Preface: I was living in Tampa, had a son (6th child) with a Puerto Rican girl, and then after she married another man I fathered my 7th and last child, a daughter with a Mexican woman.
Now...Tampa in the mid-1990s had absolutely no heroin scene. It is interesting why and how it changed.
Most BLers are too young to know the climate of the US drug scene from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The 60s of course changed the entire American outlook in terms of morality. In the 70s even the DEA was preaching that cocaine was non-addictive and so prosecutions rarely took place against cocaine violations, and when they did it was generally for smuggling. The Federal System still had parole (which they strangely called "Probation," despite the system also having actual probation). Coke was the in-drug, symbolising hedonism, affluence (as opposed to some nappy headed coke whore as it does today) and people wore little gold spoons around their neck, actually bragging about their heavy usage.
In 1983 a crew of Dominican immigrants (mostly illegal) began converting cocaine into its freebase form. They didn't use "extenders," simply added sodium carbonate, water and heat, chill as you stir and voila. They began selling it in tiny ziplocks and named their product, "Based Balls" [sic]. Americans entered the age of crack. Prior to crack Americans prepared their cocaine with ammonia to basify it, and ether to retrieve the freebase from the ammonia. The problem is that if you don't wash and dry the product you leave residual ether, which is highly flammable. When someone uses cocaine, a stimulant, their hands shake, they become way too impatient to properly prepare the freebase and so accidents began happening more frequently as coke entered the 80s...Richard Pryor became the poster boy for shitty judgement during 1 such binge when he set himself on fire. Such incidents tended to push Americans away from smoking cocaine.
When the afore mentioned Dominican crew began selling tiny ziplocs with pre-packaged freebase they were already dealing with people fairly used to smoking cocaine. While people didn't freebase much there was a custom amongst inner city youth where they would take powder coke (cocaine hcl.) and sprinkle it inside what most now call a "blunt" (cheap cigar in which the tobacco has been removed, except for the wrapper, and marijuana has been put in its place). These cocaine laced super joints were called "Boolies."One got a bit of a "freeze" on the inside of their mouth and just a momentary taste of the coke and its effect. When Booly smokers began lacing these joints with Based Balls it ripped users a new asshole. The clientele increased exponentially and by the summer of 1984 crack was the new #1 drug in New York City.
Stimulants are an entirely different ball game when it comes to addiction. The easiest way to describe it would be to imagine the normal physical, mental and emotional state as the baseline (no pun intended haha) on a graph. With just a single 10 second "hit" of effectively smoked stimulants (crack, shabu/syabu, yaa baa/yama, amphetamine freebase -tan tar that used to be moderately popular in the UK) the user rockets upwards in a very high arc, reaching the highest point extremely fast and then...not only back to baseline like a lead weight, the user plummets past that baseline into a deep depression and physical lethargy. This naturally drives the user to seek that apex post haste. Forethought disappears thanks to an almost total lack of inhibition. This means the user will almost immediately do things they never imagined in their worst nightmares just to feel that apex again.
As usage exponentially spread it also began in metropolitan areas over much of the country as dealers saw how profits soared higher than anyone thought possible. Cities like Tampa, whose "drug scene" had been here-to-fore limited to marijuana and pills suddenly were overwhelmed. Law enforcement was not in any way equipped for an avalanche of addiction-related crime and so people got desperate. The US Govt. under Reagan actually listed crack as the most pressing security threat to the US after nuclear weapons. Under his successor, Bush Sr., a local DC dealer was nabbed at a routine DWI Checkpoint across from the Whitehouse with several ounces of crack just before Bush went on air live to warn the country about this new menace. The President made a very good impression on the US public, holding up that bag filled with massive rocks as he looked disgusted. With that possibly engineered moment America changed irrevocably. The "Kingpin Law" was enacted, as were mandatory sentencing guidelines that amazingly made a distinction between 2 forms of the SAME substance. A person with 4 ounces of powder could get probation on a 1st time offence but let it be 4 ounces of freebase and it was Life. More over, parole was abolished so that Life no longer meant 18 years, it meant forever (indeed, it still does). States quickly followed suit in enacting the same knee jerk laws and regulations. Because crack was confined to urban locales this meant whites, who at the time tended to indulge themselves only in powder were not filling up prisons, blacks, and to a lesser degree Latinos were. This unpleasant truth turned back the clock on black/white relations.
As crack began stabilising a new dynamic began shapimg up as if to try and take its place in as America's new drug menace; In 1994 Colombians finally gained a marketshare of the US heroin market. Using well established distribution networks that had originally imported marijuana before graduating into cocaine they leaned on distributors in South Florida to begin building up clientele.
As I have said, I drove lorrys, trucks, and while I would fly up to New York and smuggle back 2 or 300 bags every month, it was for my own enjoyment. I had made a mistake in the army when I tried to smuggle some hashish but that was it. I considered potentially distributing those NY glassines but noone used heroin in Tampa. Then, after seeking a local connection for heroin I finally met a Puerto Rican dealer selling Colombian chocolate coloured #4 (as I mentioned in a previous entry).
I began using heavily, and 1 day 1 saw a Puerto Rican girl I knew through friends. I pulled my truck over and gave her a lift. We began talking and she had been thinking about my idea of selling NY glassines in Tampa. She then told me she and her mother were willing to work for me. I dropped her off and after I finished work went to her home where the 2 of them lived. The mother agreed with the idea enthusiastically, telling me Tampa now had a small but lucrative street scene. I was suprised but asked her about it. She told me it was on the outskirts of the Ponce De Leon Projects (which were near by) and asked if I wanted to take a look at it. I agreed and the daughter and I walked over
15 minutes later we were on a street corner outside the projects. She saw a man in his 50s and said hi from across the street. The guy, Max, was the only street dealer in Tampa but was desperate for quality heroin. He had 2 sources but both were garbage. I thought about the Puerto Rican connection I was beginning to form but Max killed that thought when he told me he was desperate to sell "my" heroin (meaning NY glassines). I asked him to show me what he was selling and to my utter amazement he showed me tiny pieces of aluminum foil that looked like they were holding single pieces of small blotter acid (in NY in that era individual dosages of LSD were wrapped in tinfoil, tiny squares). I asked him to open a bag and he handed me 2. Opening I found perhaps 40mg of off white powder with dark brown specks in it (the specks being the actual heroin). The shit was garbage. I asked him what the price was and he said they were dimes (10 US Dollars). I asked him who he worked for, etc., and he explained that he worked for himself buying 2 to 3 grammes for 300 US per gramme, and each gramme made 40 dimes after he stepped on it (adulterated it, aka "cut" it). He then told me he usually sold between 60 and 70 dimes a day. He was making a profit of 100 to 150 US a day selling garbage.
I didn't see how it would be worth the effort to sell the heroin I had just connected with after giving him his daily PC (his percentage of profit on sales each day). NY bags though, that might work. I told him that if he and I worked together he would be selling bags at least 50% bigger (NY glassines were 100mg per bag uniformly at the time, now they are at least 150mgs) but that I wanted 15 Dollars per bag. Anything he made above 15 would serve as his PC. He could easily sell them for quarters (25 Dollars) but I recommended 20 per so as to run volume (which increases your profit a lot more than selling less bags at a higher price). He agreed. As we talked he would go over to this musty thrown away couch tsitting under a tree that served as his office. Listening to the banter I saw that his customers judged purity by the colour of the product.
They ignorantly believed that it was impossible to find adulterants ("cut") that wasn't white. Since all Colombian heroin at the time was the colour of cocoa powder they judged a bag to be purer if it was dark.
The problem though was that NY had practically no Colombian heroin, it was almost entirely SE Asian #4. NY addicts had always had snow white heroin NY addicts usually would not even buy non-white heroin when sick (NY of that era had 5 or 6 brands on most corners where heroin was sold). Brown at that time was the Mexican #4, "Mexican Mud." In NY they used Puerto Rican slang and called it, "Chocofine" (as in rhymes with "Chocomine"). I had a dilemmna.
To be continued...
Now...Tampa in the mid-1990s had absolutely no heroin scene. It is interesting why and how it changed.
Most BLers are too young to know the climate of the US drug scene from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The 60s of course changed the entire American outlook in terms of morality. In the 70s even the DEA was preaching that cocaine was non-addictive and so prosecutions rarely took place against cocaine violations, and when they did it was generally for smuggling. The Federal System still had parole (which they strangely called "Probation," despite the system also having actual probation). Coke was the in-drug, symbolising hedonism, affluence (as opposed to some nappy headed coke whore as it does today) and people wore little gold spoons around their neck, actually bragging about their heavy usage.
In 1983 a crew of Dominican immigrants (mostly illegal) began converting cocaine into its freebase form. They didn't use "extenders," simply added sodium carbonate, water and heat, chill as you stir and voila. They began selling it in tiny ziplocks and named their product, "Based Balls" [sic]. Americans entered the age of crack. Prior to crack Americans prepared their cocaine with ammonia to basify it, and ether to retrieve the freebase from the ammonia. The problem is that if you don't wash and dry the product you leave residual ether, which is highly flammable. When someone uses cocaine, a stimulant, their hands shake, they become way too impatient to properly prepare the freebase and so accidents began happening more frequently as coke entered the 80s...Richard Pryor became the poster boy for shitty judgement during 1 such binge when he set himself on fire. Such incidents tended to push Americans away from smoking cocaine.
When the afore mentioned Dominican crew began selling tiny ziplocs with pre-packaged freebase they were already dealing with people fairly used to smoking cocaine. While people didn't freebase much there was a custom amongst inner city youth where they would take powder coke (cocaine hcl.) and sprinkle it inside what most now call a "blunt" (cheap cigar in which the tobacco has been removed, except for the wrapper, and marijuana has been put in its place). These cocaine laced super joints were called "Boolies."One got a bit of a "freeze" on the inside of their mouth and just a momentary taste of the coke and its effect. When Booly smokers began lacing these joints with Based Balls it ripped users a new asshole. The clientele increased exponentially and by the summer of 1984 crack was the new #1 drug in New York City.
Stimulants are an entirely different ball game when it comes to addiction. The easiest way to describe it would be to imagine the normal physical, mental and emotional state as the baseline (no pun intended haha) on a graph. With just a single 10 second "hit" of effectively smoked stimulants (crack, shabu/syabu, yaa baa/yama, amphetamine freebase -tan tar that used to be moderately popular in the UK) the user rockets upwards in a very high arc, reaching the highest point extremely fast and then...not only back to baseline like a lead weight, the user plummets past that baseline into a deep depression and physical lethargy. This naturally drives the user to seek that apex post haste. Forethought disappears thanks to an almost total lack of inhibition. This means the user will almost immediately do things they never imagined in their worst nightmares just to feel that apex again.
As usage exponentially spread it also began in metropolitan areas over much of the country as dealers saw how profits soared higher than anyone thought possible. Cities like Tampa, whose "drug scene" had been here-to-fore limited to marijuana and pills suddenly were overwhelmed. Law enforcement was not in any way equipped for an avalanche of addiction-related crime and so people got desperate. The US Govt. under Reagan actually listed crack as the most pressing security threat to the US after nuclear weapons. Under his successor, Bush Sr., a local DC dealer was nabbed at a routine DWI Checkpoint across from the Whitehouse with several ounces of crack just before Bush went on air live to warn the country about this new menace. The President made a very good impression on the US public, holding up that bag filled with massive rocks as he looked disgusted. With that possibly engineered moment America changed irrevocably. The "Kingpin Law" was enacted, as were mandatory sentencing guidelines that amazingly made a distinction between 2 forms of the SAME substance. A person with 4 ounces of powder could get probation on a 1st time offence but let it be 4 ounces of freebase and it was Life. More over, parole was abolished so that Life no longer meant 18 years, it meant forever (indeed, it still does). States quickly followed suit in enacting the same knee jerk laws and regulations. Because crack was confined to urban locales this meant whites, who at the time tended to indulge themselves only in powder were not filling up prisons, blacks, and to a lesser degree Latinos were. This unpleasant truth turned back the clock on black/white relations.
As crack began stabilising a new dynamic began shapimg up as if to try and take its place in as America's new drug menace; In 1994 Colombians finally gained a marketshare of the US heroin market. Using well established distribution networks that had originally imported marijuana before graduating into cocaine they leaned on distributors in South Florida to begin building up clientele.
As I have said, I drove lorrys, trucks, and while I would fly up to New York and smuggle back 2 or 300 bags every month, it was for my own enjoyment. I had made a mistake in the army when I tried to smuggle some hashish but that was it. I considered potentially distributing those NY glassines but noone used heroin in Tampa. Then, after seeking a local connection for heroin I finally met a Puerto Rican dealer selling Colombian chocolate coloured #4 (as I mentioned in a previous entry).
I began using heavily, and 1 day 1 saw a Puerto Rican girl I knew through friends. I pulled my truck over and gave her a lift. We began talking and she had been thinking about my idea of selling NY glassines in Tampa. She then told me she and her mother were willing to work for me. I dropped her off and after I finished work went to her home where the 2 of them lived. The mother agreed with the idea enthusiastically, telling me Tampa now had a small but lucrative street scene. I was suprised but asked her about it. She told me it was on the outskirts of the Ponce De Leon Projects (which were near by) and asked if I wanted to take a look at it. I agreed and the daughter and I walked over
15 minutes later we were on a street corner outside the projects. She saw a man in his 50s and said hi from across the street. The guy, Max, was the only street dealer in Tampa but was desperate for quality heroin. He had 2 sources but both were garbage. I thought about the Puerto Rican connection I was beginning to form but Max killed that thought when he told me he was desperate to sell "my" heroin (meaning NY glassines). I asked him to show me what he was selling and to my utter amazement he showed me tiny pieces of aluminum foil that looked like they were holding single pieces of small blotter acid (in NY in that era individual dosages of LSD were wrapped in tinfoil, tiny squares). I asked him to open a bag and he handed me 2. Opening I found perhaps 40mg of off white powder with dark brown specks in it (the specks being the actual heroin). The shit was garbage. I asked him what the price was and he said they were dimes (10 US Dollars). I asked him who he worked for, etc., and he explained that he worked for himself buying 2 to 3 grammes for 300 US per gramme, and each gramme made 40 dimes after he stepped on it (adulterated it, aka "cut" it). He then told me he usually sold between 60 and 70 dimes a day. He was making a profit of 100 to 150 US a day selling garbage.
I didn't see how it would be worth the effort to sell the heroin I had just connected with after giving him his daily PC (his percentage of profit on sales each day). NY bags though, that might work. I told him that if he and I worked together he would be selling bags at least 50% bigger (NY glassines were 100mg per bag uniformly at the time, now they are at least 150mgs) but that I wanted 15 Dollars per bag. Anything he made above 15 would serve as his PC. He could easily sell them for quarters (25 Dollars) but I recommended 20 per so as to run volume (which increases your profit a lot more than selling less bags at a higher price). He agreed. As we talked he would go over to this musty thrown away couch tsitting under a tree that served as his office. Listening to the banter I saw that his customers judged purity by the colour of the product.
They ignorantly believed that it was impossible to find adulterants ("cut") that wasn't white. Since all Colombian heroin at the time was the colour of cocoa powder they judged a bag to be purer if it was dark.
The problem though was that NY had practically no Colombian heroin, it was almost entirely SE Asian #4. NY addicts had always had snow white heroin NY addicts usually would not even buy non-white heroin when sick (NY of that era had 5 or 6 brands on most corners where heroin was sold). Brown at that time was the Mexican #4, "Mexican Mud." In NY they used Puerto Rican slang and called it, "Chocofine" (as in rhymes with "Chocomine"). I had a dilemmna.
To be continued...