If I was selling a bag of flour and sugar to a CI who thought it was meth or coke can I get in trouble? How or why when I am selling a legal substance?
But what if you played the long con, started....say a salt distribution ring. Have a run down house full of it, sell it in baggies, make it look as suspicious as possible only for them to do stakeouts, get informants in there, just to find you are not doing anything illegal at all, it just has all the signs without the actual law breaking. If you call it salt they'll probably think it's a code name for a drug
"Hey you got the good salt?" "Yeah here"
goes back to the police lab
"wtf? It's just salt?"
Then they would just think the informant got compromised and have to raid the house lol