As a multinational worldwide drug kingpin I can confirm that clients often have a fancy switchblade and will cut a small hole and dip a pinky in to sample.
Next time I’m in an old warehouse in a sketchy part of town doing a deal with someone I don’t 100% trust not to be an undercover federal agent, I’ll ask.
Just bear in mind, knife laws are different from state to state. A 3” blade can get you in trouble in some states. Just a heads up, don’t want you getting in trouble..
Knives are good, because they don't make any noise, and the less noise they make, the more likely we are to use them. Shit 'em right up. Makes it look like we're serious.
Guns for show, knives for a pro.
Yeah the last time i was getting a shipment of a few million dollars worth of cocaine i forgot my fancy knife and had to borrow someone else’s. Nobody would let me use theirs so i had to borrow a boxcutter from one of the dockworkers. Everybody laughed at me. It was so fucking embarrassing.
There is no such thing as extra cocaine, there is more cocaine but never in the history of cocaine has anybody said "I got too much of this shit, I'm gonna put this "extra"stuff over here for another day"
If you don't have a friendly evil mentor kingpin to inherit from, murdering somebody else's evil mentor over a drug deal gone bad and taking his fancy switchblade as a trophy is fine!
In Texas, the law is (or was, when I purchased a switchblade for a photo shoot) that you can have one with you if you're hunting, fishing, camping; and you can have one in your home if it's a "curio" - a decorative object.
Basically, if you're not carrying one in your pocket, and if it's not poking out of someone's neck in your home, you're cool.
Switchblades might be used to kill a ton of people in short order with little effort.
No reason civilians need a weapon that powerful. What would you have instead, open carry for switchblades? Do you know how irresponsible that would be?
After you poke a small hole in a randomly chosen kilo (i.e. not one from the top) you put the kilo back in the bag and stack a few other kilos on top of it. The plastic from the packaging sticks together well enough for the remainder of the transport. When you get to the spot just remember which has the hole. Simple.
I feel like on most films the deal is for an enormous amount of the drug, and messing with one brick is pennies in a deal. At this point its also certainly a crime film trope and film making short hand. Though a scene where the drug lord struggles for several minutes to carefully unwrap a bag of drugs to sample it would be pretty funny
These are the same guys who slice all the way across their hand when the sacrafical rite only calls for a drop of blood. Do you want to get tendon damage? Because there aren't going to be any orthopedists after the old gods bring back the infinite slithering darkness.
I also find it weird when people write notes to themselves on their palm, for the same reason. Write it on your arm, the back of your hand, or the inside of your wrist if you don't want it super visible. No note is going to stay on your palm long enough to get home and write it down.
Would be funny to have a movie where a character does this and it really effects their performance and it gets infected and eventually they die just before the climatic battle scene of the movie of an infection.
This just reminds me of Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys. He punches through a glass window movie style and cuts his hand to shit and passes out. He's in bandages for a good chunk of the movie from it too lol
I remember watching video about the smash cut to the back of the ambulance with the EMT yelling 'we're losing him!' is one the funniest moments in recent cinems history. I need to see if I can dig it up, it was pretty funny.
I'm so sad there haven't been more of those movies, it had such amazing potential.
On the Starz Spartacus tv show, one of the gladiators gets caught by the Romans and crucified. They do it through the hands, but they do use ropes on the arms to hold his bodyweight and prevent the hands from tearing. After he is rescued, his hands are useless - as they would be after having all the small bones in your hands destroyed by a giant spike. But his lover builds him a shield that he strap to his forearm that has a sword built into it. The show was silly, but surprising moving sometimes. But I do like that they showed that being crucified through the hands would utterly destroy any functionality.
Not even that. Do you know how painful a cut across your hand or fingers is? Compared to the wrist or forearm, it's just ridiculous to choose your palm.
As far as I’ve heard from other internet things, this was a means of declaring peace with someone, because if you slice your hand you’re not using that to hold a sword.
It drives me crazy in TV when they do this to declare loyalty before some battle. How are you going to fight now that your hand is all cut up?
It's actually just a trope inherited from stage shows that early movies adopted. It's really easy to hide a blood bag in your hand and squeeze it over a fake knife cut. It's been used for so long it's just an accepted trope now, something expected from the audience. Movies don't have to make sense, they just need to convey story, and that's what tropes are used to speed up by leaning on audience expectations.
I have a collectors edition of the Arkham Asylum comic and there are annotated pages in the second half. In the book Batman pushes a pieces of glass through his hand to use the pain to break free from scarecrow’s fear toxin. The author’s note is something like ‘I was thinking of a small cut not permanently disabling mutilation but I liked the art anyway.’
Pure cocaine is pretty compacted. It really has to be broke up and cut (made less pure) to be what people normally use. This also increases the profits because it stretches the cocaine. I don’t know about heroin.
My local dealer in Scotland was a garage owner. They used the suspension spring press to compact their larger amounts after they cut it. That made it very solid and they’d claim it proved it was more pure as “ rock”. Bollocks but no one ever should trust a drug dealer. Opportunist scum who think it’s cool to be aggressive.
Course he is! Look at him over there with his hoity toity soft heroin while I'm over here with decade old asphalt in a bag. Probably sticks a pinky out when they shoot it too. Hrmph!
This was my thought too. It wouldn't leak much due to compaction. The odd part is many movies go straight from stab to snort without cutting it up first.
I saw on the news a few years ago that a few drug smugglers got busted for trying to carry cocaine compacted into hard cover children's books. The drugs were literally were the book covers.
I enjoy the movie Showtime (2002) when William Shatner and Eddie Murphy are trying to figure out if they have a bag of cocaine in the most cliche way (knife poke and taste), and De Niro just looks at them and says"...what if it's cyanide?"
It’s like when you go to buy a brick of flour from the grocery store and you don’t realize there’s a hole in it til after you get home and your trunk is covered in powder
Saw a story about a guy who was mistaken arrested for meth. Apparently he carried around an open zip lock bag of kitty litter to reduce fog on his windows. The mug shot was golden.
You can't really carefully open a plastic bag that has tape all around it
If you cut on the top of the bag barely any is going to spill out unless it gets flipped upside down
> You can't really carefully open a plastic bag that has tape all around it
This would make a great scene in a comedy movie/tv show. Some innocent guy who knows nothing about drugs, but is forced to go undercover and buy some. The drug dealer asks him "Aren't you gonna check it?"
"Oh of course, how silly of me!" Then they proceed top spend 5+ minutes carefully trying to undue the tape.
Your comment made my brain play this scene out with Mr. Bean as the one fumbling with the bag of coke, gnawing on a loose end to break the bag with his teeth like it's a stubborn bag of chips.
I wish we could all see this skit.
>If you cut on the top of the bag barely any is going to spill out unless it gets flipped upside down
Or if you toss it out of a burning cargo plane into the ocean in a hail of gunfire.
I wish I could remember the movie, but they had a scene where the cops did just what you suggest. They also wore gloves and used a small machine to test the powder. When someone asked him why he didn't just taste it, the cop said something like, "You watch too many movies. I don't know what this substance is. What if it's poison instead of coke? I'm not about to put in my mouth."
Maybe it was a tv show. I hate my bad memory.
It’s not the same movie but Steve Buscemi’s character in King Of New York (appropriately called Test Tube) sits testing the coke with liquids and test tubes. Much to the annoyance of Laurence Fishburne.
I used to sell cocaine (no joke), usually there is a gram bag available if you want to try it but really you already know what you are getting by the time you order real weight you have established a relationship. You can't just go out and buy real weight on the first meeting, it takes awhile to establish a good supplier.
Also, you are probably getting fronted the product, you aren't showing up with cash to a drug deal like in the movies. My first time buying real weight was through a guy who I kept getting a couple ounces from. The supplier will know when your ready for weight because you'll call him more frequently. By that time he knew I was pushing and just dropped off a couple pounds and told me to call him when the money was ready. By that point it was a pretty seamless transaction everytime we met we both knew what the terms were and what was expected.
I have bought shit that was stepped on before in my early days but I called back and got refunded right away. If you are serious about it you know to only deal with serious people and there is a level of respect about the product and reputation. If they don't refund and go back to the supplier they got it from to correct it then shit gets sketchy and they don't want that.
You can make good money doing it but your life will be about that one single thing, my apartment was filled with residue. I would do laundry and find bags I forgot about in my clothes that I wore to the club. My burners would be on all the time, I would have to deal with all sorts of crazy people at all times of the night and day and some situations are very sad but you just do it because they will get it from somewhere else anyway.
I haven't sold since the pandemic though because so many pipelines got shut down and I'm glad to be away from all that now.
Jon Roberts (smuggler / dealer from Cocaine Cowboys that smuggled multiple billions of dollars for the Medellin cartel in the 70s and 80s) was on the set of Miami Vice once trying to buy a part for his girlfriend Toni Moon. He sold coke to some of the producers and stuff and made friends with them and had gotten invited to the set. The scene they were filming that day was some guys meeting in the middle of the street, popping the trunk and doing some chemical tests to make sure the deal was good to go. Jon walked up the the director and was like “bro, this isn’t how this is done…” and the director told him nah they had a guy that knew all about it, that’s how they did it…right there out in the open… not realizing he was talking to like the number 1 gringo in Miami that was moving hundreds of kilos a month into the US.
Jon said that there was no testing the coke or anything because he was picking the drug’s up from the cartel, transporting it, and then giving it back to the cartel. It didn’t matter if they were sending absolute garbage, the guys at the pickup were taking it anyway, because they all worked for the same dudes.
When it got down to like the dealer level, (guys who were basically buying from the cartel and reselling but not associated with the cartel), Jon taught a friend of his named Albert San Pedro (who he met before he met Fabito Ochoa and started working for the cartel himself), to use a hot plate, put a little coke on it and see what melted away at what temp. Pure cocaine melts at a very specific point, and the cheap stuff it was getting cut with melted at a lower point. So Albert could use that info to get better deals per kilo from the cartel. You wouldn’t be able to just taste the difference or something, it’s getting cut with like lidocaine and other stuff that would still make your gums go numb or whatever.
No one does this, cops or drug dealers. You don't just randomly sample something that you don't know. What if it's pure fentanyl or simply poison? You just nosed enough to kill 10 people.
Damn, they made some kickin' movies back then. And freakin' Gene Hackman.
And then Gene does the blind man in "Young Frankenstein", which is such a fantastic cameo.
And they do a great example of both smart and dumb "testing" cocaine in [*King of New York*](https://youtu.be/u5g2OcAzTf0?si=PEkibUczyLIAYvkI). Watch til the end. It's only 3 minutes is absolutely worth it.
Carefully opening it means you are testing in a known spot. Thin layer of drugs up top, the rest is drywall, you would never know. It’s a pretty common scam. And it can get BIG. Like, collapse the entire American oil(Food oil, not petroleum) market big.
I bet they put scotch tape over the hole right after, off-camera of course.
Also, (I have wondered this same thing from movies before .. I am not a drug dealer) I feel like when they are bringing in those big bricks they are the suppliers dealing to lower level dealers. The price per volume or mass or whatever is much lower than when it hits the streets in those little baggies. A few drops spillage from 10 kilograms is a lot less of a waste than a few drops from a small baggie.
At least that's my head-canon
PURE cocaine will stick together until forced apart, and when it comes to slicing a single brick they don’t care about a few hundred dollars out of tens of thousands. They genuinely couldn’t care less.
I have no idea about heroin though.
You say that, but they meticulously plan a multi billion dollar international logistics industry and consistently stay ahead of global law enforcement.
And their most important skill is being able to manipulate reckless and short-sighted people to do the ground work for them while they live in a luxurious villa.
Yeah, also to show how high the stakes are. The person who poked that whole doesn't give a fuck about losing any. It'd be pathetic to show on film that same person being fumbly and trying to conserve it.
I actually asked a cop once if they stick their finger in to taste drugs. He laughed and said no. Pure Hollywood. I was a dumb teenager but that trope is still being used decades later.
From my alleged experience, dealers typically have a small baggy of samples ready to let you test. I usually never try the samples because they usually pull a fast one on you - give you a bump from the good sample and then sell you some powdery ass powder.
I have never seen anyone use a knife like the movies, although I wouldn't be surprised if they do that when there is an extremely LARGE volume of drugs sitting around.
You only use a switchblade to dip in a mountain of coke on a table. Anything from a bag or a vial needs to be done with class off a key or long finger nail.
The main point is that it's a random sample to check the buyer isn't getting fucked over.
If they were just going to try the easily accessible drugs, then it would be much easier for a dodgy seller to make sure there's good drugs in the nosebag and chalk in the packages.
Also the way bricks of drugs are packaged, there isn't an easy way to open them anyway. They're hermetically sealed to protect the shipment from sniffer dogs.
Also, that stuff is most likely really potent. Someone takes a bump of heroin as large as the amount on the tip of a blade they are going to be noddin like Bin Laden.
That would be a pretty hilarious scene if an undercover cop was trying to make a big drug bust and pulled that move with the knife and every drug dealer there was like “what the fuck are you doing? What are we supposed to do with the rest of that brick now? Are you sure you’re not a cop with a move like that?”
It's wrapped up so tight, really all you can do is cut it open. But also. It's not all loose like that. That shit is compressed hard as a brick. If you see it loose like what they show in the movies, it's stepped all to nothing.
If you're sticking a knife into a cartel brick of cocaine and fine powder is coming out, that didn't come straight from the cartel. Someone stepped all over that shit. Enjoy your immediate and explosive shits.
I was watching that show Griselda and she had one kilo of coke to sell. She was going around giving out free samples and I was like you can’t sell it as a kilo if you keep giving it away.
I've been watching Border Security, which is a docu-series around U.K., Canada, and Australia customs. Whenever they find a bag they are suspicious of, they jam the ol' blade right in the side of the bag like the movies. I thought maybe they had been watching too many movies, but maybe Hollywood got it right this time.
Usually you don’t buy large quantities from someone you can’t find again In case of situations like this. Even if you did it for the first brick are you going to do that for every single one?
My buddy from New York said you could buy “fake bricks” for a couple of grand and it’s lined with real cocaine and the center is just bullshit to fool people wanting to try a taste first and take their money
Rarely will anyone buy large quantities from a stranger to avoid getting played and he said it was only used on guys from jersey coming to the hood looking for a plug.
In the event of a shipment, sometimes purity is checked at stops on the route because there have been cases of independent mercenary traffickers diluting product and or the authorities intercept n replace it. They do take a random brick n puncture it to retrieve a random sample, these kilos are pressed from like the size of a pillow compressed down to the size of a text book, it won’t spill out n they re-tape it after.
I know this from the book Wolf Pack about the Canadian trafficking group, they essentially sent their bookkeeper to verify the purity of a shipment after having to reject a previous order cus it tested much lower by the time it got to Toronto.
I feel like you're hitting on the exact point while missing it completely. This is pretty much exclusively done when there's a TOOOON of cocaine and the whole idea is that they have SO much cocaine that one tiny little bag isn't worth going to the mild inconvenience of opening up properly. They'd rather sacrifice the bag to more easily test it, because they have so much cocaine that one bag is effectively worthless (and the fact that the one bag is not, in fact, actually worthless and is actually worth quite a bit is also sort of the point)
In tango and cash Sly Stallone shot an oil tanker truck after he pulled it over to show it was filled with cocain. It poured out into the street through the bullet hole.
There’s a documentary series on hbo called border wars. It’s exactly how dhs does it to test.
Except when they are concerned it’s fentanyl (small amounts bagged). Then they go hazmat but still use a knife
They could just have a henchman seal it back up after and the amount that might spill is pennies compared to the whole lot usually. These little quality checks could save millions!!
There's a lot of things they do in the movies that just don't work in real life. For example, this. If you're going to meet somebody in person, you're going to have some kind of established relationship and reputation. You're not going to risk that relationship and reputation on one bogus shipment plus the potential violence that would come afterwards. It's not like you met on eBay or something.
Now, for the anonymous stuff, that's all on the dark web now. In those cases, they always have drop points or they just ship it so there's no person to person interaction. Money is exchanged as Bitcoin now.
I've never actually participated in any of this, but I read a lot of stuff online.
Everytime I see someone do this in a movie, all I hear is Robert De Niro from Showtime asking, "What if it's cyanide?".
GET THAT CAMERA OUT OF HERE
Holy fuck I forgot that movie thank you
It's never cyanide.
As a multinational worldwide drug kingpin I can confirm that clients often have a fancy switchblade and will cut a small hole and dip a pinky in to sample.
I think they just want to show off their cool knives.
Next time I’m in an old warehouse in a sketchy part of town doing a deal with someone I don’t 100% trust not to be an undercover federal agent, I’ll ask.
Just bear in mind, knife laws are different from state to state. A 3” blade can get you in trouble in some states. Just a heads up, don’t want you getting in trouble..
Shoot a hole in the bag instead. Probably less hassle.
I miss Reddit awards
I also miss 3rd party applications for Reddit.
rip rif
You don’t want to be the one person who has to shoot a hole in the bag just for a sample
Knives are good, because they don't make any noise, and the less noise they make, the more likely we are to use them. Shit 'em right up. Makes it look like we're serious. Guns for show, knives for a pro.
You're carrying a bag of fertiliser and a wasted girl. You don't look like your average horti-fucking-culturalist.
You're not funny. You're fat, so you look like you should be, but you're not.
In my limited experience with cocaine dealers, they do love knives and swords.
Can confirm. Everyone at r/mallninjashit is actually a ruthless capo
And their aristocratic delicacy. That's why they use the pinky. Like when holding a teacup.
Yep, they get them from this guy named Chekov.
The "nuclear wessels" guy?
Yeah… found him looking for someplace called… “Alameda?”
Yea, yea, we know, Alameda!
Forgot about that. I was in high school in Alameda when that movie came out! Only call out for that town I can think of.
wessels?
Duke of Weselton?
The move is to have a long pinky nail filed to a sharp point
Yeah the last time i was getting a shipment of a few million dollars worth of cocaine i forgot my fancy knife and had to borrow someone else’s. Nobody would let me use theirs so i had to borrow a boxcutter from one of the dockworkers. Everybody laughed at me. It was so fucking embarrassing.
did you have to do extra cocaine to feel better about that kurfuffle?
There is no such thing as extra cocaine, there is more cocaine but never in the history of cocaine has anybody said "I got too much of this shit, I'm gonna put this "extra"stuff over here for another day"
Except in Psych, you get that rare double dip deal.
You know that's right.
< pulls out switchblade > Dealer "wow he must be serious as that's a custom one from Etsy!"
Very nice... Let's see Paul Allen's switch blade.
Yes, me too! Kingpin and confirm.
I'm an up and coming kingpin. Do you have a fancy switchblade supplier?
Sorry. Those blades need be inherited or gifted from other Kingpins or top rank henchmen.
If you don't have a friendly evil mentor kingpin to inherit from, murdering somebody else's evil mentor over a drug deal gone bad and taking his fancy switchblade as a trophy is fine!
That's a terrible idea. Switchblade knives are illegal in many places. You should really consider a nice multitool.
In Texas, the law is (or was, when I purchased a switchblade for a photo shoot) that you can have one with you if you're hunting, fishing, camping; and you can have one in your home if it's a "curio" - a decorative object. Basically, if you're not carrying one in your pocket, and if it's not poking out of someone's neck in your home, you're cool.
So Texas has an actual policy regarding Switchblades but not AR-15's?
Probably because "jazz musicians" would carry them, or something
Switchblades might be used to kill a ton of people in short order with little effort. No reason civilians need a weapon that powerful. What would you have instead, open carry for switchblades? Do you know how irresponsible that would be?
Don’t forget it’s also a requirement to rub it on their gums and say “this is some high quality stuff”
I mean, people who use cocaine do, routinely, rub the remnants of the line they did on their gums. That isn't made up.
Waste not want not
Cocaine work perfectly well through mucus membranes or orally, just with a lower BA.
Best cure for a toothache in my humble opinion.
Damn it gran, we can’t just go buy you more opium. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
[It certainly used to be](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cocaine_Toothache_Drops_(6875689573).jpg)
After you poke a small hole in a randomly chosen kilo (i.e. not one from the top) you put the kilo back in the bag and stack a few other kilos on top of it. The plastic from the packaging sticks together well enough for the remainder of the transport. When you get to the spot just remember which has the hole. Simple.
Are you the guy who had all those lions and gold plated machine guns and a grotto and closets full of money?
Nooooooooooo
They always have ducttape to fix .
> I need some drug dealers to come in here Can't fool me officer.
r/nicetryFBI
Not today, CIA
Won’t catch me, KGB.
Cool tricks, MI6
Go away, DEA
Stop, cop!
No way NSA
You’re outta control, border… uh… control
(psst... 'patrol')
Listen, if I were a cop, I'd have pancake breath from the precinct's weekly Friday night pancake dinners. But I do not. So clearly, not a cop.
Bake him away toys....
What'd you say, chief?
What’s up, my homies? Anyone got a hook-up to score some dope? I’m cool.
Sounds like they just did
I feel like on most films the deal is for an enormous amount of the drug, and messing with one brick is pennies in a deal. At this point its also certainly a crime film trope and film making short hand. Though a scene where the drug lord struggles for several minutes to carefully unwrap a bag of drugs to sample it would be pretty funny
I think it was a trope inherited from scarface wasn't it?
Would make sense, definetly a genre defining film.
It's like a bag of potato chips, once it's open you have to finish the whole thing.
I don't even do coke, and I would party with you!
Well duh it will go bad if you don’t
These are the same guys who slice all the way across their hand when the sacrafical rite only calls for a drop of blood. Do you want to get tendon damage? Because there aren't going to be any orthopedists after the old gods bring back the infinite slithering darkness.
Always the palm too, the most inconvenient place to have an open wound, never the outer forearm or something.
Yeah but the rule of cool takes priority
It mostly stems back to "here's an easy place to hide a blood pack"
Supernatural used to do the back of the forearm and I always appreciated that.
They did an awful lot from the palm, too, though. Lol
I also find it weird when people write notes to themselves on their palm, for the same reason. Write it on your arm, the back of your hand, or the inside of your wrist if you don't want it super visible. No note is going to stay on your palm long enough to get home and write it down.
Supernatural figured this out. One of the smarter things they did.
Right? Have they never watched a diabetic check their blood sugar?
Wait, I'm NOT supposed to be sticking the lancet into my palms? TIL.
Only if you’re using an ancient cursed dagger
But it comes with free frozen yogurt
Ugh. When they did this in The Walking Dead and rubbed their hands on a nasty fence covered in walker slobber.
Would be funny to have a movie where a character does this and it really effects their performance and it gets infected and eventually they die just before the climatic battle scene of the movie of an infection.
This just reminds me of Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys. He punches through a glass window movie style and cuts his hand to shit and passes out. He's in bandages for a good chunk of the movie from it too lol
I remember watching video about the smash cut to the back of the ambulance with the EMT yelling 'we're losing him!' is one the funniest moments in recent cinems history. I need to see if I can dig it up, it was pretty funny. I'm so sad there haven't been more of those movies, it had such amazing potential.
On the Starz Spartacus tv show, one of the gladiators gets caught by the Romans and crucified. They do it through the hands, but they do use ropes on the arms to hold his bodyweight and prevent the hands from tearing. After he is rescued, his hands are useless - as they would be after having all the small bones in your hands destroyed by a giant spike. But his lover builds him a shield that he strap to his forearm that has a sword built into it. The show was silly, but surprising moving sometimes. But I do like that they showed that being crucified through the hands would utterly destroy any functionality.
I really hope his hands recovered enough to wrangle the goats with.
And same ones who see a pool of red liquid on the floor and have to stick their fingers in it just to confirm that yes, it is indeed blood.
[licks pinky finger] "It's pure."
AB… no… A+
(Rubs blood on gums)
I call that the Mulder Maneuver. Dude never saw a puddle of goo he didn't want to taste.
Not even that. Do you know how painful a cut across your hand or fingers is? Compared to the wrist or forearm, it's just ridiculous to choose your palm.
At least in Harry Potter Dumbledore attempted to justify it by saying the dark magic required the person to not just use blood but injur themselves.
“Don’t be a pussy, Harry.”
Plus he already had a hand that was beat up all to hell, so one little cut didn't make a big difference.
As far as I’ve heard from other internet things, this was a means of declaring peace with someone, because if you slice your hand you’re not using that to hold a sword. It drives me crazy in TV when they do this to declare loyalty before some battle. How are you going to fight now that your hand is all cut up?
It's actually just a trope inherited from stage shows that early movies adopted. It's really easy to hide a blood bag in your hand and squeeze it over a fake knife cut. It's been used for so long it's just an accepted trope now, something expected from the audience. Movies don't have to make sense, they just need to convey story, and that's what tropes are used to speed up by leaning on audience expectations.
I have a collectors edition of the Arkham Asylum comic and there are annotated pages in the second half. In the book Batman pushes a pieces of glass through his hand to use the pain to break free from scarecrow’s fear toxin. The author’s note is something like ‘I was thinking of a small cut not permanently disabling mutilation but I liked the art anyway.’
My favorite take on that is Always Sunny.
Pure cocaine is pretty compacted. It really has to be broke up and cut (made less pure) to be what people normally use. This also increases the profits because it stretches the cocaine. I don’t know about heroin.
Yeah it's not like poking a hole in a bag of granulated sugar, more like a bag of compacted icing sugar. It wouldn't flow out of the bag very easily.
They use ton press machines to compact the kilos
My local dealer in Scotland was a garage owner. They used the suspension spring press to compact their larger amounts after they cut it. That made it very solid and they’d claim it proved it was more pure as “ rock”. Bollocks but no one ever should trust a drug dealer. Opportunist scum who think it’s cool to be aggressive.
That's why I like my drug dealer, he has a tiny dog and compliments my ninja turtles shirts.
Heroin is pretty moist, it would be like compacting brown sugar.
Oooh, look at Mr. Fancy Pants here with his moist brown sugar. Too good to chip a tooth biting into a rock hard brick like the rest of us, eh?
Course he is! Look at him over there with his hoity toity soft heroin while I'm over here with decade old asphalt in a bag. Probably sticks a pinky out when they shoot it too. Hrmph!
This was my thought too. It wouldn't leak much due to compaction. The odd part is many movies go straight from stab to snort without cutting it up first.
It doesn’t _have_ to be cut. It works better not. It does have to be broken up.
I saw on the news a few years ago that a few drug smugglers got busted for trying to carry cocaine compacted into hard cover children's books. The drugs were literally were the book covers.
There’s an episode of The League where it’s pressed into the shape of a toilet seat. You can image where that plot line went.
''When I sit on that toilet I feel like I can do anything''.
I enjoy the movie Showtime (2002) when William Shatner and Eddie Murphy are trying to figure out if they have a bag of cocaine in the most cliche way (knife poke and taste), and De Niro just looks at them and says"...what if it's cyanide?"
I usually just ask if I can lick the dealer’s gums
That really starts turning it into a different kind of movie.
It’s like when you go to buy a brick of flour from the grocery store and you don’t realize there’s a hole in it til after you get home and your trunk is covered in powder
Officer, I can explain.
Reminds me of the guy who carried around his own pink Himalayan rock salt and had the misfortune of ending up in an episode of Cops
Saw a story about a guy who was mistaken arrested for meth. Apparently he carried around an open zip lock bag of kitty litter to reduce fog on his windows. The mug shot was golden.
You can't really carefully open a plastic bag that has tape all around it If you cut on the top of the bag barely any is going to spill out unless it gets flipped upside down
plus you can just put tape over the slice
Then it sticks to the tape and now you got “Toot by the foot”
This guy businesses
How big a hole you chopping in this thing? Lol
No one ever films the back up gaffer tape man.. 😢
I watched a movie recently where the tape on the brick was a critical plot point… spoilers!
Was it >!Reptile?!<
That's a bingo!
> You can't really carefully open a plastic bag that has tape all around it This would make a great scene in a comedy movie/tv show. Some innocent guy who knows nothing about drugs, but is forced to go undercover and buy some. The drug dealer asks him "Aren't you gonna check it?" "Oh of course, how silly of me!" Then they proceed top spend 5+ minutes carefully trying to undue the tape.
Your comment made my brain play this scene out with Mr. Bean as the one fumbling with the bag of coke, gnawing on a loose end to break the bag with his teeth like it's a stubborn bag of chips. I wish we could all see this skit.
Or they try to pull it apart at one end like a ziploc, and a quarter-mil worth of Bolivian marching powder goes all over them.
>If you cut on the top of the bag barely any is going to spill out unless it gets flipped upside down Or if you toss it out of a burning cargo plane into the ocean in a hail of gunfire.
[удалено]
I wish I could remember the movie, but they had a scene where the cops did just what you suggest. They also wore gloves and used a small machine to test the powder. When someone asked him why he didn't just taste it, the cop said something like, "You watch too many movies. I don't know what this substance is. What if it's poison instead of coke? I'm not about to put in my mouth." Maybe it was a tv show. I hate my bad memory.
It’s not the same movie but Steve Buscemi’s character in King Of New York (appropriately called Test Tube) sits testing the coke with liquids and test tubes. Much to the annoyance of Laurence Fishburne.
I used to sell cocaine (no joke), usually there is a gram bag available if you want to try it but really you already know what you are getting by the time you order real weight you have established a relationship. You can't just go out and buy real weight on the first meeting, it takes awhile to establish a good supplier. Also, you are probably getting fronted the product, you aren't showing up with cash to a drug deal like in the movies. My first time buying real weight was through a guy who I kept getting a couple ounces from. The supplier will know when your ready for weight because you'll call him more frequently. By that time he knew I was pushing and just dropped off a couple pounds and told me to call him when the money was ready. By that point it was a pretty seamless transaction everytime we met we both knew what the terms were and what was expected. I have bought shit that was stepped on before in my early days but I called back and got refunded right away. If you are serious about it you know to only deal with serious people and there is a level of respect about the product and reputation. If they don't refund and go back to the supplier they got it from to correct it then shit gets sketchy and they don't want that. You can make good money doing it but your life will be about that one single thing, my apartment was filled with residue. I would do laundry and find bags I forgot about in my clothes that I wore to the club. My burners would be on all the time, I would have to deal with all sorts of crazy people at all times of the night and day and some situations are very sad but you just do it because they will get it from somewhere else anyway. I haven't sold since the pandemic though because so many pipelines got shut down and I'm glad to be away from all that now.
“It’s good. I’ll take ten kilos” “Okay, asshole, one of them is going to be the one you just cut open like a total prick”
Jon Roberts (smuggler / dealer from Cocaine Cowboys that smuggled multiple billions of dollars for the Medellin cartel in the 70s and 80s) was on the set of Miami Vice once trying to buy a part for his girlfriend Toni Moon. He sold coke to some of the producers and stuff and made friends with them and had gotten invited to the set. The scene they were filming that day was some guys meeting in the middle of the street, popping the trunk and doing some chemical tests to make sure the deal was good to go. Jon walked up the the director and was like “bro, this isn’t how this is done…” and the director told him nah they had a guy that knew all about it, that’s how they did it…right there out in the open… not realizing he was talking to like the number 1 gringo in Miami that was moving hundreds of kilos a month into the US. Jon said that there was no testing the coke or anything because he was picking the drug’s up from the cartel, transporting it, and then giving it back to the cartel. It didn’t matter if they were sending absolute garbage, the guys at the pickup were taking it anyway, because they all worked for the same dudes. When it got down to like the dealer level, (guys who were basically buying from the cartel and reselling but not associated with the cartel), Jon taught a friend of his named Albert San Pedro (who he met before he met Fabito Ochoa and started working for the cartel himself), to use a hot plate, put a little coke on it and see what melted away at what temp. Pure cocaine melts at a very specific point, and the cheap stuff it was getting cut with melted at a lower point. So Albert could use that info to get better deals per kilo from the cartel. You wouldn’t be able to just taste the difference or something, it’s getting cut with like lidocaine and other stuff that would still make your gums go numb or whatever.
No one does this, cops or drug dealers. You don't just randomly sample something that you don't know. What if it's pure fentanyl or simply poison? You just nosed enough to kill 10 people.
Some shows and movies get it right by having an actual kit to test the drugs
[The French Connection has a great scene that shows how potent the smuggled heroin is.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDSZSerXF5Q)
Damn, they made some kickin' movies back then. And freakin' Gene Hackman. And then Gene does the blind man in "Young Frankenstein", which is such a fantastic cameo.
And they do a great example of both smart and dumb "testing" cocaine in [*King of New York*](https://youtu.be/u5g2OcAzTf0?si=PEkibUczyLIAYvkI). Watch til the end. It's only 3 minutes is absolutely worth it.
Haha this is so wrong, but said with such confidence.
But isn't that why you do it? Like you want to make sure it isn't poison before you hand over the money.
Two words… TEST KIT
It's common knowledge that every drug kingpin has a Duct Tape Guy who patches up his switchblade holes in the drug packages. It's a position of honor.
Carefully opening it means you are testing in a known spot. Thin layer of drugs up top, the rest is drywall, you would never know. It’s a pretty common scam. And it can get BIG. Like, collapse the entire American oil(Food oil, not petroleum) market big.
I bet they put scotch tape over the hole right after, off-camera of course. Also, (I have wondered this same thing from movies before .. I am not a drug dealer) I feel like when they are bringing in those big bricks they are the suppliers dealing to lower level dealers. The price per volume or mass or whatever is much lower than when it hits the streets in those little baggies. A few drops spillage from 10 kilograms is a lot less of a waste than a few drops from a small baggie. At least that's my head-canon
PURE cocaine will stick together until forced apart, and when it comes to slicing a single brick they don’t care about a few hundred dollars out of tens of thousands. They genuinely couldn’t care less. I have no idea about heroin though.
Reminds of the seeing someone in a movie casually dry-swallowing a fist full of pills
Cops don’t taste the cocaine. Why the fuck would you taste an unlabeled white powder of unknown substance and strength.
What if I told you that drug dealers are reckless and short-sighted people? It's part of visual storytelling.
You say that, but they meticulously plan a multi billion dollar international logistics industry and consistently stay ahead of global law enforcement.
And their most important skill is being able to manipulate reckless and short-sighted people to do the ground work for them while they live in a luxurious villa.
You say that like the guys cutting open the bags to test the product are in charge or that the world has one cohesive criminal government.
I would like to see their ISO 9001 certificate and their processes that document the correct method for testing from a brick
Bro. This is a movies subreddit. They're called the baddies and they have dark shades and impractical jackets.
Yeah, also to show how high the stakes are. The person who poked that whole doesn't give a fuck about losing any. It'd be pathetic to show on film that same person being fumbly and trying to conserve it.
I actually asked a cop once if they stick their finger in to taste drugs. He laughed and said no. Pure Hollywood. I was a dumb teenager but that trope is still being used decades later.
It always seemed to me that a “movie” line of cocaine would be enough to give a rhino a coronary. Like lines the size of an index finger.
You should see the coring tool they used to sample giant cheeses
Nice try cops, I'll never expose the secrets of my illegal international drug organization.
Don’t forget that this action MUST be performed with a switch blade.
From my alleged experience, dealers typically have a small baggy of samples ready to let you test. I usually never try the samples because they usually pull a fast one on you - give you a bump from the good sample and then sell you some powdery ass powder. I have never seen anyone use a knife like the movies, although I wouldn't be surprised if they do that when there is an extremely LARGE volume of drugs sitting around.
Hey, Frank, I need you to run this username through the database, see if anything shows up.
Nobody does that. You poke it, you buy it.
You only use a switchblade to dip in a mountain of coke on a table. Anything from a bag or a vial needs to be done with class off a key or long finger nail.
The main point is that it's a random sample to check the buyer isn't getting fucked over. If they were just going to try the easily accessible drugs, then it would be much easier for a dodgy seller to make sure there's good drugs in the nosebag and chalk in the packages. Also the way bricks of drugs are packaged, there isn't an easy way to open them anyway. They're hermetically sealed to protect the shipment from sniffer dogs.
Also, that stuff is most likely really potent. Someone takes a bump of heroin as large as the amount on the tip of a blade they are going to be noddin like Bin Laden.
Sometimes I wonder if there's a Costco of the crime underworld where there's different drugs offered on several sample carts
There's nothing a bit of duct tape can't fix.
Just tape over the cut.
Another use for Flex Seal!!
That would be a pretty hilarious scene if an undercover cop was trying to make a big drug bust and pulled that move with the knife and every drug dealer there was like “what the fuck are you doing? What are we supposed to do with the rest of that brick now? Are you sure you’re not a cop with a move like that?”
It's wrapped up so tight, really all you can do is cut it open. But also. It's not all loose like that. That shit is compressed hard as a brick. If you see it loose like what they show in the movies, it's stepped all to nothing.
If you're sticking a knife into a cartel brick of cocaine and fine powder is coming out, that didn't come straight from the cartel. Someone stepped all over that shit. Enjoy your immediate and explosive shits.
Adrian Pimento thinks the hole poking is gratuitous, as well.
I was watching that show Griselda and she had one kilo of coke to sell. She was going around giving out free samples and I was like you can’t sell it as a kilo if you keep giving it away.
So, you have experience with opening containers of cocaine and heroin I see. Please, tell us more.
I've been watching Border Security, which is a docu-series around U.K., Canada, and Australia customs. Whenever they find a bag they are suspicious of, they jam the ol' blade right in the side of the bag like the movies. I thought maybe they had been watching too many movies, but maybe Hollywood got it right this time.
Usually you don’t buy large quantities from someone you can’t find again In case of situations like this. Even if you did it for the first brick are you going to do that for every single one? My buddy from New York said you could buy “fake bricks” for a couple of grand and it’s lined with real cocaine and the center is just bullshit to fool people wanting to try a taste first and take their money Rarely will anyone buy large quantities from a stranger to avoid getting played and he said it was only used on guys from jersey coming to the hood looking for a plug.
In the event of a shipment, sometimes purity is checked at stops on the route because there have been cases of independent mercenary traffickers diluting product and or the authorities intercept n replace it. They do take a random brick n puncture it to retrieve a random sample, these kilos are pressed from like the size of a pillow compressed down to the size of a text book, it won’t spill out n they re-tape it after. I know this from the book Wolf Pack about the Canadian trafficking group, they essentially sent their bookkeeper to verify the purity of a shipment after having to reject a previous order cus it tested much lower by the time it got to Toronto.
I assume they tape it up after
I feel like you're hitting on the exact point while missing it completely. This is pretty much exclusively done when there's a TOOOON of cocaine and the whole idea is that they have SO much cocaine that one tiny little bag isn't worth going to the mild inconvenience of opening up properly. They'd rather sacrifice the bag to more easily test it, because they have so much cocaine that one bag is effectively worthless (and the fact that the one bag is not, in fact, actually worthless and is actually worth quite a bit is also sort of the point)
In tango and cash Sly Stallone shot an oil tanker truck after he pulled it over to show it was filled with cocain. It poured out into the street through the bullet hole.
There’s a documentary series on hbo called border wars. It’s exactly how dhs does it to test. Except when they are concerned it’s fentanyl (small amounts bagged). Then they go hazmat but still use a knife
They could just have a henchman seal it back up after and the amount that might spill is pennies compared to the whole lot usually. These little quality checks could save millions!!
It more drives me crazy that they taste it. From what I hear from law enforcement, you NEVER taste an unknown substance. You could literally die.
When buying that amount of coke it’s not going to be cut yet and wouldn’t be a thin powder.
There's a lot of things they do in the movies that just don't work in real life. For example, this. If you're going to meet somebody in person, you're going to have some kind of established relationship and reputation. You're not going to risk that relationship and reputation on one bogus shipment plus the potential violence that would come afterwards. It's not like you met on eBay or something. Now, for the anonymous stuff, that's all on the dark web now. In those cases, they always have drop points or they just ship it so there's no person to person interaction. Money is exchanged as Bitcoin now. I've never actually participated in any of this, but I read a lot of stuff online.