Silk Road was a dark web platform that Ulbricht created in January 2011 and operated until his arrest in September 2013. Not all the vendors sold banned drugs, but most of them sold banned drugs, and that’s what Silk Road became known for. It was the first dark web marketplace of its kind, and at that time it felt like the Wild West. 

Customers entered anonymously through the Tor network and were able to browse a wide range of advertisements for banned substances. Transactions were encrypted, and could only be made with Bitcoin. Silk Road generated more than 9.5 million “Bitcoins,” as the cryptocurrency was referred to at the time, during its run. I try not to think about how many Bitcoins I lost in circa 2013. 

“I used a public library computer to access Tor,” one former Silk Road customer told Filter. “I had a Bitcoin wallet on a thumb drive, and would have the packages delivered to a foreclosed house in my neighborhood that me and a few neighbors kept up the lawn on. Made sure piles of mail didn’t build up, that sort of thing; we don’t want our neighborhood to look like trash. So it was normal for me to be in the yard or clean up junk mail off the porch.”

The waiting game after placing an order was the hardest part, because you always worried that it had been intercepted by law enforcement. But if you were able to buy or sell drugs online, it was a lot safer than doing it out on the street, where you were much more likely to run into cops than you were if everything was done by mail.

“It was like such a safe place to get party favors [and] drugs,” another former customer recalled. “I never got sick off any drug I got off that website … and I believe that it did keep me safe because then I wasn’t roaming the streets to find drugs!” 

Harm reduction was a growing presence online. It came in different forms. Some might recall from that same time period the popular blog Jynxies Natural Habitat, which cataloged different New York City heroin bags, or “stamps,” accompanied by product reviews that readers could weigh in on as well. So as Silk Road grew it naturally prompted the creation of online forums like /Silkroad on Reddit, where people would share information about potency and adulterants and their experience with different vendors, who were also there sharing information. 

The Silk Road era was when I began tapping into online communities to share information about drug effects, safer use and wound care, as well as deliver harm reduction supplies to people in parts of the country where they didn’t have access to them. This kind of peer-to-peer information exchange has always been a vital part of drug-user communities, but doing it online allowed for a lot more information to be exchanged between a lot more people. 

“I wouldn’t buy anything without researching the substance and the seller,” another former customer told Filter. “Read reviews on the listing itself as well as on forums. Vendors pad their reviews all the time, I’m sure they still do.”

Silk Road meant different things to different people. Ulbricht created it from a libertarian mentality of wanting less government regulation, not more, but for two and a half years it gave many people the closest thing they’ve had to a safe supply.

It came to an abrupt end just as fentanyl began to replace heroin. A lot of folks were cut off from the sellers they knew, so to speak, and left to navigate the unknown. More than a decade later, the drug war has still had no victories, only losses. And though many other dark-web markets have risen and fallen since, Silk Road was one of a kind. 

Top image (cropped) via United States Sentencing Commission. Inset image via Anonymous.

The post Memories of Silk Road, the Drug Marketplace We Used for Safer Supply appeared first on Filter.

I realized long ago that being in recovery did not exempt me from stigma. I was determined to be as transparent as possible with my children, and anyone who asked, about how society treats people associated with drug use.

I was in recovery by the time my first child was born. At the hospital I expected pain, tears and a bit of embarrassment from having to repeatedly explain why my veins were hard to access. What I experienced instead was disdain, as if my past made me an inept mother. My nurse had seen in my chart that years earlier I’d been treated for hepatitis C. I was told that I shouldn’t breastfeed—despite the fact that, even if I hadn’t been cured, breastfeeding would have been safe.

Because I’d had to give birth by emergency C-section, I was released with a prescription for opioids. Yet no one gave me any guidance around discontinuation of use, even though they knew about my history with heroin. So I was home alone with a screaming newborn, having withdrawal symptoms, and afraid to tell anyone.

As I sat holding my baby and crying, I wondered if Child Protective Services would be called if I tried to get any medical care related to the withdrawal. I called a friend instead. A community response was safer than an institutional response. 

I am terrified of my children experimenting with drugs themselves, because of the overdose risk. But abstinence-only education won’t protect them or their peers.

Navigating full-time employment and raising three toddlers was what motivated me to begin sending people harm reduction supplies by mail, a practice which inspired the national program NEXT Distro.

People who inject drugs in particular face so many barriers to staying safe. There’s so much stigma involved in trying to get sterile syringes from a pharmacy, on top of the travel time and expense. We needed to normalize access to harm reduction supplies so they could be delivered like anything else bought at a pharmacy. 

Assembling packages of these supplies became a family affair. One child might be doing the labels, another reminding me which items needed to go in which envelope. When they were younger, we just referred to the items as medical supplies. As they grew, I gradually explained more about how the supplies were used and why people weren’t always able to access them.

I shared my own experiences. It became a way for my children to educate themselves while developing empathy for people frequently considered disposable. I told them about my experiences living on the street. I took them to the places I used to sleep. 

Children as young as 12 have contacted me to share that they revived a parent with naloxone I’d sent their household by mail.

Piece by piece I explained my history, in keeping with their age level, so that they never felt lied to nor dismissed. Instead of averting their eyes from people living on the street when we took our route to daycare, my children learned to share their snacks. Now that they’re teenagers, they’re able to talk to their peers when an overdose affects someone they know. 

I am terrified by the possibility of my children experimenting with drugs themselves, because of the overdose risk. But educating them only on abstinence does not give them the information they need to protect themselves or the people around them.

From “Just Say No” to “Red Ribbon Week” to “One Pill Can Kill,” the abstinence-only mentality taught in schools is neither accurate nor effective. These campaigns explain nothing about how different drugs work or strategies for responding to overdose. I had to take a deep breath to steady myself when at a recent school assembly a speaker began talking about “fentanyl-laced cannabis.”

Children as young as 12 have contacted me to share that they revived a parent with naloxone I’d sent their household by mail. Kids need facts, not fear. They need to know about naloxone, rescue breathing, the difference between opioids and stimulants, the list goes on. They need to know that some substances may be harmful to the developing brain, but they also need to know why. That is a much more effective strategy than a blanket statement that all drugs are bad and all come with the same risks. 

What do I tell my children about my history with drugs? Anything they want to know.

Image via Central District Health, Idaho

The post What I Tell My Kids About My History of Drug Use appeared first on Filter.

While I was grateful to be alive, waking up surrounded by EMTs and police was frightening. I was told police frequently came along with EMTs after 911 calls to “chaotic” sites, like the hotel where I was living at the time. The police directed the EMTs to take me to the hospital, even though I was awake and alert. They told me that if I refused, they would take me to jail for possession. In this case, it would have been for possession of a single now-empty syringe.

I was terrified. I knew that if they carried out that threat, I would sit dopesick in jail for days until my case was eventually dismissed. It felt like cruel and unusual punishment for what was, essentially, a medical emergency. That experience forever molded my perspective on overdose. That, and the $500 hospital bill I later received from a collections agency.

All these interventions are crippled in a pandemic.

San Francisco is currently on track to lose upwards of a 675 people to overdose in 2020—a grim record. By August, the city had already surpassed the 441 lives lost in 2019.

While the city has over the years expanded access to naloxone (Narcan) and low-threshold buprenorphine, added bedside addiction services in hospitals and expanded street outreach, all these interventions are crippled in a pandemic.

People who use drugs, who have long been cautioned to never use alone, are now being instructed to isolate—and naloxone only works when there is another person there to administer it. City-based supportive housing programs currently allow no visitors. For every step forward, we are now experiencing many more steps back.

A Long Fight for a Community Taking Care of Its Own

Throughout the 1990s, overdose became my constant companion. In 1998, fresh out of rehab, I was browsing the paper when one article caught my eye—San Francisco was in the midst of an “overdose crisis.” Names of recent victims of accidental heroin overdose were listed. One in particular stood out to me: Jennifer. She had been my partner a few years prior to my 1996 incarceration, and was the sweet woman who wrote me letters with hearts on the envelopes when I was in jail.

We had no naloxone or other tools—just running to call 911 from payphones.

Working as a peer counselor at the time, I wondered what I could do to help. I thought back to how, when I was still using drugs, we would warn each other about bad batches while standing in line at the syringe exchange. By the time I got sober in 1998 I had saved five of my friends from overdose. We had no naloxone or other tools—just running to call 911 from payphones and a week of CPR training from my high school days. But there was, and will always be, a community of folks that care for their own. We gave each other hope.

Treatment options were limited in the ’90s. The two dominant modalities were abstinence-based and/or attack therapy—where counselors “break you down to build you back up.” Wait lists for methadone clinics were long, and you had to have a minimum of two “failed” treatment episodes in detox slots before methadone was even available as an option.

Housing, too, was limited. There was a sense of despair among people who used drugs, many of whom were still being disproportionately impacted by the AIDS crisis. From 1997 to 2000, 47 percent of all heroin-involved overdoses in San Francisco occurred in low-income residential hotels; 36 percent occurred in one small central area of the city. In 68 percent of fatal overdoses, the victim was reportedly alone.

In 1999, I was encouraged to join what was then known as the city’s “heroin committee.” I sat around the table with doctors, public health professionals, advocates and activists. We were united in our frustration. While our friends continued to die, we were tasked with creating solutions. Out of this work were born: the Harm Reduction Policy for San Francisco, the Treatment on Demand workgroup, the “Fix with a friend” campaign, and later the DOPE Project, where I worked part-time until 2007. We began teaching rescue breathing and providing harm reduction education to people who were using drugs.

I heard Dan Bigg recommend that we should be diverting services away from the police and putting naloxone directly into the hands of people who needed it.

In January 2000, I attended a conference in Seattle, Washington, on preventing heroin overdoses. Because I was still in a very rigorous 12-step-based recovery program, and on probation, I was afraid to travel outside my room at a sober living facility in the Tenderloin. I was afraid of what impact this work might have on my own abstinence. What I found was that it expanded my world.

At the conference, I heard Dan Bigg recommend that we should be diverting services away from the police and putting naloxone directly into the hands of people who needed it most. By 2003, naloxone distribution began in San Francisco. In 2013, I was encouraged to begin sending naloxone through the mail by people I met through social media.

The mentality of the work had traveled from the city far into the suburbs and rural areas, but the resources had not always traveled with it. While I had access to this life-saving medication, the people who reached out to me still did not.

Scarce Resources Meet New Threats

The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. Despite some progress over the years, the introduction of fentanyl into the drug supply around 2013 brought on an overdose crisis that dwarfs the previous one. San Francisco’s 450 overdose deaths in the first eight months of 2020 were more than double the annual number that was considered a crisis in 1998.

We are still struggling under many of the same antiquated systems that harm us instead of help us. Resources flow through federal, state and local entities that often only see harm reduction as a vehicle for the promotion of abstinence-based recovery. Access has expanded, but so has need.

Many harm reductionists are left to turn to corners of the internet to try to scrounge up test strips, syringes, the meth and crack pipes that many of our county programs won’t let us purchase, and more naloxone (even the expired kind—it can still remain effective for another year or two).

We have mail-based programs through the hub at NEXT Distro with limited or no funding for postage. We have syringe exchange programs in more locations, but they’re often limited to one-to-one exchanges. We have the US Surgeon General promoting naloxone in a public health campaign, but no real significant federal funding for our on-the-ground work.

I am proud of how far we have come. Yet the road to liberation seems to be getting longer and longer.

The structural threats that we faced in the 1990s remain deeply entrenched. We still fight against white supremacy, denial of bodily autonomy for sex workers, homophobia and hate and violence against trans people, the drug war, evictions, and child “welfare” systems that extract children from homes based on prejudice and arbitrary rules.

I am proud of how far we have come. Naloxone is now a mainstream word. Drug decriminalization in Oregon is leading the way forward. The legalization of cannabis is gaining momentum every day. We have a national discourse on safe consumption sites. Yet the road to liberation seems to be getting longer and longer.

I have lost hundreds of people in my life to overdose. I have lost dozens of people in my life to AIDS. If it wasn’t for this loving community of dedicated harm reductionists, I probably would’ve succumbed to my despair long ago. As we move forward—even slowly—I am grateful for the communities we have built.

Photograph by Supercarwaar via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 4.0

The post San Francisco Drug Users Face Soaring Deaths. Solidarity Can Sustain Us. appeared first on Filter.