Heroin Brand Stamps Use “Obama”: Black Market Marketing Stays Topical

For years, heroin dealers have used “brand stamps” as a way to inform customers of their quality. Even before Frank Lucas’s “Blue Magic” in the 1960s, “good” dealers have found ways to make their product stand out among the poorer quality majority. Once the high quality dealers started doing this, everyone else started as well since it was a low cost way of increasing the apparent quality of the bags. For only the cost of a stamp and ink, a dealer could copy the stamp from the highest quality heroin on the street.

This lack of copyright laws made the high quality dealers constantly have to shift their brand names and stay topical, since the best brands were copied within days. Illustrating this: just recently, 52 glassine bags of heroin stamped both with “OBAMA” and an image of Sen. Barack Obama were confiscated following a routine car stop on Interstate 95 in Upper Chichester, according to Pennsylvania State Police. That’s an interesting way to support your candidate.

Examples of heroin brand stamps: