Salon Technology | You, too, can be a drug kingpin

Feb. 9, 2000 |I bought eight G's of heroin last night, eluded the fuzz in a Bronx alley and jumped a train to Manhattan where I unloaded my stash for about 15 grand. Cha-ching! Now I'm rollin' in the Benjamins.

Of course, they're of the virtual variety. My earnings came from Dope Wars, a graphics-starved tool of procrastination that is fast becoming as addictive as its subject. I downloaded the Windows version of the game from Download.com, and so did about 335,000 others -- making it the site's sixth most-popular game, rivaling versions of Pac-Man and Quake. And plenty of other people run drugs on their Palm PDAs, on Linux machines, even, apparently, the TI-83 calculator.

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and other conservative politicians denounced the game's drug-toting plot at a December hearing on violence in the media, according to a report in the London Sunday Times. But young Wall Streeters who play dealers in their free time say it's not the virtual drugs that attracts them, but the cold, fake cash.

"It's like the stock market," says Axel Estable, 26, a French software engineer with a graduate degree in finance, who works in Chicago and belongs to a multinational "cartel," or group of players who compete for the highest score. "If there is a point besides just having fun, it's buying and selling something. It could be stocks or flowers, but it's more fun to sell something that's forbidden."

This is how it works: You start with $2,000 in cash, and $5,500 in debt. In 31 "days" -- trips between neighborhoods -- you make as much money as you can selling marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine or almost any other drug you can think of. Prices increase or decrease randomly each day, and cops intrude as pop-up windows along the way; they bust other dealers, which drives prices up, and shoot at you, which drives your "health" down. Other pop-up windows appear at random, offering guns for sale or causing bad slip-ups -- like dropping your stash.

Ultimately, the game is all about buying low and selling high. That's why legal dealers -- of stocks, bonds and the like -- say they have picked up the game in droves, e-mailing it to friends in other firms and in countries as far away as Botswana, Guinea and France. But it's not only the money crowd that's hooked: police officers in Perth, Australia, reportedly made a fortune selling virtual drugs before their superiors erased the program.

"It's kind of like a Minesweeper or Hearts kind of game," says Ian Wall, a 31-year-old English programmer who wrote the Windows version from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. "People may initially think 'Oh, it's a drug-dealing game, that's cool.' But it takes only three minutes to play and it's random, so that it's easy to believe you'll do better next time. It's very easy to say, 'I'll try again.' After a while, most people forget that you're selling drugs. All they care about is making money."

Wall had played Drug Wars, the DOS-based, '80s original version of the game, when someone suggested that he update it. There are plenty of other drug-related games online, such as Happy Weed, Drug Lord and Ganja Farmer, all of which are listed at Hemp Games. But few have captured the popular imagination like Dope Wars.

Since March, when Wall released the current version, he has seen fans download thousands of copies -- and assemble worldwide scoreboards, fan sites and hundreds of cartels. Wall is releasing a new version this spring and is trying to figure out how to make money off the game -- real money.

Wall insists that Dope Wars is innocent, a "time-waster" that shouldn't be taken seriously. But that doesn't mean the game is stigma-free. "When I go home, I tell my girlfriend that I made $16 million selling drugs today, but she doesn't think it's funny," says Estable. He says he doesn't do drugs, has no interest in dealing. But he wouldn't chat about Dope Wars at his desk; he had to hide in an empty computer room. "I'm at work," he explains. "I just don't want anyone to get the wrong idea."
salon.com | Feb. 9, 2000

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Damien Cave is a Salon contributing writer.

Sound off
Send us a Letter to the Editor

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Get a printer-friendly version

E-mail a friend about this article

Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon


Search..Archives..Contact Us..Table Talk..Ad Info..Investors