Note:  I am in no way blaming my poor life choices, risky behavior and subsequent addiction problem on the Darknet Markets like Silkroad or Agora.  In fact I find them to be very helpful to current users and addicts as a form of harm reduction.  I just want my story to be out there as a warning to all the kids who are clever enough to know about crypto currency, and how dangerous that access can be.  The DNM's are a gateway to many possibilities.  I'm writing this down for me as much as for you... I hope you guys enjoy my story.

I left my hometown for college at 17 years of age in 2010.  

I was a bright kid.  Scholarships to an awesome college in an awesome city not far from home, but far enough to finally feel the freedom of living on my own.  It wasn't very long before I started smoking pot and taking LSD responsibly and within reason.  My entire life I was told about how terrible these two drugs were... Weed makes you dumb, LSD stays in your body forever and can ruin your mind.  I felt at the time that these drugs were making me a better person, a better musician.  Maybe they were.  

As time passed my curiosity began to grow.  I started working in a restaurant where I had no trouble finding any kind of drugs. I tried many different drugs before I discovered the dark net markets; mushrooms, ketamine, ecstacy, adderall, xanax, cocaine, hydrocodones.  Pause: The first time I took hydros has always stuck with me.  I won't say it was the best high I ever caught but it certainly felt like I had found something special.  But only when they were around... which wasn't often.  Access to painkillers required a prescription where I was at, and I didn't know many people willing to give away their precious dones.

  So I stuck to pot mostly, started playing real shows with my band and I really found myself over the next few years.  Then, in 2012 I found someone else, a girl.  She was a lot like me, younger than her peers, intelligent and well read (admittedly more literate than I ever was).  She was a writer and an actor, I was a musician in a popular band around town.   We met at a party and hit it off immediately, I knew her for 3 days before we drove hours to Austin for the South by South West Music fest.  We felt like we were the coolest couple, we were so bohemian and artsy.  She was my muse and I was hers.

A year and a half into that relationship later we split up.  I loved her, I truly did but she was in love with someone else.  She cheated on me and I was devastated.   I felt sickly alone, depressed, tired of life and nothing could have made me feel better.   Except maybe getting wasted.  So one night after her birthday we threw a hell of a going away party for the bassist in my band.  I kept ingesting drug after drug: Beer, Beer, Weed, Liquor, Coke, Beer, XTC, Liquor, Oxycodone.  I found the sweet spot and then overshot it by a mile. I remember blacking out in my bathroom, trying to puke with someone holding my hair.

The next thing I remember was walking into a room with 2 other people, a guy and a girl, I had never been here before...

I looked around at the dimly lit room, a record player was playing some music.  I guess this was the other tab of ex I had decided to take waking me from my alcohol induced coma.   The girl says something along the lines of: "finally you're up, I had to get you out of that house you were a hot mess."  

I began to recognize her... she lived down the street.  I continued observing the room before I answered and I was drawn to what the guy and the girl had out on the table.  A box of orange capped diabetic needles, a freshly opened package and what looked like a bag of east coast heroin, a tan powder version of the drug.  The Keith Richards inside me was nervously excited at the prospect of trying just about the only thing I hadn't.

"Shit..."  the guy said shooting a troubled look at my neighbor after noticing me staring.  "He's cool don't worry, he was throwing that bitching satanic party down the street"  She replied.  (Yeah the party was a devil worshipping party.  It wasn't the real deal though, just our dark humor.)  "He needed to lie down so I let him on the couch."  She turned to me.  "Know what this is?""Yes.  Can I?"  I replied.  Something had gotten into me lately... I was filled with a recklessness.   A don't give a fuck kind of attitude.  

I didn't realize at the time how rude it is to ask someone for their heroin, but they did their shots and then decided on obliging me.  The first shot that was loaded for me was tiny, probably 1/3rd of what they were doing, so when he stuck me, drew blood and pushed I felt totally underwhelmed.  I let them know and we made another, this one a normal sized dose.  

A red plume shoots into the needle stuck into the vein on my bicep, and in seconds its inside of me.No Quarter by led zep was on the record player.  I'll never hear that song the same way, I felt like I was a god.  I still had stimulants raging through my body when the heroin took over.   Every sensation I felt was amazing.   I wanted to live in this moment forever.  We sat around smoking cigarettes all night and I fell asleep on the girls bed.  I woke up the next day at 6 PM, a volley of texts from my ex, brother mom, everyone wanted to know where the fuck I was.  I wanted to know where to get more. 

From there it was all down hill.  I became enthralled in the darknet culture. 

They showed me the silk road, how to operate TOR and stay anonymous.  This was in 2013, and it was a great time to be a part of something like this, cheap drugs, lots of exciting drama.  I quickly became addicted and waiting for packages became too hard for me.  I was sick and if a vendor didn't send something right away it could mean 24 to 48 hours of terrible pain.   During this time period I probably spent 5 to 6 thousand on the markets over 4 months.  I couldn't sustain to buy top shelf drugs anymore, a rule I told myself I'd never break.

  I soon started driving to a local city to cop my fix, it led me to getting in deep debt with a drug dealer down there which meant I was in his pocket.  I was reduced to working for him to stay well and to pay off my debts.  A lot of awful things happened to me over the next year.  I was robbed twice: once at gunpoint and another at knife, I got in a near fatal car wreck, I lost a few friends and saved a few, I had to result to some pretty terrible things I may write about another day.

  This continued for a long time until I decided to get clean.  I tried quitting many different times and it wasn't until I enrolled in a maintenance program that I could actually handle quitting.  I tapered my methadone from 80 mg down to 5 mg over a year and a half and I recently made the jump to a (mostly) sober life.  I still get cravings from time to time but I haven't looked back.  I now currently work on local bitcoins, and I have my own business booking bands and working as a sound engineer and producer.  My life is much better now that I decided to quit, I know I left out many crazy junkie stories but I really exhausted myself typing this up and will write more in the future.  

Thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you guys enjoyed.  Much love and be careful with the amount of access you get.  It can happen to anyone.