Numbers

Eight Ball of Cocaine

"Eight ball" is a slang term for an eighth of an ounce of cocaine or some other powdered illicit drug.

How It's Used

“Other wan motives have emerged: Mary-Kate or 'M.K. as she is known to her friends,' is upset about her parents' 1996 divorce, is mad at her sister and wants to break up with her boyfriend: Such dire tumult would lead any of us to an eight ball, for the liftoff that plain whining simply cannot offer.

“Stars have been mad for coke since they first saw it glimmering on a mirror, their favourite flat surface. Errol Flynn anesthetized his penis with the drug and Sammy Davis Jr.sprinkled most of his sunrises with dew.”

“Aside from his fillings falling out (meth rots teeth) and the need to stay high constantly he says he smoked an eight ball a day he was living large. He says he bought an Infiniti I-30, rented a new three-bedroom apartment, bought his live-in partner a car, and took him on a cruise to the Caribbean.”

“Two months later, the five kids are still on the street, circling the same well-worn track that Bonnie, tired of all her hard living, is trying to summon the wherewithal to leave. She got on it simply enough, on a day when her marijuana dealer came by with a delivery. 'On his way out, he dropped a big piece of eight-ball' by accident, she said, referring to a chunk of crack worth about $300. Bonnie and her boyfriend traded the chunk, with a roommate, for some powdered cocaine, but wound up sharing the crack, and soon enough they were hooked.”

“When I met Anna, I was more or less living with Doolie, a woman I adored. I began stepping out on her because Anna was in high effect, moving what she said was a kilo a month from straight-up Colombian sources through a series of reliable associates who were also her pals. She worked dead drops in storage spots, safe-deposit boxes and mules to keep her at a remove from the nuts and bolts of the drug enterprise. When the piles of money were too big to hand-count, she used a digital scale to weigh piles of 20s. She had two kids in a nice house in north Minneapolis; the serious dope business was done elsewhere.

“On our first date, we mowed through my eight ball of indifferent coke. She sent me to a safe under the carpet of her steps, and I beheld a pressed kilo of pure cocaine.”

"The Canaan market opens onto Guangyuan West Road—eight roaring lanes of cars and trucks and scooters on the ground and four more lanes in the air, on concrete spans that block the rain and the sun. Every square foot has been claimed by commerce. Walking to and from work, Nwaosu (I have changed his name) traverses a sidewalk offering a sharpening stone for cleavers, a handheld sewing machine, a mobile-phone card for Africa, an hour of sex, a bundle of socks, an electronic songbird that sings, an eight ball of cocaine, a mold that makes the perfect dumpling. Lining the sidewalks are passport-photo booths, mobile-phone venders, and shops crammed with jeans and T-shirts, alligator-skin cap-toe shoes and made-to-measure suits, soccer jerseys and bulletproof vests (four hundred and ten dollars for blue nylon; five hundred and fifty-six dollars for camouflage)."

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