Part 1: Your Neighbourhood Pusher
"The set, she don't change much, no matter the setting. With the quantity of drugs available to the illicit user, no dealer can handle it all, so you get specialists. At the low end of the scale you have the "Pushers" who stock between 1 and a dozen of the local favourites, usually under 20eb a hit. These are also the only dealers who habitually carry their product on their person - usually in the form of folded-paper "Packets" containing a pre-measured amount of the drug in question. These packets are sometimes stashed in the pusher's jacket pockets or hip sack, but more often are held in a "Load" of 30 packets held in place on the pusher's wrist by an elastic band. In this way, a quick flip will send the whole load into the garbage or fountain, etc, when trouble presents itself.
"These "Pushers" are your street-corner merchants. To purchase from one you approach, quietly name your poison and a handoff occurs if he has it "in stock". With your left hand you sign the quantity you want, while handing over the cash with your right. The pusher will reach forward as if to "give you five", grab the cash into the palm of his hand and then flip forward a packet (or more) from his sleeve into your palm (this requires a routine -dif 10- sleight-of-hand roll on the part of the pusher). The whole event shouldn't take more than 20 seconds from beginning to end.
"When dealing with a pusher, it is incredibly bad form to test or use their product until well out of sight, since either will attract attention to his clandestine operations. (A PC who insists on these courses of action - usually scanning the product with a drug analyzer - will find his business spurned by that dealer in the future, as well as any other dealers who hear about it). But, because of the ease of procuring a drug analyzer in 2020, most pushers also sell a fairly pure product to avoid getting a bad rep for cutting their drugs.
"Your typical pusher only carries two varieties of drugs, a load of 30 packets on each wrist. They usually operate out of urban slums where one or two basic drugs make up most of the demand. Pushers working out of the urban core will often "diversify their holdings", moving to a "Deck" (half a load, or 15 packets) of two different drugs on each wrist plus a few specialty items in his pockets.
"While pushers in the slums always carry a gun (often a machine pistol) and often have security in proximity (50% chance of goons nearby, D3-1 goons with a minimum of 1 goon), pushers in the urban core are usually lightly armed (with a legal-carry handgun so they don't attract too much attention) and rarely work with security (25% chance of security goons, as above), relying on the public location of their work to avoid trouble with customers and would-be-thieves.
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