Oxy abusers often develop an intolerance to pain, says Wandzilak, which makes interventions difficult. "Discomfort is the touchstone of life, helping us to gain experience and depth. But it's been so long since these kids have dealt with it that they just want to keep feeling numb. They know their lives are fucked up. They just don't care."
Despite Wisecarver's claims, kids from the suburbs cruise the Tenderloin, too — even some of Wisecarver's former customers. Just ask Rick S.
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.”
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CHP officers confiscated his pills when they pulled him over on the night of Wisecarver's takedown. The cops took him into custody, looking for dirt on Wisecarver, but Rick S. wasn't much help. He only knew Wisecarver as the big Oxy dealer who'd have lines of kids waiting for him in parking lots. But he wasn't surprised. "If you're selling that much dope, you're going to get caught at some point," Rick S. says of Wisecarver. "Nobody's that good."
(While the cops had been surveilling Wisecarver for months, before Rick S's buy they hadn't been able to get any of the charges to stick.)
But Wisecarver's fate wasn't Rick's concern that night. After his run-in with the cops, Rick headed straight into the city, and then to the Tenderloin, where he scored another fix — and where he would soon find himself living as his Oxy addiction spiraled out of control.
By late 2010 the insidiousness of opiate addiction was apparent in the tired eyes of many of the residents of the Henry Ohlhoff House on the corner of Oak and Steiner. Among those in Ohloff's recovery programs was Rick S., who had finally gotten himself off the streets — this time, he hoped, for good.
While he remembers Wisecarver as "a nice guy" and concedes that scoring Oxy from him "sure was better than going to the Tenderloin," Rick S. doesn't buy Wisecarver's claims to have been helping Marin's Oxy-addicted kids. "He didn't create addicts," Rick S. says, "but you have a problem, and he's not helping that problem."
Like Rick S., 23-year-old Jessica is a former customer with complicated feelings about Wisecarver. (Her name has been changed.) Although he dealt Oxy, she says, Wisecarver possessed many other qualities that made him "a very intriguing person," and he's the only drug dealer she would consider a friend. Of OxyContin, however, Jessica has no qualms invoking judgment. A graduate of a private high school in Marin County, she became addicted to Oxy and heroin at college and moved back to the Bay Area in 2008 to get away from the opiate scene. But here, she says, the problem was just as bad, if not worse. By the time she found herself getting high in the bathroom while working as a Mill Valley nanny, she was at the mercy of opiates. "It's not so much that it took away the pain, but that nothing mattered," she says.
Rick S., too, suffered a quick downward descent once he was introduced to OxyContin. While it was more of a social thing at first — "You want to want what other kids want," he says — Rick S. soon found that he couldn't go more than 36 hours without doing Oxy, or he would get itchy and sweaty, and his bones would start to ache. Getting high became "a full-time job," and he spent the next few years in and out of treatment centers.
His bottom came in the summer of 2010 while sitting on a sidewalk in the cold San Francisco fog. He was contemplating suicide. "I was with a bunch of crackheads, and I realized they were all there on borrowed time," he says. "This was my reality. I was always worried about the next high."
Instead, he called his brother and asked for a ride to Ohlhoff. "Every time you screw up again, it's heartbreaking," he said, picking at the laces of his Converse sneakers. "But it is possible to get sober and stay sober."
There is still the fear that he hasn't broken the pattern, however, and Rick S. fidgets as he recalls giving up on life.
He offers this warning for kids who might try OxyContin at a party, kids who never dream they might end up an IV drug user with all its consequences: He is HIV-positive.
"If hell exists, this is what it is," he says.
That was 2010. Rick S. relapsed, but has been clean for nearly a year. Jessica has made it almost 18 months without opiates. But every day is a struggle.
Meanwhile, the days pass quickly for Wisecarver. Though his extensive criminal record had him facing up to seven years and four months in prison, prosecutors knocked that down to four years and eight months in exchange for revoking probation. Karen Lamb, the Marin County deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, declined to elaborate on the plea bargain; Chief Deputy District Attorney Barry Borden would only call the reduction "significant," adding that Wisecarver "got a pretty good deal."
Prison has given him the chance to mellow out from the high-stakes lifestyle of a drug dealer, and he's taking his sentence as a blessing. "I'm kind of happy I'm here, because it was getting dicey at the end with the cops breathing down my neck," he says. Despite his incarceration, he says wasn't ever truly scared of law enforcement; they were simply "an inconvenience."
