Ulbricht

The guy who facilitated at least some of that—Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online black market Silk Road—was pardoned by Trump in one of his first moves back in the White House.

And while Ulbricht sat behind bars for almost a decade, gambling became legalized, and many of those drugs became legalized too.

One of Trump’s very first moves in office, in fact, was pardoning Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder.

The symbolism is striking: On a recent Vox podcast, Ulbricht biographer Nick Bilton described Silk Road’s facilitation of Bitcoin-denominated Chinese fentanyl shipments in the early 2010s as a key step in the drug’s apocalyptic takeover of the U.S. opioid market.

“It gets to a point where Ulbricht is making so much money, and so much is being sold on Silk Road, that it captures the attention of people in China who were starting to make fentanyl at the time. Silk Road enabled them to mail fentanyl to the U.S.,”