What it is
Drugs on Roleplay Project are a criminal economy with consequences, not a stat buff you buy from a vending machine. Every bag, wrap, pill and tab on the server belongs to a batch: a record of which drug it is, how pure it is, everything that was ever mixed into it, and where it came from. Two bags of the same drug can be very different things. One is clean and does what the buyer expects. The other has been cut three times, carries a contaminant from a botched step in a lab, and puts people in hospital.
That is the whole design in one sentence: the product remembers its history, and its history decides what happens to whoever takes it. A clean batch earns its dealer a reputation and a better price. A batch that sends buyers to hospital is refused on the street, traced by police forensics, and tied back to the lab and the crew that cooked it.
There are twelve drugs: cannabis, hash, edibles, cocaine, crack, meth, heroin, fentanyl, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms and DMT. Cannabis, hash, edibles and mushrooms are grown and prepared through chains of chat commands anyone can run. The rest are cooked in faction labs by illegal factions, which is faction business and outside this guide. What every player needs to understand is the part that touches them: buying, using, selling in small amounts, and what the police can see.
How to start
You do not need to cook anything to be part of the scene. Most people meet it one of three ways.
As a user. Someone offers you a bag with /sell, you accept it with /acceptdrug, and later you take it with /usedrug. Before you do, a test kit tells you what you are holding: /testdrug <slot> <kit> burns a Marquis kit, a Mecke kit or a fentanyl test strip on the stack in that inventory slot and reads the purity band, the cuts and whether there is fentanyl in it. Buy the kit before the bag.
As a small time dealer. You get hold of product from a crew, a friend or your own cannabis grow, and sell it in small amounts to pedestrians on the street or to other players. This needs no faction and no lab, but it does need a district with demand and a feel for when the heat is getting too high.
As a crew member. You join an illegal faction. The faction has labs, a supplier, corners and an operations desk, and its leaders decide who does what. That side is covered by your faction's own briefing; this page stops at the street.
Legal cannabis. The licensed dispensary sells a rotating range of twelve cannabis strains, plus grinders, rolling papers and other accessories, to adults aged 21 and over. You pay in cash, and the stock changes every four hours. The Los Santos Dispensary is open on both servers; the English server also has the Paleto Bay Dispensary.
-280.28, 6046.85English server. Legal cannabis for adults 21 and over
169.53, -222.45Both servers. Legal cannabis for adults 21 and over
Cannabis is the gentle way in. The grow and cure chain (/trimweed, /dryweed, /curejar and friends) works for anyone with the plants, produces a batch with a purity like everything else, and sells at street level without a lab. If you want to understand batches, purity and reputation before risking anything harder, grow a jar.
Step by step
- Get a test kit
There are three: the Marquis kit, the Mecke kit and the fentanyl test strip. Use
/testdrug <slot> <kit>on any drug stack you hold and it reads the batch: the purity band, every cutting agent in it, any contaminant, and a red flag if it contains fentanyl. Never take or sell anything you have not tested. - Buy from a player
Stand within 3 m of the seller. They type
/sellwith your id, the stack, the number of units and the price; you see the offer and answer with/acceptdrugor/declinedrugwithin 60 seconds. Money and product change hands together, so nobody can take the cash and run. - Take it, if you are going to
/usedrug <drug> [units]consumes one to five units and rolls the outcome. The intended effect is the usual result of a clean batch at a sensible dose. A junk batch, a heavy dose, or a contaminant can instead make you sick, drop you where you stand, put you into an overdose, or kill you. The safety tab of/drugsexplains what makes each of those more likely. - Sell to pedestrians
With a stack in hand, walk up to any pedestrian and use the street offer interaction. The server decides whether they buy based on the district's demand, how saturated it is, the heat, and the reputation of the batch. Up to 5 g per sale, one sale every twenty seconds.
/dealerprints your standing: sales today by district, demand and the price band for what you are holding, and any open orders. - Watch the heat
Every sale nudges the district's heat up. Overdoses, deaths, dumped waste and busts push it up hard. High heat means more police attention, lower prices and a better chance that the next pedestrian you approach is a plain clothes officer. If your price band is dropping and
/dealershows the district running hot, move on or stop for the night. - Get out cleanly
Heat decays on its own. A dealer who stops selling in a district for a few hours comes back to better prices. A user who stops taking a drug loses tolerance again over time and finds smaller doses hit harder, which is the moment most overdoses happen. Ease back in.
What purity and cuts do to you
Every batch has a purity from 0 to 100, which sets its quality tier: junk, bad, medium, good or premium. Purity decides the price a buyer will pay and, together with dose and your tolerance, how dangerous it is. Above 85 is premium. Below 25 is junk that makes people ill.
Cutting agents are what a dealer mixes in to stretch a batch. Some are harmless in small amounts and simply lower the purity. Others make buyers sick or drop them. A few kill:
Agent | What it does to the buyer |
|---|---|
Sugars, powders and fillers | Lower the purity, little else. The usual way to stretch a batch |
Caffeine, levamisole, benzocaine, paracetamol, plaster dust | Sick and collapse become more likely; levamisole leaves a ten minute illness on top |
Chemical solvent | Deadly above a small share. Sick, collapse and death all climb |
Rat poison | Deadly above a small share, and leaves the buyer bleeding |
Fentanyl in anything that is not an opioid | Kills. Two percent in a bag of cocaine kills about a quarter of the people who take it |
Contaminants are different from cuts: they are picked up by accident from a botched step in a lab (damp, spill, fumes) and they travel with the batch for ever. A test kit shows them.
Outcomes are rolled once per use in a fixed order: death, overdose, collapse, sick, then the intended effect. Sick costs a little health and leaves you wobbly for under a minute. A collapse costs more and puts you on the ground for a few seconds. An overdose needs medical help. A death is a death, and the cause on your record reads "Fatal overdose" with the batch code.
Selling on the street
The street market is 27 named districts, each with its own demand that drifts through the day and a rolling six hour window of how much has already been sold there. Outside a district there is no market at all. The price you get is the drug's base price, adjusted for purity, the district's demand, how saturated it is, the heat, the reputation of your batch, and any cuts. In plain terms:
Purity pays. A premium batch fetches roughly twice the base price; junk fetches a third.
Saturation punishes greed. Flood one district and the price falls by up to 60 percent until the window clears. Spread sales around.
Heat costs money and freedom. At the top of the scale the price is 40 percent off and the odds that a buyer is an undercover officer rise steeply. If that roll goes against you the "buyer" refuses, you pick up two wanted stars and a 911 call goes out with your description.
Reputation follows the batch. Buyers remember signatures. Clean sales earn up to 30 percent more over time; a batch with sick, collapsed or dead customers behind it is eventually refused outright with "Heard about that batch. Not from you."
After a run of clean sales in a district, a character carrying a burner phone may start getting texts from regulars: a named buyer wanting a set amount at a quarter above street price at a meeting point. The burner's Orders section accepts or declines; walk to the meet and make the offer. Some regulars are police. Orders last fifteen minutes.
Larger scale selling, corners that factions claim and defend, and wholesale buyers are crew business and are described in the handbook's selling tab for the ranks that can use them.
Heat and the police
Police see the scene through its side effects. A busy district shows on their systems. Overdose bodies can be examined and tie back to a batch and everything that shares its history. Product seized in a raid or a search is matched by signature to earlier incidents. A cut street bag still carries the lineage of the lab that cooked it, so one death can lead a detective from the body to the seller to the crew.
What that means for you as a player: a K9 unit can sniff a person or a car for contraband, a search on arrest finds what you carry, and your name on an incident is permanent. Selling a batch you know is bad is the fastest route to a manslaughter charge in the city. Read the laws on possession, supply and manslaughter before you decide what kind of dealer your character is.
Getting clean
Addictions build with use and show as cravings and a drop in performance when you go without. The way out is to stop, and to roleplay it: the hospitals (Paleto Bay Medical Center on the English server, Pillbox Hill Medical Center on the Balkan server) and the city's counselling services exist in character for exactly this, and a story about a character trying to get clean is often better roleplay than the dealing was. Tolerance falls over days without a dose. There is no purchase that resets it.
Tips
Related commands
/drugsEveryoneOpen the drug handbook: step by step guides for every drug, cutting agents, equipment, selling and safety
/testdrugEveryoneBurn a reagent kit on a drug bag to reveal quality + cuts.
Single-use reagent test. Identifies opioids, amphetamines, and detects unexpected cuts. Burns on use.
Immunoassay strip - single-use. Detects fentanyl contamination in any drug bag. Saves lives.
/sellEveryoneOffer a drug stack to a nearby player for a price
/acceptdrugEveryoneAccept the drug offer you were given
/usedrugEveryoneConsume a drug from your inventory.
/dealerEveryoneShow your street standing, prices and open orders
Worked example
Marco Reyes has been selling bags of a friend's cocaine around Vespucci for a fortnight. Clean batch, good reputation, regulars texting his burner. Tonight the friend is away and a man outside the Yellow Jack sells him a fresh bag for cash. Marco has a Marquis kit in his glovebox and does not use it.
At a party in Mirror Park a girl called Tess asks for a wrap. Marco types /sell with her id, one unit, $120. She types /acceptdrug.
/me hands over a small wrap folded from a lottery ticket.
Tess takes it in the bathroom. /usedrug cocaine 1. The roll comes back collapse: the bag was cut with solvent by someone in a hurry. She drops on the tiles and a friend starts shouting for help. Marco runs.
A second guest had bought two units earlier and takes both at once. Tolerance low, dose high, contaminant in the batch: overdose. Somebody calls 911. Paramedics get him breathing and take him in; the incident is logged against the batch code, and the signature of that batch now has a collapse and an overdose behind it.
Marco, at home, finally burns the Marquis kit on the rest of the bag with /testdrug. Purity band medium, cut solvent 15 percent, contaminants: solvent residue. He stares at it and flushes the lot.
Two nights later he tries to sell in Vespucci again. The first pedestrian says "Heard about that batch. Not from you." His burner has gone quiet. A detective who examined the overdose case has the signature, and every bag Marco sold from it points back to the man outside the Yellow Jack, and to Marco.
/do A patrol car slows as it passes the corner.
He goes home, and for the first time thinks about what his character does next.
See also
Factions and the MDC for how illegal factions are structured and what police can see.
Custody and the law for what an arrest for supply looks like from the inside.
The laws for possession, supply and manslaughter.
The phone for the burner and its Orders section.
Hospitals and medicine for doctors, prescriptions and controlled medicines.