Informant: “My brother is a really big stoner, and so he’s really picky about his bags–nobody really uses bags anymore because nobody buys dimes anymore because now everyone has a club card but–like, back in the day, when you actually bought everything like dime-bags and dub-sacs they all had their own little prints on them. So you’d have like diamonds or piggies or the little playboy bunnies. Or like whatever the insignia was, and so like–”

Friend: “There were the really fancy ones too.”

“Yeah, like the big guns and the Ferrari diamond. But yeah, my brother used to collect ’em, and he was convinced that certain bags were better, like not because they were better for holding the weed but just like, better luck to have your weed in. So like, he liked certain bags. And I think he liked the diamond ones the best. The really simple diamond ones.”

Aesthetic plays a major role in many “unofficial” activities that have nothing dictating them except for the tastes and preferences of individual participants. I think baggies were originally sold in jewelry stores to hold tiny jewelry parts, and then appropriated by dealers to push marijuana. The repeating images printed on the baggies took on symbolic meaning, some widely shared and others specific to the individual. Diamonds are a simple yet elegant symbol of high worth. Preferred prints were a way to assert an aesthetic association and identity, even subconsciously elevating one’s own affinities to be imbued with enchanted properties.