His willingness to take gambles — such as offering three 80-milligram Oxys for $100 — paid off, and he felt one step closer to emulating his idols: Tiger Woods, Bernie Madoff, and Charlie Sheen, whom he admires because "he's rich and gets to do whatever the fuck he wants."
"Lots of times I just gave shit away," Wisecarver says. "Oxy is worse to detox off of than heroin. It goes into your marrow, it feels like icicles under your skin." He claims never to have been addicted, although at the peak of his use, he was doing about $3,000 of Oxy a week — and he knew what it felt like to detox. Other times he accepted goods and services in exchange for pills: Foot Locker shoes, golf lessons, car stereo systems, and even a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that he says he later sold for $10,000. (It cost him 30 pills.)
Photos courtesy of Cody Wisecarver.
Cody Wisecarver
Photos courtesy of Cody Wisecarver.
The Oxy Life: Cody Wisecarver posted these images to his Facebook page. His MySpace profile picture is Al Pacino in Scarface; that page also includes a photo folder titled “Hot Ass Linsday Lohan.”
Related Content
More About
And there was another reason he felt empathy for his customers: "They're doing pills because something is going on in their lives, or something happened, and they want to forget about it," he says. "Every one of these kids' drug use stems from their problems at home." That was the "public service" he argues that he provided: helping these kids through their problems but also protecting them from the big city. He had no qualms — especially if he could make his million doing it.
Whether or not Cody Wisecarver's arrest benefits Marin County, life in the Tenderloin has gone on as usual — and, true to Wisecarver's description, "Pill Hill," the area surrounding the intersection of Leavenworth and Golden Gate, isn't for the faint of heart. Shortly before 9 on a recent evening, S.F. police Officer Angelique Marin shed her uniform in the locker room in preparation for an undercover "buy-bust" operation. Illegal pills are now the source of so many arrests that the SFPD has tacked up huge posters in its precinct at 301 Eddy to help officers identify the panoply of brightly-colored tablets they regularly confiscate.
"It's like Skittles," Marin says. "'Taste the rainbow.'"
Marin pulls a ratty sweatshirt over her bulletproof vest and squeezes into a pair of tight stonewashed jeans. She smears her eyeliner, dirties her fingernails, greases her hair. Then it's out onto the streets with another undercover cop — a beefy guy with tattooed arms and a hidden earpiece — and her partner, Officer Kevin Lyons, who shadows the pair in a patrol car.
Sometimes, the cops target pill sales by launching stakeouts from concealed locations. But as any kid from the suburbs could tell you, all you have to do to score OxyContin or any other pill is simply walk down the street. Sure enough, less than a block away from the station, the offers start pouring in. Marin picks her bait: a thin man in a white T-shirt and baggy pants who offers to sell her two 40-milligram Oxys. She hands him $40 in marked bills; he spits out a tiny plastic baggie from under his tongue.
Marin disappears, and the patrol car swoops in.
This has all taken less than five minutes.
"Buying pills is as easy as buying a pack of gum," Marin says as the man is handcuffed.
Lyons says that the night's first pill arrest was an easy one. Many suspects run when they suspect the deal has gone sour. Or they swallow the pill packets. Dealers go to great lengths to conceal their wares, sewing pills into the linings of their clothing or storing them in bodily orifices: for men, the anal cavity, for women, the vagina. They expel the packets when a deal is made — addicts desperate for a fix don't seem to mind the unsanitary product. A common sight in the Tenderloin is a woman squatting between two parked cars: Most likely, she is holding pills for a dealer who controls her, much like pimps control their prostitutes. Others forge alliances with the owners of convenience stores, threatening violence unless they're allowed to stash pills in the stores. To reduce their liability, dealers never hold more than a few pills on their person at any one time.
Eddie Bridgett, a director at S.F.-based Ohlhoff Recovery Programs, says that roughly half of his clients at any given time are addicted to opiates. That number differs greatly from 10 years ago, when the most commonly abused substances were cocaine and crack. Most of these opiate addicts, Bridgett says, are white males between the ages of 19 and 28, many of them from Bay Area suburbs — and nearly all are what he calls "chronic relapsers."
Bridgett estimates that the average Oxy addict is using between 10 and 15 pills a day, a level of usage he says often requires a 28-day lockdown in order to detox, followed by six to nine months of inpatient treatment. But "it takes about two years before they can get to the point where they can even fathom staying sober," he says. The reason for the high recidivism rate among young opiate addicts, according to Bridgett, is that the drugs create such enormous cravings that even if the body doesn't physically need another hit, the mind does. "They crave them so much that they get nowhere in terms of accepting recovery, and they bounce out and self-medicate," he says.
