Anyone who’s ever watched The Wire knows about heroin branding. Dealers come up with outrageous-sounding names for the product they sell on the streets. It may actually be no different from the stuff around the corner, but if you got some “Death Row” from a guy last weekend, and that stuff proved to be to your liking, you come back and ask for it by name.

Some of the more colorful brand names that they used in The Wire include:

* Tech 9
* In the Hole
* Q tip
* Payback
* Killer Bee
* Red Dilly
* Gold stars
* Family Affair
* Death Row
* WMD
* Bin Laden
* Rockefeller
* Double Cheese
* Spider Bags
* Bottle Rockets
* Reddies
* Rasheed
* Benno
* Body Bags
* Pandemic
* Black Horse
* Big Yellow Bird
* Brokeback
* Icicle
* Mistletoe
* Greenhouse Gas

You may remember some of these from the series.

This practice is a real-world thing, too, not just something they thought up for movies and TV to sound tough.

When actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died from a heroin overdose, police found dozens of heroin packets in his apartment labeled “Ace of Spades” and “Ace of Hearts”.

Recently, police raided a Ramada Inn hotel room in New Jersey where one Barnabas “Hammer” Davis was allegedly selling heroin and crack. Police say they found 633 wax folds containing heroin and about 40 grams of crack cocaine.

But it was the brand name stamped on some of Davis’ stash that stunned police. The packets bore the brand “Ebola”.

Perhaps Davis was capitalizing on the recent hysteria surrounding the disease. It certainly would be an attention-grabbing moniker, hard to forget whether you liked the product or not.

There were other “brands” of heroin among Davis’ products, but with a name like “Ebola”, it’s got to be good.

Various drug message boards have compiled lists of branded names in different locales. A few of the more imaginative are:

* God Father
* Parkway South
* Perfect Ten
* Dipset
* Adult Content
* Bulletproof
* Fleetwood Mac
* Purple City
* Street Money
* Whitehouse
* Summer Jam
* Sick Call
* True Story
* Absolute Power
* Regallion
* No Way Out
* 911
* Hercules
* Horse Power
* Black Night
* Taking Lives
* Hot Sauce
* Slick Rick
* K9
* Michael Jackson
* Dog Food