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Ross’s days now often begin before the sun rises, with the sounds of keys and the door to each
prison cell unlocking. His cell is only a few feet deep and half as wide. The walls of the prison,
which are mostly thick orange concrete blocks, are a brooding and formidable sight. Ross wakes up,
slips on his prison clothes, and walks out into the general population. The days are tediously
regimented, with an hour allocated for breakfast, thirty minutes for lunch, and the same for supper.
Meals are served on plastic trays, with divots on the sides for plastic forks or spoons, plastic cups,
and pats of margarine. The commissary at the prison sells snacks, drinks, and clothing. Ross, using the
money his mother has placed into his account, can sometimes buy candy and sodas or a new pair of
sneakers or sweatpants.
Inmates like Ross, who are well behaved inside, are given an hour outside to walk in circles on
the roof of the prison, where a cage encloses the air. In the evening Ross is ushered back into his cell,
and the bolts on the doors slam tight. The concrete room is thrust into darkness.
After Ross was arrested, the Silk Road Web site was promptly shut down. But it took only a few
weeks before a new Silk Road 2.0 opened for business, with a new Dread Pirate Roberts at the helm
of the ship. When that was subsequently shut down by the Feds, another Silk Road appeared, along
with hundreds of other Web sites that anonymously sell drugs online. The people who run these Web
sites see themselves as part of a movement, and some believe what they are doing is making the
world a safer place. Maybe it’s just a justification; or maybe it’s not.
In 2015, the year that Ross was sentenced to life in prison, a group of university researchers
concluded a 67,000-hour study that involved interviewing 100,000 people around the world about
their drug use. One of the questions in the survey asked people how they got their drugs. With that data
the researchers noted that the year after the Silk Road opened for business, as many as 20 percent of
respondents started to purchase drugs online. When the researchers asked these people why they
chose to buy drugs on the Internet and not on the street, the users explained that they were nearly six
times more likely to be physically harmed on the street. Clearly Ross had fulfilled the goal that had
led him to start the Silk Road, and tens of thousands of people feel safer being able to buy drugs
online.
But as with all technologies, there is a good side and a bad. Also in 2015, another study was
released. This one was by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said that for the
first time in recent history, more people had died from heroin- and opioid-related drug overdoses in
America than from gun deaths. As news reports noted, sometimes accompanied by chilling videos
taken from smartphones, in hundreds of incidents of overdoses, children are left orphaned. One of the
reasons for the rise in deaths was due to the ease with which people could now gain access to
synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, that are made in labs in China. These drugs are fifty to one hundred
times stronger than traditional heroin and users often misjudge how much to inject, which inevitably
leads to a fatal overdose. The charts the CDC released along with its report, illustrating the number of
people who had died from these synthetic opioids, were not too dissimilar to those showing the
profits and revenues from the Silk Road, with an abrupt line pointing upward and off to the right.
Often when news articles are written about studies related to online drug-buying, the stories
mention Ross Ulbricht as the pioneer at the forefront of this new world. The links from the stories
will eventually lead readers to an obscure video online that was recorded a few years earlier at the
Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. In the video Ross is talking to his old friend from