brand recognition

Click, I don't know
if it will do any good.
Filched from somebody
I don't like very much.

A recent Brand Name package of heroin sold on the U.S. market.

Like washing detergents, beer and carbonated beverages, heroin distributors have a long history of competing Brand Names and Logos to encourage repeat business and customer satisfaction.

On the wholesale smuggling market, the Southeast Asian brand of heroin called Tiger, with a very artistic and recognizeable logo, guaranteed the North American smuggler top quality Golden Triangle-grown smack every time.

This small amount -- a dime bag, slang for its common street price of $10 -- is shown here in its traditional glassine envelope.

Glassine is a pre-plastic packaging material made from melting and forming glass shards, and has the virtue of keeping the contents perfectly dry and protected from contaminants in the envelope's surroundings (like in your pocket).

When you buy loose postage stamps at the Post Office, they give you the stamps in glassine envelopes, the stamps are protected and the glue never gets wet, and philatelists = stamp collectors around the world also store their precious stamps exclusively in glassine.

A huge famous paper factory down the road from me manufactures all the glassine envelopes sold in North America. It was always a small, obscure sideline for this company, but about twenty years ago their sales department noticed an odd explosion in demand for glassine envelopes. They wrote it off as a surprise growth of popularity among stamp collectors. Only the odd psycho, perv and newspaper reporter like moi knew those extra 20,000,000 glassine envelopes per year weren't going to be stuffed with postage stamps.

During the past decade or more -- thanks entirely to The War On Drugs -- supplies of heroin in the USA have grown, prices have stayed constant or have decreased, and the average concentration of street heroin has grown dramatically stronger.

Traditionally heroin was almost always a syringe-injected drug, but the new super-concentrations allow teenagers scared of needles and the risk of AIDS to snort their heroin like powder cocaine, thus adding Typical Weekend Party High School Teens like Archie, Veronica, Jughead and Betty to the consumer base. Traditionally American consumers were the William Burroughs-style marginalized, pariah slum needle-sharing junkies, or freakazoid punkers.

Word has also spread among teens who are subject to school drug tests that THC -- the Fun Molecule in marijuana -- is fat-soluble and remains in the urine and blood for a month after partying with it, but heroin and the other opiates are water-soluble, and if you snort smack at a Friday night party, your urine will probably be Pure As Virgin's Tears by Monday's or Tuesday's random drug test.

In all human history, no one has ever died from a cannabis overdose. (When you O.D. on superstrong NL or BC pot, you fall asleep, and later you wake up again.)

But just to be on the Safe Side, American teens are giving up pot and switching to heroin.

This Logo Brand is the heroin industry's reflection of a constant propaganda theme of the Bush Administration's Drug Czar since 9/11:

The War On Drugs
is the same as
The War On Terror.

Drug users -- both hard-core smack, crack and meth needle addicts and occasional recreational teen pot-smokers -- are all Terrorists, or support Terrorists.

But America is making great progress in its Newly Combined War On Terrorism and Drugs. The USA now has about

2,300,000 children,
women and men

behind bars, most of them for non-violent, victimless, consentual drug transactions. The Land Of The Free has more prisoners than Russia. The Land Of The Free has more prisoners than China. We're Number One! Victory against the Terrorists, and a Drug-Free America, are Just Around The Corner! Watch This Space!