Fries With That?

I used to buy from this dude who would meet you someplace and make the deal real fast—quick high five, little dap, etc. He wasn't a businessman by any means, didn't always have a bag (70 percent of the time I was walking away with a handful of weed), and he certainly ran on weed-dealer time.

One day I hit him up and he tells me he’ll be at McDonald's all day—he makes sure to specify he'll be there all day. I tell him I’ll be there in a few hours, figuring he’s working and can pop out real fast to make the deal.

I get to McDonald's and call him:

“I’m here, dude.”

“Yeah, I'm in the side parking lot, white Civic.”

At this point I figure he's taking his smoke break and needed to run to his car to get it. I find this man in a wifebeater, boxer shorts popping out the top of his pants, perma-leaned all the way back in the driver’s seat of this dirty-sink-white Honda Civic with too-dark-to-be-legal tint—slingin’ dime sacks from 8–5 at McDonald's. He had spent the day trappin’ out the drive-thru.

A Dab’ll Do Ya

Once, my weed guy was super into dabs. I'd go over and he'd set them up, the same way that you offer a guest water. And I wanted to be cool. But I'd be stuck at his house for over an hour, because I'd immediately be too stoned.

Photo Credit: Klon Waldrip

Pills and Thrills

I was introduced to a supplier of THC pills at the age of 15. I was an avid stoner at the time and found the idea of being able to ingest my high as attractive as smoking, because I would be able to get high at school.

My sister's boyfriend was living with this lady at the time, so I decided to spend a Saturday night there trying her product out with the supplier, my sister and my sister's boyfriend. About an hour after taking the pill, I began to feel good. Like, really, really good. I’m talking, “I’ve never felt this good in my life, what kind of weed pill could this possibly be?” kind of good.

The next day, I proceeded to take down orders from an ungodly number of other 15-year-olds for a shipment of what I promised to be “the best shiznit you've ever had.” My tiny private Catholic high school was about to be the single stoned-est student body in Los Angeles County.

Luckily, a mere days before taking the close to $300 I had in orders, I found out that these pills were not the THC that I hoped they were. My sister, with tears in her eyes, informed me that the euphoria I felt and ability to stay up all night were effects of none other than ecstasy.

I immediately canceled all of the orders I had and thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t become the most infamous accidental designer drug trafficker in my high school's history.

Weedgate

I was 16, and it was the first time I ever smoked weed. I was at a friend's birthday gathering where we were all thrown in a pool to clean off the pistachio pudding we had drenched each other in and had to change into a friend's boxers and sleep shirts.

My friends took me into a bedroom, turned on 97.1 The River, where "Take on Me" was playing, and lit a bowl. I had my friend light it for me because it was amateur hour somewhere. We soon depleted our resources, so a weed run had to be made, but first, we had to call the guy. No one wanted to speak to him, so they gave the phone to me.

He lived in one of the more bougie neighborhoods with a gate code he had previously provided us. The driver refused to put in the gate code, so I had to get out of the car and do it myself while I was wearing a giant T-shirt and boxers. I tried the code a number of times to no avail. It took way longer than it should have, and I held up close to 10 cars that spilled out onto the main road, one of which belonged to my math teacher (who later called me out on this). Embarrassed, I had to call the dealer again explaining what was happening, and he said he could see it from his window.

We finally got in, got to his house, got the weed stuffed within the pages of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and left. It was only a gram. I never went back to him.

Photo Credit: David Mack

Wanna Hang?

I got stuck watching the drug dealer’s wedding videos that he had filmed for a couple while he kept saying how “dope” they were. Don't buy from a talkative or social drug dealer.

Don’t Chance It

I once knew a guy who tried to buy an ounce of pot from this redneck dude in Newnan. After giving him the money, and after 24 hours had passed, the drug boy openly admitted that he had ripped my friend off. My friend decided to tell him that he would come to his house with a few guys and convince him to return the money, and the dealer was like, “Bring it on, motherfucker, I'll be here waiting to sic my dogs on you, and you can taste the barrel of my shotgun." Honestly, I think the dude was bluffing, but nothing happened after that.

No McD’s for Me

My dealer once met us at a dollar-store parking lot. We got in his car. There was pizza on the floor. Like a slice, on a plate. And he wrapped my dub in a McDonald's receipt. It ruined my cover, because mom knows that I don't eat Big Macs.

Photo Credit: Ruth Allen

Sack of Crime

In the first half of 2015, I lived in a run-down rental house and managed to sell enough weed to pay for my rent and still have a significant amount of leftover profit every month. A large factor in my ability to pull it off was my ludicrously cheap rent and absence of a lease. I lived with three other young guys, all also in their early 20s.

On the day of one of my roommates’ birthday, we got pretty drunk by 2 p.m., and while sitting outside drinking on the porch, we heard some distant gunshots, but thought nothing of it because it wasn't all that uncommon in our neighborhood. We went inside and continued drinking until sundown. Shortly thereafter, I decided to clean my room, and in the process, I temporarily moved all of the illegal things in my possession to the living room. As I sat on the couch sorting all this stuff to move it back, the living room was quickly bathed in a wash of blue light, and there was a loud, I'm-a-cop knock at the door.

In my drunken, stoned and now terrified stupor, I threw a felonious amount of weed with various scales and paraphernalia into a backpack and retreated to the back door with one roommate as another stepped out to speak with the police. We slipped out the back door and around the corner, and just as we snuck past the side of our house one officer came around shining his flashlight at us.

He asked us if we lived at the house, and my roommate said yes. This officer then turned to another who was just getting out of a CSI van, spoke quietly and turned his light back to my friend and me with our backpacks and young faces. He saw two bewildered college students, despite the fact that neither of us were actually in college. He told us to have a safe night, and we hastily darted down the street.

Along the way, my sack of crime still on my back, we saw nine squad cars parked in driveways. The police, interrogating a number of my mostly elderly, mostly black neighbors, would occasionally shine their lights at us or remind us to get home safely. We eventually reached another friend's house a few streets down, and I spent the night.

In the morning I learned that the police had been looking for and eventually found a man who was firing what turned out to be a stolen gun, and were in no way after my small-time weed venture. That day was as much of a lesson in what not to do when the police show up as a rather disgusting exercise in white privilege.