I sell fentanyl six days a week under the El at Kensington and Somerset, and every bag I sell is net life-positive. Each bag carries a small but real chance of killing whoever buys it. Each bag also sends $1.80 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates saves a child’s life for about $5,500. My customers die at a rate of roughly one per 4,000 bags. Four thousand bags at $1.80 buys nets for 1.3 children. Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.

I arrived here the way most people in effective altruism arrive at their careers: by asking where my comparative advantage was largest. I spent four years as a quantitative trader at Jane Street. I was good, but I was replaceable, and so was every dollar I made there. Earning to give tells you to take the highest-paying work you can stomach and donate the difference. I took the Giving What We Can pledge in 2019. I have simply taken the “highest-paying” half more seriously than the people who sign it between sessions at EA Global. My customer base is the most price-inelastic in North America, my overhead is a fanny pack, and my plug in Fairhill has never once asked me to attend an offsite.

The question critics refuse to ask is not whether a bag can kill someone. Of course it can; that’s the product. The question is the net change in lives per bag:

ΔL = D/G − p

D = donation per bag ($1.80)
G = GiveWell cost per life saved (~$5,500)
p = probability a given bag is fatal (~1/4,000)

D/G comes to 0.000327 lives. p comes to 0.00025. Every bag nets about +0.00008 lives. In 2025 I moved roughly 21,000 bags, which my model attributes to 5.3 deaths in Kensington and 6.9 lives saved in Malawi, for a net of +1.6. My old desk at Jane Street saved zero lives on net, and nobody there ever had to step over anyone to get to work.

People object that the deaths in Kensington are real and the lives in Malawi are statistical. This is scope insensitivity with a zip code. A child dying of malaria in Lilongwe is exactly as dead as a man nodding out on the Allegheny steps, and arguably more tragic, because she wasn’t dopesick first. If you feel the Kensington death more vividly, that’s a fact about your eyes, not about the moral universe.

If I leave the corner, Hector from Lehigh Avenue has it inside of an hour. Hector sells the same tranq dope at the same price, with zero offsets and a pit bull named Dollar. The counterfactual to me is not “no fentanyl at Kensington and Somerset.” It’s fentanyl without malaria nets. Every person who wants me gone, including Officer Ruiz, who arrested me in August and asked whether I understood what I was doing, is functionally campaigning for Hector. I told Ruiz I’d modeled it extensively. He did not want to see the model.

I hedge under moral uncertainty, as Will MacAskill recommends. I keep Narcan in the fanny pack and hand it out with every bundle the way airlines hand out pretzels. If I see somebody go blue on my block, I hit them with it, and I book that as direct work, separate from the offsets. I hand out fentanyl test strips too. My product tests positive every time, which is more honesty than you’ll get from a Wawa hot dog.

This summer I began stamping my bags EFFECTIVE in red ink. Every serious corner has a stamp. Mine is the only one that’s also a mission statement.

Longtermists have taught us to weigh not just the life saved but the future that life makes possible. A girl under a net in Malawi has, in expectation, sixty years ahead of her, children of her own, grandchildren, and descendants across a future that may hold trillions of people. A 46-year-old man nodding on the steps of the Somerset station has, with respect, a shorter and less branching future. Weighted by descendants, I’m not trading one death for 1.3 lives. I’m trading a cul-de-sac for a family tree.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s mistake was operational, not philosophical. He was right that a serious altruist goes where the money is. He went to crypto. I went to the El.

My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.

People say I profit from addiction. Every job profits from something. Jane Street profited from the volatility of Robinhood users’ retirement accounts. At least my customers get high.

The strongest objection is that I could donate without selling. I could, but I’d be donating a Wawa cashier’s salary, which buys about half a child a year. I’d be keeping my hands clean at a cost of more than a child per year in Malawi. That isn’t ethics. It’s a skincare routine.

Last month a man named Darnell died on the steps of the Allegheny station with one of my bags in his pocket. I had already wired his $1.80 to AMF on the first of the month. Somewhere in Malawi a child is sleeping under a net because of Darnell, and I don’t think anyone in Kensington has ever said anything that nice about him.