What Are the Street Prices of Ecstasy and LSD at Columbia University?

I'm not feelin' the love, brah! Neither are the five Columbia University students/fratboys who were busted this week for selling all kinds of crazy drugs at school. Luckily, via Columbia's BWOG, understanding the numbers of the busts also gives us a chance to understand how much drugs cost at Columbia University! It goes without saying, but The Village Voice, Village Voice Media, and Runnin' Scared do not endorse the illegal use or purchase of drugs, and no drugs were harmed purchased or used in the making of this blog post. So, how much does Ecstasy or LSD cost at Columbia University?

The MDMA ("Ecstasy ") Bust: 50 capsules at $1,000.

Get your rave-goggles out, and prepare your best Whitebred-Noodle-Dance! This one's easy. $1,000 divided by 50 sales is $20 a sale. Prices of E typically don't waver unless one's buying for a group of friends -- say, five -- in which case, your dealer may or may not throw in an extra for free. If it's exceptional Ecstasy -- as in, cut with something you can't buy at Duane Reade -- maybe you're paying $25, but if that were the case, the cops would have only purchased 40, unless they were just given 10, or one free capsule for every four they purchased, and two for every eight. But dealers are likely to get suspicious if you're buying in fours, eights, fives, and tens all the time, so they probably just picked off singles, twos, or threes until they added up. Safe bet's at $20.

Street Price: $20 a pill.
Value: About the same as anywhere else.

Movie Columbia Students Should Watch Before They Consider Selling Ecstasy to Cops: 1999's Go, written by John August and directed by Doug Liman, starring Sarah Poley as a drug dealer would-be, Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr as her gay soap opera would-be customers, and William Fichtner as the weirdest narcotics officer ever, and Timothy Olyphant as "Todd the Hot Drug Dealer" and pre-Tom Cruise but post-Dawson's Katie Holmes as Sarah Polley's friend with the slightly memorable monologues. It's really worth seeing even if you aren't selling E.

The LSD ("Acid") Bust: 44 tabs at $440.

For a drug that induces such complicated feelings, the pricing scheme is pretty simple! Even people tripping on acid right now could do the math, here. It's $10 a hit (or "norfteen dandelion seeds," for those of you currently tripping sans-calculator) and they're like a pair of black Wayfarers: never discounted. Drug dealers don't offer deals on acid because it's already so goddamn cheap, and gets you so fucked up for so long the average user doesn't need more than a hit or two of what a Bulgarian cook at summer camp once noted as "you know, the [sticks out tongue, points to it, waves hands in air frantically while rolling eyes] how-you-say, DOCTOR OFF-MAN!"

Street Price: $10 a hit.
Value: Meh, but running around Columbia wasted on acid is certainly a bonus prospect in and of itself. It's a nice campus.
Thing You Don't Want to Do On Acid at Columbia: Go deeper into Harlem than you already are. This just sounds like a bad idea no matter what happens. Feel free to terrorize the Lox counter at Zabar's, however. That's probably a safer bet.

Previously:

What's the Street Price of Cocaine at Columbia University?

[fkamer@villagevoice.com | On Twitter]