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Editor’s Note: Today guest blogger Depaulo Vincent Bariuan completes his two-part series on Silk Road, the online drug emporium just recently taken down by federal authorities. Part One focused on the website’s relationship to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its users’ efforts to evade government oversight. Today’s entry looks at the online life of Silk Road’s alleged founder, Ross Ulbricht, and asks how a young Ron Paulian might have conceived of online drug sales as an experiment in free-market utopianism.

Despite not knowing much about the anonymous online drug-trafficking website Silk Road beyond what news agencies and blogs have been reporting, the public has quite a bit of knowledge on its owner/orchestrator, 29-year-old entrepreneur Ross William Ulbricht. Operating his website out of what NPR called a “modest” $1,000/month room in San Fransisco, not even those close to him knew what he was doing. He lived with two roommates who only knew him as “Josh,” and reported that Ulbricht mostly kept to his room. His parents claimed ignorance of his online empire, but also remarked that he was “stellar, good person” and “very idealistic.”

In an interview on December 6 of last year, StoryCorp correspondent — and Ulbricht’s best friend — Rene Pinnell asked him about where he wished to be in 20 years. He responded: “I want to have had a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by that time.”

What we know about Ross Ulbricht is due to the fact that he, much like any other person of his generation, had a substantial digital footprint. His name appears in many places all over social media, and with it many tidbits of the idealism his mother described.

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Editor’s Note: Points readers have no doubt followed the story of Silk Road with some interest, given its role in establishing a new paradigm in drug distribution. Today guest blogger Depaulo Vincent Bariuan begins a two-part series on Silk Road by explaining the now-defunct website’s relationship to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, suggesting that we look at Silk Road’s fate not only in terms of drug law but also as a key site in the government’s efforts to exert more control over life online. Vincent has a B.A. in Asian Studies from Florida State and an M.A. in Film Studies from Columbia, where his scholarship focused on new media. Since graduating, he’s worked in the video game industry.

On July 12, 2012, the Australian Federal Police raided the home of Melbourne resident Paul Leslie Howard. Tipped off by the 46.9 grams of MDMA and 14.5 grams of cocaine mailed to his residence over the course of 2 months, the police also recovered the following in the bust: marijuana, digital scales, clip seal bags, $2300 in cash, a money counter, and 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones. But this wasn’t an ordinary drug bust – Howard wasn’t connected to any widespread drug syndicate. Most of his product was sent not from any nefarious location but from various households in the Netherlands. In fact, all of his drugs were acquired on the internet through a website called Silk Road. Taken down by the federal authorities this past October, Silk Road had become known as the internet’s one stop shop for any imaginable recreational drug.

Much of what people have learned about Silk Road since its takedown comes from the accounts journalists and bloggers have written about the website.

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Editor’s note: In recent weeks Points contributing editor and media liaison Amy Long has secured interviews with a host of leading contemporary fiction writers about the role of alcohol, drugs, and addiction in their work. The resulting interview series, which we’ve christened “Fiction Points,” will run weekly, beginning tomorrow with Eleanor Henderson. Today Long and Points editor Eoin Cannon introduce the series by discussing the relevance of fiction to drug history and the importance of drugs to the current state of fiction. 

View the entire series here or use the links at the end of this post to navigate to a specific interview.

EC: Fiction plays a unique set of roles for those seeking to understand the nature and meaning of drugs in history. Some survey it for depictions of the social realities of drugs’ procurement and use in a given time and place—data to join that of letters, newspaper reports, and medical treatises. Fictional representations are invented, of course, but they can be traced to real-life models, and in proper context can make vivid the phenomena under research.

Others look to literature for a rarer kind of access to the subjective experience of a drug’s effects and social meanings—a narrower view, because particular to the writer’s identity, style, and ability, but a deeper one. This depth comes not just in the sense of submerged mental experience, but in the possibility of foundational insight, the kind that can shape the very questions we ask about drugs in history.

Drugs are threads in the social fabric, but they are threads that tend to tell us something significant about the pattern of that fabric beyond their own limited place in it. Drug use facilitates a wide variety of social behaviors (both mundane and unusual) and it defines the nature of ordinary versus altered consciousness. When authors depict drug use they limn simultaneously the structures of outer social order and inner mental life. Far from being the “escape” they provide for some characters, drugs tend to drive stories themselves toward the heart of things.

Consider how Edith Wharton uses drugs to render the plight of her character Lily Bart, in a brief scene toward the end of The House of Mirth (1905).

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A recent article from Stanford University’s in-house news service highlights a continuing ed program that has made humanities coursework an aid to both addiction recovery and the broader social stability needed to sustain it. The Hope House Scholars Program was founded in 2001 by Stanford philosophy profs Debra Satz and Rob Reich, who were inspired by the Clemente Course in the Humanities program founded by Earl Shorris in 1995. Each term, two Stanford profs team up to teach a course to the residents of Hope House, a residential drug and alcohol treatment facility for women, many of whom have recently been released from prison. The courses focus on themes including ethics, social justice, and moral responsibility. Each of the roughly 16 graduates per term receives college credit and a voucher for another continuing ed course. Corrie Goldman reports:

Wende C. is a grandmother who worked in banking for 27 years. She is also a crack addict who checked herself into Hope House, a residential drug and alcohol treatment facility in Redwood City, Calif., so she could learn the skills she needs to recover from her addiction.

As a resident in the all-female facility, she participated in group and individual therapy sessions, and health and nutrition seminars. She also attended a weekly humanities course.

Each session focused on one historical female figure, including medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen, poet Emily Dickinson, African American abolitionist Sojourner Truth and Hatshepsut, one of the most successful pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

At first, Wende wondered about the merit of studying “old and dead people,” but she said that learning about influential women made her feel “empowered” and helped her realize that it’s “OK for women to take a stand.”

One of the reasons I find this kind of program fascinating is the way it interacts with the humanist traditions built into the various mutual-aid and talk therapies used in recovery facilities and beyond.

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