Green Room Diaries: Back In My Day

Earlier today, I was too lazy to walk to one of the seven marijuana dispensaries located within a two-block radius of my apartment. So, I ordered online and it was delivered in less than an hour. I realized just then that, yeah, I’m getting to that age where I can sit you kids down and tell you about the olden days, back when you had to pick seeds out of flat, brown weed, after purchasing it on street credit, from a pedophile outside of a 7-11.

There Were Two Types Of Weed In The ‘90s

First off, in 1996, there were only two kinds of weed: Mexican dirt weed and "killbud." The latter was anything you’d get in a dispensary today and it ran for anywhere from fifty-to-sixty bucks per eighth. Sure, there were several different strains, as illustrated by High Times and such, but no one knew what was what. Plus, the good shit was judged on things that honestly don’t matter much, such as whether or not the bud had red hairs, if it was sticky or not, etc. Today, you can get a dry, no-stick, totally green nugget that will put you in a coma, but back in the ‘90s, everything was part of the external sale. Unless, of course, you were purchasing the first type of weed I mentioned; Mexican dirt weed is not a term that is meant to imply "dirt" quality, nor is it racist—it literally originates from the ditches ("dirt") of Mexico. Cartels stand near the roads—next to the ditches this shit grows in—and they guard it. That’s all the tending that said garden receives. It’s brown, full of seeds and back in the day, you could grab an ounce of this crap for eighty bucks. Yeah, that’s still very, very expensive by today’s standards, but if given the choice between an eighth and a half, or an entire ounce, high school kids tend to buy in bulk.

Shady Dealings Meant Shady People

This brings me to my second point: buying weed was shady for more reasons than the obvious. Yeah, you had to score it like you would score a street drug today, but some after-the-fact reflection draws attention to some pretty sketchy activity. In retrospect, the people who were selling weed to us, were selling weed to kids in high school. Yeah, it was Salem, so we’d all moved on to community college and/or the Juvenile Detention Center by sixteen, but the point still stands—we bought drugs from people who had no problem meeting up with teenagers. And, more often than not, these weren’t exactly members of the neighborhood watch. Either we dealt with gangbangers who were related to someone in our group (it wasn’t until I was much older, that I realized 13th Street and 18th Street weren’t the names of the roads our dealers lived on) or we dealt with the uber-creepers, who wanted us to hang around and watch videos with them after we bought weed.

Locating someone by phone often involved a pager, a series of "pound sign" (hashtag) codes (911, 420, etc.) and a serious, mafia-level stance toward anonymity. Every weed dealer in the ‘90s was convinced that the Feds were tapping their phone. Out of this paranoia, came the middleman, and the middleman’s middlemen. By the time you got an "eighth" of killbud or an "ounce" of the Mexi shit, it was at least a gram (or ten) under weight. Back in the day, we’d call this getting "ripped off," but now that I think about it, those two or more middlemen were splitting half a bowl among themselves for commission.

Weed Turned Kids Into Drug Dealers

Beyond the sketchiness of locating weed, the process of actually paying for the shit was even harder. High school kids are broke, so we’d often "front" (borrow) weed from dealers. And, what did the dealers do when you asked for an eighth of killbud or an ounce of Mexi? They’d give you an ounce of killbud or a pound of Mexi, then tell you what you owed, which meant you had to either sell the weed or pay for it yourself. So, pretty much any kid buying pot became, at one point, a weed dealer. I remember being in possession of a pager, that to the best of my knowledge, had been through at least six other people. The number still worked and I had no idea how, so I used it to slang herb until I got caught by the cops (and, ironically, charged for a tab of fake acid, which was part of a prop for some home movies we were making). I had passed the drug pager on to a buddy and I’m pretty sure it still works to this day—possibly getting #420#911 texts in a dumpster somewhere.

In addition to the ups and downs of dealing drugs while attending public high school, there was also the issue of working for people who smoked a lot of pot. I don’t like to admire the crack people, but their whole "don’t get high on your own supply" rule seems to be something weed dealers could learn from. Keeping in mind, I haven’t touched Mexi bricks in over two decades, I was at a strip club last year and ran into a dealer from Salem, who was convinced I still owed him money for some weed. So, I asked and he told me "six grand." Last I checked, I fronted out fifty bags, one at a time, so I politely (while shaking) told him and his handgun that he mixed up his Rays. "Which Ray are you?" he asked. "Dave’s friend," I replied. "Ohhh...shit. Man. I got you guys mixed up." Mexican dirt weed, at that. Glad I’m not dead.

In Conclusion, I’m Too Old For This Sativa

So, you kids these days with your pens, dabs and medibles, getting pot delivered at 9pm by some app on your iPhone 23...you have no idea what it was like to purchase weed in the ‘90s. And, to an extent, we had it worse than our parents did. Yeah, ‘70s weed was shit, but to quote pretty much any old fuck who pretends to have actually attended Woodstock, "even the cops were smoking it." Meanwhile, in 1996, there was, like, this one dude who was rumored to have had a medical marijuana card ("doctor’s note"). Even worse, Dr. Dre and Snoop had to blur the weed leaves off of their hats and necklaces, while rapping on MTV—it was that illegal. By the way, did you know that MTV used to play music videos? Goddamnit, I’m old.