Not me but close.

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I am a big fan of mind maps, and the other day I had written down some stuff in an attempt to brainstorm for ideas of things to write about. I hesitate to call them “books,” because most of them are only about five thousand words in length.

I made a mind map the other day with the center hub being, “Things I learned in the army.” Joining the military was one of the defining moments of my life, probably the most defining. Still, I had trouble coming up with actual things that I had learned as a result of my time in the service.

That caused me to think about other defining moments in my life. If I had to pick a second-most important period of transformation that I went through, I would have to pick my time as a hair straightener salesperson.

I’m not going to talk about either of those things right now. I’m going to talk about what I learned when I used to sell drugs.

I don’t mean in a cheeky way like Tim Ferris. I don’t mean selling supplements on the internet or selling Vitamins through Herbalife. I mean illegal narcotics.

I am from southern California and during my adolescent years I grew up in an area called Pacific Palisades. This is the type of neighborhood where celebrities buy homes to live in when they don’t want to be accosted by the paparazzi. Many people have heard of Malibu and Santa Monica, but not many have heard of the Pacific Palisades, which just happens to be nestled right in between the two previously mentioned cities.

Its a nice little town. Very quaint with mostly white people. Our high school, however, brings kids from the inner city as well. This is a good thing, because it means that we have competitive sports teams.

Due to a number of factors, let’s just say that lots of people did drugs at the time that I went there. I don’t mean that they were shooting heroin in the bathroom. Lots of people smoked weed (hey, it’s California after all) and there was quite a bit of ecstasy floating around. This was in the late 90s and early 2000s when raving had gotten pretty popular.

Long story short, if you want to do drugs, you could definitely find them.

To change the subject briefly, I am an only child but my dad was previously married and has a few other children. My half-brother died when I was 8 years old, presumably from an overdose. I know its a sensitive issue for my dad so I never pressed him about the details. My mom told me that it had taken them so long to find his body that it was difficult to determine the cause of death.

So naturally, as I was growing up, I was one of these anti-drug kids. I was a “late bloomer” in many ways, not having tried any sort of mind altering substance until the ripe old age of 16. This may sound young, but in my specific peer group it is practically geriatric.

I remember the first time I smoked weed. I had become friends with a group of guys who were a little bit on the “bad” side. They were nice white boys from the Westside with a dash of bad boy in them. They would get into fights, get drunk and do drugs. I don’t know how I started to become friends with them because I was totally not like that. I was kind of a nerd, but I suspect that we both had a sort of devil-may-care attitude about life and somehow connected on that level.

When I would hang out with them and my other friends, everyone would smoke weed except me. The first time I ended up smoking was when I went with one of my friends, let’s call him Z, to go buy some weed from his dealer out in Culver City.

It was about a 20 minute drive from our school. Because we had left right at the beginning of lunch, we calculated that we should have exactly enough time to drive down there and back. I don’t know how long it had been since he had gotten high, but he seemed to be particularly fiending for something to smoke.

We made the drive down to his house. Z had called him on the way but he wasn’t answering, although apparently he was a decent enough customer that he could just show up at his house anyway. When we got there, nobody answered the door and the dealer still wasn’t answering his phone.

Long story short, we had to wait for an extra thirty minutes for him to get back. When my friend triumphantly returned to the car, he had a big grin on his face.

“Alright, let’s smoke!”

I was like, “No thanks man.”

Then he goes, “God DAMN it man!” and slapped the center compartment between the passenger seat and the driver’s seat as hard as he could.

I was stunned and said meekly, “Okay, I’ll smoke.”

This was a big deal for me! Especially because I was the type of kid to quote the drug commercials to my friends when they were getting high, much to their annoyance. Yet here I was, about to put my lips on the business end of a pipe and begin what would become a long love affair with mind-altering substances.

I had never smoked anything before and found the process somewhat difficult, but after a few minutes I managed to get a few hits and cough part of my lungs up. Z was super excited that he had been the one to finally convince me to get high.

I remember driving to Burger King to get something to eat before we went back to class and noticing how the lights seemed very bright.

When we got back at school, I started to trip out. The feeling of my backpack pressing against my back felt different to me. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. I didn’t know if I liked it or not.

Actually, I suppose I did like it because I spent that whole summer at Z’s house getting high with his group of “bad” friends, relatively speaking. I don’t know where I got the money to buy all the weed but it was probably from my parents.

The group of friends liked me and would let me smoke for free sometimes, but they had all moved up to dealing and had money and weed to spare. They liked to get stoned, play video games and go out to eat at restaurants. I was getting used to the lifestyle of being a drug dealer without actually selling any drugs.

That all changed the next year when I came back from my first year of college.

Well, first semester would be more accurate. My initial experience with the university lifestyle didn’t go as I had planned. To say nothing of the fact that I would have preferred to enlist in the Marines (despite my mom’s promise that she would “lie down in front of the bus”), I sat by as my mom applied to schools for me, signing my name and writing my essays. I eventually got into University of Arizona.

I got kicked out of my dorm after a few weeks when my roommate and I got caught smoking weed. The Residence Assistants came knocking on our door asking for the weed. They said that if I didn’t give it to them they would call the cops. This was Arizona, not California. I took the fall for my roommate and moved into off-campus apartments.

I had no money and no job, so it seemed like a natural thing to start selling weed. I asked around where to buy some, and people directed me to some street where you could apparently buy drugs. I found some guy walking down the street and he promised to hook me up. I told him I needed an ounce and gave him $300 bucks. I watched as he walked down the street. I never saw him again.

A nice life lesson for an eighteen year old: don’t trust people who want cash up front for drugs and promise to come get it for you. I must have called that guy 100 times in the next few weeks but he never answered his phone.

Then 9/11 happened. It was a big deal and the whole country was freaking out. My birthday was a month later and my parents flew me back out to LA. It was the first time that I had been away from home for so long, so I think they wanted me to come for a visit. I was a particularly grumpy 18 year old at this point, not especially wanting to be at college and just hating life in general.

Naturally, I decided to have my “bad” friends hook me up with another ounce of weed. My plan was to stuff it down my pants, pass through airport security undetected, return to University of Arizona and sell it to my friends there.

Strangely enough, that’s exactly what I did.

The weed was incredible and smelled very strong, so I had to do something. One of my friends told me that a good way to prevent the smell from getting out was to double-bag it and put Vaseline around the first bag. I didn’t have any Vaseline, so I used sunscreen. It worked and I got through without a problem. Granted, this was about a month after 9/11 and while there may have been guys with guns walking around, they had fewer drug sniffing dogs and X-ray machines. Good thing too, otherwise I would have been in big trouble.

When I think about how I did something so crazy, it makes me think that my balls used to be huge. The world is a different place now and something like that would probably not work (hopefully not!).

When I got back to U of A, I sold the weed in about a day and made about a hundred bucks in profit. The problem, however, was that I now had about four hundred bucks and no product to sell. It was notoriously hard for students to get weed back then in Tucson. Cops were cracking down hard on everyone and even if you could get weed, it would be hard to buy in bulk to make a profit.

After buying a $400 ounce and losing money, I knew I had to do something else. That was when I started making border runs to Nogales, a Mexican border town to pick up pharmaceuticals.

I don’t know if its still like this at U of A, but when I was there, it was common for kids to go down to Nogales for a night of partying. I’m not sure why people would want to make the several hour drive to get drunk in Mexico when you could just get drunk in America, but maybe it had something to do with the legal drinking age. Seems strange now that I’m so old.

Anyway, another cool thing about Mexico is that you can buy pharmaceuticals without a prescription. Well, it doesn’t quite work like that. Its more similar to the experience I had where I gave the guy $300 for nothing.

Mexican guys will come up to you and ask if you want things, like weed or drugs. I remember the first time we went down there, we went with this kid whose name escapes me at the moment. Let’s call him Brandon.

Brandon was a rich kid. When we went to Mexico, we would pay $20 for the open bar because that was all we had. Brandon would do the same and then disappear for a few hours, come back and tell us that he had spent $250 on hookers and lap dances. For an 18 year old kid, that’s a lot of money.

But when I went to Nogales for the first time with Brandon, he knew his way around the city. He knew how to get drugs and was nice enough to show me. I came back to America with 200 somasets in my pocket and plenty of cash leftover.

I made a few more runs to Mexico that year, buying as much as I could each time with the few hundred bucks my parents sent me each month. I would sell the pills and live off the money until the next $400 check from the parental units arrived.

That semester, I don’t think I even attended ten lectures. I remember having a mini-breakdown when I couldn’t figure out where my classes were, what building they were in and the difference between a lecture and a lab.

Nobody seemed to want to explain it to me, so I chose to just not go to class. Hell, I didn’t want to be there anyway.

I spent the semester getting high with another friend, taking pills, and pining hopelessly over a good female friend of mine. When my report card came back it was all F’s.

My parents were obviously pissed because they had high hopes for their son.

I’m not an idiot, I just didn’t give a shit about school. Now I wish that I had been more interested in things like that at the time, or at least more interested in something other than getting high.

When I came back to LA, I had a lot of fights with my parents. My mom took me to a psychiatrist who was kind of a dick.

He said, “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” I said.

He goes, “You seem kind of down.”

“Nope. I just hate my parents.”

He goes, “Hmm… I’m going to give you Welbutrin.”

And then I started taking legal drugs.

I will say this though, Wellbutrin is fantastic! Maybe I will go on it again, it is that good.

I remember going to my classes (I had applied to Santa Monica Community College when I came back. My mom dragged me there, of course.), sitting down at my desk and actually paying attention to what the professor was saying. For the first time in my experience in formal education, I actually opened my notebook and took notes.

As things started to calm down, I hooked back up with some of my friends from high school. Most people who had graduated without going off to a four year university had ended up at Santa Monica College (SMC for short) which was known as, “high school with cigarettes.”

I didn’t have any particular interest in any one subject, so naturally I became a philosophy major by default. When I was choosing my classes, they were the only ones with interesting titles.

In one of my philosophy classes, I was lucky enough to have one of my best friends from high school in there with me. He wasn’t exactly part of the “bad” crowd, but he did smoke weed and we had been friends since our freshman year. We had smoked a lot of weed together and I did ecstasy the first time with him and some other people. Let’s call him “Sam.”

Sam and I had a lot of similar interests. When I wanted to try out for the football team in my sophomore year, I dragged him along with me, which turned out to be a good idea because we played for three years. We worked out together trying to “get buff.” We spent a lot of time together and he was a good guy.

I remember one day after class, or possibly the gym, we were sitting in his car and smoking a blunt.

I said something like, “Man, I wish I had more money to buy weed.”

He said, “Why don’t you just buy an ounce? Instead of buying an eighth every week, just buy an ounce and sell half of it. Then you smoke for free and have some money left over.”

That made a lot of sense to me. I had partially wet my whistle for dealing in Arizona, but because of a lack of suppliers, I had a hard time getting the logistics down for a smooth operation. That problem was solved for me in LA because of the more relaxed laws and the better connections I had through my friends.

But then I said, “But I don’t have any customers. How am I going to sell it?”

He goes, “Just make a few calls. Say, ‘Hey, I have weed. Call me if you want some.’”

So I bought another ounce and made some calls. One of my best customers turned out to be another one of my childhood friend’s little brothers. He was about a year younger than me and was known as the troublesome sibling of the family. But fortunately for me, he had a lot of friends. And they had friends.

My life for the next two years looked something like this:

I would wake up early and go to the gym, then head over to SMC and go to class, then head to Z’s house (At this point, Z had moved in with another one of my friends in the “bad” group. They had an apartment in Culver City which turned out to be our hang out spot of choice) and get stoned out of my mind. Periodically, we would get phone calls and make trips around the city to sell small bags of weed.

There was a long period of my life where I would look back on those two years as the golden years of my life. I had no worries and plenty of money for what I needed, which was food, water, weed and prescription pills.

I didn’t mention it earlier, but Z had a medical condition which required frequent surgery so he always had Vicodin, Valium and all kinds of other goodies. He was a troubled kid as well, making frequent trips to the psychiatrist, so there was always plenty of Xanex and Ambien on hand.

The good thing about selling drugs is that it is a very liquid business. Drugs can be traded for other drugs at street value as well as cash. It was a common occurrence for me to sell someone a bag of weed and have them ask me if I could get them ecstasy. Or they would ask me if I wanted to buy some of their ecstasy.

I remember I had this one customer, let’s call him “Mike.” This kid was a true fuck up with roots in the “bad kid” group of friends that I was now a card-carrying member of. Mike liked to smoke weed and take pills, though it was rumored that he snorted lots of Oxycontin and even shot heroin. That being said, I got his number through another one of my dealer friends and he became one of my best customers.

He would go through periods of sobriety which, in his case, meant only smoking weed. He would also go to some doctor who would prescribe him Norco, which is basically maximum strength Vicodin without the acetaminophen. Normally, Vicodin is anywhere from 250–750 mg of hydrocodone with some acetaminophen thrown in. Norco is 1000 mg of pure hydrocodone. It is a relatively expensive and sought after drug.

Mike would sell them to me for $1 per pill and I would turn around and sell them for $5. When you are dealing with a hundred pills, this turns out to be a lot of money for someone my age. And that was just one example.

When you’re a drug dealer, sure, there are market prices. But because the supply is so plentiful, sometimes things don’t exactly compute. This is because at the end of the day, people want to consume the drugs as well, not just sell them. Sometimes even the dealers.

So while I may have paid $240 for an ounce of super dank weed, I might turn around and sell it for $290 because I don’t want to rip off one of my good customers. The next week, however, I might get some weed of lower quality for $265 and sell it for $330 because I need to make it worth my time.

There were no set prices, and they changed based on how much I liked the customer and how much I had paid for whatever I was selling them.

Anyway, those two years were fantastic. When you sell drugs, you are king of the neighborhood. Well, that is unless you deal with some shady characters.

My first experience with such shady characters was one day when I was leaving my parents’ house. We lived in “The Highlands,” which is a small community in the Palisades that you have to drive through a long, twisty canyon to get to. It only takes about five minutes, but it seems like it would stretch on forever if you didn’t know what to expect.

Anyway, there was no public transportation up there, so sometimes there would be hitchhikers trying to get a ride up or down the hill. This one day, I picked up a kid who looked to be about my age. He was short and didn’t look like anything special, but when he got a whiff of the stanky danky I had in my car, he made a comment.

“Smells good in here,” he said.

I gave him my phone number and told him to call me if he needed anything. I figured I had just scored myself another customer.

A few days later I got a call from someone, saying that they were a friend of this kid. I had been in business long enough not to be paranoid when strange people called me who said they knew a friend of mine. Maybe I had just gotten a bit lazy at this point, but I asked the person on the phone how much they wanted.

“A QP,” he said.

QP stands for quarter pound, which is a fairly large amount. At the time, my friends and I were rolling in some very powerful stuff which had been quite expensive, even for us with our connections. I remember sitting with Z at his house while on the phone with this kid. Z shrugged and told me the price.

“1200,” I said.

The kid agreed and we were going to meet up later that day in front of Z’s apartment building.

Now, I wasn’t a gangster or anything, I was a business man. I was going to do a deal. So I stood outside with the goods at the appointed time and saw someone walking towards me. He seemed a little unsure of himself, so I waved at him and tried to call him over. He approached slowly and seemed to not be looking at me, but past me.

He came up to me and I greeted him like everything was okay. I asked him, “Do you have the money?”

He just stared at me and then lunged for the bag. I kicked him in the stomach, but noticed that he was still looking past me. When I turned my head to see what he was looking at, I saw a huge guy come barreling down on me. He took me down to the ground, sat on my chest and punched me in the head until I let the bag go. They ran off with a small fortune (for us at the time) worth of weed as well as my cell phone, which had fallen out of my pocket.

I went back up to Z’s apartment, destroyed. I had enough money to cover the loss and then some, but it was my first major setback since the $300 lesson in Arizona. My head was swollen from getting punched.

“No,” said Z. “You’re kidding me! I knew I should have gone with you!”

I shrugged. “Yeah.” I figured there was nothing I could do about it.

“Well, what happened?” Z wanted details.

I told him the story. I actually recognized the tall kid from the Palisades. When Z heard this he got excited. “Are you serious? You know who it was? Let’s call H.”

H was our dealer and one of the biggest in the city. He was a nice guy if you were one of his customers and one very tough dude. He was friends with Rixon Gracie, son of Royce Gracie, the famous MMA fighter. Rixon was killed by a rival gang in my senior year of high school, though the official story was that he died in a motorcycle accident.

H had been one of his best friends as well as J, another one of mine and Z’s close friends. Z, J and I sat in Z’s apartment and called H. Z spoke to him and told him the story, mentioning that I knew who it was.

The kid’s name was MK, another one of the jujitsu wanna-be’s of the Palisades that studied under Royce Gracie. For such an affluent town on the west side of LA, the Palisades definitely had its fair share of punks who liked to fight and join gangs.

H hated MK. When I told him who it was, he laughed. “That kid’s a pussy. Don’t worry man, you’ll get your shit back.”

We hung up and waited. I took a few Vicodin for the pain and we smoked bowls in Z’s apartment for several hours, H giving us updates along the way.

Apparently, H had called MK’s sister, who he knew from the Palisades. He told her what had happened and said that if he didn’t bring back everything that he had stolen, that he had people waiting outside his mom’s house with guns. He said that they would shoot up the house unless he brought back everything he had stolen.

The story is that MK began to cry on the phone. But because he had already “redistributed” the merchandise, he had to go back to all of the people he had bought it from and give them their money back! When H came to Z’s apartment, he brought multiple different-sized bags than what we had originally packaged in for our “customers.”

“Weigh that shit out, make sure it’s all there,” said H.

We did. “It’s off by half a gram,” said J.

We all had a good laugh about that. Half a gram is only a few dollars when you’re dealing with that much volume.

“You should go up to him and be like, ‘hey dog, I want that dime.’” H thought he was clever.

Personally I was relieved and amazed that everything had worked out. From then on, I made sure to buy everything from H. Granted, it was in his best interests to get me back my property. If I didn’t have any way to make money, then I wouldn’t be able to give him any money. So in effect, MK had actually stolen from H.

Still, I had been won over. This whole time, I was accepted by my friends only because other friends of theirs had accepted me. From Z to J to H to Mike, they all gave me the same respect as the bad kids because I was friends with them. It was quite nice.

Eventually, the dream had to end and I had to wake up. Z went sober after having a grand mal seizure, caused by withdrawal from weeks of Xanex and Ambien abuse. Mike eventually died from a heroin overdose.

I was actually doing quite well. After Z had dropped off the map, I begun hanging out with R, another one of our crew. R had a place in Santa Monica and was also selling anything he could get his hands on. We both picked up our stuff from H and kept it at his house, meaning there was always about a pound of marijuana there between the two of us.

I had managed to save a bit of money as well and kept an inventory of quite a bit of narcotics. After getting introduced through a friend of a friend to a new customer, I went over to his house only to realize that it was actually someone that I had gone to high school with! Let’s call him Stan.

Stan was also in the jujitsu club, but had moved onto bigger and better things. He was the protege of a high volume ecstasy dealer in LA who had promised to teach him the tricks of the trade so he could replace him. It turned out that the rave scene was still alive and well, despite the fact that it was no longer 1998.

I bought a few pills from Stan and took them at R’s house. When they started to kick in, I spoke to Stan on the phone and he invited me to a rave. Despite being forty minutes away in downtown LA, I went and ended up staying for several hours. It was quite possibly the most fun I had ever had at that point in my life.

Ecstasy is an incredible drug. It floods your body with serotonin or dopamine, I don’t remember which, but it feels like a four hour long orgasm. Add some flashing lights and pumping base and you have a very intense experience.

Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that night changed something in me. I reached a new level. I asked Stan how much he would charge me for 100 pills. He had told me earlier that he only paid 300 for them, but charged me 700, promising that he would lower the price if I became a regular customer.

The rave scene was a fast paced, intense lifestyle where people come and go very quickly, usually in handcuffs or off to rehab. Its filled with kids who are mad at their parents and people who just want to put a pacifier in their mouth and listen to some body-thumping beats. I have to say, potential brain damage notwithstanding, the raves that I went to over the next few months were some of the most fun I had in my entire life.

My revenue jumped up sharply when I started selling X. I would find random $50 and $100 in my pocket and not remember how they got there. It became my main source of income. While I still carried various types of prescription pills, most of my money came from selling X to my existing customers. You could say that I utilized my current book of business, to use an adult term.

The money was good and came fast, and I might have even been able to keep it up if I hadn’t fallen prey to the next trap: crystal meth.

Now, I had taken my fair share of adderal. Z, some other friends and I had gone on many 2–4 day adderal benders where we played video games and smoked ourselves retarded. But as intense as that was, it just wasn’t as intense as crystal.

One small line would burn your nose like battery acid and keep you wired for 12 hours. It was better than any diet I had ever been on, as suddenly all the work I had put in at the gym over the years became more visible as the fat melted off my body. In general, it was a very rewarding drug.

The weight loss would prove to be too much sometimes and my head would get that “sucked-in” look. It was pretty gross and people were starting to worry about me.

At this point, I had moved in with my aunt and uncle in the San Fernando Valley, Woodland Hills to be precise. I had just finished my two years of general education at SMC and it was time to transfer. My parents had just bought a house about two hours from LA in La Quinta (near Palm Springs), but I had no desire to live with them. Because I managed to keep my double-life hidden from them, they agreed to let me stay with them while I finished my remaining two years at Callifornia State University of Northridge (CSUN).

I made several mistakes those first few months. One, I told some of my cousins that I sold weed. Thinking that I would get some additional customers out of it (which I did, by the way, and now another one of my cousins is married to the guy), it turned out to be a horrible idea because of the tension it created between me and the rest of the people living in the house. The obviously had no idea that I was into that kind of thing because I have the appearance of a straight-shooter.

This was right around the time that I was reunited with Chris and began to expand my business. I knew that it was only a matter of time before someone went snooping through my things and found my stash, so I kept everything in my car in a large, smell-proof turkey bag. I spent as little time at their house as possible, leaving in the morning and coming home after dark. Still, it was hard for me to avoid the family, especially late at night when I was stoned and wanted a snack.

I spent nearly every day at R’s house which began to cause problems as well. Not surprisingly, he started getting sick of having me in his house more than he was, despite the fact that I would watch his dogs and sell weed to his customers when he wasn’t there. We kept our stuff in the same place, sometimes not knowing which bag was whose.

I didn’t like the idea that I might be losing money, so I moved my stuff into my car. R had borrowed an ounce from me to sell to customers and a month later, still hadn’t paid me the money. I called H to resolve the matter and he cleared it up right away.

“So, you can’t re-up until R pays you?”

I go, “No. I need to also because I have people calling me.”

H goes, “Oh dude, that’s no problem. I’ll just transfer his debt over to me. Come by now and I’ll hook you up.”

At this point, I was ready to name my first born after H. I was so grateful to him even though I knew it was strictly business. Still, that made the tension between R and I even worse and he eventually kicked me out of his house a few times.

I didn’t care as much as I thought I would, except for the fact that now I had no base of operations. I had no apartment and couldn’t spend more than an hour at my aunt and uncle’s house in the valley without feeling like I wasn’t welcome.

Meanwhile, I continued to go to raves every weekend. I would take 4–5 pills a night and party like it was my job while still managing to end up with several hundred dollars in my pocket that I didn’t know was there until the next day. I would walk around with a huge wad of cash in my pocket or in my car, fearing absolutely nothing.

I had also hooked up with a girl named Sheila, who was a half-black half-Mexican girl who was also very well-connected in the rave scene. She had been around forever and knew all the top dealers. She was also pretty violent but had a major crush on me. Being the nerdy Jewish kid from the Palisades, I obviously did the rational thing and made her my girlfriend.

Now nobody could touch me. I walked around the party with muscles on my body, Sheila on my arm and a pacifier in my mouth. We would take pills, smoke weed and snort crystal meth to our hearts content. I had everything I wanted and despite the fact that I was alienating myself from my old friends and family, life was fantastic.

I remember one day after a party, Sheila and I were driving around downtown LA. She wanted to “smoke some shit,” which was slang for smoking crystal. I had plenty to spare which I had conveniently purchased from Stan. I think he told me that his mom sold it to him or something, which should give you an idea of the types of people that I was hanging out with were.

So this one day, Sheila and I are driving around aimlessly. She is calling her friends and we are trying to find a place to rest. We had just spent the entire night at a rave and the better part of the next day coming down. Our bodies were exhausted from the copious amounts of substances we had subjected them to, and strange as it may sound, we wanted nothing more than to smoke some crystal meth in the ghetto.

The ghetto, by the way, is a disgusting place. I remember when we finally parked the car at her friend’s house. I got out and looked around. Even though I was disoriented from the lack of sleep, I could tell I was in a bad part of town. I think people who saw me were probably thinking, “What the fuck is this white kid doing here with his Volvo and those gangsters?”

Why, doing drugs, of course!

We went up to this apartment. I don’t remember what the woman’s name we were going to see was, but when she opened the door to the apartment, it looked like a bomb had gone off. A smelly, disgusting bomb. The apartment was super small and there were little kids running around all over the place. A black woman answered the door and it looked like she must have weighed at least 300 pounds. Her eyes were glazed over and she had long, fake nails.

She took us into the back room of the apartment and closed the door. The pipe came out and we all started smoking. At this point in my career, I carried a bag with a change of clothes, my cash and my drugs. I was one step away from getting a gun.

On this particular occasion, I had chosen to take the bag with me because I didn’t want to leave it in my car in the middle of the ghetto. As we were up there smoking crystal, someone called out from the other room, “Hey, the cops are here!”

We all thought they were joking, but they repeated it again. The black lady took some time to light some incense and hide all the contraband. For some strange reason, I wasn’t nervous at all. I knew that whatever was going to happen would happen and that was it. If I was going to get caught with a bag full of drugs in the ghetto then that’s just how it would end.

When the black lady opened the door to the back room, two cops walked in. No warrant, nothing. They just walked in and looked around.

One of them asked, “Where’s Jorge?”

We all looked at each other, slightly confused. The black lady took a moment to answer, “Jorge ain’t here now. He went out yesterday and hasn’t come back.”

The cop who had spoken kept asking about this Jorge character while the other one just looked at us. He didn’t have the typical angry cop face. It was more like an amused look. Like he was thinking to himself that we were a bunch of weird losers who were sitting in the ghetto getting high. And he was right.

But back then, I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to get out of there alive and not in handcuffs. I focused very hard on the conversation, ignoring the black bag next to me. Good thing they hadn’t brought a dog!

After they were satisfied that this fucking Jorge guy wasn’t there, they just left. No search, no problem.

I was lucky that day, but my luck would run out a few weeks later after going to another rave.

This was a particularly good party that I had been looking forward to for a long time. They would be playing lots of old school trance and there were lots of big name people performing. I’m not talking about Tiesto or anything, but big names in the underground scene. After going to raves for a few months, I was excited about a development like this.

The money was still coming in and it looked like I had excelled past my peers in the drug dealing department. I had plenty of everything, making a name for myself as a one stop shop for all my customers. When I would meet with them, I would pull out a large bag with several smaller bags inside and they were like kids in a candy store.

That being said, after this party which I will remember forever as “Tranceformers,” I decided to go to the after party. This is a typical thing in the rave scene, because after your mind has been blown for 8 hours and the sun is about to come up, the last place you want to go is home. Sometimes you still want the party to keep going. The after party is also a good place to make money, especially for someone like me.

I made the drive to this after party which was all the way in Santa Clarita, about an hours drive from where the party was. I spent the entire day in one of these kids’ apartments, taking ecstasy and smoking weed constantly to keep the high going. I was also doing crystal to stay awake.

It was Sunday and I had class the next day. At about midnight on Sunday, I called my uncle and told him I would stay the night at my “friend’s” house. He wasn’t one my parents, so he couldn’t exactly tell me what to do. But he was my mom’s brother, so I could tell he was concerned.

I actually did plan on going home, I just didn’t want him to know that and wait up for me. As I was getting ready to leave, this kid who we will call “Triple J” (or JJJ), asks me to drive him down the street to get cigarettes and that he doesn’t mind to walk back to the apartment. I agree.

We got in the car and started to drive. I remember that when we went to the 7–11 so the kid could get cigarettes, I went in to get something as well. We had to wait there for 20 minutes while the girl at the cash register was trying to figure out how to use the machine. Had we not had to do that, things might have turned out differently.

Eventually we got out of there. Triple J was nice so I decided to give him a ride back. It was now about one in the morning and the suburban streets of Santa Clarita were empty. I got in the left lane and made a U-turn to go back to the apartment.

“Oh shit, is that a cop?” JJJ said from the passenger seat.

I looked behind me and sure enough, flashing blue and red lights apparently wanted me to pull over, though I had no idea why. There was not a lot of room on the shoulder, so I got in the left lane and turned into an empty parking lot.

The cop gets out of the car, comes over to my window and is super pissed off.

“Where are you from?” He asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“Well I don’t know how they do things in Los Angeles, but over here in Santa Clarita when you see those flashing lights, you pull to the right side of the road.” He sounded angry.

I was a bit nervous because he was yelling at me. I still had my Big Bag O’ Drugs in the back seat, and looked over my shoulder to make sure he wouldn’t see it. Of course, he saw me look, so he purposely looked in the back seat.

“You ah, been playing any sports lately?”

I go, “What? Sports? No, why.”

He asked me, “Then why do you have a baseball bat in your back seat?”

I told him the truth, my first mistake of the night: “Well you know, in case someone tries to attack me. I can defend myself.”

“That means you are carrying a concealed weapon, illegal in the State of California. Please step out of the vehicle.”

That’s when I knew that it was all over. My blissful two and a half years of easy money was about to end. I got out of the car and put my hands on the roof. He went through my pockets and I will never forget how he pulled out my big wad of cash and slammed it on the top of the car. I can still picture the money in my head. It didn’t seem like that large of an amount anymore.

He asked me, “Do you have any drugs in the car?”

“Yes,” I said, making the same mistake twice.

“Are you selling it?”

“Yes,” I said again, making that three times.

I always thought that if you tell the truth, people will appreciate that and give you the benefit of the doubt. I was wrong then and I have been wrong regarding that many times after this event took place. He put me and JJJ in the backseat of the cop car.

“Yo dude, I’m so sorry,” said Triple J. I think he felt responsible for asking me to get cigarettes.

“Its alright man. Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you think they’re going to take me to jail also?” He asked.

“Nah man, they’re going to let you go. You don’t have anything on you.” I was pretty sure of that.

We waited there for a few minutes. I had turned out to be right and JJJ was let go. As the cop was taking me down to the station, he decided to give me a little pep talk.

“Now you’ve been very cooperative, so I’m going to put that in my police report. When you go to court and see the judge, he’s going to go easy on you. You don’t have any prior offenses, right?” Of course I didn’t. I had been squeaky clean up until that point.

When I got to jail, I waited a day to call my parents. I just needed some time to think about what had happened, about what I would say when I got them on the phone. Because they had just recently bought their house in La Quinta, I decided instead to call my uncle.

Unfortunately, when you are in jail, you can only make collect calls. And when you connect to whoever you’re trying to get a hold of, they play a very loud recording that says, “<NAME> IS CALLING YOU FROM SANTA CLARITA CORRECTIONAL FACILITY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCEPT THE CHARGES?”

My little cousin answered the phone and said, “Holy shit, are you okay?”

I asked to speak with my uncle, but he didn’t want anything to do with the situation. He said I needed to call my parents.

As you can imagine, that went over really well. My mom started crying on the phone.

“Maybe I should just leave you there! Maybe I should just leave you there!” She kept saying. “You have no idea what you’ve done to your father!”

A touching moment, but in the end they agreed to come pick me up under the condition that I would move back in with them and “get clean.” The next few weeks after that were tough for me. I had gone from the top of my game to the bottom in a very short amount of time. All my money was gone and so was my stash. If you are busted by the cops, any outstanding debts that are owed to you get swallowed up as well, of which I had a few.

I had nothing. And to make matters worse, I was living with my parents in a small, quiet city filled with either old people or Mexicans. I didn’t know anybody and was under constant supervision. The only time I was allowed to leave the house was to go to the gym and to occasionally drive down to LA to finish my classes for that semester. My mom insisted on driving with me. I’m not sure what she thought I would do, but I was totally defeated.

My life changed again when I lost the ability to make a living with drugs. I had lost my easy money and elevated social status, not to mention easy access to mind-altering substances. It was a huge hit for me, and I had to find satisfaction from exercising and working a real job. Fortunately, my dad had gotten me a gig as a barback at a swanky restaurant across the street from our house.

For the next seven months, I worked my ass off about six days a week. I exercised every single day with no rest. I remember one time I counted how many days in a row I lifted weights without taking a break. I stopped counting at 23 days. I would listen to trance music as I did my workouts, dreaming of the day where I could go to a rave again.

To make a long story short, I slowly regained my parents’ trust and saved some money. Eventually, I moved back to LA, got a place of my own and went back to study at CSUN. I had tried to get into the military after being arrested, but once again made the stupid mistake of telling them about my criminal record. They wouldn’t even process my application.

In retrospect, I should have just kept my mouth shut like a smart criminal. But I wasn’t smart, not even clever. I was just slick. I thought I could move through the system undetected but I had absolutely no defense if I got caught. It never occurred to me that it may happen. I mean, I must have thought about it, but I didn’t actually plan what I would say or do if it did.

I spent about six months living in the Valley and going to school. I was off the Welbutrin and not exactly as motivated as I once was to study. Without getting off on another tangent, I moved to Israel after half a year of living in LA in order to join the Israeli military.

I was relatively drug free in the military, though I did smoke some hash on the weekends after about 7 months into my training. I had a pothead friend on the kibbutz where I was living and when we both had time off from the army together, we would “read books,” which is what we would call getting high.

Our kibbutz was in the Galil, and we would walk to the very edge and sit on boulders and smoke out of a pipe. We would get stoned, talk about life and watch the cows stand around and be weird.

I didn’t sell any more drugs until long after I had gotten out of the army, despite having many opportunities to do so. Friends of mine in Israel would deal, and though I still had an eye for business, I didn’t dabble until I moved to Tel Aviv. Once again, I was faced with the same problem of not having enough money to support my habit. Or rather, spending too much on my habit.

Over there, weed is very expensive. Most people smoke hash, which comes from Arab countries like Lebanon. So the consequences for dealing are much harsher over there. I had to be extra careful.

When you buy hash in large quantities, it comes as a “plate,” basically a large solid rectangle. You have to heat it in the microwave and cut it with a knife. I would bring one or two of these plates back to my apartment, chuck them in the microwave and then individually wrap all of them in bits of a plastic bag. Using my mad army skillz, I would singe the edges so that the plastic would melt together and they would all be neatly wrapped. By the time I was done, I had twenty something sticks of hash ready to go. At 200 shekels a pop, I would more than double my money each time.

In addition to that, I worked at a customer service job for a small start-up that sold eyeglasses over the internet. I had a mountain bike and would travel 6k to and from work, five days a week, until they allowed me to install a phone line in my house and work from home. That was a very cushy gig, as I would stay at home and serve sacks from my apartment while pretending to be a customer service agent over the phone.

The problem was that I was scarred from my previous experience with the law. I didn’t want to get caught again, and figured that my best defense would be to make sure that I never actually kept any of the stuff at my house. Before I made this genius decision, I would keep the sticks in an old oatmeal tin in my room, naively trusting my roommates not to steal anything from me.

Eventually one of them did and me and my other roommate kicked her out of the apartment, but that is a story for another time.

When I wised up and decided to keep everything off site, I knew that I would have to put it somewhere that nobody would possibly look. Because I was in excellent shape from lifting weights and riding everywhere on my bike, I knew I could travel a couple kilometers out if I had to.

I settled on Hayarkon park, which was a few kilometers from where I was staying at the time. It is a huge park in the center of Tel Aviv, one that I rode through frequently to get to my office of the customer service job. I knew the terrain pretty well, figuring that if I buried my stash somewhere over there, I could just take a quick ride on my bike every time I needed to sell something. It would be inconvenient, but safe.

So I went to the arts and crafts supply store, bought myself a plastic container and painted it black. I wrapped my sticks in a black plastic bag, put a backpack on and rode out to the middle of the park. I walked up a hill that didn’t seem like the type of place people would go and buried it next to a tree. Each time I went out there, I would bury it someplace slightly different, making sure to remember where it was each time.

Despite being stoned out of my mind most of the time, this arrangement worked pretty well. Though it did wear me a bit thin in the energy department, my bank account was nice and healthy. Or rather, the fat stack of cash I kept in my room was healthy. I’m not sure why I decided to sell drugs again, but if I had to guess, it was because I liked getting high and didn’t want to waste any money.

Eventually, the Israeli government started to crack down on hash dealers and the entire country dried up. It became very hard to find anything through the usual channels. The price of a place rose until it became unprofitable to sell.

At that point, I had already gotten sick of living in Tel Aviv and moved back to America to start my next journey: selling hair straighteners. But that is a story for another time.

I know that I titled this: What I Learned From Selling Drugs. If I had to sum it up, I would advise against it. It may be easy money, but most people don’t make it out with anything to show for it. Some people are able to do it long term without getting into trouble, but they are few and far between. Its next to impossible to sell weed in LA anymore with all the dispensaries everywhere.

In a way, that’s a good thing. I couldn’t sell weed even if I wanted to. And without weed, you are stuck selling hard drugs where the customers are a lot more unpredictable. No, I believe that legalizing or decriminalizing it is definitely the way to go, both for the economy and crime rate.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my little story! I hadn’t intended for it to be this long, but you know how it gets when you start talking about the good old days…