Silk Road Was Safer Than the Streets for Buyers/SellersMeghan Ralston People use drugs. They get those drugs from someone else. In order to consume drugs, someone had to buy them, and someone had to sell them. We dont have to like it, but we do have to acknowledge the reality of it. Our entire approach to responding to that reality has thus far been a dismal disappointment. Silk Road was, in the most basic sense, a product of our failed war on drugsa response to our woefully inadequate way of managing not only drug use, but also drug demand and drug sales. Many reformers, myself included, have long been highlighting the forward-thinkingbenefits of Silk Road and the ways it began to slowly revolutionize drug sales around the world. It provided a platform that could allow indigenous growers and cultivators around the world to sell directly to the consumer, potentially reducing cartel participation and violence. It created an economic opportunity for drug sellers with previous felony drug convictions and others typically excluded from participating in the regulated and controlled US drug sales marketplaces (such as dispensaries where marijuana is sold). Silk Road was a far better way for people to buy and sell drugs than on the streets. It was a workable model of largely peaceable and less dangerous drug transactions. Transactions that did not result in women drug buyers being sexually assaulted or forced to trade sex for drugs. Transactions that did not result in anyone having a gun pulled on them at the moment of purchase. Journalist Mike Power had this to say in response to the verdict: Drug war blogger Poly Paradyme echoed that sentiment: We need to bring drug sellers into the conversation about ending the war on drugs. We need to acknowledge the role they play. We need to prioritize the realities of people who sell drugs all around the world, the terrible consequences (including death) many of them face, the risks they take and the way they so often are excluded from our demands for justice and drug policy reform. We need something better than what we have now, which is nothing but failure, cartels and beheadings, mass incarceration, mandatory minimums, a vibrant and throbbing illicit market, and a prison industrial complex totally out of control. Drug sales and e-drug marketplaces are illegal only because we say they are. We could equally decide to say they are not illegal, but rather they are controlled and regulated environments, with enforced product quality standards, age verification measures, fair trade agreements with drug cultivators, healthcare workers dispensing drug safety information in chat rooms, and any number of other policies that would enhance safety and reduce risks. We could decide to create models that champion human rights, promote eco-stewardship and sustainability and create good jobs for people. Or we could choose to do nothing and let the disastrous global drug war keep grinding away, ruining lives and destroying opportunity. Silk Road gave us a new way to imagine better management of the drug trade. It remains to be seen if policy reformers embrace and champion this new model, or if we allow that innovation to fade into our history of opposing the failed war on drugs. Meghan Ralston is the harm reduction manager for the Drug Policy Alliance where this article first appeared. 