Legally, they do not. If you have a problem with that, take it up with (relevant to the federal laws at issue here) the Congress.
The rule of law and courts were supposed to protect such minorities (ie drug legalization through generalized privacy of Roe v Wade, and trade via the right to free speech). It's pretty fucked up that the legal system has rotted so thoroughly that the courts are harshly persecuting them while the majority of interested people dissent.
Then again, much of that rot is due to the "war on drugs" and its underlying philosophy that people exist to serve their government.
Unless you live in a jurisdiction where the purchase of narcotics is legal (Mars?) the meaning of "People have a right to buy drugs" is quite clear.
In a world where the laws you invoke are responsible for so much suffering and death, to come in with a "Well, legally" and pretend the moral dimension does not exist is... well, I've already said what that is.
As for having a right to drugs, every man has a right to do what they please with their body.
Try harder, like by working to convince the public that such a right should exist, so that other people join you in your effort to convince Congress to change the law.
Of course, you haven't provided any argument here for your position on rights, just a bald statement that the right you would like to exist does, as if that were some kind of uncontroversial, universally-accepted thing that required no justification.
Would you like a list of examples where extremely illegal actions are clearly and controversially moral, or can you think of historical examples yourself?
No, I haven't. "Equivocating" is, you know, pretty exactly the opposite of "expressly disambiguating".
> Would you like a list of examples where extremely illegal actions are clearly and controversially moral
Presuming you mean "clearly and uncontroversially", no.
Though if you are arguing that "the right to buy drugs" is in that category, I'd like to see an argument for that.
Not to detract from your point. I think he deserves life without parole for the attempted hits by themselves, ignoring every other charge. (Despite the fact that's not what he was convicted of.)
Actually they don't, which is kind of the point.
But I think the idea of natural rights is dumb. They're made up by humans. They're enforced by humans. Their exact nature is disagreed upon and debated by humans.
The idea that there is some set of core natural rights that comes from somewhere other than humans is a tactic used to avoid debate on which rights we should and should not have by people unwilling to actually support their ideas with facts or reasoning.
You might as well just say that god told us to do it that way.
If humans followed the law above all else, then we would not have democracy, or even republics. We'd have totalitarian nations of smiling slaves.
The idea of particular divine ordinances -- which is what doctrines of natural rights are -- are fine ways to organize identity and action around that identity, including revolution.
That that is true doesn't, in any way, make any particular such quasi-religious concept correct. And, even if it did, I can't think of any of those revolutions that included, in their conception of natural rights, a right to buy drugs, as such. So, even operating in such a framework (and even once we've agreed which framework of natural rights we are operating in), you probably have more work to do than just simply asserting it to establish the claim "people have a right to buy drugs" is valid even within that framework.
> If humans followed the law above all else, then we would not have democracy, or even republics.
Yes, most people would agree that there are principals beyond the law that justify arguments about what the law should or should not be, and most would probably even agree that some of those principals are sufficient to justify breaking the law as it stands -- and even to justify soliciting homicides if they are threatened sufficiently.
However, that kind of high-level agreement itself is very different than agreeing that the "right to buy drugs" is in either the first or, more relevant to the claim that the Ulbricht verdict is a miscarriage of justice, the second class of principals.
There wasn't revolution because the people were aesthetically displeased at the fact that their natural rights were being violated. There was revolution because the people wanted something and they were willing to fight for it.
If income inequality keeps going the way it's going, one day we'll see the people revolt against the rich demanding a natural right to housing, medical care, education and who knows what else. You'll, of course, note that particular definition of natural rights far exceeds the Jeffersonian one. It'll be just as an illogical concept then as it is now. It's a nice rhetorical flourish though, and rhetoric goes a long way when you're asking people to risk their lives.
Accurate slip of the keyboard, given the eroding Constitution.
Rights are what you get if a bunch of rational, self-interested people get together and say, "What ought we be allowed to do without interference?"
There is a single, correct, rational answer to that: you ought to be allowed to do anything that doesn't initiate force against someone else. All rights are a function of that single fundamental observation.
Every rational, fully self-interested person (who has studied the topic a lot) will agree on this.
So that's where rights come from... they are a human construct, but there's also a single, objectively correct answer.
So they don't come from "Laws of Nature" or the Founding Fathers.
Ironically (since you are obviously a rational, self interested person), this statement is objectively false.
Rights are the things that we would all agree should be legally protected if we were all rational about it.
So they're a human construct, but they're still objective.
No, I think you're the one who doesn't seem to understand them.
> Rights are the things that we would all agree should be legally protected if we were all rational about it.
We, as a society, have a system in place to work out this sort of thing. That system has already decided that we don't have this right. If you were in fact able to convince enough people that your position is the most rational then your available rights can be changed. Your argument is valid but your conclusion is wrong based on the available facts.
What "rational", of course, usually means, is "agreeing with me", and so there are so very many false Scotsmen in attendance.
There are lots of definitions of "rational", and I don't think that explanation actually works (or even makes sense) for any of the obvious ones.
Every single government actor involved in this case is far more guilty than Ross and, frankly, they are the ones that deserve prison.
Yes, Ross should have realized you can't massively break the law and get away with it. He made a big mistake.
But the mistake he made was assuming that other people were more benevolent than they really are.
This young man viewed the world with a child-like, rosy-eyed perspective, and for that, he gets crushed by the boot of government brutality.
Disclaimer: I have no involvement with any dark nets or online drug trade.
edit: I don't know if he hired hitmen and if he did, I suspect it was in his own defense.