WacoWas AnAccident
Ex-Bluelighter
You never really want to get to know a drug dealer, but you always want to know of one. Preferably more than one, in case of emergencies. The ideal relationship with your drug dealer is when he is just a number in your cell phone. Of course some people know their drug dealers intimately, but these people are either very bad human beings, or the drug dealer in question doesn’t qualify as a drug dealer at all. Rather, he’s a friend who happens to sell drugs occasionally and keeps his clandestine activities localized within his circle of friends. He’s not really a “drug dealer” in the honest sense of the word. He’s the kind of guy who drops off a gram of cocaine at your house before taking off for a weekend to snowboard in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. When you call his cell phone and ask for a gram of pot, he makes you use transparent code words. “Can I borrow a CD” is a common and fiendishly stupid one. He does this mainly to inflate his own sense of importance because in actuality law enforcement could not care less about him. He’s not even a blip on the radar.
He is the guy who inevitably gets caught with an ounce of pot and a digital scale when he runs a stop sign in the car his parents are leasing. He has to retreat to the comfortable safety of his suburban roots and his father’s legal connections while relinquishing his false claims to drug dealerhood. He sells drugs as a hobby, to bolster his image, to make a little side money. He is not a drug dealer, he is a facsimile.
A respectable person can identify a real drug dealer by the way they will make your skin crawl. There is a feral stupidity that lingers in their faces. They make vast sums of money, but the prospect of upward mobility is bleak. These people are constantly in danger of being killed, robbed, arrested or any combination of the three. This kind of existence reduces a man to a state of Neolithic primitivism where the only goal is survival, eating uncooked animal flesh and sleeping in a urine-soaked cave.
It is completely different from the world of your childhood. Nothing means what you think it will because in fact nothing means anything at all. In order to survive a drug dealer must exist in a moral vacuum; they must reject social conventions and substitute their own ethical code. This code is highly unstable. Certain fundamental tenets exist of course; snitching is the greatest liability in the clandestine world of backdoor deals, and an unspoken referendum on defecting is enforced throughout all underworld spheres.
After that, virtually all bets are off. Stealing and deception are accepted as the inevitable consequences of this lifestyle. You will be robbed. You will be shorted. The question is, how hard and how fast will you strike at the guilty party? And will they strike back? The power dynamic is actually extremely complex. To further complicate things, a primitive code of honor and manhood pervades the superstructure of this world. Having someone rip you off in a drug deal is not only perceived as a financial loss but a personal insult to your manhood. As in any free market capitalist system, a good reputation is invaluable and a drug dealer labeled as “weak” or “soft” is essentially finished.
He is the guy who inevitably gets caught with an ounce of pot and a digital scale when he runs a stop sign in the car his parents are leasing. He has to retreat to the comfortable safety of his suburban roots and his father’s legal connections while relinquishing his false claims to drug dealerhood. He sells drugs as a hobby, to bolster his image, to make a little side money. He is not a drug dealer, he is a facsimile.
A respectable person can identify a real drug dealer by the way they will make your skin crawl. There is a feral stupidity that lingers in their faces. They make vast sums of money, but the prospect of upward mobility is bleak. These people are constantly in danger of being killed, robbed, arrested or any combination of the three. This kind of existence reduces a man to a state of Neolithic primitivism where the only goal is survival, eating uncooked animal flesh and sleeping in a urine-soaked cave.
It is completely different from the world of your childhood. Nothing means what you think it will because in fact nothing means anything at all. In order to survive a drug dealer must exist in a moral vacuum; they must reject social conventions and substitute their own ethical code. This code is highly unstable. Certain fundamental tenets exist of course; snitching is the greatest liability in the clandestine world of backdoor deals, and an unspoken referendum on defecting is enforced throughout all underworld spheres.
After that, virtually all bets are off. Stealing and deception are accepted as the inevitable consequences of this lifestyle. You will be robbed. You will be shorted. The question is, how hard and how fast will you strike at the guilty party? And will they strike back? The power dynamic is actually extremely complex. To further complicate things, a primitive code of honor and manhood pervades the superstructure of this world. Having someone rip you off in a drug deal is not only perceived as a financial loss but a personal insult to your manhood. As in any free market capitalist system, a good reputation is invaluable and a drug dealer labeled as “weak” or “soft” is essentially finished.
