The Evolution of Vice

“Jesse X” is a new breed of drug dealer. Gone are the days of late night bus stop hand-offs, or jumping into an unfamiliar vehicle to be driven in circles around the block while making awkward small talk with a vaguely menacing stranger; in 2023 (just like everything else) your drugs come right to your door. Or to your coffee table, your bedroom, your kitchen counter, wherever you feel comfortable letting Jesse reach into his bike messenger bag, pull out a gleaming aluminum briefcase and flip it open to reveal fat nests of baggies containing every drug you’ve ever heard of and a few you definitely haven’t. 

Every loosely-defined decade of youths seemingly has its vice of choice. The 50s were all about booze. In the 60s the fun boomers had acid while everyone else had prescribed sedatives. The 70s saw weed hit a peak. The rapacious 80s were fed by cocaine and hollowed out by the crack epidemic. And in the 90s Gen X stayed true to their name by binging MDMA both on and off the dancefloor. As we pass Y2K though, the prevailing cliche gets a little harder to pin down. Legal highs, research chemicals, your mom’s bathroom cabinet benzos, whippets –everything became available but nothing seemed to stick. By the early 2010s, the bleak creep of the opioid crisis was casting a shadow over the age old pleasure of getting fucked up, and it’s against this backdrop of the ravages of addiction that many Gen Zers are cautiously coming of age. First-hand information about drugs is readily available online, as is the ability to fire up your VPN and buy them safely, but the prevailing cliche about today’s young people is that the glut of access has resulted in them opting for sobriety in record numbers. 

For this issue of BONES, we wanted to understand the role of getting blazed, blitzed, addled, and altered in the lives of youths today. My question was simple: is there any truth to the stereotype that Gen Z are addicted only to their phones? I spent a day with Jesse to see first hand what youth drug culture looks like in 2023 and came away with a new appreciation for old vices. 

At 24 years old and already six years deep into dealing, “Jesse X” has a thriving business and a finely-honed routine. He got into the game through his freshman roommate in college and quickly found plenty of eager customers in the halls of his dorm. Adderall was the natural starting point, which he shifted initially in small numbers to the students unlucky enough to not have procured a script of their own. “Everyone has ADHD, seriously everyone. So everyone has Addy, but they don’t share it.” I ask him what he thinks is behind the surge of ADHD diagnoses, “TikTok”, he rolls his eyes, “people my age have a victim complex, they always need something to blame.” In college he noticed that few people were taking Adderall purely recreationally. While it helped them drink more and stay up later, the goal was primarily to keep on top of a punishing workload or quiet the imposter syndrome that fueled their procrastination.   

Branching out into other offerings came naturally to Jesse. “People started to know me and ask if I could get other stuff. Usually for specific parties or nights…I’d get like 10 people in a row asking for coke or K and know there was a party coming up.” At the mention of parties I can’t help but call out the notable lack of molly / MDMA in his recounting. Born too late to enjoy the pure pressed ecstasy pills that were all but gone from circulation by the 2010s, I’m interested to hear that molly is more of a novelty than a staple for many young people today. “I’ve sold it before and taken it a couple of times but you don’t see it too much.” We bat some ideas around about why –lack of supply compared to other drugs, inconsistent potency, inability to easily snort, but the one that piques my interest most is its interaction with SSRIs. “You just don’t come up, like you don’t feel it at all, it’s pointless.” I do some digging and it turns out he’s right. Although they work in different ways, SSRIs and MDMA both increase serotonin and can delay or negate a come up when taken together. This makes it easier to overdose or to experience serotonin syndrome, as well as induce epic comedowns that make the whole thing painfully not worth it. Does he know a lot of people on SSRIs? “Most people get put on them at some point, but not everyone sticks with it, they’re like off and on.” He reiterates his earlier point about needing something, anything to blame: “life is hard and weird and everyone’s just trying to escape it.” With illegal drugs or prescribed ones, I ask. “Both” he replies.

In the relative absence of molly, what’s the drug of choice for the dance floor these days? “K” he tells me without skipping a beat, “it’s all about K now.” Ketamine, aka the infamous horse tranquilizer, is evidently having a moment. Along with the old faithful cocaine, it’s far and away Jesse’s most popular ware. When I ask him why he thinks K has become so popular, he counts out a pile of 40 KETAMINE-stamped baggies to bring on a Wednesday night bike ride between his Brooklyn-based customers and twirls one between his fingers, “You can control the high pretty easily, it’s hallucinogenic-ish but without the commitment of a trip, a mild K hole feels sorta zen…it’s fun in a lot of different settings.” I’ve always categorized K as an upper but hearing him talk about it I realize the drug of the moment is fuzzier and offers a more out-of-body experience than the functional punch of coke and molly. In generations past, getting out of one’s head was the goal, now it’s increasingly appealing to get out of one’s body.

We talk briefly about the professionalism of dealers. I’ve been surprised to note things like scheduled home deliveries, QR codes directing you to evidence of small batch testing, and laminated menus that call to mind a build-your-own diner breakfast. Without doubt this feels like the biggest difference between this present moment and the drug buying experience of generations past. Jesse chalks all this up to nothing but good old market competition. He doesn’t think people buying drugs these days necessarily expect anything new, but he knows information and access are more abundant than ever and he needs something to differentiate and sustain his business. “I’m an entrepreneur” he laughs, “I’m trying to make as much money as I can so I can start a real company”. When I ask him what that company might do he isn’t sure; he’ll go wherever the money is. Glancing at the stacks of cash casually spilling out all over his apartment, it feels unlikely to me that he’ll ever go anywhere else. 

I tell him I’m curious about the role of alcohol in young people’s lives today and he shrugs, “when you’re young you’re always broke so it’s just whatever’s cheap shitty and strongest…after college most of my friends didn’t really see the point in drinking, no one I know is like “Sober” but they don’t drink a lot.” Not yet in the stage where they’re agonizing over which bottle of natty wine to bring to a dinner party but out of the Everclear punch era, this youth cohort nonetheless has a different relationship to alcohol than cohorts past. Recalling our hypothesis about molly, Jesse specifically calls out the antidepressant Wellbutrin “and other meds” as a reason for why many people he knows don’t drink. “I was on it for a while and the Dr fucking freaked me out saying it causes seizures.” He and a couple of his friends who come over to hang out also talk animatedly about their aversion to hangovers, preferring weed as a social lubricant and tool of relaxation to the effects of alcohol, which are expensive, short lived, and often regrettable. Weed is legal in the state where Jesse went to college so he didn’t even consider stocking it for sale, but it’s unequivocally his own drug of choice and has been since he was 15. Throughout the time we spend together, he hits his dab pen (a vape filled with concentrated THC oil) with a regularity that would require me to be hospitalized. 

 

The thing that sticks out to me most during our conversations, regardless of what substance we’re discussing, is how central caring for yourself and others is to the experience of getting fucked up. Jesse and his friends talk articulately about the importance of set and setting, deftly weaving together things they read on Erowid with their own personal experiences, both good and bad. They tell stories about looking after friends in K holes and helping out an acquaintance who started to rely too heavily on coke to have a good time. They stress how vital it is to “test your shit” and have deep, rational anxiety about the pervasive threat of fentanyl in every line. What registered to me as entrepreneurial professionalism, like QR coded bags and lab grade testing, is really just an evolution of the ways in which we look out for each other when we’re most vulnerable. It looks radically different today because of the technology available to us, but the very human impulse to do so has been there all along. 

As I watch Jesse bike off stoned into the night with his backpack full of K, it occurs to me that, rather than their approach to recreational drugs, it’s the ubiquity of the prescribed ones that differentiates the lives of young people today. Ultimately he’s right, everyone is perpetually trying to escape this hard and weird life and it’s oddly comforting to know that that, at least, will never change.

– Sophie Peck