The only drug dealers not making any money are the ones that are born into poverty and have to come up with no money from the street level.
Once you can put together at least a few thousand for a re-up you will make more than minimum wage, and you can double your money in a week or two with cocaine and harder drugs. It's easy to make 2k a week selling just eight balls and grams of cocaine if you know the right people on both ends of the equation.
But of course it's only easy until you get raided or someone else decides to test you! The cops will rob you too in the US. One friend lost two lbs of weed and another got jacked a few times for larger amounts of coke by the police. It's a real calamity and drug legalization is the only solution.
If your making 2k a week selling blow, but still risking robberies or cops that's an issue. That's when its time to move on to having the less than minimum wage low level guys working for you. If you are buying weight and handling re-ups then your already handling back end. Being a full stack drug dealer is not a long term proposition. If your doing 2k a week profit your moving a couple ounces of coke and ideally would have a couple cheap low level guys and a middle man that deals with them. The goal would be to just supply those middle men, but if your selling eight balls that probably is already the case. The real profit in cocaine is at the very low level where a $150 8-ball, gets cut to become 8 $50 grams, which turns into 6, $20 bags, that finally makes 10 $5 pieces of crack. If you control that entire operation and can go straight from the 8 ball to crack pieces your looking at greater than a 20x profit margin. Its going to require labor to cook and piece it out all day though. Because the only way you can sell those $5 pieces is to have a 24/7 presence on the street to serve the crack heads that successfully beg $5.
You can make 30-50% net margin selling weed to end users, and 10-25% selling pounds to dealers (in black market states). Your overhead is time, gas, and plastic bags. There’s plenty of money to be made with low risk (don’t sell cocaine if you don’t want to have to carry a gun)
Yep, best bet is to check your state's weed laws and stay under an amount where the penalty is not too severe. If you have no priors and get caught with less than 1-2 lbs in a lot of states, any felony possession charges will be cleared after serving a year on probation.
Whatever you are doing, make sure that you can do the time you might get and don't panic when you get raided.
I remember seeing dealers selling crack in plain sight on 9th and mission every day. Cops would drive by and the dealers wouldn’t even try to hide. It really seemed like there was some sort of arrangement going on there. But what would I know.
On a side note, those dealers had pretty long hours, they’d be there from before 7am some times (and people buying too). It was also sad to see that most of their customers seemed to be residents of the nearby affordable housing buildings.
There was a great book called Gang Leader for a Day, about a UChicago sociologist that spends time inside a Southside drug crew. His research showed that the average low-level street dealer made less than minimum wage. Almost all the profit accrued to the guys high up in the supply chain or gang hierarchy.
Recommend the book Narconomics for an in-depth look at the «free-market» ideas that drug organizations use in South America.
Gang tattoos to limit the mobility of their labor, duopolies to minimize conflict but maintain most of the benefits of a monopoly, squeezing upstream suppliers by playing them off each other, geographically-differentiated pricing and much more.
The violence is obviously the biggest difference, but even the rest serves as a warning not to drop regulation entirely.
What makes you think that? Free market capitalism is premised on the existence of a “market.” A “market” is not something that exists in the state of nature. In particular, you need some sort of property rights. If you can kill people and take their stuff, as in the state of nature, or use violence to coerce labor, then you don’t have “markets.”
You don’t need a government necessarily to enforce those rights, but free exchange of goods and labor cannot exist if violence is possible to coerce those exchanges.
So for free market capitalism you need these "markets" that eliminate the ability for money to be used for violence. Anytime violence is involved, it's automatically not free market capitalism, so any negative result does not reflect the ideology.
Anarchists aside, I have yet to meet an extreme free-marketeer, libertarian or whatever who did not see the point of having some degree of governmental intervention.
Enforcing legally binding contracts, for example.
In doing so, you no longer need to keep business within a tightly controlled group (family?) or enforce it with chainsaws.
That research was from 25 years ago. Rent has ballooned since then and wages at the bottom have dropped (minimum wage is lower now relative to CPI). Would be curious if this result holds up if we adjusted for inflation.
> It was also sad to see that most of their customers seemed to be residents of the nearby affordable housing buildings.
I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems that the way we manage affordable housing in the US contributes to the problem. Vienna and Singapore can teach us a lot about how to do this better:
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
> It really seemed like there was some sort of arrangement going on there.
There's no arrangement needed, the entire state of CA has effectively decriminalized drug possession. Getting busted for dealing with just a small stash sufficient to support a few hours of selling amounts to a slap on the wrist.
So unless the dealer is A Problem, there's not really any interest in wasting time on it. You're not putting them behind bars by catching them, you're just generating busy work for yourself as a cop, and wasting resources in general.
The same scene can be observed in any CA urban center. There is still some enforcement in the lesser populated/rural parts where police are bored and looking for reasons to mess with the lives of poor addicts though.
Pre-Chesa at least, SFPD brought several cases in that were dealers at Civic Center station and Montgomery. I know that at least some of these cases folks were found guilty.
I live on the east coast near DC. There's no rent control here. Instead there's very aggressive construction and housing is very cheap. I'm able to live in a fairly large luxury apartment on a junior engineer salary and there are plenty of much cheaper options.
Subsidized housing is ok because it lets the government suffer from its own incompentence. However, it's an ineffective/self sabotaging way of providing housing.
Rent control is literally about politicians absolving themselves of accountability. They "make" housing "cheap" again without direct consequences to the budget. The angry mob is gone, the money problem is gone and the social problems are now allowed to pile up over time until you have a dysfunctional community. It's like sticking your head into the sand.
Oh and please don't comment on how you can stick your head into the sand while simultaneously solving the actual problem as if sticking your head into the sand is a valid strategy.
Do low income families rent houses in the suburban parts of the bay? I’m curious if these people are actually poor or if it’s a situation where a lot of them are accidental real estate millionaires who just don’t want to move away
I went to SF two years ago. I was just shocked by the amount of drugs around. Walked out of my hotel at 8 AM and was offered crack. Waiting at the walk signal, there would be people in the throes of a high hallucinating and screaming at no one in particular. I brought sandals with me on the trip but had to stick to close toed shoes because of the needles/human waste on the streets. I used to just love SF when I was younger, but my recent trip really put me off.
The sad thing is, I think it’s good that SF is trying to treat addicts differently. However, I don't know if they’re attracting more addicts because they are lax or maybe you just see more because they aren’t thrown in jail? I’m not from Cali so I don’t know the situation too well. Sadly, it just seems like it’s spiraled out of control whatever they’re doing.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 96.8 ms ] threadOnce you can put together at least a few thousand for a re-up you will make more than minimum wage, and you can double your money in a week or two with cocaine and harder drugs. It's easy to make 2k a week selling just eight balls and grams of cocaine if you know the right people on both ends of the equation.
But of course it's only easy until you get raided or someone else decides to test you! The cops will rob you too in the US. One friend lost two lbs of weed and another got jacked a few times for larger amounts of coke by the police. It's a real calamity and drug legalization is the only solution.
Whatever you are doing, make sure that you can do the time you might get and don't panic when you get raided.
On a side note, those dealers had pretty long hours, they’d be there from before 7am some times (and people buying too). It was also sad to see that most of their customers seemed to be residents of the nearby affordable housing buildings.
The experience certainly inspired me further on the path of entrepreneurship.
Gang tattoos to limit the mobility of their labor, duopolies to minimize conflict but maintain most of the benefits of a monopoly, squeezing upstream suppliers by playing them off each other, geographically-differentiated pricing and much more.
The violence is obviously the biggest difference, but even the rest serves as a warning not to drop regulation entirely.
You don’t need a government necessarily to enforce those rights, but free exchange of goods and labor cannot exist if violence is possible to coerce those exchanges.
Enforcing legally binding contracts, for example.
In doing so, you no longer need to keep business within a tightly controlled group (family?) or enforce it with chainsaws.
Neither apply to selling heroin on the street.
It's illegal, so it's hardly a free market.
I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems that the way we manage affordable housing in the US contributes to the problem. Vienna and Singapore can teach us a lot about how to do this better: https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
There's no arrangement needed, the entire state of CA has effectively decriminalized drug possession. Getting busted for dealing with just a small stash sufficient to support a few hours of selling amounts to a slap on the wrist.
So unless the dealer is A Problem, there's not really any interest in wasting time on it. You're not putting them behind bars by catching them, you're just generating busy work for yourself as a cop, and wasting resources in general.
The same scene can be observed in any CA urban center. There is still some enforcement in the lesser populated/rural parts where police are bored and looking for reasons to mess with the lives of poor addicts though.
With legalization, you get rid of black markets and dealers, taxes flow and product quality rises.
Decriminalization just means that addicts and dealers don't get fucked as hard when caught.
At that time at least, SFPD targeted dealers.
Rent control is literally about politicians absolving themselves of accountability. They "make" housing "cheap" again without direct consequences to the budget. The angry mob is gone, the money problem is gone and the social problems are now allowed to pile up over time until you have a dysfunctional community. It's like sticking your head into the sand.
Oh and please don't comment on how you can stick your head into the sand while simultaneously solving the actual problem as if sticking your head into the sand is a valid strategy.
The sad thing is, I think it’s good that SF is trying to treat addicts differently. However, I don't know if they’re attracting more addicts because they are lax or maybe you just see more because they aren’t thrown in jail? I’m not from Cali so I don’t know the situation too well. Sadly, it just seems like it’s spiraled out of control whatever they’re doing.