You got it. I was talking about the banger Phish show I enjoyed in'August. I have watched two full Widespread Panic shows today and they won't top Phish in my book, but they are awesome. I'll play it cool and mingle. Thanks for the great advice.
SKL's harm reduction guide to buying drugs from hippies: a brief primer
Part One - Hippies IRL (if you can tolerate the smell)
Concerts with thriving lot scenes are not so common as they once were. Sourcing drugs at drug oriented festivals, however, is incredibly easy but the trick is to avoid the scammers and the heat. The latter is easy, unless you are buying truly copious amounts from someone they are watching already, the odds of you getting snagged are practically nil barring you doing something stupid. Now, on to meeting the right people. This is the first step in eliminating the scammer and the taxing middleman. To do this at a bare minimum you have to buy and show interest in both quantity and quality, and to give the impression that you are connected enough already, even if you're not.
Look the part, be the part. Your task is essentially the same as an undercover police officer, and it's helpful to think of it in those terms - you are there to infiltrate the network, get above the retail level, and achieve your goal (scoring good drugs, or busting people, as it might be...) Study the music, the subcultural mores and language, fashion, etc. Maybe you hate the music. Maybe you hate hippies. That's OK, if you're a good enough actor, but if you're going to try to score drugs in their scene you've got to at least appear to be integrated into and respectful of it. You might think people would smell a poseur immediately, but not really, most people are too fucked up on drugs and too hungry for money to give a shit. Drug dealing in these sorts of events is basically a numbers game, as in
safety in numbers ... there are too many dealers to go after, X proportion will get busted, there are too many shady dealers around, Y proportion of people will get bunk shit. To avoid bunk shit steer clear of to good to be true prices or wild claims about potency. Tell anyone who talks about micage or purity of L doses to fuck right off unless he immediately admits that it's just marketing or pulls out an LC/MS result (I have actually seen done this on shakedown and the product was top notch.) Most people who talk about "crystal lines" and stuff are lying hippies but some of them are deluded hippies and sufficient numbers of both deluded and lying hippies have access to good drugs. "White fluff," "Swiss Criss," "Silver," "Amber," this is all hippy bullshit, but you can't discount necessarily those hippies' merchandise and trying to educate them will probably only offend.
Another good strategy to avoid bunk shit, in at least small festivals, is to buy some pissant amount, tell him you'll take it and come back tonight, throw it away just to make sure the temptation doesn't get the better of you, then wait 24 hours, then try to look for the guy that sold it. If he's not there, he's probably done a runner because people are looking to beat the shit out of him. The of course do the rest of your vetting, testing, etc. But I've seen alot of bunk sellers clear right out after I guess hitting their $$$ targets. The ends of the festivals are at once a time people try to drop the bunk and a fire sale on the good stuff, all under pressure. Not an easy atmosphere to operate in without some experience under your belt. The beginnings are mostly targeted at low retail custies who just want to get spun for a show so this might be the easiest time to get bunked. The second day, when people are chilling at camp, is the best day to wander around and make contacts. But yeah Bluelight is rightly fond of saying don't go without a test kit unless you already know who you'll be dealing with. Tell anyone who's offended at you busting out a tube of Ehrlich to get fucked. Also, the blacklight thing is largely mythological.
Don't get drawn into headier than thou or west coast vs east coast hippie drama. These people might ramble on about love and light but eventually the guns, knives, and getting sprayed in the face with powerful drugs come out, if you get in too deep. So basically, don't get in to deep. Don't mix business with being very high. Don't mix business with pleasure or recreation much less sex. Deal with professionals only. East Coast crew tend to be more professional and West Coast crew often have cheaper drugs, but they tend to be insufferable elitists and weird New Age types, but if you can convince them that you are one of the cool kids, which is difficult if you don't know a bunch of them going way back to MM/DD/YY dead/phish show or have some kind of magical energies ... well, they are into a lot of weird voodoo ass bullshit that is best avoided even at the cost of a slight tax on dosework. They will also scam the shit out of you if they think they can. Not that East Coasters won't, but the West Coasters (speaking from my experience which is mostly on the East Coast) are worse. Finding the professionals is the tricky part. Some people will tell you to avoid anyone with dreads but this hasn't always been my experience. Middlemen can be a pain in the ass and an added expense but if they are trustworthy they can be useful, a tax of no more than 10-15% is reasonable in bulk to semi-bulk quantities, decreasing as quantity increases. People from a similar cultural and geographical background to your own are almost always better. I'm a White man originally from a rural part of America and have always had much better experiences from people with similar backgrounds (even if from a different part of the country.) I don't work with people from different backgrounds as there can't be the same rapport and they tend to favour the in-group. Be vary wary of tight knit communities although these are also some of the best soruces. Also, don't work with college students, they tend to be irresponsible and have a lot to loose if caught by LE hence a propensity to snitch.
Part II - The Challenge of New Technologies
In this Internet informed age a lot more people will know how to talk the talk and instill confidence, but so will you, this is sort of the premise of this pep talk, and hopefully your bullshit detector is helped by this as well. Avoid the hell out of anyone who mentions any drug website especially sourcing websites in real life. Go to a few festivals just to get a feel for the scene, do some weed or coke or whatever you fancy, avoid serious drugs, just take it all in, after a few it will feel like old had and you'll start learning the basics of operating in that world. Then your next quest is to take it to the next level and find a phone number or hopefully a cryptographically secure method of communication. Establish a relationship. Talk socially frequently and build trust and rapport. See them again at the next show. Eventually you get some quality introductions and can drop your pretense and really start to feel like an actual member of the community sharing in their practices and mythologies and the occasional tidbit of gossip passed word 'round the campfire. Soak it all up and continue to integrate into your new world. Then find the next festie/show, find the particular circuit your new friends are on and schedule stuff accordingly. Again, avoid, avoid, avoid the darknet, or anyone who talks about the darknet. Run far away. Again, test, test, test. There are rapidly evolving ways of defeating tests and then defeating those measures, keep up on your chemistry. General tips: Avoid elaborate perforated blotters, some of these are good but the blotter art is readily available online so it's an easy avenue to create a product that looks impressive but is a ripoff or worse. Lots and lots and lots of LSD is on plain white paper. Question European LSD and much of the rest that comes out of that part of the world although their MDMA is usually excellent, but LE knows exactly who ships what where, so never work internationally. Never buy overpriced LSD because of claims of potency. Even if 250/500/whatever ug hits did exist they're not worth correspondingly more than 80/100 ug hits especially if you're planning on reselling (who do you plan on convincing?) Avoid China, the Netherlands, and all other known hot spots when at all possible. Eastern Europe is often surprisingly decent.
But fuck all that, remember? We're avoiding the darknet. We're infilitrating the hippie circuit, but surprise, maybe it comes time to do a little import/export business. Get a proxy (not a computer proxy, a human proxy, with the odd combination of desperation to make a few bucks and trustworthiness not to run off with your shit, so most junkies who might otherwise be ideal candidates are right out...) to work internationally but they had better be either insanely well compensated or scared shitless of you. Don't be anybody's proxy. Don't be suckered into "Just pick up this package for me i'll give you 25%." There are operational security measures for receiving packages but they are probably beyound your pay grade. Keep off the Internet, assume Tor is compromised, assume the end is inevitable (remember, Cassandra-like, I was calling out the imminent demise of Silk Road only a few months prior to that particular bit of Fremdscham. Avoid Bitcoin, too unstable and too big a target. Real pro's use vac saced cash in a radio-opaque wrapper or in a cookie tin, and the good old US Postal Service. (Never overnight, if not in a tin or whatever, as flat as possible.) Trouble is coming, and we'd best retreat to our old habits, practices, cultures and networks. The worst thing is that these scenes are withering becuase of the corporate libertarian shit, but that, too, shall pass, and hopefully the old networks will survive, but they will, they've proved durable through Nixon, the War on Drugs, Reagan, "
...and half a dozen other sons of bitches."
So, in substance,
0. Turn off the computer
1. Find a scene
2. Research the scene in detail
3. Learn to act the part
4. Enter the scene
5. Build trust in the scene
6. Soon enough you
are the part
7. Make connections
8. Socialize and build trust again
9. Meet
their connections or at least get them to be middleman
10. ????
PROFIT