Remember when it was more difficult?

[tobedetermined]

One of my strangest drug buys . . . Rochdale College in Toronto started as a university dorm & then converted to a tax-free ‘college’. By the time we went in 1971, it was a major drug store. Three of us got the bright idea to go to check it out one Friday night & to make a buy. I had heard that security was starting to hassle people going in, so I brought some LPs along so I could return them to my buddy in 723 (wink, wink).

The ruse worked & in the lobby we asked for ‘directions’. Hash on the 9th floor, mescaline on the 11th . . . etc. We made our purchases, consumed a bit & rode the subway & streetcars for hours.

Btw . . . streetcars are really, really strange & evil & insect-like (when you are stoned on mescaline).

[BCC]

I used to sometimes score weed at Dead shows in the early 90s, mostly on the West Coast. It was always very good. Around 2002, I moved back to NY from CA and had no connections. I needed some weed and was at a Phish show, so I tried to score in the parking lot. Every kid thought I was a cop. It made me feel so fucking old and I was still in my early 30s! Went home and restarted my garden, after a 12 year break.

[BCC]

One time around 1988 or 89, I was in Union Station in Washington DC waiting for a train. This guy who looked like a middle aged parody of Jeff Spicoli, right down to the checkerboard Vans, came up to me and asked to buy weed. I looked like a hippy kid then, so it was not uncommon for people to do that. I politely told him I didn’t have any. I had a couple of hours to kill and was wandering around the station. I keep seeing this guy. It is clear he is following me. And I’m freaking out because I DO actually have weed on me. So, he comes up to me again, except this time he tries to sell me weed. Pounds of weed. I’m want to be a smart ass and tell this cop all the ways he fucked up. The outfit, the changing story, following me, etc. Tell him that it was entrapment. Tell him he was an asshole. But I was afraid to piss him off. So I just said no. And then he came over a half hour later and asked again. And then again. That train could not come soon enough!

[Ginger_Rick]

Geez… I guess it musta been what, '96 maybe '97? Dammn it’s been a while! I’m a scrawny little teenager, just rail thin, no shoulders yet, bright green punker hair, mouthy as fuck. Dammn that kid was a pain in the ass!

So it was a dry spell, all the usuals were clean out, someone had gotten pinched somewhere up the chain and everyone’s else was waiting for the heat to die. So out our way suddenly it went flush to bust for a few weeks. Bit it was Friday, and we wanted to party.

We decided to head downtown, check around the Art gallery steps, head down Granville Street. Something would turn up. Back in the '90s in Vancouver Granville Street hadn’t been hit with the heavy gentrification yet, and there were still some pretty greasy SRO hotels up above the punk shops and pizza by the slice joints. You couldn’t walk down the street without getting offered everything, but without exception all the people offering seemed WAAAAAAAAY strung out. Because they pretty much were, because those SRO’s were chock full of crazy crackeads, tweakers and needle fiends. If you’ve never seen a thing about Vancouvers Downtown East Side, well just google it. Its warm enough not to freeze to death on the street most of the year here so we basically collect the entire countries homelessness problem here in Vancouver. Plus, it’s a port town, it’s where the heroin comes in. It’s been a hell of a scene for the last 30+ years a d at this rate it’ll still be shaking with the tweek a other 30 years from now. Sad.

So young dumb me, walk the strip a few times and I decide to go with the guy who was the least twitchy of the bunch. He shows me a nug and I give him the money, expecting the bag in my other hand. But instead he says “come with me” spins and starts weaving off through the crowd.

Well this isn’t good… but he’s already got our $70 and I wanted my quarter ounce, so I follow. He takes me up the block, turns into a stairway, and now we’re heading up into one of these cracked out hotels. My friends stop following about 10 feet from the stairs, none of them will flow me in, but I’m young and dumb and stubborn.

So I wisely step over the junkie nodding off with his rig still hanging from his arm at the top of the stairs and follow him into the lobby. At this point the red flags are really piling up, but somehow I’m still thinking he just wants to step into the lobby a d off the street to make the exchange. Instead he almost seems surprised that I’ve come in the door after him he shrugs and heads up the stairs. I step over two more heroin zombies as I follow him to the third floor and down the hallway. He unlocks about 6 locks and I follow him into a single room, the smell of which nearly floors me it’s so distressing. Something breaks beneath my foot as I take a step in, I look down and it’s av very used crack pipe. I look around, needles stabbed into the drywall by the dozen, more crack pipes everywhere. Just gimme my fucking bag tou sketchy fuck, what am I doing here?

But no, he says “ok, I’m gonna go grab your weed, just waint here a sec” and heads out the door. He’s gone 2 seconds and suddenly it all just falls into place for me. I don’t know how I’d even gotten that deep without bailing already but all of a sudden I just feel it 100% clear as day.

Run. He’s coming back to rob you.

I turn, step out the door, take three steps towards the stairs and I hear him shout from the end of the hallway, "hey, where you going man, dont you want your weed?. I pick up my pace, look back over my shoulder, see five guys with him, ones got a bat, ones swinging a piece of chain. Full on running now, I hear knives flicking open, hurdle the junkie at the top of the stairs, stick the landing halfway down the staircase as the guy with the bat trips over the junkie and bails down the stairs. The bat goes flying and misses my head by an inch, as I take the rest of the staircase two leaps to a flight. Sprint through the lobby, smash the door open with my shoulder sending the tweaker on the stairs flying over sideways. Run down the stairs to see my friends waiting at the curb, my girlfriend looking just terrified.

“What the hell were you thinking following him in there?” she yells.

To this day I have no idea, it was all SOOOOOO obvious. Just young and dumb and stubborn.

Oh yeah. And lucky. Really lucky that day.

[J-Icky]

Being a teenager in the mid-late 90s and living in the hood as a small skinny white kid, scoring was always an adventure.
Most times you’d get what you paid for but there were plenty of “keep it low” sliding a baggy in hand and walking away just to see a few blocks later it was just tobacco.
And then there were the idiots that even the gangsters didn’t like. The ones that couldn’t just rip you off, they had to jump you, pistol whip you or whatever that would lead to attention in the neighborhood from cops. Usually if that happened, one of the actual dealers, usually crack, would find that person and do them 10x worse than they did the victim just because they didn’t want that heat on their block.

But i must say most dealers in the “hood”, at least when it comes to weed, we’re always straight up with you and never shorted. They didn’t want just the one time deal, they wanted us stoners to be their regular customers so they always did us right and took care of us when the conmen hit us up. Now if you were from a better part of town, you best believe they were selling those spoiled white kids grams of schwag for $20 Lol.

[gramps]

I grew up in East Oakland California anything could be had on the street . late 50s early 60s I moved to the country in the 70s in an area that always had weed or whatever you wanted it only took cash .

[zephyr]

This SRO story pales in comparison to yours, but it’s kind of funny.

I had a buddy come back to san francisco after a year and a half at college in boston. He had no idea how much the city had changed in that year and a half, and no matter what I told him, it just didn’t sink in.

He says he wants to hang out for the afternoon, and I want to catch up and chill out, so we meet in front of the Green Door dispensary.

Turns out he actually wants me to come with him to buy shrooms for a bunch of people who were visiting from boston. I tell him they can take that risk if they want to, he has no business buying that for them and I certainly do not. He says he promised them. I told him I would hang out with him long enough to talk him out of it, which in itself should have set him straight.

He had texted back and forth with the dealer who originally said he lived in the sunset, a sleepy asian neighborhood. But that morning, he suddenly changed the location to an SRO in the Tenderloin, which is the absolute worst part of the city and always had been. I tell him this is a huge red flag. He refuses to see daylight. There was nothing I could do to convince him.

He keeps going deeper in to the tenderloin, and I’m like, “Ok we’re at Larkin st, I’m not goin any further. You take one step further towards the epicenter of the tenderloin, and you’re dead.” He looks me in the eye, and defiantly takes one more step.

At that very moment, a shaking vomiting elderly prostitute lunged out of a doorway, grabbed him by the face, and literally screamed the words “DICK SUCK! DICK SUCK!” before falling to her knees and tugging on his pants.

I grabbed him by the back of his collar, and pulled him off the street into a burger joint, dumped him in a chair, and bought him a dr pepper. The Dr Pepper was watered down.

After that 3 hour nightmare, it was the watered down Dr. Pepper that finally convinced him he shouldn’t be there.

[Ginger_Rick]

Haha that’s great! I’ve heard the Downtown Eastside here compared to the Tenderloin by a few cats from the Bay before. It’s funny, here in Vancouver cannabis folks make all kinds of crackhead jokes to eachother, but it horrifies friends who visit from out of town. You forget how desensitized you get to it.

It’s still one of those moments from my youth that really stands out for its sheer bone headedness. The funny thing is usually I was the one talking my other friends down from the sketchy shit. Guess it was just my turn that time.

[zephyr]

That is really funny, we are definitely desensitized. I have hours of crackhead stories I could tell haha.

[minitiger]

The Tenderloin’s not THAT bad. Every time I go to SF, I usually end up there at some point haha. I dunno how it happens, but it does… It’s good and dirty, but I’ve never felt unsafe there or anything.

[zephyr]

I was born in sf and trust me, it can be that bad. The SRO’s make sure of that. I would know, because I apprenticed at an auto shop at Ellis and Larkin for 3 years when I was in high school. One of my favorite sandwich places is in the tenderloin, $2 ban mi. I’ve spent plenty of time in there, and don’t mind going there if I have business or am going to a shop or restaurant.

I would never venture into one of the sro’s for a drug deal though. I doubt you did haha.

It’s worse than any of the project neighborhoods, which are just normal residential neighborhoods and communities.
Aside from the people who own the restaurants and shops, the tenderloin has no real community, it’s just people passing through flop houses.

[zephyr]

And now for some modern San Francisco history:
That story came from one of the most vicious years of political corruption and street violence. Mayor Ed Lee was in the pocket of Chinatown Gang and Tong business association aka the legal front of the chinese triads. Senator Leland Yee was running guns for the same people. Just look up Leland Yee, Ed Lee never got caught.

Small businesses owned by black and latin minorities were torched and city officials made sure the police looked the other way. Ed Lee gave illegal construction contracts to chinese corporations.
CT gang suck, they go all the way up to the triads which are in turn connected to chinese corporations, and due to their unique communist system, everything their corporations do has the full weight and approval of the chines government behind it. They go all the way up to the chinese government, and all the way down to the teenagers in identical track suits who used to threaten me when I was a kid.

Everyone was losing their businesses, people lost their homes to arson or crooked evictions when the landlords made deals with chinese corporations to develop their properties. People lost their project housing and government benefits. People went homeless in record numbers, and the homeless were treated ruthlessly by the police who pushed them all into the tenderloin. It was absolutely the worst I have ever seen the city get.

All due to corruption and the intervention of a foreign government.

People were fucking desperate in the streets, and violence skyrocketed. I won’t go into the details, but me and all my friends who were unfortunate enough to be living there that year, we all saw some horrible stuff. There were bodies on the street that year.

Edit- I just looked up Leland Yee, he served federal time for gun running, was somehow freed, and then 9 days ago, was arrested again on political bribery charges.

Local Rapper and activist Equipto confronts Ed Lee about his corruption-

[minitiger]

Sounds like when I lived in Koreatown in the mid-2000’s, before it got all gentrified. There were definitely bodies in the street and gang members ditching stolen cars, running from cops right beneath my apartment window. I’d look out the window and there’d be like twenty cop cars and dogs, shouting through bullhorns or whatever,”There’s nowhere for you to go, give yourself up.” Luckily, I lived on the fifth floor. If I’d been on the first or second floor, I might’ve gotten a little nervous. Helicopters shining their lights in my apartment window, waking me up.

Even then, though, during those years, I never felt unsafe. Parking’s horrible in K-Town, sometimes I’d have to park like half a mile away when I’d get home at 2am from work or going out.Long-ass walk back to my apartment, but I just didn’t worry about it (other than the fact that parking ten blocks from my apartment was irritating as fuck).

That’s why when people are like,”MS13! MS13!” I just laugh. I lived in the heart of it and never felt threatened or like I was in any danger. But okay, tell me how people in rural Pennsylvania or wherever need to worry about MS13… If you’re not a part of that world, like an active gang member or something, they don’t give a shit about you. I mean, it could be because I’m not a little guy or I’m white or something, but I never worried about it.

And I actually have been in one of those SRO’s at like 2am to buy “crystal” (turned out to be crushed glass haha). That was yeeeearrrssss ago, 2001 I think, back when I was interested in that kind of stuff. First visit to SF, went with a friend who lived not too far from the Tenderloin. I never felt sketchy or anything.

Maybe I was just drunk haha…

[minitiger]

That’s interesting about Ed Lee, though. Never knew about that. I’ll have to read up on it.

[zephyr]

I totally agree with you, me and my friends used to go all around the city and never worried about it. We treated everyone with respect so we never had any problems. More often than not, we would actually have really interesting and memorable interactions with people. It was pretty great.

Yeah, not enough people know about what went down with ed lee. the corruption which escalated into extreme violence in 2013 to 2015 was really bad. A lot of places that were close to my heart were torched, and have since been replaced with office buildings and luxury high rises owned by Chinese corporations. The arson, bullshit police investigation, and demolition of The Mission Market in particular really hurt. It was an underground market with at least 25 different shops, restaurants, vendors, and specialty groceries inside, all latin owned small businesses.

I left SF in 2015, and everything has pretty much been replaced since then. I don’t even know whether you could even call it gentrification because of the corruption violence used to make it happen.

[minitiger]

Well, that and the fact that a million fucking tech companies moved in. I dunno what’s worse: corruption and violence or a bunch of tech dickheads coming in and ruining it for anybody who doesn’t make at least three million dollars a year. I mean, corruption and violence I at least understand haha…

[zephyr]

Oh definitely man. My neighborhood was the one of the initial epicenters of tech gentrification.

When I was a kid, it was working class italian, irish, and latino. it was where all the plumbers and construction workers lived. There were family businesses dating back to the early 1800’s, and it was all gradually wiped out and replaced with dumb high falootin shit we didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

We held out for a long time, but of course we eventually had to sell and move away.

[toastyjakes]

Starting to drift a bit fellas lol

Love the convo though

[zephyr]

Sorry about that. To get it back on topic, here’s a story which isn’t that sketchy, just kind of funny.

I had a dealer in Santa Cruz who would always offer 2 strains, one supposedly higher grade, and one cheaper and a little lower grade. I would usually buy a quarter of the cheaper stuff, but occasionally spent an extra $15 for a quarter of the higher grade. I was most concerned about having a safe product because I need it medicinally, and this was way cheaper than dispensaries and never had mold or any problems like that.

One time I asked for an eighth of the cheap stuff and an eighth of the high grade. He was visibly surprised. He come back with 2 bags, and he looks nervous. It was clearly the same stuff in both bags. I paid him and thanked him.

And then I found a better dealer. It wasn’t a big deal, and he wasn’t sketchy, but it was going to be awkward dealing with him after I caught him fibbing.

[SmknCanuck]

When i was 18…I took a buddy to get a 1/4 lb for his boss.Took him to the biker dealers in New Westminister B.C.my so called buddy fucked off with the weed and i in turn spent 3days tied to a chair where i was repeatedly kicked and punched in the face.hit with a bat wrapped in barb wire,had a gun held to my head,slashed by a knife multiple times.After the 3rd day of being held there they passed out and i crept froze and crept agonizing at the door for an hour wether to bail or not.Knowing if i bailed and got caught i was dead yet after 3days of being beatin i knew if i did not bail i could end up dead…6 months later i caught the mother fucker Jeff in downtown Vancouver and took a pipe to his knees and head.Would have killed him if my buddy did not pull me away from him as it was he spent 6wks in hospital …Fun times indeed.

Almost as much fun as in 2000 when i got pulled over by the cops on my way to Mongobongo taking him a 1/2oz of weed and 6 3ft clones and having over 500 clones at home waiting to go up north.Thank heavens i had my big rotty with me and kept the cop a distance from my van as she was growling at him everytime he moved or got close to my window​:rofl: i was playing cool but shitting bricks at the same time…Showed up at Mongo’s and said you owe me for the speeding ticket then we drove to his spot and lugged the 6 plants out to his spot to plant.