At the high school I walk past every day, someone threw a pair of running shoes tied together at the laces over the overhead electrical wires. At first I thought this was something some bully did, and I was feeling sorry for the poor kid whose shoes they are - running shoes are expensive and not everyone can afford to replace them on a whim, and you lose marks in gym class if you don't have your shoes.
But then someone told me that the shoes mean that drugs are sold there. Okay, good to know. But that raises a bunch of questions:
How do you know who exactly is selling the drugs? There are a lot of people under those shoes - it's a high school so there are hundreds of kids during the day, and there are some benches in front that random passers-by sit on sometimes.
How do you know what drugs they are selling? Not everyone is in the market for just any old drug. And how do you know how much it costs? Not everyone has an infinite drug budget.
How do you strike up the conversation? You don't just walk up to some random and say "Good evening, I wish to purchase some marijuana." There's a whole dance that you have to know that I haven't a clue about.
Despite the fact that this convenient location is clearly marked as being open for business, it's still quite obvious that outsiders aren't welcome. So basically the moral of the story is that I don't do drugs for the same reason I don't shop at Holt Renfrew.
5 comments:
Well obviously it's going to have to be a very vague advertising for selling drugs. They can't just put up a sign saying "buy weed from Joe, he's under the maple tree" because... well police will know who is selling drugs too.
So you find out in a very unscripted way. You look for the guy standing around and ask "you got any ____?". You are not guaranteed to have the right guy or he might not have what you want.
People have approached me many times asking me for drugs. Even though I don't sell any and I don't think I look like a drug dealer. At least I don't look like any I've ever seen.
So no one knows who is selling the drugs or what they sell. But you know they are there.
Strangely enough though, I had never heard that the shoes meant someone is selling drugs. I thought it was when someone was murdered and they threw the dead guys shoes over the wires. And I just figured the ones in my neighbourhood were just kids wanting to be cool, since I know there haven't been like 8 murders recently.
Well, I'm certain there hasn't been a murder, so it's either drugs or bullies.
You'd think the dealer would pick a place where there are fewer people randomly hanging out. Here there are dozens and dozens. I wonder if many high school students get approached for drugs by strangers. Or maybe the dealer and the clientele are all high school students. (Although that would make the shoes pointless.)
You should know that there is huge controversy and disagreement about what the shoes over the wire means. It means different things in different cities, and in different neighbourhoods of different cities. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with drugs.
What's more, once people learned that other people were decoding shoes over wires as drug-related, they started throwing shoes over wires randomly, as decoys and mind-fucks.
This has been going on at least since the mid-1980s, when I first heard about it, but probably much longer than that.
Wow, I'm so behind in my drug culture.
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