Beat Bag

Or is it the one I beat for five thousand dollars?
Thought he had 'caine but it was Gold Medal flour!

—Geto Boys, "Mind's Playin' Tricks on Me"

Selling a "beat" bag is a form of the Short Con that involves representing a bogus product as a more valuable, but illegal product, such as oregano for marijuana, baking soda for heroin, or cubic zirconias for stolen diamonds.

This means that the buyer cannot report the scam to the police, because he doesn't dare admit he was trying to buy the illegal item in the first place. The main push on these is often that the deal has to go down fast, for cash, right now.

Very much a case of Truth in Television, since many jurisdictions treat drug supply as a more serious offence than fraud, and since street dealers are unlikely to see their mark again after the con. Note, however, that many jurisdictions make selling fake drugs carry the same penalty (and in some cases, make it the same crime) as selling the real thing in order to prevent Loophole Abuse.

If the buyer sees the genuine article, but that's not what they get, it's Good for Bad. For cases where the scam is reported to the police, see Stupid Crooks.

Beat Bag is a Sub-Trope of Pig in a Poke.

Examples of Beat Bag include:

Comic Books

In the British Comic Viz, Paul Whicker (The Tall Vicar), responds to his verger's suggestion that the forthcoming youth group disco would give them the chance to 'shift some Es and whiz' with a grin and "Or aspirins and Vim if the ugly truth be known" (Vim being a brand of scouring powder with a (very) superficial resemblance to powdered amphetamine.
A very silly version of this in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, when Fat Freddy tried to buy illicit sugar in the middle of a shortage.

Freewheelin' Franklin: You fat fool, you got burned AGAIN! This "sugar" is 90% heroin! It hardly makes the coffee sweet.

Film

Performed in the movie Go, in which one of the characters sells harmless household products as drugs to inexperienced teens.
At the beginning of A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise's character is defending a client who bought and smoked "a dime bag of oregano."

Dave: Well, your client thought it was marijuana.
Kaffee: My client's a moron, that's not against the law.

Literature

This apparently happens ~~a lot~~ all the time to Mr. Tulip in the Discworld novel The Truth. "In a street where furtive people were selling Clang, Slap, Chop, Rhino, Skunk, Triplin, Floats, Honk, Double Honk, Gongers, and Slack, Mr. Tulip had an unerring way of finding the man who was retailing curry powder at what worked out as six hundred dollars a pound."
In Holes, X-Ray was arrested for selling drugs, but they turned out to be bags of chopped-up aspirin. Then he got arrested for selling aspirin without a pharmaceutical license.

Periodicals

Invoked in a "Clichéd TV Lines" competition in New York Magazine in the early 1970s, reprinted in the collection Maybe He's Dead: "Milk sugar!"

Live-Action TV

Played with in Spaced, with the oregano-for-weed variant. They weren't out to con anyone originally - they just happened to have a bag of oregano on them when they got mugged. Although everyone involved thought it was weed- Daisy had got confused and put the weed in the stew, so Tim was unknowingly carrying the oregano when he was mugged.
In The Pretender, a series where the No Social Skills protagonist does a Once an Episode thing of discovering something that people with normal childhoods take for granted, the episode "Silence" has him (A) discovering chocolate milk powder and (B) trying to bring down a drug pipeline transporting brown heroin. Near the end of the episode, he brings (A) and (B) together.
On My Name Is Earl, Earl and Randy wanted to take advantage of "special brownie night" at the Crab Shack. They switched the price tags on the brownies, so that those who wanted to buy the pot brownies ended up buying regular ones, and then Earl and Randy could sell the actual pot brownies later. Darnell intended to take the regular brownies to share with his mother, and is stopped by angry would-be stoners, who then proceeded to stone him. It was Biblical.

"Number [whatever] : Got Crabman stoned"

In the Raising the Bar episode "Is There a Doctor in the House?", Kellerman's client, a middle-aged woman, was arrested because the police found a large quantity of white powder in her car. . . while she was on the way to the laundromat. After lab tests confirmed that the powder was laundry detergent, the police showed their customary regard for the law by charging the defendant with selling a Beat Bag.
Shows up in The Wire when Bubbles steals a gang's ground stash, only to find the gang was selling vialed baking soda. He feels extremely guilty, having seen the gang beat up some innocent addicts for his theft as he was escaping. It gets worse at the end of season four when Bubbles prepares a hot shot of cyanide for a fiend who constantly attacks him for money and drugs, expecting the fiend to take it, shoot up and drop dead. The effort fails when the fiend misses Bubbles during the day and Sherrod steals Bubble's stash that night, shooting up with the vial filled with cyanide.
Downton Abbey: Thomas invests in some black-market food that turns out to be inedible.
On the American version of The Office, Michael tries to frame Toby for drug dealing by planting marijuana on him. He tries to buy some from the warehouse guys and they sell him a salad at a ridiculous price. For bonus points, it looks nothing like marijuana.

Music

This comes up in the folk song Quare Bungle Rye. Jack thinks he's getting smuggled whiskey, but the seller slips him a baby in a basket instead and runs off.

Web Comics

Octopus Pie alludes to the oregano/weed switch in one story.

Western Animation

In The Venture Brothers, when Doc Venture was in college (with several other characters, Baron Underbeit gave another friend oregano to smoke claiming it was a rare drug from his homeland. Turns out the poor sap was allergic (which Underbeit didn't know at the time).