug buyers and sellers were insulated from physical violence thanks to their use of the Silk Roads anonymity and digital protections:BLOCK Using Silk Road could be seen as a more responsible approach to drug sales, a peaceable alterative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular. None of the transactions on Silk Road, for instance, resulted in women drug buyers being sexually assaulted or forced to trade sex for drugs, as remains a possibility in some street-level drug transactions. Nor did any Silk Road transactions result in anyone having a gun pulled on them at the moment of purchase, also a danger present in face-to-face street-level drug transactions. BLOCKWhether or not you buy her argument about the Silk Roads virtues, Ralston concludes that taking down the site will almost certainly do little to stem the sale of drugs, online or off. On that point, theres little doubt: sites like the Silk Road 2, Evolution, Agora and dozens of others have already sprouted across the Dark Web to fill the digital drug market vacuum the original Silk Road left behind. Silk Road is not the only website of its kind and its displaced users will likely either turn to a competitor site or seek out drugs in other ways, Ralston writes in her statement. This approach to fighting the war on drugs has never worked and it's not likely to start working now.