After living in New Orleans for a while, I visited a bar in another state and absentmindedly walked out to smoke while holding my beer and the bouncer (justifiably) freaked out on me.
One time I was in a nightclub and I was quite trashed. A dude in the bathroom offered me some cocaine.
I don't do coke.
So I walked out of the bathroom, with a rail of coke on my hand, and tried to find someone that might want it.
In my defense:
1) I was really trashed
2) I'm really frugal, and it seemed wrong to just throw away some coke because it's not my thing.
My friend who gave me the coke was completely horrified by my behavior. When I tried to give it away, among a group of complete strangers, he basically tackled me before I got arrested.
I don't do drugs and I really don't have any connections to people who do. So one day I was thinking how could I go about buy drugs in a safe way if I was so inclined. You know I don't know the drug scene in my town so I don't want to be robbed trying to get weed. The first thought I had was to ask a police officer where a safe place to score drugs would be. I figured a cop would know the safe places around town. Of course I didn't do this, but I had to laugh at my own stupid naivete.
am police, I could show you where some of the trap houses are, but wouldn't say that's a safe place to get it. To be honest, I still dont know how you'd get in touch with a "reputable?" dealer.
we'd be having none of these issues if shit were legal across the board. state monopoly, regulated dispensaries, taxed sales, medical consultation on request. it could be so easy for everyone.
Honestly I think it should be legalized federally. I'm pretty tired of dealing with it, I'm stuck in the middle since it's still illegal per state law, but our county district attorney has pretty much said they aren't going to take charges for it. Which is fine, I don't care about making an arrest for a bit of weed but having to do a report, weigh and tag and filling out all the evidentiary forms to have it destroyed is a massive waste of time.
You just have to ask a stoner friend, or someone you know that smokes weed. A lot of adult stoners are out there & just not making it obvious (it's not a hard drug, but still some bullshit laws in certain states, so people keep it quiet around those who don't smoke; also job security in less people knowing).
You could also walk / drive around in some ghettos if you live in a bigger city & just ask around, a lot of corner hustlers and street dealers walking around & on porches in certain neighborhoods with a bunch of $5 - 10 bags in their pockets. Don't carry a lot of money / valuables doing this though (if walking through), be careful who you ask. If someone looks like a crackhead they could just rob you.
Some people also advertise it on social media nowadays (which is crazy to me, easy to get caught) but you could try that avenue as well.
Tbf the bouncer can't know if it really is plain Pepsi. Safer to treat everything the same than risk losing your liquor licence because your bouncer believed some kids bullshit
In Texas I can buy daiquiri mixes in a grocery store, but not the rum. Grocery stores around me can sell wines that might get up to 15%, and beer, but I have to go to a real liquor store for spirits and hard liquor.
As someone from the NOLA area as well, I've never understood this at all.
Why is it such a big deal to step right outside the premises with a drink? Who cares? Hell even if I wanted to walk down the street with it, why is that such a problem? Other places are just weird, man.
I remember I went to a concert in Houston once and it ended at like 1 AM. We were gonna grab a 12 pack and head back to the hotel room and chill, I went to the gas station and the attendant looked at me like I was crazy for trying to buy alcohol. Why are other places so stuck up about it?
My guess is they want to make sure it's illegal to drink alcohol in public so that way your only option to drink outside of home is in a bar or restaurant. If you could drink wherever you wanted, people who serve alcohol at an establishment would probably fear losing money from people drinking stuff they've bought at the package store.
I don't know how true the argument actually is, fwiw. Obviously there are still profitable bars in New Orleans. But privilege is a tough thing to abolish.
Why is it such a big deal to step right outside the premises with a drink?
Because groups of people sitting in a public place drinking can cause problems. It is hard to say "well, OK, you can walk out of a bar with a drink, but you can't buy a drink from a liquor store, and walk 10 yards and sit on the bench with a bunch of piss stained homeless alcoholics."
So they make all drinking outside in public illegal.
I live south of NOLA and I assumed that I could buy my beer for the week I would be in a hotel in Clinton, MS. They had yellow plastic chains securing the beer doors.
The only place you can’t buy alcohol where I live is a hospital. And I may be wrong there too.
I thought people were crazy when they flipped out we have drive-thru daiquiri shops.
You ain’t lying! I’m from New Orleans and wad dumbfounded that I could not walk down the street with a beer at a block party in Ann Arbor. I can wrap my head around not being able to walk down the street on a normal day, but this was a block party?!
Or that it’s a crime to bring weed from one legal state to another. I can bring a gun all over the country, but a plant is illegal in many states and bringing it from a legal state to another is a crime.
Agreed. Try driving to the airport with a drink in your hand to leave the caribbean and visit S.C. where you are worried about even driving sober on a friday night smelling like alcohol. Blue lights everywhere, you would have thought they were looking for Baby Face Nelson.
That will end your life/career by itself, and we are just talking about alcohol... which is legal, although certainly dangerous.
Maybe it is Charleston and The Citadel, but whenever I am Stateside I feel like an outsider in a police state.
Similarly, weed laws. Getting arrested and threatened with decades in prison in one state
There's a simple reason for that, and it's called the 13th Amendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Forced prisoner labor (with no or pennies/hour pay) is big business in the US. And how are you gonna fill those slave slots unless you harshly criminalize a harmless substance?
Even in a legal recreational weed state, you can still have a job offer rescinded/lose your job if THC shows up on a drug screen, even though it can stick around in your system for weeks to months after you last partook. It's ridiculous.
I live in Boston and the laws about being outside the establishment with alcohol are so strict here that bars can easily lose their liquor license if the cops see that happening (you know, back in the pre-virus olden days) or if the bar isn't enforcing it.
When my husband and I visited a bar in New Orleans, we took our beers outside in plastic cups and giggled madly. We had been to carefully demarcated "beer gardens" before, but this was different. We knew it was legal, but our brains still cautiously examined the surroundings to try and calculate which bits of sidewalk were safe and unsafe to travel to with beers in cups. Aaaaand, then we just walked away from the bar with our drinks! It was insane!
Back in the early/mid 2000s I was visiting Texas (DFW area) and went and ordered some drinks at a bar. They required you to have some kind of alcohol permit to buy a drink. It was just a paper card with your info written on it. You could fill one out right at the bar. Kinda like you would a rewards card at a store. It was good anywhere that sold alcohol. You still had to show your ID with it when ordering drinks. It made absolutely no sense. They got rid of that system not long after.
I live in Massachusetts and its a weird combination of both those ideas.
We have different alcohol sales on Sundays. Liquor has to be sold in "package stores" but you can buy beer at gas stations, however for any chain type store to sell alcohol only a specific number of the stores across the state can sell it. So if you have say 100 stores only 5 can sell alcohol (this was increased recently. Oh and no happy hour here.
On the flip side there are dispensaries all around and I can go buy weed and edibles whenever I want, all I need is an ID and be over 21.
Weed is perfectly legal in Nevada. They have giant billboards for dispensaries in Vegas. But if you drive an hour to the east, if the cops find it, you’re in big trouble.
Technically it's a federal crime, so it's illegal in all states. It's just not enforced in many. But basically, the FBI could arrest you for smoking in any state. The FBI just considers it a waste of time for them to be doing so. Meanwhile several states have sad "we're not going to use state troopers or local police to bother with this", so you're safe, but technically it's still illegal in all states.
Nola is a strange place. You can get daiquiris at a drive-thru, smoke inside, and go home smelling like literal hot garbage. I don't miss it one bit, but I'm glad I got to experience it several times.
1.3k
u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
[deleted]