Swipe right, get baked
I can say with absolute certainty that no-one, in the history of the world, has ever said, 'I really enjoy the process of procuring illegal drugs'. What's fun about loitering in a Wetherspoon car park for a guy called Daz to show up three hours late and short you on what's essentially baking soda mixed with a bit of anaesthetic to make your teeth go numb? Has anyone really ever enjoyed making small talk in a dealer's car with their obviously bored girlfriend while Warren G rummages around in his glove compartment for a bit of mouldy old hash? Nope, thought not. But that doesn't matter any more because, as it turns out, the kids of today are all about buying their drugs online – on Tinder, of all places.
The Guardian reports that drug dealers are increasingly using social networking apps like Instagram, Tinder and Kik to ply their trade – and that teenagers are their main customers. When it comes to Tinder, users swipe right when they stumble upon relevant profiles (look out for those big ganja leaves), while on Instagram you can scroll through hashtags such as #weed4sale until you stumbe upon what you're looking for. The process after this is relatively simple: arrange a face-to-face meeting, or payment online in the hope that your goods do actually end up being posted to you. While this might appear on first sight to be easier than keeping track of all the 'New Model, New Quality' texts you get from random numbers and saving them in your phone, to be honest the guarantee that random person you met on the Internet will actually send you the drugs you've paid for is pretty slim IMO.
Instagram in particular is often perceived to have a problem when it comes to glamourising drug use. #Girlswhosmokeweed is a major hashtag on the site, with well over a million hits. Searching for #weedforsale does bring up a huge amount of hits, but a lot of these are in places where weed is currently legal, like the United States. An Instagram spokesman told The Guardian that "promoting the sale of, or selling marijuana and other drugs is against our community guidelines", while Tinder declined to comment. Meanwhile the Liverpool Echo reports that they were able to purchase weed on Tinder from a guy called John – which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Netflix and chill'.
