What a lot of people don't realize is that even the person who
buys an occasional ounce and sells it to friends is a dealer; that's how the law works. As far as I'm concerned, a dealer is somebody who is looking at dope as a business; it doesn't really matter how much business they do. A dealer means to make a livelihood from selling dope, whether it's subsistence living by selling a couple of pounds a month, or the high life of moving several pounds a day. As a friend of mine says, though, "Remember, you're not selling plants, you're selling happiness." Dealers have to be specialists in human emotions.There are different levels of dealers: retail, wholesale, and some who do both. I'm primarily retail, but I occasionally do some wholesaling, which might mean selling a couple of pounds to another dealer if somebody's running low.
In the last couple of years, the buying public has become pretty sophisticated. The only mistake a lot of people make is to buy their dope by the size of the ounce. They'll buy the ounce that looks the biggest, although they all weigh the same. The bigger, the better, they think; that's a good American axiom. But it's not always true. I try to buy fluffy dope whenever I can, because I know customers respond well to a full-looking bag, but it's not necessarily a better buy.
Of course everybody comes in looking for a bargain, but you have to remember that the people bringing dope into this country by the ton are not stupid, and when they get it here, they carefully grade it and sort it out and determine what is the best price they can get for their work, and their risk. They want top dollar for their product. Oh, sure, sometimes something will come down the line that is a bargain; maybe somebody decided that it wasn't as good as it was reported to be, and they've put a lower price tag on it, and you'll get a real bargain. But not very often.
But there is such a thing as a good buy, and I always tell my customers what it is. I think some of the best buys are shake. Shake is—well, dope comes into this country in huge bales, great big sacks. And what everybody is looking for are the tops, the big buds, where the flower clusters are. These buds command the highest prices, and they're usually the most potent smoke. Down at the bottom of the sack is the stuff that falls off during transit and storage, which is known as shake. Dealers always specify to each other the percentage of shake in a pound; it usually averages around 25 percent, but it can fluctuate quite a bit.
Most distributors put an equal amount of shake in each pound, averaging it out from bales. But there are a few who make up pounds of tops only, and they make up other pounds of only shake. One week you might have Colombian Gold tops at sixty dollars an ounce, and the next week you might be selling the shake of the same stuff for forty dollars. How good it is depends on the quality of the buds it has fallen off; sometimes the shake has fallen from excellent buds, and the dope will be very good, at a much better price than usual. But one of the problems with shake is that you get a lot of seeds. A big distributor will have a lot of sacks around, and usually you can get a good look at what you're buying.
I know one fellow who handles so much dope that he complains of suffering from "gold lung disease." This can occur when you're dividing up a bale into pounds. Each bale weighs anywhere from twenty-five to fifty pounds, and dividing it is quite a job, involving the sifting out of tops from shake, and then making up pounds with a representative amount of shake in each one. This takes hours of handling the dope and after you're done you find yourself covered with dust and pollen. It can take a couple of hours to cough it all out of your lungs.
Another good buy for some people is my cheapest dope, which sells for ten dollars an ounce. I call it cooking dope, but I have customers who get off on it, just like some people enjoy cheap wine. The older customers, especially, never got accustomed to the better stuff, and they have no need to buy anything but the cheapest. I try to sell to each customer according to what he needs and enjoys.
The older customers are different in that they tend to be more paranoid. They are often solitary smokers. They come here with my middle-class furnishings and my revolving dope table, and they freak out. "Close the window, draw the shades!" They associate buying dope with all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, and they sneak in and out of my house. They also eat the roaches, and use the entire ounce, and they pick up anything that has dropped on the floor. They waste nothing.
I see a lot of changes, and one place where the quality has zoomed right up is in what used to be called homegrown. The name is misleading, though, because it's really American grown. We're talking about people who combine good farming techniques with a scientific awareness of what they're doing. Dope is no longer grown so much as farmed. The California farmers are among the best in the world, and they're getting to be experts at sinsemilla, which is very nice dope. It has no seeds, smells heavenly, and has a delightful taste. But because it is difficult to grow—you have to destroy the male plants early enough so that none of the female plants are fertilized—it goes for very high prices. My sinsemilla is selling for $140 an ounce, and sinsemilla tops go for up to $200 an ounce.
Sinsemilla is a status thing. Mostly I sell it to wealthier clients, but many people say that even at the price it's a good buy because it doesn't have any seeds, and it's also very potent, so it lasts a long time.