In a somewhat unexpected move by President Donald Trump, on January 21 he issued a full pardon to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. After a decade of incarceration, Ulbricht was released that same day from the Arizona federal Bureau of Prisons facility where he’d been serving his two life sentences, plus 40 years.
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.
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