When the drug-selling website Silk Road was shut down in October 2013, the event made international news. What didn’t make the news was how much the site’s purchasing clients were paying for the substances they were buying. Substance abuse comes with many costs. Emotional, health and career costs are just a few that we can name.
However, Silk Road added yet another cost on top of its substance users’ problems: spending costs. For example, the buying price of heroin on Silk Road was nearly 2x greater than heroin’s average street price.
What’s more, drug users of nearly every single state would have saved more money buying drugs on the street as opposed to buying them on Silk Road. Drug users from roughly 1/5 of the country overpaid by more than $100 and North Dakota was the only state to see a decrease in drug costs for users who bought drugs on Silk Road. Silk Road offered everything from mushrooms, to marijuana, to DMT and even heroine. But at what costs?
Infographic by Clarity Way Rehab Center [2]