Working inside a virtual environment and running pip install anything was giving me this error:

pip is configured with locations that require TLS/SSL,
however the ssl module in Python is not available.

Also this error:

Can't connect to HTTPS URL because the SSL module
is not available

I wanted to install requests such as:

(env)$ pip install requests

I deactivated the virtualenv and ran:

$ pip install -U pip

I got this error:

Permission denied: 'usr/bin/pip'

Then ran this. As recommended on the output:

$ pip install -U pip --user

This worked.

Now I wanted to install requests:

$ pip install requests --user

This worked too.

Remove and Create a new env

I removed the virtualenv and created a new one:

$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 env
$ source env/bin/activate

Installing requests:

env$ pip install requests

This works now.