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People Share Their Most Painfully Awkward Encounters with Drug Dealers

Buying drugs is never a pleasant experience at the best of times, but some people really get the short straw.
Photo by Eldad Carin

Painfully awkward interactions with drug dealers are to drug consumption what pooping at your significant other's apartment is to dating: an excruciating but inevitable byproduct of normal social relations. Call it a tax on fun; call it a necessary if inconvenient reminder that you are engaging in criminal activity for the purposes of getting out-of-your-mind high later on—picking up drugs is never anybody's idea of a good time. But sometimes even the most mundane of drug purchases can turn into a comedy of errors. With that in mind, we spoke to four people whose experiences with buying illegal substances went horribly wrong.

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Zara

My friends and I were picking up drugs before a music festival, so we called my old dealer over to my place for a bumper order. The day before, I'd been randomly given some drug testing kits so we were messing about at mine with them. The entire reason we'd called this guy was because I'd had a period of picking up terrible drugs from cheaper random dealers, so we were testing some shitty coke I'd gotten a month ago for laughs.

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When he walks in, I immediately realize he sees the test kits. I've stupidly left them in plain sight my table. "Oh, you don't trust me, do you?" he asks. This guy is like six-foot-three, built like a brick shit house, and all I have to protect myself with is my weedy friend Joe, who is cowering on the side of my sofa. But instead, the dealer says he's interested in getting some test kits himself and would like to try them out.

Cue an excruciating 45 minutes where we sit with my dealer around the table in complete silence as he produces literally every single illegal substance he sells—coke, MDMA, pills, even research chemicals like 2CB and 2CI—out of his bag and tests them one by one. But nothing happens. Like, literally nothing happens—the tests don't even change color to indicate that they're bad. I finally choke out a strangled, "Ha ha ha… I guess the kits are duds?"

He gave me a discount, though, so I guess it wasn't all bad.

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Photo by KKGAD via Stocksy

Bradley

I once went to the pub near my park to pick up a bag of weed and got flashed by a car, so I got in. I gave the guy $30 and he gave me a bag of coke, then we got into an argument about whether I hadn't given him enough money or whether he'd given me the wrong thing.

He said, "Are you actually Bradley?" and I said, "Are you Ash?" As I was realizing I'd gotten into the wrong car, some guy came out of the pub and jogged over to me and knocked on the window. This dealer and I exchanged looks, and he nodded. I rolled down the window, took the guy's money and handed him the wrap.

I literally stepped off the side of the boat and fell down the crack between the two boats—like at least ten or 15 feet down.

Then I had to walk across the parking lot to find the dealer I was looking for, who was obviously furiously dialing me because I had the temerity to be eight seconds late.

Luna

Once my weed dealer described the entire plots of three different documentaries about national security before he got to the giving me weed part.

Sarah

I was in Croatia with my girlfriends at Hideout festival. We'd pretty much spent the whole festival looking for drugs, and we decided the best thing to do was to find the most fucked person in the club and ask them where they got their drugs from. Eventually, this mangled guy gave us a number. So we call the number and the dealer is like, "Meet us down at the harbor where all the party boats go from."

My friends go to get cash out, but I'm [freaking out] about missing the guy because we got lost on the way and he was like, "Be at the harbor at this time." So I'm waiting by the boats, it's like 1 AM, and then this guy starts waving at me from one of the top decks of this huge two-story boat. I go, "Are you Shawn [the dealer]?" and he's like, Yeah, and motions for me to get on the boat.

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And like, deep down I know I shouldn't get on a boat with this rando guy, but my friends are literally like 50 meters away, so I figure they'll probably hear me scream. I climb onto the second story of the boat and follow him across the top deck. At one point, he turns around as if he's warning me or something, but it's really dark and I blithely plough on.

**Read more: All the *Drugs* You Can Expect to Find at Music Festivals This Summer**

Basically, there were two of these double-decker boats side by side. I literally stepped off the side of the boat and fell down the crack between the two boats—like at least ten or 15 feet down. And I'm like, "Shit! I'm in sea!"

The guy isn't able to pull me out on his own on account of the height, so he leaves me there for a bit—just bobbing in the dark between two huge boats—and then him and his friends come and haul me out. They give me this Formula One towel and a matching hat and then my friends turn up and are like, "What happened to you?" Turns out they were just the deckhands, not drug dealers. We ended up drinking with them most of the evening.


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Dan

One guy came round to sell us weed and asked if he could use the table. Then he pulled out a huge bag of heroin and some scales and started weighing out brown on the coffee table. We'd all been watching so much Top Boy that we were petrified the cops or some Jamaican gang lords were going to come in with shotguns and blow us all away.

The dealer's name was Mr. Chips.