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How to Confront Your Drug Dealer If They Short You

It’s a delicate process that can go really (really!) badly or land you a free gram

It’s been a long week, and all you want to do is spend Friday night the old-fashioned way: Getting high on drugs. You call your guy, meet him in a 7-Eleven parking lot and do the deal. But when you get home and pour out your spoils, your heart sinks; you paid for heaps and were given a sprinkling. 

But what can you do? This is a drug dealer, not a Target. There’s no customer service or return policy.

It’s a delicate situation, but there are a few ways to approach it. I gathered a band of veteran drug buyers on Reddit, and we put our minds together to come up with a couple solutions.

Your first option is to simply cut your losses and go elsewhere next time. “A good plug wouldn’t short a good custie,” one of my drug purchasers says. If a dealer shorts you once, it’s likely they’ll do it again. What’s more, if you can’t trust your dealer to supply the amount you’ve paid for, you probably can’t trust them to deliver quality either. And you don’t want to mess around with drugs that are potentially cut with dangerous additives.

All of this is even more true if you get the impression that your dealer could be violent and may react badly if you mention that you’ve been shorted. “Where I’m from, dealers are pretty involved in organized crime, so I’m not going to risk getting on his bad side,” another drug shopper says. “Stop buying from him, and let the market show he’s not doing a good job.”

If you’re feeling bold, however, the other approach involves presenting your dealer with the facts. That requires both weighing and testing your drugs, then sending your dealer photos of the results and gently pointing out your unfortunate findings. “If they’re decent people, they’ll understand,” says yet another drug procurer. “If they start getting defensive and start problems because of you asking, they’re usually trying to get one over on ya.”

It may seem overly direct, but for a different one of my assembled drug browsers, this approach led to them receiving priority treatment, like a free gram of cocaine whenever their dealer got a fresh batch. “Feedback has had me looked after,” they say. After all, many dealers care about their customer’s return business, so they’ll be happy to rectify a deal gone wrong if that keeps you coming back.

In the end, though, the way you deal with an unsatisfactory drug deal really depends on your relationship with the dealer and any potential dangers that confronting them could provoke. “You decide if it’s purely a business transaction, or if there are other factors involved you’d not like to sour,” my final drug consumer explains. “It’s a free market, after all.”

That said, it’s probably best to make that call when you’re not high on the drugs you just bought.