Have you ever woken up after a three-day music festival, throat, nose, and ears raw, made a quick mental checklist of the various chemicals you consumed, and wondered: Where the hell has that stuff been, and what did I do to myself?
To add to the anxiety that is an MDMA comedown or the connectedness between you and your neighborhood’s stray cats while you were tripping balls on LSD, I spoke with current and former drug dealers to learn the oddest, grossest, and most imaginative places they’ve stored your drugs. Here's where your stash has been before it entered your brain and blood stream:
1. Your dealer’s digestive system
The practice of drug mules (and what can happen should a condom packed with cocaine explodes) is an extremely unfortunate byproduct of the War on Drugs, and too evil to be fully explored within this article. However, for drugs like MDMA that are easier to pack and hide, there is a chance that the pill you popped for the Horse Meat Disco show has been pooped out by another human.
“There was one time I was going to buy 50 grams of MDMA. As we are driving to go get it, I talk to the guy my friend was getting it from. He tells me he arrived in Oslo yesterday. He's arriving from Netherlands, [and] swallowed 300 grams of MDMA and has also brought bottles of acid,” says Jake*, a dealer in Norway, who sold (and used) the MDMA. “It was a surreal experience meeting the actual courrier. He had a sweatband on his head and was looking like a tourist. I drive to his hotel and waited outside with my friend. He comes back 15 minutes later with 100 grams of MDMA. Me and my friend split the pack.”
2. The best part of waking up…
At some point or another, waking up is such a struggle that we've all said "fuck it" and gone in for the wake and bake. A joint pairs terrifically with coffee, and according to Mike*, a former New England weed dealer, your kush and your coffee might be better friends than you realized. “In my high school days I would get weed from a guy who would get l50 pounds at a time. He was really high up. He would get his stuff directly from the mafia and was really protected,” Mike recalls. “We ended up getting a lot of the stuff factory sealed in Folgers Coffee cans direct from a Folgers warehouse. It would come sealed in coffee cans and it looked really funny transporting them around. It was like…I’m distributing Folgers’s Coffee?”
3. Under a Band-Aid, in your dealer’s nether regions, in the Netherlands
When you purchase LSD, it’s usually in tabs of blotting paper for about $10 a pop. If you’ve ever watched an exchange of LSD go down, it’s pretty funny to watch people exchange money for teeny tiny tabs of paper. (But if you're on acid, you might realize that money itself is just paper and nothing matters yet everything matters.) These acid tabs are super easy to hide and store; a former dealer from the Netherlands known as CocaineKeys on Reddit says the best place to hide smaller drugs like LSD or MDMA when transporting is taped under a Band-Aid. “I used to deal a lot … I stopped that; I started bodybuilding,” CocaineKeys says, and added that he could get anything you wanted, but mostly sold LSD and MDMA since they were easy to store.
After a night out with a buddy went wrong, he ended up in what Americans call the drunk tank—with MDMA on him. “I had all these Band-Aids taped under my underwear. I had tabs in there with MDMA. My mates and I were in that chamber for 12 hours. The police couldn’t find it. They searched me, but the Band-Aid is just a Band-Aid—you wouldn’t expect something to be under there. I managed to get it into the police station, into the drunk chamber, and got out without anyone noticing anything.”
4. At the Pentagon
If you're a resident of Shondaland, you're well aware that some bonkers stuff goes down at the Pentagon—but you might be surprised to learn that D.C.-area residents may be getting stoned on weed that has also passed through that mysterious government headquarters. “I used to sell a lot of weed and I was bringing it back from D.C. I had to meet up [with a friend] at the Pentagon Metro stop. I had four pounds of cannabis in a massive family-sized Doritos bag, and in the smaller bag, I had two ounces of shrooms,” says Aaron. “It actually inspired my friend to write a rap about it because he couldn’t imagine what it’s like having all of that at the Pentagon.”
5. Inside some DJ’s dreadlocks
After knowing to stash molly under a Band-Aid near your balls, CocaineKeys had to have more stories. If MDMA works great covering a fake wound, where are some fun spots to keep tabs of LSD?
“I have a friend with whom I sold and he had really long dreadlocks. He was a psych trance DJ. What he would do is hide tabs in his dreads, a lot of them. We went to Brazil, and LSD prices in Brazil are fucking high. The dreads were long enough to hide a lot of it in there. We went to customs and no one found anything. We sold there and made some good cash. Dutch LSD is some of the best quality around,” says CocaineKeys, who uses bottles of eye drops when storing liquid LSD at home, which he labels to avoid the urban legend of accidentally consuming a large quantity of liquid LSD, which he says has happened.
“That was me actually. The dropper didn’t work.” When trying to drop one or two hits on his tongue, he ended up with a mouthful of LSD, which he didn’t spit out because, hey, it's expensive. “In that moment, I thought either I wake up in the asylum or I just have a great trip. I completely lost my sense of self. I was outside chasing cats because I noticed the cats also showed affection. That was a really big fuck up, because I tripped for like two days. I had a lot of crazy shit happen, but that’s what happens with drugs I guess.”
