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he had written to Dread. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come
get you.”
But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up,
and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer DPR in a new direction on a particular topic.
It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they
came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no
rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally
every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB . . . but it was the letter
H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that
letter, but heroin—he hated it.
“I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man—in prison I’ve seen
guys—I wish that shit would go away.”
Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about
people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including
how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to
years earlier. “I treat [prison] like being in a 3rd world country with poor communications
infrastructure,” he joked.
But he told Dread about his time in jail not for amusement but as a prelude to sharing a story
about what he had seen heroin do to people in prison: In lockup they drug-tested you randomly, but
they performed these exams only during the week, on Monday through Friday. Everyone inside knew
how long each drug lasts in your system. If a prisoner smoked some weed, for example, it would
show up in his piss for up to a month. As a result, no one ever smoked weed behind bars. But heroin
only sticks around in your bloodstream for two days, tops. Which meant that if you injected H on a
Friday, it was out of your system by Monday morning, just in time for the drug tests to begin.
“On Fridays,” VJ wrote, “folks would go wild on H.” And in the maximum-security wing where
he was housed, H days had been nicknamed Hell Days, because that’s exactly what they were like.
“Guys would jam a week’s worth of H in 4 hours.” The wails from the inmates who were under were
followed by moans as they came to and then a week of vomiting and tweaking as they spun out, unable
to sleep, jerking and tugging and twisting in their beds as they waited for the following Friday to
arrive, when they could ease the pain from the Friday before, and the cycle would begin anew.
“It wasn’t pretty in there then,” VJ said. “They just wanted to sleep.”
Now, long out of jail and the deputy of the biggest drug site the world had ever seen, VJ found
himself in a moral predicament.
DPR had been talking to the South American smuggler, Nob, about transporting massive amounts
of heroin through the United Kingdom and selling it in bulk on the Masters of the Silk Road site. But
before they could even begin building such a site or taking money from Nob, DPR wanted to ensure
this Nob character was legit. So he had asked VJ, his consigliere, to help facilitate an early test deal.
Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you
want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”
Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person, as he noted to VJ that the experience of Hell
Days “sounds awful.” But it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. As Ross had argued back at
Penn State, it wasn’t his place to say who could put what into their body. “I’ve got this separation
between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help