This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Nornagest: Cut the following —
- * Truth in Television (sorta) : Drug dealers will give away free samples to people who've never bought drugs from them in order to get them addicted to the drug.** Out of curiosity, where did you hear about this?
It takes a special kind of blindness to ignore the entire point of the trope and mark it as Truth in Television anyway.
To recap: this may have happened. Somewhere. Once. But it's by no means a common, useful, or intelligent strategy, unless the dealer's goal is to get 15 to life as quickly as possible. Attracting attention aside, most drugs — or at least most drugs which can easily be given out in convenient bite-size packages — are simply not addictive enough for it to work well.
fleb: The first isn't even trying to look like an example. The other two sound like not-this-trope.
- This troper thinks it was a clever Xanatos Gambit on the part of the anti-drug groups to convince people that this was how real drug dealers acted and so limit their access to drugs since they never even got a CHANCE to say no. It kept this gullible troper drug free for many years.
- Excellently mocked in a new anti-drug commercial, wherein the dealer is losing business because kids are abusing prescription drugs that they steal from their parents.
- The villain of the movie version of Live and Let Die was going to give away millions of dollars in heroin. His reasoning was that it would drive everybody else out of the business and give him a monopoly.
This is the kind of trope I'd expect to see in a religious tract. The drugs as such would not be the point there. They would be using the drug dealer as an Agent of Satan to illustrate active Evil or Corruption or Temptation or something of the kind. I can't think of an illustrating example though.
Josef Bugman: would it be possible to slightly adjust the Opium War mention to "popular preconception" or "popular idea of the Opium war is" rather than stating it as fact? There is a lot of historical debate around it still.
