The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. 

Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: 

Document Title: We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets 

on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Final Report 

Author(s): Ric Curtis ; Travis Wendel ; Barry Spunt 

Document No.: 197716 

Date Received: December 2002 

Award Number: 1999-IJ-CX-0010

This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federallyfunded grant final report available electronically in addition to 

traditional paper copies.

 

Opinions or points of view expressed are those 

of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect 

the official position or policies of the U.S. 

Department of Justice.
We Deliver: The gentrification of drug markets on Manhattan's Lower East Side 

Ric Curtis 

Travis Wendel 

Barry Spunt 

John Jay College of Criminal Justice 

New York, NY 

Final Report 

National Institute of Justice 

Grant #1999-IJ-CX-0010 

PROPERTY OF 

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) 

Box 6000 

Rockville, MD 20849-6000 -/ 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
.-_, 

ABSTRACT 

This 2-year ethnographic study documents and analyzes changes in the social and 

technical organization of drug markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side from March 

1999 to March 2001. Among the major findings to be discussed are 1) the virtual 

disappearance of street sales, 2) the growth of delivery and delivery services, 3) the 

growing importance of “secondary markets,” 4) the increasing class fragmentation of 

drug markets, and 5) a discussion of dealing as labor, including the different meanings of 

dealing and motivations to do so that characterize the distributors in the sample. The 

research also examines the declining incidence and importance of violence and non-drug 

crime in drug markets and an assessment of the relative impacts on drug markets of law 

enforcement activities, demographic shifts, and land-use changes. 

a 

1 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

This study uses ethnographic methods and techniques to examine the 2-year 

evolution of the variety of illegal retail drug markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

The study examines the structure, functioning, and interactions between existing and 

emergent drug markets from January 1999 to January 2001. The report employs a model 

that examines the “social organization” and “technical organization” of drug distribution 

to structure the presentation of the findings and the discussion. The wider context of the 

study is important to note: it took place during a period of dramatic and unprecedented 

reductions in all categories of criminal offending both nationally and in New York City, 

which some have claimed has driven national trends. 

Methods: The report is based on ethnographic observations and interviews conducted on 

Manhattan’s Lower East Side with 73 dealers of various drugs and 93 users. Slightly 

more than half the sample was white, with Hispanics, African-Americans and people of 

mixed heritage making up the remainder. The overwhelming majority of distributors 

were male. Users, on the other hand, were evenly split between men and women. 

Major Findings: 

1) The Virtual Disappearance of Street Sales: 

The most notable change in the technical organization of distribution on the - - 

Lower East Side during the study period has been the almost complete disappearance of 

2 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
street-level drug sales, especially those effected by corporate-style organizations. By the 

middle and late 1990s, gentrification and continuous pressure applied by the police had 

made much of the Lower East Side inhospitable to street-level dealers. Most of the 

changes in street-level drug markets observed by the researchers involved the physical 

displacement of dealers and users to indoor locales and an accompanying adjustment in 

the way that business was conducted. 

2) The Growth of Delivery and Delivery Services: 

As street-level markets have disappeared, they have been replaced by drug 

delivery as the primary way for people to sell and buy drugs. A considerable number of 

corporate delivery businesses exist on the Lower East Side, but the market is open to 

many smaller and less organized businesses. The three primary types of drug delivery 

operations that were observed over the research period were: freelance delivery, bar 

delivery of drugs, and corporate delivery services. The larger corporate-style marijuana 

delivery distributors are the only corporate-style drug selling-organizations that continue 

to operate in the study area. 

3) The Growing Importance of Secondary Markets: 

In the transformed drug markets which now characterize the Lower East Side, 

buying drugs is now frequently accomplished through accessing personal networks, 

rather than through the anonymous public markets which characterized the area in the 

past. We describe much of this as a “secondary market” for drugs. The critical feature of 

3 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
the secondary market is the use of a person who is not a “professional dealer” to facilitate 

the purchase of drugs, a person who, in essence, works as an agent for the consumer 

rather than the distributor. Another growth area in retail drug markets on the Lower East 

Side has been the proliferation of white heroin distributors who work as freelancers out of 

their homes and who represent a considerable portion of the secondary market for drugs 

in the neighborhood. In a third development that we call the “franchise system,” the seller 

wholesales prepackaged bags of drugs to younger entrepreneurs who pay a percentage of 

the retail price (typically 75-90%) and keep the difference. Franchising appears to be a 

form of freelance distribution, but we argue that it is, in fact, the corporate form of 

distribution adapted to the realities of a changed marketplace. 

4) Class Fragmentation and the Gentrification of Drug Markets: 

Markets for all drugs are clearly diverging and the participants in the isolated or 

specialized sub-markets are becoming more insular and demographically homogeneous 

within them, often involving tightly-knit groups of distributors and users who have few 

interactions with participants from other markets. This is another facet of what we 

describe as the gentrification of drug markets. Middle-class consumers are the bulk of 

users on the Lower East Side at this point as the demographics of the area have shifted, 

but even within their ranks, users -- as groups or individuals -- tend to be highly 

segmented and compartmentalized. Furthermore, the class segmentation of markets has 

4 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
been facilitated by technology that makes it easier for relatively closed groups of dealers 

and users to maintain contact with each other while excluding others. 

The relative absence of any mention of violence associated with participation in 

drug markets over the duration of the study was remarkable given the history 'of drugrelated violence on the Lower East Side. Old-time hard drug users who had lengthy 

criminal careers and were veterans of the period when violence was commonplace in the 

area agreed that the era of street crime and violence was over. Drug dealers were far more 

likely to be involved in violent crime as victims than as perpetrators. For the most part, 

dealers were extremely paranoid about being robbed, especially house dealers, many of 

whom recounted horrifying tales of home invasion-style robberies and one of whom told 

of witnessing the murder of a close business associate, after he himself had been brutally 

0 

tortured. No dealers in our sample said they carried a gun while selling drugs and few 

kept firearms at home. Many commented that this was because they feared that the courts 

would look more sternly on carrying a gun than on selling drugs. The corporate delivery 

organizations which exist today are diametrically opposed to violent solutions, and 

generally employed a carrot rather than a stick to manage their labor force. Since the 

delivery organizations have no "turf' to defend and little idea where the competitors are 

active, there is little incentive to engage in violence with competitors. 

Discussion: 

5 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
While the Lower East Side is unique in some ways -- as a trend-setter in many 

areas of social life, including art, music and drug fashions -- it has often been "ahead of 

the curve" in terms of national drug trends, and it may offer insight and clues that 

resonate with developments taking place in other neighborhoods. Drug distribution 

continues to flourish today. Although gentrification and aggressive policing have 

reconfigured and recaptured the public and semipublic spaces in which drug distribution 

took place in the 1970s and 1980s, users continue to obtain drugs with little difficulty. 

And as the neighborhood has gentrified, so have the drug markets. Changes have 

occurred both in the technical organization of distribution (delivery and indoor markets of 

various kinds have come to predominate) and in the social organization of distribution 

(large corporate structures are less common and flourish only in the delivery segment of 

the business). 

In general, law enforcement interventions have had little lasting impact on drug 

use patterns and are only partially responsible for the major transformations which took 

place in drug markets in New York City over the last fifteen years. The New York Police 

Department should continue doing what it has proven to be quite good at: containing and 

controlling public drug markets. In our view, the measure of success of narcotics 

enforcement should not be defined as eliminating drug distribution and use, but rather, 

reducing to the lowest possible level the harm to individuals, families and neighborhoods 

a that may be associated with such activities. 

6 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
7 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
INTRODUCTION 

Takin’ the edge off on a beautiful day 

With a Frappacino and a crkme brulCe 

Yeah, it’s all over when you see a Range Rover 

And to my bodega, I say “Hasta luega” 

It’s not what you do, it’s what you say 

And it’s not who you know, it’s who you pay 

Down on Avenue A 

And that’s where the junkies used to play 

Down on Avenue A. 

(The Dictators. 2002. “Down on Avenue A.”) 

This study’ uses ethnographic methods and techniques to examine the 2-year 

evolution of the variety of illegal retail drug markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

The study examines the structure, functioning, and interactions between existing and 

emergent drug markets from January 1999 to January 2001. This report employs a model 

that examines the “social organization” and “technical organization’’ of drug distribution 

to structure the presentation of the findings and the discussion. By “social organization,’ 

of distribution we refer to issues of cooperation, differential responsibility, and power and 

authority among distributors. “Technical organization,” on the other hand, refers to issues 

The study was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (grant #1999-ij-cx-0010). The authors would 

like to thank Sally Hillsman, Henry Brownstein and Bruce Taylor at NIJ for their continuous support, 

encouragement and advice. We would also like to thank John Veit, Dr. Marni Finkelstein, Alexander Blow 

and Jed Tucker who helped collect data for the study. Kate McCoy, Tracy Hanlin, Kesha Louis, Dea 

Varsovczky, Jacob Marini and Poline Haralambopoulos were helpful in the administration of the grant, the 

interpretation of the data, and the preparation of the final report 

8 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
such as the physical location, policies, procedures, technology and equipment employed 

by distributors. 

Drug researchers, like law enforcement, have tended to concentrate on the most 

publicly visible distributors and users and there have been many studies conducted on the 

Lower East Side and elsewhere across the nation that describe or analyze rather narrow 

segments of the drug selling and using population that exist there. Few of these studies 

acknowledge, let alone describe, the scope of the overall market for illegal drugs. By 

focusing on the spectrum of illegal drugs markets on the Lower East Side, this study took 

a broader view that, we argue, is essential to contextualize the findings of in-depth study. 

Moreover, in light of the blatancy that characterized drug selling and consumption in the 

neighborhood for so many years, it is understandable that the less visible aspects of the 

market might have been overlooked by researchers, but as the neighborhood has changed 

over the last decade, these hidden segments of the illegal drug market have assumed a 

progressively more important role, and thus, it is now incumbent upon researcher to 

account for the overall contours of the market. 

The wider context of the study is important to note: it took place during a period 

of dramatic and unprecedented reductions in all categories of criminal offending both 

nationally and in New York City, which some have claimed has driven national trends 

(Cuneen 1999, Curtis 1998, Greene 1999, Harnett and Andrews 1999, Silverman 1999). 

a While crime was down across America, the popular explanation for the startling change 

9 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
in New York City was that civility did not percolate from the bottom up, but rather, was 

imposed from the top down by the more technologically-savvy application of law 

enforcement resources in managing people, especially around the lynchpin problems of 

disorder, the crown jewel of the Giuliani administration (Giuliani 1998a,b). Given the 

extraordinary emphasis that this administration placed on policing illegal drug use and 

distribution, this research provides a timely examination of that issue through an analysis 

of violence and non-drug crime on the Lower East Side and an assessment of the relative 

impacts of law enforcement activities, demographic shifts, and land-use changes on' drug 

I 

markets. 

Why the Lower East Side?: history and demographics , 

The Lower East Side is a neighborhood that is compact and sharply defined (see 

Appendix IVY map of the Lower East Side), and it has often been a harbinger of trends in 

drug distribution, use and policing that later emerge in other areas of New York City and 

the United States as a whole (Curtis and Wendel 2000, Goldstein 1984, 1985, Sharff 

1981, Waterston 1993, Wendel and Curtis 2000, Zimmer 1985, 1990). The Lower East 

Side was well established as a heroin selling area by the late 1920s, when aggressive 

Italian dealers replaced the Jewish entrepreneurs who had initially dominated the market 

after the drug had become illegal and was no longer dispensed by medical doctors 

(Courtwright 1982, Courtwright et al. 1989). In the 1960s, an influx of hippies began the 

10 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
area’s long association with countercultural activities. The term “East Village” dates from 

this period (Mele 2000). 

In the 1970s, the Lower East Side, like most poor areas in New York City, entered 

into a long spiral of crime, decay and abandonment, culminating in the city’s fiscal crisis 

and near-bankruptcy in 1976. Landlords walked away from or burned down dilapidated 

buildings whose rent rolls would not provide much more than the cost of taxes and heat. 

In an effort to prevent abandonment, the city began taking over buildings for unpaid taxes 

more quickly, but the policy backfired and abandonment increased (Mele 2000: 19 1). By 

the end of the decade, the scores of abandoned buildings and vacant lots provided the 

locations for the area’s thriving drug markets. The area was referred to as “the drug 

capital of America” (Chambers 1982) and “the Mecca of dope [heroin]” (by a heroin 

addict who died last year after living in the neighborhood for more than 30 years). 

The Lower East Side was deeply affected by the exponential growth of streetlevel drug markets beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a development that many 

attribute to the consequences of the Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption 

(1973) which documented how police officers regularly extorted cash from drug 

distributors and users, and were also “involved in possession and sale of narcotics in a 

variety of ways, including financing transactions, recruiting informants and addicts as 

pushers, and share-selling, where the pusher is given drugs on consignment and retains 

part of the proceeds as payment” (Knapp 1973: 105). The Knapp Commission 

11 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
,I 

recommended that the Police Department’s “enforcement efforts be directed away from 

indiscriminate drug loitering arrests and toward making good cases against high-level 

drug distributors” (Knapp 1973:113). What resulted was a hands-off policy by the New 

York City Police Department and the introduction of the “Mr. Big” strategy of drug 

control, an approach that focused on arresting major trafhckers, but allowed street-level 

! 

drug markets to grow unchecked. Soon, the Lower East Side was being described as a 

“buyer’s paradise” (Zimmer 1987) as the blatancy of street-level drug distribution and 

consumption spiraled out of control. In noting the powerlessness of New York City 

police officers to affect the situation, Zimmer (1987: 1) quoted one police officer, “who 

had spent nearly thirty years policing the Lower East Side”: , 

There was nothing we could do. There were some blocks in the precinct 

that I avoided as much as possible because it was embarrassing to be a 

police officer and see the law broken in front of your eyes and know there 

was nothing we could do. 

The entire area was awash with drugs in the early 1980s. Marijuana and cocaine 

were widely available at many street-level locales, but also from candy stores, tire repair 

shops, record stores and the several “doors” throughout the neighborhood. The “doors” 

were storefront operations that made no pretense of selling legal commodities - they 

consisted of an empty storefront containing a teller window where consumers could 

purchase marijuana. Bodegas (small Hispanic grocery stores) were another type of indoor 

locale that sold drugs. They differed from the “doors” in that they appeared to be 

12 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
legitimate businesses (and indeed, to varying degrees, often were), offering various 

grocery items for sale, as well as illegal drugs. Both the “doors” and bodegas were often 

run by Hispanics and were generally characterized by socially-bonded and corporate 

a 

forms of organization (see Curtis and Wendel 2000). 

, 

Heroin and cocaine were also available from a v&iety of street locations and 

abandoned buildings that were taken over for drug sales. These locations were generally 

run by large corporate organizations, with a great deal of division of labor and a 

consequent unequal division of the fruits of that labor. Whole blocks and stretches of 

blocks were entirely dominated by these large corporate drug-selling organizations, 

which employed hundreds and maybe, thousands of people. For example, there were 

a 

people employed to watch for the police on rooftops or street corners and call out 

“Bajando!” (“Coming down” in Spanish, as in “The police are coming down the block”) 

or “Five-O!” (police, from the television series Hawaii 5-0),2 people employed to keep 

order in the lines customers would be required to stand in, people employed to actually 

do hand to hand transactions, people employed to package drugs, to count money and so 

on. Of course, there had to be still more people employed to watch and monitor all these 

people, given the large amounts of cash and drugs involved in the trade. 

a 

The current street term is “Feo,” meaning “ugly” in Spanish. 

13 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Moore (1977:198) was right when he noted that “street-level dealers can now 

afford to behave very aggressively because neither the Narcotics Division nor the Patrol 

Bureau is paying very much attention to them.” The mushroom in cocaine trafficking in 

the early 1980s combined with the development of huge street-level drug markets, 

however, led to a renewed interest in street-level drug enforcement. Following Mark 

Moore’s (1977) advice that law enforcement agencies were targeting the “wrong level of 

distribution,” and that the disruption of “copping areas” might deter new drug users from 

escalating their patterns of drug consumption, many police departments, but especially in 

New York City, began to devise strategies which refocused their energies on the growing 

problem of street-level drug markets. 

In 1984, responding to community pressure and the interests of real estate 

developers, the New York City Police Department initiated their first attempt to address 

blatant street-level drug distribution and consumption since the appearance of the Knapp 

Commission Report. Operation Pressure Point primarily targeted street-level heroin 

markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side by deploying an additional 240 uniformed 

police officers in the area. The goal of the intervention was to “disrupt” trade on the 

Lower East Side and the police did so by primarily targeting buyers and sellers. Zimmer 

(1987:6) noted that “nearly half of all arrests [were] for misdemeanor possession; another 

nearly 10 percent for loitering for the purpose of buying drugs.” Thousands of arrests 

a 

were made during the campaign and the New York Police Department proclaimed it an 

14 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
unqualified success, setting the stage for additional interventions in the latter half of the 

decade. Some observers questioned the overall effectiveness of the strategy and noted 

that one outcome was that drug markets were not so much dismantled as they were 

displaced to less affluent areas of the neighborhood and to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 

located directly across the East River from the Lower East Side (Curtis and Maher 1992, 

Mulgrav 1985, Zimmer 1987). 

Operation Pressure Point, and, beginning in 1988, the Tactical Narcotics Teams 

(TNT), clearly had some localized effects on drug markets, especially the more blatant 

ones, but it was often difficult to recognize whether or not tangible gains were being 

made in the lengthy war of attrition on street-level drug markets. Clearly though, the 

blatancy of street dealing and drug use never returned to the levels that sparked Operation 

Pressure Point. They were further reduced by TNT operations in the late 1980s and early 

1990s. While there is evidence that some geographical displacement of drug markets 

resulted from successive waves of street-level law enforcement initiatives on the Lower 

East Side, the emergence of alternate styles of distribution filled the void created by the 

disappearance of street-level operatives, and represent another type of displacement that 

took place. Nevertheless, many businesses continued to operate on the street during this 

period despite vigorous policing, but they found themselves having to alter their 

operations in a variety of ways. For example, since the early 1970s in heroin markets, 

a 

customer loyalty to a particular organization or its product was established and 

15 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
maintained via logos-or “stamps”-that were affixed with ink on the glassine $10 bags 

(Goldstein et al. 1984, Wendel and Curtis 2000). Stamps were often associated with a 

particular organization and they sometimes lasted for years without changing. One 

enduring stamp on the Lower East Side was called “No Joke,” and the organization 

papered the neighborhood with adhesive stickers that instructed users to “ask for it by 

name.” While this strategy allowed organizations to build a substantial customer base, it 

also allowed narcotics police to more easily identify and track the participants associated 

with that particular market place. To avoid detection, by the mid-l990s, some I 

’ 

organizations began to switch logos on a regular basis. For example, one heroin dealer, 

during late 1995- early 1996, changed his stamp at least four times. The stamp began as 

“Action,” then changed to “Da Bomb,” then to “Real,” then to “Life” (With The Life 

Magazine Logo), and then back To “Action” in the space of a few months. Some dealers 

in the neighborhood, fearing that a logo would provide a road map for the police, began I 

to sell unstamped bags of heroin. There were many other ways that street-level operatives 

changed their business practices in response to greater police pressures (see Sviridoff et 

al. 1992 for more discussion of these), but the point is that despite the substantial 

numbers of arrests that were effected on the Lower East Side and elsewhere in New York 

City, drugs continued to be widely available and easily accessible on the street well into 

the 1990s. 

16 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The population and demographics of the area have changed a great deal over the 

last twenty years. Renovation, often involving dividing one family-sized apartment into 

several studio apartments, co-op conversions and some new construction have made a 

great deal of new housing stock available in the area, but the much higher cost of this 

housing has largely resulted in an influx of affluent newcomers, as long-time residents of 

the area are priced out of the market. The result is a neighborhood which is more affluent, 

whiter, has far fewer children and a large concentration of single people in their twenties 

and thirties. Hispanic families, in particular, have been priced out of much of the 

0 

privately-owned housing and increasingly concentrated in the large public housing 

projects which run along the eastern edge of the area, between Avenue D and the East 

River. 

0 

From 1980 to 1990, for example, median household income increased 36% (City 

of New York Department of City Planning 1993). Unfortunately, the 2000 Census figures 

on income by neighborhood will not be available until June, 2002 (personal 

communication, 2002, Peter Lobo, New York Department of City Planning), but from all 

indications the increase in median income in the area in the 1990s was even greater than 

in the 1980s. Median gross rent in the area increased 37.3% from 1980 to 1990 (City of 

New York Department of City Planning 1993), in an area where 88% of households are 

renter-occupied (vs. 95% in 1980) (City of New York Department of City Planning 1992, 

0 - 

2001). 

17 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Hispanic population has declined considerably. In 1980, there were 56,690 

Hispanics (30.1% of the total population), in 1990,52,217 (City of New York 

e 

Department of City Planning 1992). By 2000, only 44,195 remained (26.9% of the total 

population) (City of New York Department of City Planning 2001), mostly concentrated 

! 

in housing projects along the eastern edge of the neighborhood (Mele 2000). The white 

population on the other hand, remained roughly the same (46,396 in 2000 vs. 47,671 in I 

1980), but in 2000 for the first time there were more whites than Hispanics in the area 

(City of New York Department of City Planning 1992,2001). The Asian population of 

the area increased greatly (57,871 in 2000 vs. 34,979 in 1980), but was concentrated in 

the fringes of Chinatown on the southern edge of the study area and isolated by language 

and culture (City of New York Department of City Planning 1992,2001). 

a 

The number of children in much of the study area has plunged, as childless whites 

replaced Hispanic families. The number of children enrolled in neighborhood preprimary schools plunged by 48.3% from 1980 to 1990, while the number of college 

students in the area jumped by 62.8% (City of New York Department of City Planning 

1993). In 2000, there were only 28,116 persons 18 under in the area (vs. 37,682 in 1980, 

a 25.4% decrease in the number of children) (City of New York Department of City 

Planning 1992,2001). Almost all (77.8%) were either Asian or Hispanic (10,139 Asians, 

11,722 Hispanics), population groups who are mostly concentrated in public housing on 

0 

18 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
the eastern and southern edges of the area (City of New York Department of City 

Planning 200 1). 

e 

In 1980, the number of persons aged 20-39 was 52,503 (City of New York 

Department of City Planning 1993). In 2000, the comparable figure was 62,499, a 19% 

increase (City of New York Department of City Planning 2001). In 1980,60.3% of the 

area's population lived in family households and there were only 17,350 non-family , 

households in the area (City of New York Department of City Planning 1992). By 2000, 

only 46.8 % lived in family households, while the number of non-family households' had 

more than doubled, to 36,971 (City of New York Department of City Planning 2001). 

The number of housing units increased from 47,244 in 1980 t0 72,681 in 2000 (City of 

New York Department of City Planning 1992,2001), a 53.8% increase, in a dense urban 

a 

area where little new construction took place, reflecting the trend towards subdividing 

existing residential spaces into smaller apartments for the smaller, childless households 

which have come to characterize the area. 

By the mid-l990s, the gentrifying neighborhood was inhabited by a surreal 

mixture of aging Eastern European immigrants, Asians, yuppie stockbrokers, dreadlocked 

squatter punks and Hispanic families who all found that an extremely wide variety of 

drugs were available from an increasingly diverse number and style of distributors. 

Second Street and Avenue B, the hottest heroin comer during that period, was a vivid - 

a reminder of the decidedly odd mixture that had come to characterize the neighborhood. 

19 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
On that corner, an abandoned gas station had been ceded to local artists by a fleeing 

group of Dominican heroin dealers who liked the artists’ unique scrap metal supersculptures. The gas station quickly turned into a neighborhood icon with a hive of 

fantastic metal towers, a 24-hour forge that cranked out bicycle repairs, an 80:foot US 

states steel map, and the proprietors sold organic produce and grilled upstate trout during 

the late summer and fall. While local drug dealers who worked on that comer did not 

associate with the cabal of welders, musicians and farmers that made the gas station their 

headquarters, the area around the gas station, devoid of storefronts and obscured by the 

towering fence made from metal scraps and overgrown with local weeds, was a magnet 

for those needing a public place to linger and conduct business. Exchanges of money for 

syringes happened on the street while heroin was sold more discreetly in nearby nooks 

a 

and apartments. To passers-by, the scene on this corner, like many others in the 

neighborhood, exuded an eclectic blend of people and lifestyles that were, all at once, 

confusing, sometimes complementary, but strangely attractive. The symbolic power of 

this corner has not been lost on other observers: 

Most symbolic in this regard is the new 6-story rental building on the 

corner of Avenue B and Second Street. This building occupies the site of 

an old gas station, converted in the 1980s to an eponymously named art 

gallery. The gallery closed and the condo development was begun in 1996. 

[Tlhe building will contain 61 apartment renting for an average $26 per 

square foot per year ($1,950 per month for a 900 square foot apartment). 

Studded by four duplex penthouses on the top floor, it will be fully wired 

with T-1 Internet access.. . . This late 1990s condominium symbolizes the 

20 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
new constellation of political and economic forces that now transform the 

Lower East Side. (Smith and Defilippis 2000:648) 

As the “Mecca” of drugs, the Lower East Side continued to attract people from 

across the nation and, indeed, the globe. One homeless youth we interviewed commented 

on the annual pilgrimage that he and his legion of friends made to the Lower East Side. 

While he recognized that the Lower East Side was place where homeless youth could 

survive over the summer, at the same time, its fast-paced lifestyle exacted a visible toll on 

them. 

In New York, everybody is fighting and shooting drugs. I see all my 

friends and they look so healthy and looking good and then they come to 

New York City and they just trash themselves. It is too easy to get drugs 

here. It is too easy to get dope. Everywhere else you get a $20 bag of dope 

and kids say they don’t even get high off it. Here you get a fucking dime 

bag of dope, split it between two people and you both get off. . . . I think 

New York City is the worst for chewing people up and spitting them right 

out. 

In 1998, the year before this project began, the researchers interviewed about 40 

of a growing number of nomadic homeless young people (referred to locally as the 

“crusty” kids) who spent their summers in the neighborhood. According to them, 

“Everybody knows about the East Village. It is where the punk rock scene is, and I 

thought, if there is a punk rock scene there, I am sure there is other shit going on as well. 

Might as well head over there” (Isaac). “My sister told me about it first. She told me to go 

down to the East Village and Tompkins Square Park. So I came here to check it out” 

a (Rocket). “It is where I heard all the street kids stay” (Sammy). “Everyone knows about 

21 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Tompkins Square. I heard about it on the road. It is just where the kids go” (Andy). “My 

friend knew to come to the park. It is cool. All my friends come here” (Cindy). “My 

friend told me to come here. When I got here it’s [heroin] all over the East Village. You 

just look around and everybody is a junkie”(Regina). “I know this area. Like I know 

where to get drugs. I have had connections here for a long time” (Karen). 

t 

It has become a standard journalistic cliche that the “East Village” and the Lower I 

East Side in general have gentrified. For example, the New York Times real estate 

section’s weekly column “If you’re thinking of living in.. .” featured the East Village in 

December 2000 in an article entitled “From mean streets to cutting edge”: “On once 

drug-infested streets, it’s now rents that are shooting up” (Garb 2000). The article says 

that the median price of a two-bedroom condominium apartment is $450,000, up from 

$350,000 in 1999 and $150,000 in 1995 and that the “midrange price” on a two-bedroom 

apartment is $1,500 a month, up from $1,200 in 1999 and $900 in 1995. One real estate 

agent is quoted as saying “If you want to live in the East Village, you better be prepared 

to pay a lot of money. The only way to get anything under $1,000 is to share a bedroom.” 

Another article in the “House and Home” section, “On Avenue Cy renewal and regret” 

(Leland 2000), says that “in storefronts that once housed drug dens, a handful of 

entrepreneurs are opening smart bistros, bars and cafes.. . . Gone too are the cinderblocks 

that sealed abandoned buildings; behind the new, double-paned windows are tiny one- 

,, 

a bedroom apartments renting for $2,000 a month, surprising even real estate agents.” The 

22 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
article quotes a staff member at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, a needleexchange and healthcare service provider, then located at Avenue C and Third Street, as 

saying that “We’re looking for a place where our participants won’t have to walk past 

haute couture clothing stores on their way to us.” The Center subsequently moved to the 

presumably more appropriate precincts of Allen Street below Houston Street, outside the 

East Village portion of the neighborhood. Another official of the same program is quoted 

in another article (entitled “East Village junkies as historical footnote”) as lamenting that 

intravenous drug users have become hard to find in the area: “They’ve vanished and I 

can’t figure out where they’ve gone” (Jacobs 1999). Another article, marking the tenth 

anniversary of the anti-gentrification Tompkins Square Park riot of 1998, asks the 

question “Did the protestors win that battle but lose the war?” “These days, however, 

gentrification is alive and well in the East Village, thanks to plummeting crime, the 

waning crack epidemic and the city’s robust economy. Avenue B, once a no-man’s-land 

of drug dealers and shuttered storefronts, is lined with a smattering of new restaurants, 

bars and boutiques. Luxury rentals are moving briskly on Avenue B and Second Street 

and even once-anarchic and drug-addled Avenue C feels tame” (Jacobs 1998). 

The gentrification of the Lower East Side has also become the subject of 

academic discussion as well, much of it focussing on the changes in the area that 

occurred in the 1980s and culminated in the Tompkins Square riot (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 

a 1994, Mele 2000, Smith and Defilppis 2000). Mele’s Selling the Lower East Side: 

23 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Culture, real estate and resistance in New York City (2000) argues that the area’s 

reputation as a center of countercultural activity, and ethnic diversity has been used by 

the real estate industry as a marketing tool: “Commercial and residential developments 

based on representations of an ethnically, sexually and culturally diverse corninunity have 

sold housing to submarket of middle class who are capable of paying significantly higher 

‘rents to consume such an identity.. . . This submarket consists mostly white, collegeeducated individuals in the twenty-to-forty-year range who live alone or in shared 

households” (Mele 2000:297). Mele uses census figures to document the concentration of 

Hispanics and low-income residence in public housing on the eastern and southern 

margins of the area (Mele 2000:302-6). Smith and Defilippis (1999) argue, based on city 

records of tax arrears owed by area landlords that the initial wave of gentrification and 

a 

increases in rents which occurred in the 1980s and abated somewhat during the recession 

of the turn of the decade, has been followed by an even greater increase in the 1990s. 

This view finds support in a recent worldwide survey of housing prices by The 

Economist (“Going through the roof’ 2002), which found that New York real estate 

prices made up their early 1990s decline in the late 1990s and that “Since 1980 prices in 

New York have risen more than five times as fast as the national average.” 

In sum, between the 1960s and the mid-l990s, the Lower East Side had acquired 

and regularly burnished its international reputation as a major center of legal - and extraa legal recreational activity: the bars, cafes, dance and rock clubs that lined the streets and 

24 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
avenues were complemented by the entire spectrum of illegal drugs, including marijuana, 

heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, prescription drugs, psychedelics and, more recently, the 

so-called club drugs, such as Ecstasy (MDMA) and Special K (ketamine). Beginning in 

1983, the police had managed to decrease the blatancy of street-level sales and use (as 

well as crime, in general), but to many observers, the crackdown had resulted in a 

broadening of purchasing options for users rather than restricting the availability of 

drugs. Many different styles of drug distribution also flourished in this heterogeneous 

ferment: in addition to the corporate street-level organizations that remained active, 

freelance street-level retailers were evident, as well as “house connections” (dealers 

operating out of apartments), delivery services, and bar and club sales. It was this rapidly 

changing and heterogeneous mixture of people and drugs, squeezed into a confined urban 

space, that prompted the researchers’ interest in this study. 

METHODS 

This report is based on ethnographic observations and interviews conducted on 

Manhattan’s Lower East Side with 73 dealers of various drugs and 93 users. Slightly 

more than half the sample was white, with Hispanics, African Americans and people of 

mixed heritage making up the remainder. The overwhelming majority of distributors 

were male. Among the 5 female distributors interviewed for the project, 2 of them were 

“dispatchers” for corporate marijuana delivery services; two of the others ran “house 

connection” businesses (one for marijuana, one for heroin) that catered to a relatively 

25 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
small clientele. Users, on the other hand, were evenly split between men and women. The 

majority of the study sample fell into the 25-40 age range, but there were a few who were 

18 and 19, and several who were over 55 years of age. The oldest distributor in the 

sample, 62 years old, began selling heroin in 1996. The researchers had initially worried 

t 

about problems analyzing the data if dealers and users under the age of 18 were 

excluded,3 but contrary to some popular opinion, ther.e was little evidence that substantial 

numbers of youths under the age of 18 were involved in dealing drugs. Though it was 

clear that many people under the age of 18 were using illegal drugs, especially marijuana 

and ecstasy, it did not appear that their patterns or trajectories of use were dissimilar to 

those of other, slightly older users who were eligible for inclusion in the study. 

With the wider view of the overall drug scene that this study attempted to capture, 

there were some niche markets that could not be penetrated without extraordinary effort 

and greater time, and that was a luxury that the research team did not possess. For 

example, one distributor told the researchers about a former associate who delivered 

drugs to an exclusive clientele of “stockbrokers and Wall Street executives.” Though the 

project was not able to conduct direct observations of or many in-depth interviews with 

people who participated in the more exclusive, class-segmented markets that existed on 

the Lower East Side, the fact that the research team documented the existence of these 

Persons under the age of 18 were excluded from the study because the researchers could not convince the 

26 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
truly hidden distributors and consumers provides a more complete picture that what 

currently exists and gave the researchers a better idea of how to contextualize the findings 

that are presented in this report. 

Given the complexity of the overlapping and intersecting markets that 'had 

historically been present on the Lower East Side and which had been increasingly evident 

during the proposal-writing period, the research team purposely sought to recruit a study 

sample that was as broad as possible: one that represented involvement with the entire 

range of illegal drugs that were sold and used in the neighborhood. To that end, fieldwork 

by the researchers first documented the extent and diversity of drugs found in the 

neighborhood through conversations with key research subjects and participants in the 

various drug markets. The research team subsequently interviewed users and distributors 

who sold everything from heroin to methadone, cannabis to Marinol, and Prozac to 

Xanax. 

In addition to drawing a sample that covered the entire spectrum of drugs that 

were available in the area, the project was interested in sampling along two additional 

axes of differentiation: according to differences in the social and technical organization of 

distribution. By social organization of distribution we refer to issues of cooperation, 

differential responsibility, and power and authority among distributors. Technical 

John Jay College Institutional Review Board to allow the study to include minors. 

27 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
organization, on the other hand, refers to issues such as the physical location, policies, 

procedures, technology and equipment employed by distributors. Included as part of the 

technical organization of distribution are such items as the timing and sites of distribution 

a 

activities, the types of materials and equipment used by distributors, and the policies and 

I 

procedures adopted to ensure that distribution activities function smoothly. For analytic 

purposes, some aspects of the technical organization of distribution are clearly more 

important to consider than others. For example, distributors may vary greatly by the type 

of equipment they use to effect retail sales and these may have important law 

I 

enforcement implications, but such distinctions may not be as useful for understanding 

the differences between different styles of distribution. For this research, the location of a 

sales was selected as the critical variable to focus upon because it offered greater analytic 

power than other measures of technical organization. There are many examples in the 

data of different types of selling locales, but we have grouped them into three categories: 

1) street-level sales, 2) indoor sales, and 3) delivery services. Given the rich history of the 

Lower East Side, the researchers anticipated recruiting comparable numbers of 

distributors from each of these three categories, but they quickly discovered that one of 

them, street-level sales, had been significantly affected by recent changes in the 

neighborhood and there were very few street-level distributors working on the Lower 

East Side by the time the researchers entered the field. In many ways, this somewhat 

a startling fact was a major finding of the research and it is discussed at length immediately 

28 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
after this section. Ultimately, the researchers interviewed about a dozen street-level 

operatives while the rest of the sample of distributors was somewhat evenly divided 

0 

between indoor sales and deliver services. \ 

The researchers also recruited from among three ideal types of social organization 

I 

that represent a conceptual sequence of increasing complexity: 1) freelance distributors, 

2) socially bound businesses, and 3) corporate-style distributors. The two major defining I 

characteristics of freelance distributors are a lack of formal hierarchy and the absence of a 

division of labor. Relationships between freelance distributors are, ideally, 

egalitarian-no one owes anything to anyone else and every person is their own 

boss-and alliances made strictly on an ad hoc basis are typically short-lived. Sociallybonded businesses are those that are based upon extra-economic social ties, typically 

a 

kinship, race, ethnicity, nationality, and/or neighborhood. Those who make up the group 

share some common feature (or set of features), beyond simply making money, which 

binds members of the group together. Corporate-style distributors are the most complexly 

organized of our three ideal types. They are the most hierarchic and exhibit the highest 

degree of division of labor, and the associations between persons involved are primarily 

based on making money. Given our earlier experience in the neighborhood over the 

previous few years and that of other researchers in the field, the research team had 

anticipated recruiting a substantial number of distributors who were employees of large 

0 - 

corporate-style street-level organizations, a style that had dominated drug sales on the 

29 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Lower East Side over the past few decades. As mentioned above, however, by the time 

the project began, street sales had largely been eliminated from the neighborhood, and 

e 

most of the large organizations were either disbanded or they downsized and transformed 

the way they did business to accommodate to neighborhood-level changes. The 

researchers found that corporate-style drug distribution organizations continued to 

operate in the neighborhood, but only as delivery services, a type of business that 

generally entails fewer specialized roles, and thus less hierarchy, than their street-level 

counterparts. In the end, freelance distributors accounted for about half of the sample of 

distributors, with socially-bonded and corporate distributors each making up about a 

quarter. 

Because of the changes that had taken place in the neighborhood-gentrification 

overlaid with intensive narcotics- and quality-of-life policing-recruiting subjects for the 

study was much more difficult than the researchers initially anticipated. When the 

investigators wrote the proposal for this study, considerable street-level activity was still 

visible in several parts of the area, and the street-recruitment of research subjects was 

sometimes as easy as taking a stroll down the street (see Appendix I, Typology of drug 

distribution from preliminary research). Street-recruitment was, after all, a strategy that 

had worked well on several earlier research projects, including the 5-year study of heroin 

that the researchers had begun in 1996. By the time the researchers entered the field to 

a begin this study, however, the situation had changed rather dramatically. Street dealing 

30 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
had virtually disappeared (see below) and potential research subjects were difficult to 

locate and sometimes even more difficult to recruit for the study. By the summer of 1999, 

the neighborhood had changed so rapidly and radically that even the homeless kids from 

a 

around the nation who normally made their way to the Lower East Side each summer 

went elsewhere. The few who remained explained the problem from their perspective: 

There are too many fucking cops. Giuliani, man. I got a ticket for laying 

on a bench, sitting on a sidewalk. . . they want us to get out of town. They 

will be glad when it gets cold and none of us are here. 

I love New York, but New York is a little much for me. I have been here 

for three weeks and I got arrested once for smoking a joint, once for doing 

drugs, and once for my old warrants. I can’t seem to stay out of jail here. It 

is very frustrating. 

’, 

Steady and intensive policing was one factor that drove street-level activities a 

indoors, and as distributors retreated to more private domains and the police adjusted 

their approach to the problem, the problems of research subject recruitment were 

compounded. In interview after interview, research subjects spoke about the air of 

paranoia that had come to permeate the neighborhood (and New York City in general) 

and many people were extremely suspicious of everyone, especially other users who were 

suspected of having become police informants to save their own skins. Below, one Puerto 

Rican dealerher talks about the level of paranoia that had crept over the downtown 

scene: 

These days, it’s much harder to get drugs. You gotta be careful first, who 

you gonna talk to, ‘cause down here you don’t really know who’s who. 

31 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

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You got a lotta guys, they worlun’ with the police just so they could stay 

high. The only way you really know someone, like I know you and you 

know me, ya know, and maybe we know some other people. But then 

again, you don’t know how many other people have changed themselves, 

just so they could stay above water, ya know what I’m sayin’. 

The lack of trust, it seems, impinged upon every category of relationship: 

I 

neighbors were often described as vengeful and were constantly suspected of having 

called the police on dealers and users, users were uniformly suspected of being informers, 8 

dealers were accused of using the police to eliminate rivals, and they were even suspected 

of tipping off the police about their customers, as one cocaine user worried: 

There were times I had copped [drugs], and the people I copped from-the 

way they are-it’s just like they know people are bein’ busted when they 

walk a block away, but they’re sellin’ anyway. It’s like they gonna be 

down with the fuckin’ police, man, ya know-I’m serious, ya know. 

In a period characterized by great paranoia among distributors and consumers, the 

ability to recruit anyone for this study was an achievement. The researchers’ affiliation 

with John Jay College of Criminal Justice was also sometimes an impediment to 

overcome with distributors and users, particularly after 9/11, when we found ourselves 

sharing floor space with the Secret Service, whose presence made some research subjects 

even more uneasy about talking with the researchers. 

The atmosphere of secrecy and distrust was not confined to research subjects; it 

was a theme that ran through nearly every group of people that the researchers talked 

with about the study. No one, it seemed, wanted to go “on the record” about anything, 

32 

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and it was, and remains yet today, a serious impediment to formulating a complete 

picture and understanding of the forces that are changing this neighborhood and the city 

at large. In the opinion of virtually everyone the researchers spoke with, the responsibility 

for this dark and worrisome undercurrent that stained an otherwise upbeat picture of 

urban regeneration, lies squarely and indisputably with the Giuliani administration. The 

unwillingness to divulge information, we were told, was the outcome of direct orders or 

rooted in the perception that harsh punishment would befall on those who violated the 

secrecy dictum. Thus, for example, despite letters, phone calls and verbal appeals, we 

were unable to get even the most basic crime and arrest information from the Police 

Department for the three precincts that intersect in the study area. It has only been since 

the Giuliani administration has left office that any numbers at all have been forthcoming. 

FINDINGS4 

a 

0 

THE VIRTUAL DISAPPEARANCE OF STREET SALES 

As mentioned above, the technical organization of distribution refers to issues 

such as the physical location, policies, procedures, technology and equipment employed 

by distributors, and includes the timing and sites of distribution activities to ensure that 

distribution activities function smoothly. This section will primarily describe and analyze 

changes in the “sites” of distribution according to the tripartite division described in the 

33 

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Methods section (above) -- street sales, indoor businesses and delivery services-but will 

also include some discussion of changes in the tools and technology that are employed by 

participants in the various drug markets. For example, the widespread use of cell phones, 

pagers, and to a lesser degree computers, to conduct business is discussed in light of the 

a 

increasing class fragmentation of drug markets, specific changes in local conditions (e.g., 

blocking incoming calls on pay phones) and national or global trends (e.g., the ubiquity 

of cell phones). 

The most notable change in the technical organization of distribution on the 

Lower East Side during the study period has been the almost complete disappearance of 

street-level drug sales, especially those effected by corporate-style organizations. Our 

description of/use of the term corporate-style drug distribution arose from our and others’ 

observations of “old school” New York City-style drug dealing in public spaces. 

Distributors of this type were very common from the 1970s through the mid-1990s 

(although, of course, many other styles of distribution also flourished at that time) and 

arguably represented the dominant form of drug distribution throughout New York City 

during that period (see, e.g., Curtis and Wendel 2000, Johnson et al. 1985, Preble and 

Casey 1969, Waterston 1993, Wendel and Curtis 2000). The term corporate arose 

primarily from the stratified and hierarchical nature of these enterprises, which exhibited 

a See Appendix 11, Typology of drug distribution, 2001, for a table depicting drug markets at the end of the 

34 

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a great deal of division of labor and functional specialization (“owners,” “managers,” 

“workers,” “lookouts,” “touts,” etc.), and often paid wages to their “workers” on a 

regular payday. Invariably, when talking with study participants about their overall 

impression of how the neighborhood had changed over the last few years, the’first thing 

they talked about is how the “street” had changed with the disappearance of these 

organizations. Below, several long-time drug users and distributors from the 

neighborhood summarize the change: 

[The neighborhood] cooled down a helluva lot, man, a lot! If you ever 

been down here before, you could see the difference-the change of 

people. A lotta people that was here at that time, they’re not here now. 

They either dead or they in jail somewhere. There’s still drugs here, but 

not like it was before. Now, maybe they not sellin’ on the corners like they 

used to, but they usin’ beepers to do what they have to do. They doin’ it 

that way or they on bicycles, you know. 

I mean it’s totally different [today]. If you do drugs, it’s like underground, 

it’s real quiet. Nobody comes here approaching you, you gotta actually 

know the person. [It’s hard] to cop drugs out here now, you know what 

I’m sayin’. It’s real down low now, you know what I’m sayin’-it’s real 

down low now. 

Well, I used to sell drugs on Second Street and Avenue B-back in the 

day. I lived in the Lower East Side for all my life. Now, you barely see 

[drugs] out here. Back in the days, the Lower East Side always had 

abandoned buildings and you went from this building to that building and 

you didn’t have to come out. All you hadda do is go from building to 

building, yard to yard [for drugs]. Back in the days, out here was a mess. 

Judy, 38: 

a 

study period. 

35 

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The way I see it now-it’s like cleaned up compared to the way it was, say 

in ‘83. You could walk the streets now. You don’t see syringes layin’ all 

over the place like you used to back then. Before, you used to see syringes 

everywhere, and now it’s like if you find like three in a neighborhood it’s 

a lot. At least the kids can play without fallin’ down and gettin’ 

hurt-worryin’, gettin’ stuck with a needle or an infected needle, ya know. 

The other day I went out looking for weed in the street. I used to time 

myself in the early nineties, before I got connected better, just to see how 

quickly I could score a bag of weed. It would be like two minutes 

sometimes, but sometimes I had to walk a few blocks till I found someone. 

This last time the two people I asked I could tell they were on their own, 

without any kind of back-up or friends or look outs and I figured it would 

just be a fluke thing, like, maybe he’ll just sell me some of his personal 

stash. But they just told me they could give me some beeper numbers. I 

thought that was pretty generous and wondered if they were open so late, 

it was one in the morning. They both said that the services probably 

weren’t open then. 

The shrinkage of street-level markets and reductions in the number of street-level 

dealers can probably be traced as far back as Operation Pressure Point in 1983-4, when a 

0 

heavy police presence managed to displace street-level operatives from the western end 

of the Lower East Side (Mulgrav 1985, Zimmer 1987) (particularly, lst Avenue and 

Avenue A) to areas surrounding public housing projects in the eastern section of the 

neighborhood. By the middle and late 1990s, gentrification and continuous pressure 

applied by the police had made much of the Lower East Side inhospitable to street-level 

dealers. 

By the time that this project began in 1999, there were virtually no organizations 

conducting street-level transactions on the Lower East Side. The place where the e 

36 

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researchers anticipated finding street-level drug transactions was near Avenue D, in and 

around the public housing projects. With that in mind, several users and part-time dealers 

were contacted in May 1999 to help the research team identify these markets and the 

people who operated and participated in them. One particular incident was typical of the 

experiences that the research team encountered when trying to observe and interview the 

participants in these vestigial markets. One former heroin dealer, Tony, who had worked 

with the researchers on other projects and had been quite helpful in recruiting research 

subjects was asked to act as an intermediary so that the researchers could meet some of 

the local street-level heroin dealers. He had recently been laid off when the corporate 

sellers downsized, but he continued to occasionally work with them and still knew many 

of those who remained in the business as well as their customers. He took members of the 

research team to meet a group of heroin dealers on Avenue D and E. 12" Street. 

Arriving at the projects around 3p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, he was somewhat 

mystified that the young men who he thought were sure to be there, were not visible in 

their usual spots around the housing projects. Tony explained that the young men that 

sold heroin spent most of their time hanging around outside the projects, but that their 

hours of operation were severely limited, unlike the previous year when their operation 

was often open around the clock. It is significant to note that heroin was the only drug 

that continued to be sold on the street by organized distributors. One reason for this is 

a that, unlike most other drugs, the pharmacology of heroin use demands that habituated 

37 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
users administer the drug at regular intervals or they begin to experience withdrawal 

symptoms, and the social and economic circumstances of most users are such that they 

cannot purchase drugs in advance, but rather engage in a pattern of “copping” one or 

more times daily. Thus, distributors can anticipate, and indeed, shape their clients’ 

purchasing routines, but transactions must take place at fairly regular intervals. This 

group of distributors had developed a schedule with their customers that allowed them to 

spend only a few hours each day transacting business, thereby reducing their risk of 

detection and arrest. The rest of the time, they milled around the projects playing soccer 

or basketball, watching for potential trouble like unknown or suspicious-looking persons 

asking about buying drugs, or making arrangements with loyal customers to meet at 

specific times and places. When Tony did not see the dealers on a particular set of 

benches near Avenue D or near the basketball courts, he went to their mothers’ 

apartments to find out where they were. 

As the ethnographer sat outside the projects waiting for Tony to return, it was 

clear that the Lower East Side had changed rather dramatically over the last few years. 

The park was filled with children playing, mothers pushed baby carriages up and down 

the sidewalk, a wedding party with men in tuxedos and women in chiffon dresses carried 

bouquets of flowers and trays of food in and out of the lobby of the building that Tony 

had entered, and old men sat in the shade in front of a bodega playing dominoes and 

e listening to salsa that blared on the radio. If there were still drug dealers and users in the 

38 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
area, they were scarcely visible in this transformed urban landscape. The ethnographer, 

whose presence a few years ago might have caused all these heads to turn in this Hispanic 

neighborhood, was scarcely noticed and people went about their business without any 

apparent distractions. When Tony finally returned an hour later, he apologized for taking 

so long and then proceeded to explain that the dealers were afraid to come outside and 

meet the ethnographer, despite his vouching for our trustworthiness and telling them that 

he had known us for more than 10 years. It was several weeks later before we were able 

to talk with some of the distributors who worked in the area, but their levels of paranoia 

never seemed to disappear, and even though they appeared to spend the majority of their 

days relaxing and lounging on the benches around the projects, they were often extremely 

anxious about who might be watching them. Over time, we discovered that customers, 

too, frequently had difficulty locating and buying drugs from former street-level dealers 

like these, and many of them found it easier to buy elsewhere. For example, one longterm heroin and cocaine injector with visible track marks on his arms complained that he 

could no longer walk into the area and buy drugs; even he needed an intermediary to 

make a purchase: 

Coke is in the projects, in the ones near Chinatown. Tens and twenties are 

sold there. At that place, I have to sit in the car while my pal goes in to 

cop. They don’t let me go in and I never get to see the transactions. It’s 

sold in foil packets, like in the old days. Often, we go across the bridge to 

Williamsburg. It’s more convenient to go there because you don’t have to 

search for anyone and I know the people there. 

39 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The researchers were surprised by the cautiousness that street-level dealers 

exhibited; they were loath to take on new clients or talk to strangers like the 

ethnographers. Perhaps because they had been the main targets of narcotics enforcement 

while their more sheltered counterparts seemed scarcely affected by policing, they 

seemed to treat everyone as a potential informer. Since street-level drug markets had such 

a long history in the neighborhood, however, the research team felt compelled to find out 

what happened to some of the more enduring businesses whose operations the research 

team had periodically documented in the years leading up to this project. Two of these 

street-level businesses are discussed below. 

“Laundromat” and “GQ” 

Laundromat was infamous for the brazenness of the transactions that they 

conducted in full view of the entire block. In the pre-“Pressure Point” era, drugs were 

sold from a laundromat in a tenement building located in the middle of the block on East 

7” Street between Avenues B and C. By the late 199Os, Laundromat was long gone, but 

the drug selling continued, first from the former laundromat and then from the residential 

building where the storefront laundromat had been located. Heroin users from across the 

metropolitan area flocked to this site to buy $10 unstamped bags of heroin. Cocaine was 

also available in $5 foil-wrapped units, primarily for heroin users who preferred 

“speedballs” (a mixture of heroin and cocaine that is typically injected) - few who were 

exclusively users of cocaine would buy there. Two lookouts were posted at each end of 

40 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
the block to watch for the police, and other workers in front of the building would exhort 

would-be buyers to “Keep moving! Keep moving! Come back in ten minutes!” When the 

traffic light on the end of the block was red and no police were in sight, sellers wearing 

ski masks and waiter’s aprons with large, deep pockets stuffed with bags of heroin and 

cocaine stepped out the front door onto the stoop to serve the lines of drug users that 

formed in seconds. Furiously selling bags and “bundles” of drugs, money and drugs 

changed hands rapidly for several minutes. After selling all their drugs, or stepping inside 

to avoid detection by the police, the remaining users would have to linger around the area 

to wait for the sellers to reappear in about half an hour, only to have the same scenario 

play out all over again. 0 

This classic corporate-style organization began in the 1980s and was one of the 

last remaining street-level organizations on the Lower East Side in the late 1990s, but 

they were put out of business in 1996 (Harnett and Andrews 1999). A member of the 

New York City Police Department about the years of frustrations that Laundromat had 

presented for the Department and how they finally “solved” the problem. 

We were going there every day and filling up the van with people. We 

must have arrested hundreds at that spot alone. But when we went to 

community meetings, we were getting hammered by residents who 

complained that the minute we left the area, the dealers came right back 

out. No matter how often we went there or how many people we arrested, 

we couldn’t seem to get rid of the problem. Eventually, we figured out that 

this was not going to solve the problem, so for about 6 months, we did 

surveillance on the block. Undercover officers bought drugs there to learn 

more about the business, and observations were made from rooftops and 

41 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
other places. Eventually, we learned who the different players were, who 

was in charge, where they kept their drugs, where the stash houses were, 

and so on. After about 6 months of this, we went in one day and arrested 

everyone connected with the operation. After that, Laundromat was closed 

for good and the block has been clean since then. 

The initial approach taken by the police was to arrest the laborers of this 

organization-the lowest rung on the corporate ladder-and seize whatever drugs might 

be found with them, but with a nearly inexhaustible supply of street-level workers at their 

disposal and the bulk of the drugs hidden in nearby locations, the owners and managers 

of Laundromat were easily able to keep pace in a war of attrition and still make a profit. 

It was only after several months of close observation by undercover police that the social 

organization of the business was mapped and the technical organization of the business 

understood in such a way that the police could effectively intervene, arrest the key 

players, seize their assets, and close the business down. 

Even though the police were able to close down Laundromat, drugs were still 

available on the block, just not in as visible a fashion. While most residents, especially 

the newer ones, seemed generally pleased by the passing of this local institution, some 

long-term residents expressed mixed feelings about its demise. One white “yuppie” 

resident of the block who was a marijuana user but had always viewed the activities of 

Laundromat with great distress told researchers 

At first, when they got busted we were happy, like ‘Ding! Dong! The 

witch is dead! But then I realized, now I can’t lock my bike on the street 

overnight. I could be mugged right on my own block. I live in New York 

42 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
City now. Because this was a very safe block, those guys wouldn’t allow 

any crime. 

The closing of Laundromat was a capstone event in the gentrification of the 

Lower East Side, but many saw its closing as more than simply a skirmish in the war on 

drugs. To them, it signaled the triumph of gentrification, the certainty of escalating rents, 

new kinds of neighbors, and increased vulnerability to street crime, which Laundromat 

employees had effectively controlled on the block. Three years after the city shut down 

Laundromat, apartments in a newly-constructed luxury apartment building (with in-house 

laundry room) next door to the Laundromat building were renting for $1,800 to 5,500 a 

month (Garbarine 1999). 

e Another long-term street dealing location did manage to survive into the study 

period, but only briefly. GQ was a cocaine and crack dealing organization that operated 

out of a bodega and two apartments on First Avenue and 1 lth Street. Everyone who 

worked there was Hispanic, although in later years not all were Puerto Rican or 

Dominican. Mexicans, Ecuadorians and Colombians, many of whom got their jobs 

through relatives, also worked there over the many years that GQ was in operation. This 

is an example of a business which bridged the gap between what we have termed a 

socially-bonded and a corporate business: many of the workers were related to each 

other, but there was a hierarchy of workers, managers and owners. Prior to the study 

period, GQ had been a fairly typical Lower East Side cocaine bodega: a business that was 

43 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
a legitimate, if poorly-stocked and indifferently-run, grocery store, which also sold 

cocaine. Many such stores filled the area during the 1980s and early 1990s. GQ also 

developed a sideline in crack, which drew a different clientele than their cocaine 

operation. Because the dealers saw their crack clientele as “dirty” and “low-lifes”, they 

would not let them into the store, but sold to them outside on the street. By the beginning 

of the study period, most sales of both cocaine and crack took place on the street outside ,. , 

the bodega, with crack sold on the opposite side of First Avenue from the store and 

cocaine directly in front. Many arrests took place, day in and day out, but with seemingly 

little effect on the organization’s ability to conduct business as usual. While law 

enforcement pressures were apparently not enough to eliminate GQ’s operation, the 

business was finally dismantled when the landlord replaced the bodega with a distinctly 

upscale restaurant. The surrounding area had changed, too: many new stores and 

restaurants catering to newer, more affluent neighborhood residents appeared in the area 

that was GQ’s turf. GQ’s sellers no longer blended into the fabric of the neighborhood, 

but were now conspicuous and vulnerable. 

Laundromat and GQ were two high-profile street-level corporate-style businesses 

that had operated on the Lower East Side for more than a decade. The sudden demise of 

both of the organizations in 1998 and 1999 underscores how an array of pressures 

brought about rapid changes in the neighborhood. In the case of Laundromat, the 

relentless application of narcotics policing was the key element in closing down the 

44 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
operation, though it required an innovative approach that was more than the standard 

buy-and-bust routine, and a considerable investment of time and effort. GQ, on the other 

0 

hand, was not dismantled by brute force, but rather, by the encroachment of gentrification 

that attracted new populations and merchants who displaced GQ's management from 

their storefront headquarters and made selling drugs on the sidewalk increasingly visible 

'and uncomfortable for their operatives. 

Adaptations in the street-level markets: temporal displacement and Washington 

Square Park 

With the disappearance of street sales effected by corporate organizations like 

Laundromat and GQ, street-level drug transactions became quite rare in the 

a neighborhood. Most of the changes in street-level drug markets observed by the 

researchers involved the physical displacement of dealers and users to indoor locales and 

an accompanying adjustment in the way that business was conducted. Those dealers who 

continued to meet customers on the streets, like the heroin dealers in the projects 

described above, tended to severely limit their hours of operation and coordinate business 

with long-term customers in such a way that their vulnerability was reduced. There were, 

however, a few exceptions. Street-level markets for methadone and pharmaceuticals were 

active near drug treatment facilities. These markets are discussed later, in the context of 

the increasing class segmentation of drug markets. For those distributors who attempted 

to remain active at the street level but did not have a strong connection to their customer a 

45 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
base, a temporal displacement effect was clearly at work. For example, the researchers 

observed occasional sales made by opportunistic freelance distributors who solicited 

heroin customers from their bicycles near Tompkins Square Park, a site that had a 

reputation for being a place where heroin users hang out and use drugs. These few 

instances, observed only during the first year of fieldwork, were very brief in duration 

and happened only during a few hours each day. We have termed these transitory and 

opportunistic street markets “hit and run” markets. 

Another type of opportunistic operation observed by the researchers capitalized 

on the late-night crowd exiting from bars, clubs and other events. These types of 

transactions tended to occur after midnight, and were confined to a few hours-generally, 

about midnight to 2 a.m.-at one or two specific locales in the neighborhood. In one 

case, two dealers set up a temporary base on the stoop of a building near the one of the 

East Village’s main drags while a “runner” solicited customers for a cut of the proceeds. 

A loca marijuana dealer who came across the scene commented: 

The other night I saw this dude scurrying down the street counting money 

with a pair of white suburban-types trailing behind. They seemed drunk, 

or maybe high on X [ecstasy] or coke, I don’t know what but they 

definitely weren’t sober. The other couple was standing in front of one of 

the new boutiquehintage clothes/whatever shops, the woman yelling loud 

enough for anyone to hear within 40 feet, “Don’t get it unless it’s good!” 

The woman was in her mid-twenties and was wealthy enough to have 

purchased the latest fashions from J. Crew or Eddie Bauer or some store 

like that. Both the men had khaki tan pleated shorts that reached their 

knees and bulky woolen socks stuffed inside brown boatlsport utility 

shoes. They seemed to be bridge and tunnel types; New York people don’t 

46 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
usually dress that dorky. It was just like they had stepped out of a mall. 

The fact that they were buying drugs in the street in the year 2000 just 

showed that they were too out of it to have a delivery number. 

These after-midnight sales by opportunistic freelancers and small, socially-bonded 

businesses almost exclusively marketed cocaine to late-night revelers, a population that is 

4 

easily recognizable within the small window of opportunity that exists at this very 

particular time and place. 

The bicycle dealers in Tompkins Square Park eventually stopped coming around 

every afternoon, partially due to the lack of potential customers, but also as the result of 

changes in the park that made them increasingly visible during a time when there was 

considerable policing. On the other hand, the late-night markets persist because their - - 

a 

customer base has not disappeared, and indeed, it might very well have increased as the 

result of more bars and clubs opening in the area (see below), but also because there is 

simply far less enforcement activity in the late evening than during the day. Though we 

were not able to get any information from the Police Department regarding the timing of 

their drug arrests, observations and interviews strongly suggest the most active period for 

drug enforcement activity is during daylight hours. 

There was one street-level market that merits mention, even though it fell several 

blocks outside the western edge of the project’s research area. The persistence of this 

market is important to note because it was the recipient of much more pressure from the 

0 forces of gentrification and the police than any of the sites the researchers observed on 

47 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
the Lower East Side, including Laundromat and GQ. Since at least the 1960s, 

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, adjacent to New York University, has 

had a reputation for drug sales, especially marijuana. Since the 1970s, the park has been 

dominated by a loose federation of West Indian freelance distributors, mostly Jamaicans, 

who generally do not live in the immediate area. At one time, anonymous transactions 

were common in the park, but dealers generally preferred, and sought to develop, a stable 

client base. Under the Giuliani administration, extremely aggressive policing in and 

around the park and the installation of video surveillance cameras in the late 1990s had, 

in the opinion of many, largely eliminated the problem. Yet despite the extraordinary 

attention that drug sales in the area received from the police and local residents, 

distributors and consumers continued to meet there with regularity. For example, one 

Jamaican marijuana dealer who spends his days in Washington Square Park, discusses his 

daily routine and the degree to which law enforcement is an inconvenience but does not 

prevent him from conducting business. 

For the past twenty-four hours-me wake up yesterday morning, me eat, 

shit, shower and shave. You see? Take my daughter to school, walk me 

wife to the train station. Then me start a hust1in’-like sellin’ reefer, West 

Fourth Street Park. Me been down this area now for maybe the past three 

years. On a average day, me could make at least a hundred dollars. Me 

have me own clientele so me don’t have to sell to no stranger. Most a the 

time me sit in the park, play soccer ball with my friends then and sell my 

weed. I don’t start no trouble with nobody and I stay in the park ‘till about 

five. Me go home and check on the kids from school. Evenin’ time me 

spend time with my wife-everyday ting-the routine never change. 

Never sell to nobody me don’t know and me only deal with customers me 

48 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
know for years! Me been arrested for sellin' my reefer-but not for long 

time now. 

While nearly every site for street-level dealing on the Lower East Side and in Greenwich 

Village has disappeared lover the last several years, the continued existence of marijuana 

sales in and around Washington Square Park-indeed, the normalcy with which dealers 

perceive the situation-suggests that some markets will persist despite the investment of 

time, money, technology and enforcement personnel far beyond the point of diminishing 4 

re turns. 

Post 9/11 street-level drug sales 

For the most part, there is little evidence to suggest that drug dealers reoccupied 

the streets in the numbers predicted by the police or media fear mongers following the 

events of 9/11. On the Lower East Side, one of the neighborhoods closest to ground zero, 

a minimal change in the way that drugs are distributed since 9/11 was observed, with a 

few street-level freelance dealers furtively offering marijuana or cocaine to passers by. In 

those neighborhoods where drugs were sold on the street before 9/11, there was clearly a 

reprieve for drug dealers when the police were diverted to emergency duties and some of 

them saw street-level markets become quite blatant for about three months. On the Lower 

East Side, however, especially in the two weeks following the attack when Manhattan 

south of 14'h Street was closed to all traffic, there was considerably less public dealing 

than other neighborhoods that the researchers observed, and some dealers-especially 

49 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
marijuana dealers whose product is bulky and pungent-were fearful of bringing supplies 

into the neighborhood because of the stepped up police presence in the area. 

THE GROWTH OF DELIVERY AND DELIVERY SERVICES 

As street-level markets and the street-level drug users they catered to have 

disappeared from the Lower East Side, they have been replaced by drug delivery as the 

primary way for people to sell and buy drugs. Though there are a considerable number of 0 

corporate delivery businesses that exist on the Lower East Side, the market is open to the 

type of smaller, less organized businesses that were not permitted to coexist and compete 

with their dominant corporate counterparts when transactions took place on the street and 

in other public spaces. In the more recent past, in addition to the growing number of 

delivery operations, many novel forms of drug distribution in other areas of the city have 

been documented, including: 

0 A Brooklyn ice cream truck which sold marijuana and hashish (Roane 1998a) 

“a cluster of sports bars on Staten Island” which distributed cocaine (Roane 

1998b). 

0 A hotel which “sold millions of dollars worth of crack cocaine to white-collar 

workers in midtown Manhattan” (Rohde 1998). 

A Bronx car service which delivered cocaine and heroin in radio-dispatched 

cabs (Fitz-Gibbon 1998). 

In this section, we describe the three primary types of drug delivery operations 

that were observed over the research period: freelance delivery, bar delivery of drugs, and 

corporate delivery services. Prior to that, we describe the history of drug delivery on the 

50 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Lower East Side, beginning with marijuana delivery in the 1970s. Unlike anonymous 

street transactions, buyers almost invariably need an introduction to be able to buy from 

one of these distributors, but such introductions (sometimes done entirely over the phone) 

are relatively easy to come by. Distributors often rely on a core base of reliable clients 

and this allows them to anticipate sales and profits, but they also sometimes seek to build 

market share by recruiting customers from rivals. Unlike street-level transactions where 

violence was sometimes an outcome of coveting a rival’s customers, in this market place, 

violence over customers is virtually unheard of. Below, a bartender in the neighborhood 

talks about drug delivery, accentuating its difference from earlier methods of selling and 

acquiring illegal drugs. 

Rent has tripled and the neighborhood is gentrified. And as far as drugs 

go, like I said, it’s gone from off the street to delivery. The demographics 

have changed in this neighborhood-there’s richer people living in this 

neighborhood, where ten years ago you still had the arty farty freaks who 

could sort of afford to live in this neighborhood. Now, you don’t have that, 

so you don’t have that much of a street style-you know. What you have 

now is a gated community that lives in their apartments and I think that 

totally caters to a delivery clientele. I would say that the availability is 

higher than it was. The delivery thing has been goin’ on for quite awhile. I 

think it was always here anyway, but it just became more of what 

everybody did-“Let’s get some blow. Okay. Do you got a number?” 

That’s it, “Do you have a number?” A phone number-a 917 -- a 

cellphone number. You call the guy up. “Where are you?” “I’m here, blah, 

blah, blah.” “How much do you want?” You have to get a minimum of 

fifty dollars. “Okay, who wants some coke?” And like that. And then the 

guy would come and show up. 

History of delivery on the Lower East Side 

51 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Drug delivery in New York City began in the late 1970s or early in 1980s on the 

Lower East Side, when “Pope” Mickey Cesar (AKA Caesar, Cezar, etc.), a homosexual 

Navy veteran who had been selling marijuana in the Netherlands was deported and I 

returned to downtown Manhattan to set up shop in the East Village, selling marijuana to 

all who called 777-CASH or appeared at his storefront, which was raided in 198 1 (Sager 

t 

1991). Subsequently he moved to Eleventh Street and Avenue B, where his “Church of 

the Realized Fantasy” set up shop, selling marijuana at 1-800-WANT-POT (Sager 1991). 

This number was widely known and was heavily publicized, especially by “Pope” 

Mickey’s annual appearances at the May Day Fifth Avenue Pot Parade clad in a papal 

mitre emblazoned with a large marijuana leaf and handing out,free joints attached to 

business cards advertising his 1 -800-WANT-POT service (Sager 199 1). Long-time 

marijuana activist (and “Pope” enemy) Dana Beale comments on “Michael Caesar, the 

self-styled ‘Pope of Pot”’: 

For ten years, the “Pope” had a simple but effective way of glomming all 

the column inches available for pot coverage in the New York papers: 

Open up a marijuana delivery service; offer all the younger anarchists jobs 

(without the political demands they’d be subjected to at #9 [Bleecker 

Street, the headquarters of Beale’s group], where they were forbidden to 

deal pot). Let them do hard drugs (Fred was the Pope’s lieutenant for 

years; all his earnings went into his arm.) Then go public in unfriendly 

media like the New York Post, get busted, and take all the delivery boys to 

The parade has been a New York institution since the late 70s, although much smaller in the Giuliani * 

years (January 1994-January 2002) due to widespread arrests. 

52 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
jail with you.. . .He [Beale] knew that Pope Mickey was only interested in 

free advertising for dial-a-joint (DeRienzo et al. 1997:77). 

The “Pope” reigned until 1990, when he appeared on the Howard Stern radio show and 

advertised the 1-800-WANT-POT number, which resulted in a police raid on November 

14, 1990, which followed three purchases made by police from the service’s couriers 

(Sager 1991). The service continued in operation after the arrest, and, according to our 

research, many of the services which followed (including some of our research subjects) ’ 

assembled their initial client lists from the Cesar’s customer list which allegedly included 

as many as 5,000 clients. Cesar died of liver cancer on February 1, 1995. ,, 

The marijuana delivery business became a New York institution in the 1990s. 

Knowing references to “weed delivery” are a staple of the city’s alternativekountercultural press. For example, when the satirical weekly The Onion moved their editorial 

headquarters from the midwest to New York City, weekly lifestyle/listings publication 

TimeOutNewYork interviewed them about “what they like best about their new home”: 

“Weed delivery.” 

“Oh my God-why didn’t we say that?’ 

“I just said it.” 

“Scratch everything. That is number one.” 

“The guy brings it to your door-and you don’t even have to listen to 

tapes of his band.” (Cohen 2001) 

53 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
A nationally syndicated radio broadcast series on the underground economy syndicated 

on public radio stations6 commented that “It’s the way that drug dealers have adapted 

that’s interesting. Knowing New Yorkers-who are mostly carless and love ordering 

in-dealers have taken a page from grocery stores, delis and restaurants. For thousands of 

New Yorkers, illegal door to door drugs are just a phone call away. Jody, who 

understandably doesn’t want to use her real name, spent last summer delivering pot to 

customers in uptown Manhattan. And as she wrote in her diary during her summer of 

selling drugs, ‘It’s not bad work if you can get it”’ (Henn 2001). 

The online publication Wired (affiliated with the computer-oriented magazine of 

the same name) commented in 2001 that “Drug delivery services are nearly as ubiquitous 

in New York as pick-up basketball and pizza parlors. And they are alarmingly 

businesslike, passing out business cards, offering frequent buyers’ programs, and sending 

flyers to customers when contact numbers change.” (Schachtman 2001) In their annual 

“Best of Manhattan” issue, downtown weekly New Yurk Press included “Best trend in 

weed delivery: Clear plastic boxes’’: “All the guys we buy from sell them in clear plastic 

boxes; they look like ice cubes with flowers frozen inside” (Anonymous 1998). 

An article in the UK fashiodmusic-oriented magazine The Face (Jellinek 1999) 

gives a detailed description of a freelance delivery distributor of marijuana, who rides a 

The program interviewed study author Travis Wendel, as well as “Jody.” 

54 

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position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
1--, , 

motorcycle and sells marijuana to clients who contact him by beeper. The article also 

mentions, but does not discuss in detail, an apparently corporate-style marijuana delivery 

e 

organization. The article discusses the pressures of the job, including fear of arrest and 

robbery and describes a robbery of “Dean,” the freelance seller: 

Dean is standing in a record shop on Avenue A in the East Village, 

looking nervous. Outside are a couple of guys he thinks are following him. 

Messengers dread making deliveries in the East Village. Here, more than 

anywhere else in the city, messengers get jacked [robbed]. In recent years 

the neighborhood has seen a huge number of young, white hipsters move 

in. With them have come marijuana delivery services. Since many of 

these guys [marijuana deliverers] are also young, wealthy and white, they 

are easy targets for muggers. (Jellinek 1999) 

The article also mentions the intense competition for such jobs, saying that “It is almost 

0 impossible to become a drug messenger. The competition for a slot working for one of 

the delivery services is intense” (Jellinek 1999). 

A Spin magazine article, “Confessions of a Pot Delivery Girl,” written by an 

recent Ivy League graduate, says that, as a result of her job “I soon became convinced 

that virtually every person on the island of Manhattan smokes pot. I delivered to doctors, 

lawyers, professors, architects, housewives, and stockbrokers.” Initially, according to the 

article, she feared arrest, “[blut the feeling passed as I walked by them [police] in my 

black leather mules and knee-length skirt, a confident felon, young and white and female, 

handily concealed from the scope of the law” (Feinman 2001). 

55 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In the summer of 2001, the Internet was abuzz with rumors of a Net-based home 

pot delivery service. It turned out to be hoax, intended to promote “We Deliver” 

(available at www.we-deliver.tv), a web-based TV series about “Green Acres” a fictional 

Lower East Side-based marijuana delivery service. The series, guest-starring actress 

Rosie Perez as a stressed-out dot-commer and marijuana delivery customer, was 

produced by sputnik7 “the world’s first real-time audiohide0 Internet entertainment 

experience, sputnik7 is a broadcast network offering a sophisticated mix of independent 

music, film, and anime programming via interactive Video Stations, Audio Stations, 

Videos on Demand, and Digital Downloads. sputnik7 [sic] recently received 3 awards: 

the Invision Award for Excellence in Entertainment, the Invision Award for Best 

Entertainment Streaming Media Site, and the first-ever ASCAP - Deems Taylor Award 

for an Internet website with outstanding music-related content” (Sputnik7 2001). 

Sputnik7 also recently released a theatrical film about hip-hop DJs, Scratch. 

Sponsored by a long list of trendy hip hophkateboard-oriented sportswear 

companies (including Triple 5 Soul, August Bishop, Rp55, North Peak, Enyce, Willie 

Esco, Dimes, Armani, Ecko Unlimited, Supreme, Writers Bench, Mecca, Soletechnology 

and Etnies), the eight-part web-based series follows the adventures of the employees of 

the service. A review in the pro-marijuana magazine High Times says that “Pothead 

couch-potato types will love this stuff. Green Acres sets up Wedeliver.com at the Fat 

e Beats record store in Greenwich Village. Things quickly spin out of control because 

56 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Wedeliver.com is a high-tech weed-delivery service that responds to calls online-the 

kozmo.com of pot dealers” (High Times 2001). Another reviewer (Moretti 2001) 

0 

commented that 

About two years ago I wrote an article on the popularity of various weed 

delivery services that were operating across Manhattan. When the story hit 

the streets we caught tons of shit from people who thought we’d blown the 

cover of a great scam. I tried to tell them it was smart to be paranoid 

because their secret world was about to explode. Since then the number of 

weed delivery services has multiplied ten fold and become infinitely more 

efficient. Now even movie people are getting in on it. After getting so 

much flak for my first article on weed delivery it was nice to see someone 

who knew their shit talking about smoking shit. All this media attention 

isn’t evil. It’s a secret heads up to the dealers. So, if you’re out there 

delivering weed, watch “We Deliver,” take notes, get organized and most 

of all, stay paranoid. 

a The online magazine Slate (“Lucas Miller” 2000) in an article entitled “Smoked out: 

what do cops really think about marijuana” by regular correspondent, pseudonymous 

policeman “Lucas Miller,” discusses how an off-duty policeman encounters the 

marijuana delivery market in the course of his social life: 

About a week ago, I stopped by my girlfriend’s apartment to pick her up 

for dinner. Her roommate.. ..was uncharacteristically unhappy to see me at 

the door.. ..I figured that it was just because I was interrupting their lazy 

Sunday afternoon.. . . I plopped down on the couch with the other two and 

starting watching television. Soon the doorbell rang and the roommate 

jumped up, a look of horror on her face. “Who’s that?” I asked with 

friendly curiosity.. . . What I should have known but didn’t guess is that 

they had just received a little package from one of the many marijuana 

delivery services that bring pot directly to New Yorkers’ doors.. . . It’s not 

that I think that you, smoking a little marijuana in the privacy of your own 

living room, are committing a wrong against society that must be righted. 

In fact, in New York State, possession of small amounts of marijuana in 

57 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

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your home is a “violation,” which is less serious than a misdemeanor and 

not legally a crime. It is on the order of urinating in public., . . Since 

violations are not grounds for a search warrant, you are almost definitely 

going to get away with it. Buying that pot on a street comer is a different 

story.. . . [Alggressive enforcement of quality-of-life violations has simply 

become the normal way we do business .... That said, I won’t be hauling 

my girlfriend’s roommate off anytime soon. My department, like many, 

frowns on off-duty arrests for all but the most serious crimes. Were I to 

interrupt my dinner dates to make arrests for unlawful possession of 

marijuana, I would probably get laughed out of my office. But nor could I 

sit idle.. ..That’s why.. . .I found myself hitting the redial button on their 

phone pad, trying to get the number of the delivery service. 

Freelance Delivery 

Freelancers are active in the markets for all drugs. Most do not seek, nor are they 

equipped to handle a large volume of transactions. With the exception of corporate 

delivery services that hire multiple delivery persons, most businesses consist of no more 

than a handful of people. Some freelancers who have begun delivering drugs to their 

customers have carved out a market niche by offering “one stop shopping.” These 

distributors usually offer cannabis, ecstasy and other club drugs, and cocaine 

hydrochloride to an affluent and hedonistic client base. This poly-drug palette approach 

appears to be confined to freelance delivery distributors. 

There is no way of knowing or even estimating with any degree of confidence, the 

number of freelance delivery businesses that exist on the Lower East Side. Given the 

disappearance of street-level sales and the proliferation of organized delivery services in 

the area (one corporate delivery service owner estimates there to be “more than 50” a 

58 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
similar businesses on the Lower East Side) the number of freelancers must be 

considerable. This is clearly a growth area of the market, and since many of the larger 

services offer fewer rather than a greater number of choices to their customers, and there 

are limits on how much money a delivery person may make working for such’a service, 

many freelancers have branched out on their own, often offering a full range of products 

in various denominations. Below, a marijuana dealer in the neighborhood talked about 

one of many freelancers that started his own operation over the last few years. 

After running a half dozen delivery services of varying sizes, Elmo 

decided to go it alone. He answers his pages immediately from a pre-paid 

cell phone and uses a variety of travel modes to cover a small area. If 

customers can’t make it in to the East Village he doesn’t meet them. Theft 

primarily drove him this point. He said, “No matter how much you think 

someone is your friend, when you’re doing this they’re always going to 

steal from you eventually.” While I’m not sure just how much he lost over 

the years it was enough to swear off working with associates ever again. If 

he goes away he has a small enough customer base to let his regulars 

know in advance, and since the pager works anywhere, he can at least 

respond and tell whomever that he is not around. 

Bar delivery of cocaine 

The Lower East Side is home to a huge concentration of bars and nightclubs. 

According to a recent New York Times article (Moynihan 2002), “There are 99 

businesses licensed to sell beer, wine or liquor for consumption on their premises within 

the 10002 ZIP code, an area bordered by the East River, the Bowery and East Houston 

Street. Sixty-one licenses were granted in 2000 or 2001. In its neighboring ZIP code, 

10009, which extends north from East Houston Street up to 20” Street, 153 businesses 

59 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
have liquor licenses, many issued within the past few years.” As street distribution has 

become increasingly risky, the cocaine market has followed the customers into the bars 

and clubs. One user, who frequented many of the local bars and clubs where cocaine and 

other drugs were readily available commented: 

I was living on like First Street and First Avenue. There were certain bars 

down here that were like a coke scene-and a few friends that did blow 

and stuff like that. . . .everybody’s in the bathroom for prolonged periods 

of time-comin’ out with these big wide eyes and sniffles and all that 

stuff-and playin’ pool and drinkin’ and sweating profusely. But it was 

like you’re up all night. I would buy it with other people from local 

dealers-people that were at the bar. 

There are a substantial number of cocaine distributors who roam from bar to bar, 

looking for familiar faces, who then become intermediaries helping introduce the dealers 

to new customers. These are not “delivery” businesses in the same way that others rely 

exclusively on phones and pagers to effect a meeting between distributor and consumers. 

These dealers, by contrast, tend to have a circuit that they follow (although it is often 

possible to arrange to meet them in the same way that other delivery businesses are 

structured), and their regular customers quickly learn the various stops along the route 

and when the dealers are likely to be there. Distributors who participate in this scene tend 

to sell $20 packets of heavily adulterated cocaine hydrochloride to clients who sniff the 

drugs on the premises. Bartenders interviewed by the researchers have indicated that they 

are aware of this practice, which they attempt to prevent in order to avoid police activity, 

a community complaints and possible threats to their liquor licenses. One bartender talked 

60 

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about how he handled what had become a worsening problem for him: 

I can nail ‘em every time. I’m like, “What are you doin’ here?“ They’re 

like, “Oh, Jack Daniels.” I’m like, “Fuck you man, you’re not gonna 

drink-you’re gonna have a sip of that and you’re gonna wander around 

talkin’ to everyone in this bar. You get out now. I’m not gonna charge 

you for your drink-leave. I’m refusing you service because I think you’re 

selling drugs.” )A guy walks in, doesn’t order anything to drink and starts 

walkin’ around, sittin’ down, talkin’ to people at tables-you’re just not 

socializing, you know what I mean? It’s New York City, it ain’t like no 

fuckin’-it’s anywhere-it’s so obvious. I’m sure there’s other drug 

dealers who are not so obvious that got away with it and I’m like “More 

power to you-whatever you gotta do to make money, just be subtle.” If I 

see you, you’re busted, that’s it-it works like a cop. And then they give 

me this speech about “Oh, oh, you’re a racist. Oh, oh, this and that.” I’m 

like, “Bullshit.” And I’ve busted white guys in there sellin’ drugs in there 

and I’ve busted black guys sellin’ drugs in there-like big, big guys. 

There’s not a lotta Hispanics who come in the bar-it’s mostly white kids 

that come in that bar. It depends on what night of course. On Friday nights 

I got idiots-idiots. The new Village-the people who can afford to pay 

$1200 for a studio apartment come down here. 

Corporate Delivery 

The larger corporate-style marijuana delivery distributors are the only corporatestyle organizations that continue to operate in the study area. Most sell only marijuana, 

partly because of the lower penalties for sales of marijuana as opposed to sale of other 

illegal drugs, but also because of a larger customer base and more stable, reliable 

customers. Below, one owner talks about why the business only sells marijuana: 

[Selling drugs other than marijuana] just totally kills the concept of what 

we’re about. I mean the idea is to keep this in the sense of how the Dutch 

view different drugs as soft drugs and hard drugs. We definitely want to 

stay away from the hard drugs. You know, not just because of the laws, 

61 

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but mostly because of the laws. But also because, because, you know the 

client base you get with that is pretty wacky too. 

The researchers were able to interview employees of four different corporate 

marijuana delivery services. One service was extremely cooperative, and researchers 

were able to interview ,all of their staff and one of the two owners, visit their offices and 

observe almost all aspects of their operation throughout the two-year study period. This 

service, which we will call DankCo, had been in business for about ten years, after 

splitting off from an earlier operation which had begun in the mid 1980s. There are two 

owners, both white males in their 30s and one former owner who still is somewhat 

involved, a black male also in his 30s (the only non-white person involved in DankCo). 

a The business employs about 10-15 runnerdriders, all of who are white males, and 2-3 

dispatchers. Unlike the corporate street-level businesses that the researchers have 

observed over the last 15 years, there is much less functional specialization within these 

organizations, remarkably little tension between management and labor, and 

comparatively less turnover in staff than the earlier street-level businesses. One owner 

purchases the large amounts of marijuana required to keep the service running, relying on 

three or four regular wholesale suppliers, and receives the bulk of the profits. The other 

owner is responsible for packaging the marijuana for sale and managing the staff and 

offices. The service sells from 65 to 85 $50 bags of marijuana a day, 363 days a year 

(they close for Christmas and New Year’s Day). (I) 

62 

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A prospective customer must first be recommended by an existing customer’s 

phone call. He or she is then assigned a number, which is used in all future transactions. 

The customer calls a phone number (which is changed regularly), which is answered by 

a 

the dispatcher, who is most often a woman, “just because of the idea that some people are 

afraid when they call up. To talk to a woman, you know, it kind of calms you down a 

little bit. But really, basically I think it was because we have women friends that needed 

jobs too.” The dispatcher takes down the customer’s location and verifies his or her code 

number. No amounts or prices are ever discussed on the phone and customers who 

I 

mention such things are dropped from the rolls. The dispatcher then passes on the 

customer’s location by cell phone or beeper to the runner or rider, who then goes to the 

customer’s home, office, or other location where the transaction takes place. The runners, 

a 

who may travel by foot, taxi, subway, bicycle, skateboard or rollerblades, pick up a set 

quantity of marijuana, prepackaged into $50 bags, at the beginning of each shift and 

return with the cash and any unsold product at the end of the shift. The money, marijuana 

and business records are kept in a location that is completely separate from where the 

dispatcher is taking in orders. The runners are paid $5 for each bag sold and also receive 

a monthly bonus based on hours worked, which was instituted to convince the riders to 

cease selling other drugs on the side, which the owners feared would jeopardize their 

business: 

63 

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Worker: How much is the monthly payout? Basically you can blow all 

your day to day money and that’ll still pay your rent, like six, seven 

hundred dollars. 

Owner: We split profits now with them, in a bonus system. [How exactly 

does that work?] We count how many days a person’s worked, and if 

they’ve done a lot, or if they came in at the last minute for somebody they 

get a bump up that way. If they’ve been bitching, whining, and 

complaining, they get a bump down that way. You wind up getting some 

cash. If you put in 12, 14 days, you’re gonna get $600 a month 

The riders work only in Manhattan, from Canal Street in Lower Manhattan to 125” Street 

in Harlem (Upper Manhattan), and they are assigned their routes randomly each day by 

drawing cards The dispatchers, like the riders, work from 2 to 8 p.m. but are paid a 

straight hourly wage. There are relatively few enduring tensions or disputes between the 

workers or between workers and management in this particular service, as evidenced by a 

fact that they have successfully been in business for more than 10 years without a serious 

problem resulting from internal disputes. Over this time, the turnover rate has been 

minimal. 

When asked how his business had reacted to the intensified policing style of the 

Giuliani era, one owner of this service replied, 

We’re not hiring black guys anymore because just basically if you’re a 

black guy walking around New York, at least once a week you’re gonna 

get some cop hassling you. I don’t like Giuliani or whatever, but it just it 

just seems like it’s a totally different thing to be a black guy in New York 

now and you know basically, you’re gonna get hassled, you’re gonna get 

rousted, it’s just the way things are. And uh, unfortunately I gotta run a 

business. And that means I’ve got to hire squeaky clean white kids. I mean 

I love hiring preppy looking white kids. Because it just seems like a very 

64 

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a 

Since 

assholeish thing [not to hire blacks], but you know realistically, it’s like 

hey, we’re in this to pay the bills, you know, 

dopting this policy, his service has gone five years without an arrest. Whil this 

feat speaks to the relatively invisibility of delivery services as compared with their streetlevel predecessors and, the degree to which violence is anathema to this style of business, 

it also points to a trend toward the gentrification of drug markets and greater class 

segmentation between them, a development that is discussed in more detail below 

THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF “SECONDARY MARKETS” 

In the transformed drug markets which now characterize the Lower East Side, 

buying drugs is now frequently accomplished through accessing personal networks, 

0 rather than through the anonymous public markets which characterized the area in the 

past. We describe much of this as a secondary market for drugs. Other researchers have 

used different terms, like “mutual societies” (Dorn et al. 1992), to describe much the 

same phenomenon. According to Dorn et al. (1992: 10) 

A mutual society is a friendship or acquaintance-based network of drug 

users, some of who, some of the time, will supply drugs to others. 

Reciprocity is the name of the game-very user is potentially a supplier 

and everyone is expected to help out everyone else-members of mutual 

societies or user/dealers as they are sometimes called, constitute a large 

population in relation to other types of traffickers. 

Dorn et al. describe mutual societies as a phase that end in the early 1970s as the drug 

scene evolved into a much more professional and criminal enterprise. While we agree 

a that in the United Kingdom and the United States, the 1970s witnessed considerable 

, 

65 

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growth in the organizational sophistication of drug distributors, clearly mutual societies 

of the kind they referred to persisted, and indeed, among some groups of drug users 

(especially, club drug users) have remained the predominant way that they acquire drugs. 

Our use of the term secondary market refers to more than simply a smll group of 

friends who buy and share drugs together. The critical feature of the secondary market is 

the use of a person who is not a “professional dealer” to facilitate the purchase of drugs, a 

person who, in essence, works as an agent for the consumer rather than the distributor. In 

this section, we describe the wider contexts of these secondary markets, including the 

evolution of “house connections” that often began as simply a group of friends that used 

drugs together, and the increasing importance of “franchising,” where personal 

connections between dealers and users are important, as are the connections between 

wholesale distributors and franchisees whose relationship becomes defined and 

maintained through the extension of credit so that business can take place. Each of these, 

we explain, is an example of a secondary market. 

Our definition of a secondary market also includes the more limited meaning of a 

group of friends who get together, pool their money and often have a single person who 

buys for the entire group. This method of acquiring drugs is especially popular among the 

“club drug” crowd who use recreational drugs primarily on the weekends. Below, one 

Hispanic ecstasy useddealer describes the egalitarian nature of these networks and hints 

0 

at how, at any one time, one might be either a dealer or a user within the network: 

66 

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So I’m sittin’ at a friend’s house and I’m watchin’ a movie-and I actually 

got a few of ‘em [tablets of ecstasy], went over to another friend of mine 

who wants it too. At that time they were probably like fifteen, eighteen 

dollars-something like that. They’ve gotten more expensive. They’re like 

twenty-five dollars now-that’s the cheapest. I got some from another 

friend and I told him, “This friend of mine has got some Ecstasy, I’m 

gonna go pick a couple up for me-if you want any.” He said, “Yeah.” So 

I gave him some-dropped it off at nine o’clock at his place. I dropped a 

tab myself. Went to another friend’s house, watchin’ TV. 

Our data indicate that most of the participants in these particular drug 

using/dealing networks have not had much interaction with law enforcement, though that 

could change given the increased interest that club drugs are generating with policy 

makers and the police. While those who are obsessed with maintaining the appearance of 

aggressive drug enforcement would likely seek to arrest and charge members of these 

a -- 

networks (who sometimes procure drugs for their friends) there is growing recognition 

that there is a very real difference between these people and bonafide drug dealers. 

Sometimes, however, no member of the group acts as a distributor, but rather, simply 

mobilizes the group to acquire drugs. According to one member of such a group: 

[We found] out about [the coke] through the mutual friends. It was just 

like one day you’re hangin’ out with somebody: “Hey, you ever do blow?’ 

You just gotta kinda like break into it. Or you meet somebody, and you 

kinda make a joke to somebody if you wanna find out if they smoke weed: 

“Oh man I wish I had a joint-a joint would be so good right now.” And 

you’ll find out if they smoke weed or not. And then they’d be like, “Yeah, 

that would be kinda cool.” And you’re like, “Awright!”-this guy’s 

in-“C’mon, let’s go in on a bag a weed together”-that whole kinda 

thing. And the same thing with coke. 

67 

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Friendship networks were not the only route into a secondary market for drugs 

that users could activate. For many people, acquaintances at work were often seen 

a 

as safe and reliable sources for drugs since the workplace provided cover and 

networking potential that often exceeded that found in strictly social circles. For 

example, one Hispanic polydrug user talked about various options that were 

t 

available to him in the workplace: 

Yeah, there were some guys that worked there I could always get weed 

from. And there was another guy I could always get blow from. There was 

actually another guy I knew at my job, he used to sell blow at a bar after 

work. 

Without too much trouble, users can often find several sources for drugs, but many 

seemed to rely on a single source for their supplies. This was partially a matter of 

convenience for some, but for others, the disappearance of street-level transactions and 

the fragmentation of markets along class and race/ethnicity fault lines (see below), meant 

that their options became increasingly limited. 

IndoorP’House Connection” freelancers: 

One growth area in retail drug markets on the Lower East Side has been the 

proliferation of white heroin distributors who work as freelancers out of their homes and 

who represent a considerable portion of the secondary market for drugs in the 

neighborhood. Heroin sales in the neighborhood were formerly dominated by corporatestyle organizations run by Puerto Ricans whose robust markets attracted a wide variety of 0 

68 

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customers from throughout the metropolitan area. As these large organizations 

disappeared, the victims of housing displacement and relentless police pressure, many 

former employees who remained active in retail heroin sales branched out on their own or 

a 

in small partnerships and cultivated closer relationships with their former employers’, 

core customers-especially white or employed users-who had always bought heroin 

! 

I, 

from them on the street. These new businesses, however, were frequently unable to 

expand because the distributors found themselves both socially and geographically 

isolated from their potential clients. Once a link between a distributor and a consumer 

was severed in this reconfigured market, it was very difficult for either party to reconnect. 

The resulting bottleneck between the well-stocked Hispanic heroin wholesalers with 

dwindling numbers of customers and the modestly growing number of white heroin users 

a 

with no place to buy drugs created opportunities for a new generation of white 

distributors in the neighborhood to gain a toe-hold in the market. 

The cadre of new white heroin sellers on the Lower East Side emerged to service 

white users who had very limited access to the drug. For example, Bob, a middle-aged 

Italian-American heroin user who was raised by alcoholic parents in the Bronx, served a 

clientele that fluctuated between 20 and 60 white heroin users. During the heroin 

epidemic of the 1970s, Bob had been a heroin injector, but stopped using when he 

entered a rehabilitation program. It was through that program that he received vocational 

0 training, completed his GED and, because of his academic abilities, was encouraged to 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
pursue a college degree. He eventually earned a Bachelors and Masters degree and found 

employment in a health care facility in Manhattan. Bob’s entry into the heroin business 

started slowly, beginning in 1993 when various stresses in his everyday life coincided 

with his meeting several white heroin users who reintroduced him to the drug’that he had 

not used in more than 15 years. At this time, he was studying for a graduate degree and 

found that using heroin helped him focus on writing papers for his classes. He had also 

discovered that he had hepatitis C and his brother died of AIDS. Bob moved into his 

brother’s apartment on the Lower East Side (partially because the rent was only $74 a 

month) and within a few months he had begun to inject heroin again. 

At first, Bob used only a few times each week with his new-found group of 

acquaintances. Typically, they would pool their money and one person would buy the 

drugs in Harlem (because some of them had “connections” there and because they 

considered the heroin in Harlem to be stronger than what was available on the Lower 

East Side), but they used his apartment as a place to use the drugs. By 1995, Bob was 

using heroin on a daily basis, but the daily pooling of money to send someone to Harlem 

had become too expensive, cumbersome and unreliable for Bob and the others who had 

developed habits that demanded more frequent service. Running low on money and with 

a habit to maintain, Bob put up signs in the neighborhood seeking a roommate (who he 

charged $200 a month, still a bargain in that neighborhood). The roommate, Bonnie, a 

Russian woman, almost 60 years old, was also a heroin user. She had been introduced 

70 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
a first to morphine many years ago by a nurse in the hospital where they both worked, but 

she later switched to heroin when she was unable to get morphine on a regular basis. 

When she and Bob began their business, she brought with her most of the “customers” 

(including a number of Eastern Europeans who had recently come to the United States) 

while Bob provided the operating capital and a base of operations. Neither of them had 

strong connections to Hispanic wholesale distributors on the Lower East Side, and Bob, 

whose conversations were often replete with invective aimed at blacks and Hispanics, 

found another source. He started buying weekly “packages” of stamped bags of heroin 

(called “Execute”) from two “mob-connected” distributors who worked out of 

Philadelphia, a fact that probably says less about Bob’s racist leanings than it does about 

the disconnect between wholesalers who had heroin on the Lower East Side and upstart 

white dealers who wanted to buy it. Starting off with less than 20 clients, all of who had 

once been Bob or Bonnie’s drug-using partners, through word of mouth, the business 

quickly grew to about 60 customers. 

a 

, 

Because of the relatively large size of their client base, the business operated 

primarily via cell phone and delivery by Bonnie, though long-time drug-using partners 

were still allowed to come to the apartment to buy and use their drugs. Most of the clients 

were from the Lower East Side, but several were from outside the immediate area, 

including one who lived in Stamford, Connecticut, where Bonnie made a weekly trip 

with several “bundles” to resupply a retail dealer who was selling heroin to his friends 

71 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
and acquaintances. In 1998, Bonnie was arrested carrying drugs on 34” Street and 8” 

Avenue in Manhattan and her partnership with Bob abruptly ended. Neither of them were 

sure how the police managed to find out about Bonnie’s delivery activities, but Bob 

suspected that the landlord, who lived on the first floor and wanted to get them kicked out 

of the building (after all, $74 a month represented a significant financial loss for him) 

L 

called the police after noticing all the traffic in and out of the building and the frequency 

of Bonnie’s movements. With Bonnie in jail, Bob sought another roommatehusiness 

partner via word of mouth in the neighborhood. He also began selling unstamped bags of 

heroin, suspecting that the use of a stamp might have somehow led to their detection by 

the police. Ray, a white guy in his mid-30s took over Bonnie’s delivery function, and 

even brought about 10 of his own customers (former using partners) to the business. The 

business, however, had begun to languish as the quality and quantity of the product they 

sold began to deteriorate and the total number of customers dwindled to about 30 people 

by late 1998. Those who continued to buy from them did so, according to our interviews, 

because they knew of no other place to buy heroin. Most of these were white people in 

their late 30s and 40s. The youngest were two white women in their mid-20s. 

Bob and Ray were initially worried that Bonnie’s visibility on the street was a 

factor that contributed to her arrest, and they reconfigured their business to be primarily a 

“house connection” where users would come directly to the apartment to buy drugs, 

e though some customers still preferred to have their drugs delivered. The apartment 

72 

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quickly deteriorated into a “shooting gallery” and customers, who bought and used drugs 

on the premises, began to spend considerable amounts of time at Bob’s place. This 

a 

development, as well as their own escalating levels of use that they could not sustain, led 

Bob and Ray to purge the apartment of all customers and return to delivering drugs. In 

addition to worrying about the landlord calling the police on them, they feared being 

robbed since there was another heroin dealer working out of their building and they 

suspected that some of his customers would find them an “easy mark.” Because of his 

paranoia, Bob maintained a small arsenal of weapons (rifles, sawed off shotguns and 

various handguns) in his apartment and kept a loaded pistol on the coffee table at all 

times, though he has never had to use it. By the end of the research, Bob and Ray were 

still servicing their core groups of customers, but the business had not grown over the 

two-year research period. Bob became concerned about his increasing dependence upon 

the distributors from Philadelphia (whose product was sometimes of questionable 

quality), but lacking solid contacts to Hispanic wholesalers in the neighborhood and 

being socially inept, Bob and Ray had few options. 

Secondary markets have become a much more prominent part of the overall 

market for drugs on the Lower East Side since the disappearance of street-level 

transactions, and in this section, we have described several permutations of that 

phenomenon. The existence of secondary markets is comparatively more important in the 

a heroin business than others because of the degree of urgency that users attach to getting 

73 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
,4 

themdrug on a regular and predictable basis. In this case, personal connections and the 

0 ability to activate extended networks is crucial to managing a daily habit. Nevertheless, 

our observations and interviews revealed that virtually all drugs were regularly procured 

through secondary markets. 

The externalization of labor: “Franchising” and the evolution of the corporate form 

of distribution 

In the recently reconfigured drug markets on the Lower East Side, many of the 

former laborers in corporate-style organizations found other work when the large streetlevel drug businesses that employed them downsized, but a significant number of thkm 

began their own small drug businesses by assembling and serving core groups of reliable 

customers. The former owners and managers of the large businesses benefited in several 

ways from this arrangement. By “externalizing” their former laborers (for example, the 

0 

hand-to-hand seller role, once paid for directly by drug-selling organizations, was no 

longer a paid position within the organization), the former owners and managers became 

wholesale suppliers to these new, smaller businesses. They were able to continue selling 

large volumes of drugs, but made far fewer transactions and managed to place an extra 

layer of insulation between themselves and the point of retail sale. The externalization of 

labor solved a big problem for the former corporate owners: what to do with an unruly 

labor force whose presence on the street often resulted in businesses losses (often through 

employee theft) and increased the risk of arrest. An example of this was Twin, a long74 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
time heroin user who once worked for a corporate heroin business, but who was laid off 

and subsequently developed a group of customers who are dependent upon his small, but 

in some ways, quite predictable business. Below, he talks about his relationship with one 

customer and in doing so, highlights the degree to which operatives like himself have 

become crucial to a marketplace of diminished choice for consumers. 

I 

Yesterday started like kinda shitty-like. I had a regular customer that I 

normally do EVERY morning. He wakes me up, okay. Yesterday, he 

woke me up, but I kept the money-I didn’t bring what he want back, ya 

know. Believe it or not-he’s an Oriental guy-been friends a long time. 

He told me, “You fucked up again. You fucked up again!” And for the 

fourth time he gives me the money again to go get some more. I fucked 

up! It’s hard to explain because it seems like ..... I guess this shit happens. 

Shit happens. 

When anonymous street-level markets dominated the Lower East Side, users 

would not have tolerated dealers who ran off with their money; indeed, most of them 

would have had little difficulty making purchases themselves and would not have relied 

upon a dealer who repeatedly proved himself to be untrustworthy. The new market, 

however, is much more difficult to access, especially for new users, and with fewer 

choices available to them, users must often accept such losses as part of the price of using 

drugs. The advantage of his position was not lost on Twin either: he did not seem 

particularly alarmed at the prospect of facing the customer whose money he had 

pocketed. As he noted, “Shit happens” and the customer, it seems, shrugged it off and 

, 

gave him money “for the fourth time” to buy more drugs. As a laborer whose work had 

75 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
been externalized, Twin and others like him supplemented their modest income from 

direct sales by periodically “taxing” their clients in the manner described above. Even 

then, the money that he makes does not allow him to support a robust drug habit or live 

comfortably. 

In some cases, the former owners offered “franchising” arrangements with retail 

dealers like Twin. Franchising is the term we have developed to describe the form of 

distribution which characterizes heroin and cocaine markets in the study area and much 

of the rest of the city as well. With the franchise system, the seller, rather than setting up 

a “spot” (or several “spots”) by hiring workers, lookouts and so on and putting the word 

out, wholesales prepackaged bags of drugs to younger entrepreneurs who pay the supplier 

a percentage (typically 7590%) of the retail price and keeps the difference. The 

“franchisee” gets the benefit of a prepackaged product, often with a stamp which has an 

acquired a city- or borough-wide reputation. This arrangement was especially noticeable 

in heroin markets as “stamped” heroin bags, for many years an enduring symbol of 

corporate organization (Wendel and Curtis ZOOO), began to disappear in the mid-1990s 

and then made somewhat of a comeback over the research period via franchisees who 

procured “known” brands of heroin on credit from wholesalers. Evidence for this practice 

is supported by the DEA, who note that “Not all cutting mills are out of business, as 

evidenced by the discovery, as a result of a recent fire in the city, of a cutting mill in an 

apartment. One the walls of the apartment charts displayed several brand names of heroin 

76 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
along with different formulas for cutting each brand” (National Drug Intelligence Center 

2000: 10). The advantage of being a franchisee and selling a brand name product-in 

addition to the name recognition factor-is that the retailer can get the product on credit 

and will not have to do any of the cutting, preparation and packaging of the product that 

purchases of bulk heroin, cocaine or crack might otherwise require. Heroin, in particular, 

‘has considerable street lore associated with adulterating it (Wendel et al. 2002, in press), 

and most retail distributors do not possess the resources, knowledge or skill required to 

“cut” the product without fear of ruining it. In other instances, pre-packaged but 

unstamped units were sold to retailers who wanted to avoid the dangers that branding 

carries with it (i.e., potentially providing traceable clues to law enforcement). 

Franchising of distribution of heroin and cocaine arose in the early and mid-1990s 

as the tide in the war on drugs was beginning to turn in the Police Department’s 

favor-fixed location public dealing was clearly a doomed practice. Managers and upand-coming street workers began giving out their beeper numbers to trusted long-term 

customers and meeting them in locations that were less “hot” (with police) than their 

usual locations. It was a bumpy transition: our fieldnotes from this era are full of accounts 

of going to meet the dealer on a street corner away from traditional dealing blocks, only 

to find several other familiar faces also waiting for the same dealer. The awkward 

visibility of meeting in this fashion tended to defeat the purpose of using a pager and 

a dealers gradually moved to one-on-one meetings with their customers as a less 

77 

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position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
conspicuous way to do business. This would seem to be an indication that this was not a 

business model adapted from WeeDeliver and the marijuana delivery business (or, at 

least, that the business model was poorly understood by the would-be adapters) and 

would seem to indicate that this was a parallel evolution predicated on the widespread 

availability of pagers (and, later, cell phones). 

Franchising appears to be a form of freelance distribution, but we argue that it is, 

in fact, the corporate form of distribution adapted to the realities of a changed 

marketplace. Just as the corporate buzzwords of the non-criminal economy in the 1990s 

were “downsizing” and “outsourcing” (processes that were paralleled by government 

“privatization” plans where private companies and individuals were paid to perform tasks 

traditionally seen as the responsibility of government), so too were they the operative 

words in criminal corporations. With franchising, the function of hand-to-hand sales to 

customers shifts from being waged labor performed by an employee under the 

supervision of a boss to labor performed by a (pseudo) independent contractor who 

appears to be a customer of (rather than a worker for) the supplier. Franchise dealers 

appear to be freelancers, but they can be distinguished from actual freelancers because 

their payments to suppliers are based on the retail price of the prepackaged product, not 

on a wholesale price for drugs. True freelancers are free to cut, alter, package and sell as 

they please. Franchise dealers, by choosing to sell a particular wholesaler’s product, give - 

0 up much of the independence that true freelancers enjoy. Indeed, we argue that franchise 

78 

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dealers are in fact employees who are paid a commission (rather than a wage), and their 

new relationship with the company has allowed the owners to further cut business costs 

and divest themselves of responsibility for their laborers. 

Drug robbery may represent another (albeit involuntary and unintentional) form 

of externalization of labor functions formerly handled directly by the corporate 

enterprise. Most of the large-scale old style corporate dealers employed a number of 

enforcers (“violent labor” (Reuter 1985)). Even at the peak of violence in drug markets, 

however, such enforcers spent little time actually enforcing, and it can be argued that the 

real reason they were being paid by the owners was as a form of disguised bribery to 

prevent themselves and their businesses from becoming victims. When enterprises 

downsized and violence (or the reputation for violence) came to be seen as a more of a 

liability than an asset (for example, more likely to draw the attention of the police) the 

enforcers were no longer needed. Unlike the franchisees who were able to redefine their 

relationship with the company, enforcers were unable to get paid for their services any 

more, and many of them turned to robbing drug dealers (Jacobs 1999). This can be seen 

as another externalization of costs of doing business: rather than paying violent labor 

“wages” (AKA protection), the same dealers (or their replacements) are paying the same 

thugs through the ritual of robbery. 

One phenomenon we have noticed in fieldwork that has contributed to and been 

an outcome of the trend toward franchising in the drug business, especially in cocaine 

79 

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..._ 

markets, is the disappearance of the ounce level distributor. This is not to say that ounces 

are no longer available, but rather, that the price-niche for ounces of cocaine has basically 

vanished. This phenomenon has also been noted by the DEA, who note that “Generally, 

there appear to be fewer middlemen in New York’s heroin business than in the past. 

Investigators say that in some cases a seller is now only a step or two away from the 

importer” (National Drug Intelligence Center 2000: 10). Where formerly the market was 

defined in terms of kilo prices, ounce prices and gram prices, there are now only 

wholesale and retail prices. Pro-rated kilo prices, for purchases as small as a few grams, 

have made it impossible to enforce an “ounce price” or for intermediate-level dealers to 

reliably find buyers for drugs which have been substantially cut. Traditionally, dealers at 

the ounce level would “put a one” (add an equal weight of cut) on an ounce of nominally 

pure7 cocaine, yielding two ounces of 50% “pure” cocaine. Some would “put a two” 

(tripling the weight) or even a “three” (quadrupling the weight). With large amounts of 

substantially uncut product available, dealers are afraid that cutting will turn salable 

product into an overly cut and thus unmarketable product. Of course, there is also less 

incentive to dilute the product because cocaine is considerably cheaper than in the past, 

an ironic result of the “War On Drugs.” One result of this has been the elimination of the 

It is important to remember that “uncut” and “pure” are not necessarily synonymous. Cost-cutting, 

incompetence or the exigencies of running a clandestine business often lead to the production of drugs at 

considerably less than 100% punty. 

80 

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ounce dealer, who now provides a service-like so many other retail distributors, big or 

small-where they can arrange for customers to buy any denomination, including ounces. 

The ounce-level distributor who was an independent operator (often a freelancer) has 

now been displaced by the corporate exile working on commission, a position that brings 

with it considerably less profit and prestige. 

Drug markets, credit and relationships 

Credit permeates the functioning of drug markets as currently constituted, from 

the most impecunious “street”-type users, to middle class marijuana buyers who need a 

little help from their dealer to make it through to payday, to the highest echelons of the 

wholesale trade. There are many terms used for credit, which reflect the importance of 

credit in drug markets: “fronting,” “lending” and “borrowing” (meaning drugs, not 

money). Daily drug users who do not get paid on a daily basis often rely on getting drugs 

“fronted” in order to stave off withdrawal, escape or intensify reality or simply to 

maintain a desired mental state. Traffickers typically have a balance of capital resources 

which favors social capital (trust founded on reputation) over financial capital and thus 

must rely on credit to finance drug purchases that will pay for themselves many times 

over once credit is extended by the sellers (Jacobs 1999:28). 

The role of credit in wholesale-level drug dealing is a result of high levels of 

demand for drugs, coupled with high availability of supply of wholesale quantities of 

drugs. The bottleneck in the market occurs at the middle levels of the market. Growers, 

81 

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manufacturers and importers8, despite intensified enforcement efforts, face significantly 

lower risks of apprehension than middle level and retail distributors. In order to get their 

products to consumers, while insulating themselves from the risk of apprehension, 

traffickers at this level of the business need intermediaries between themselves and 

retailers. Because the work of a middle-level distributor is fraught with risks of 

apprehension, inducements to participation are often helpful. Offering goods on credit is 

one such inducement, and our observations and interviews suggest that credit is 

indispensable at every level of the market. One marijuana distributor talked about his 

experience with credit, and reveals the degree to which credit is critical to the overall 

functioning of the larger market: 

I always got everything fronted, I would never bank [pay for] anything 

myself, that was my ceiling. I didn’t want to have invest my money. It 

feels like the path of least resistance. I was paying about $700 for a quarter 

pound [$175/oz.], selling for like $75 for a quarter ounce [$300/oz.=$125 

markup]. For a few years, I got most of my weed at this place, it was a loft 

in Chelsea, people lived there but it was mostly a business. Two people 

owned it and there were maybe 5 or 6 people at the core. They pretty 

much sold pounds of herb or they would lend [fronugive credit]. And 

there was this whole scene of kids that would get weed there, ride around 

in cars and come back with the money, just flipping Bs [pounds]. They 

were usually there from like noon to 4 am, but they really didn’t keep 

hours, it wasn’t that organized. They would usually have 2 or 3 different 

Importers occupy a position which is functionally close to that of a manufacturer or grower because of 

the immense differential between the domestic market price and the source country price. As a matter of 

scale of profitability, importers reap rewards comparable to those of a manufacturer, not those of a a 

distri butorltrafficker . 

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kinds of weed at a time, a couple pounds of each. The most I ever saw 

there was maybe 20,30 pounds. 

Bottlenecks in the market for various drugs meant that distributors were just as eager to 

extend credit as they were to ask for it. Below, a rider for a marijuana delivery business 

talked about how an offer of credit for hashish led to a “sideline” business: 

After a while me and this other guy started a side business. I was over at 

his house in midtown one day smoking weed and letting a couple calls 

build up and he showed me some hash, he’d give it to me on credit. Then I 

started making $350 a day, between selling weed and the hash, it was an 

extra hundred or $125 a day. Me and the other guy, we’d just offer it to 

everyone. 

Violence, whether displayed or threatened explicitly or implicitly, is thought by 

many to be part and parcel of efforts to collect drug debts, but this is by no means 

universal, and indeed, the role of violence is greatly reduced in current markets. Rather, 

violence or threats of violence as a debt collection technique characterizes certain types 

of markets: anonymous public markets, especially corporate public markets where 

several “bundles” at once are put in the hands of often untrustworthy employees. In the 

current climate on the Lower East Side, the threat of withdrawing credit and thereby 

interrupting further access to product (“that nigga’s cut off,” as one distributor put it) is 

the most typical technique for enforcing these legally unenforceable bargains. In markets 

characterized by strong social bonding, the threat of ostracism is also a potent debtcollection tool. One Hispanic ecstasy/marijuana distributor, complaining about a 

customer who refused to pay him back, reveals his non-violent means of dealing with 

83 

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these types of circumstances and hints at the degree to which credit is important to his 

business. 

I tried fronting [ecstasy] a couple of times and actually had gotten this one 

person I know that just does not pay me for a tab and I was just like, “You 

know what, never again.” I’d pay like twenty bucks for that tab. I want 

twenty bucks. Just because you forget now .... He’d be like, “Oh I forgot, I 

forgot.” And I was like, “Okay.” I don’t think that I’m going to be able to 

get that money back, but I’m never gonna hook up that person again. He’s 

not someone I see regularly. Every once in a while I bump into this 

person. That’s one person that will never, ever get hooked up from me 

again. Basically it cost me twenty bucks to find out that this person is 

unreliable, so for twenty bucks I got a deal, I’d say. 

CLASS FRAGMENTATION AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF DRUG 

MARKETS 

This section examines one significant outcome of the changes that have taken 

place on the Lower East Side over the last decade: the increasing class stratification of 

drug markets. Drug markets have long been segmented in this fashion, and on the Lower 

East Side the existence of large street-level markets within or around public housing 

projects from the 1970s to the 1990s bolstered that perception, even though people from 

all sectors of society could and did buy drugs there. Indeed, some researchers have noted 

the degree to which smokeable cocaine, at least during the period when crack markets 

initially formed, was noted for the degree to which it allowed for the mixing of various 

classes, and it was this mixing of users from a wide variety of backgrounds (class, race 

and ethnic differences) that was initially crucial to the ambiance and the attraction of the 

drug (Hamid 1990, Curtis 1996). The notion that crack distribution and use is a 

84 

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. -.w, 

phenomenon primarily associated with low- and working class minority populations, 

however, is unlikely to stir much debate and the overwhelming majority of enforcement 

activities involving crack sales and use-as well as the preponderance of scientific 

studies of crack-have taken place in poor minority neighborhoods. Clearly, many 

middle-class people and whites have participated in these markets, and continue to do so 

(Rohde 1998), but there has been a precipitous drop in crack sales and use on the Lower 

East Side like the rest of New York City (Golub and Johnson 1997). The drug has not 

disappeared entirely, but those who continue to sell and use it are no longer doing so in a 

visible fashion, and indeed, the researchers were struck by the degree to which crack 

market participants were integrated into the social fabric of the neighborhood in such a 

way that they were virtually indistinguishable from their neighbors (see below). In 

making that shift, however, outsiders (both geographic and social) found it difficult to 

locate and access markets for the drug and often had to seek other places or means to get 

it. 

a 

In the current period, markets for all drugs are clearly diverging and the 

participants in the isolated or specialized sub-markets are becoming more insular, and 

demographically homogeneous within them, often involving fairly tightly-knit groups of 

distributors and users who have few interactions with participants from other markets. 

This is a phenomenon that we describe as the gentrification of drug markets. Middle-class 

consumers are probably the bulk of users on the Lower East Side at this point as the 

85 

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-*< 

demographics of the area have shifted, but even within their ranks users-as groups or 

individuals-tended to be highly segmented and compartmentalized. For example, the 

researchers interviewed dozens of professionals who used drugs to enhance the work 

performance. Among the trends common to these subjects were: task-oriented use, 

clandestine use, and specific drug tastes. Most of the professionals who were interviewed 

take drugs while working to maintain the level of professionalism they were contracted to 

perform. While few take drugs every time they work, intermittent use was frequent. For 

instance, a television cameraman reports, “When I smoke some weed I can focus. I just 

zone out on what I’m doing and actually enjoy taking pictures. If I don’t smoke it just 

becomes another job.” This cameraman does not use any other drugs while working, but 

sniffs cocaine a few times a year after a shoot. Very seldom he will take a very small hit 

of cocaine to remain focused when shoots run longer than anticipated or is particularly 

tired. Reports one print journalist, “When I’m facing deadline and am falling asleep at the 

keyboard a bump of cocaine is exactly what I need. Coffee just doesn’t cut it sometimes.” 

A managing editor at one magazine described her relationship between work, coffee and 

marijuana. “When I get in and have to read boards I just love that feeling of pot and 

coffee and sugar. Ijust kind of float through it. If I go in straight I get picky, there’s no 

flow.” Unlike many other users who use drugs recreationally with friends and 

acquaintances, the context of drug use by some professionals is decidedly non-social, and 

a - 

they generally do not associate with a recognized drug-using crowd. For them, the 

86 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
compartmentalization of drug markets fits nicely with the place that they have assigned 

drugs in their everyday lives. 

Other examples of the class fragmentation of drugs markets include, at one end of 

the social scale, the methadone and pharmaceutical markets that catered to an enduring 

cohort of aging hard drug users; at the other end were many of the delivery businesses 

that catered to “exclusive” groups of customers who kept their distance from other types 

of users. “House connections,” too, were often extremely selective in whom they sold to, 

and many catered only to the well-heeled or the well-connected gentrified drug 

consumer. For example, among the house connections for marijuana, the study found that 

most of them had been in the business for many years, were highly security conscious 

and essentially completely unwilling to take on new customers. Only one was willing to 

a 

be interviewed extensively. Of the nine distributors of this type we were able to contact, 

eight were male, one female; three were black, two of Middle Eastern descent, the 

remainder white; all were native New Yorkers. None reported any law enforcement 

contacts or arrests and all reported a high level of fear of robbery. Two had been victims 

of harrowing home-invasion-style robberies and all knew of fellow house-dealers, in this 

and other neighborhoods, who had been robbed. The advantage of the fragmentation and 

gentrification of markets for drug users is that they are much more sheltered, but they 

generally have fewer options for buying drugs. From the distributor’s perspective, 

a security is enhanced, but this isolation makes it difficult to increase sales by adding new 

87 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
customers, and over time, the dealers tend to have fewer options available for buying 

supplies, often becoming dependent upon a lone wholesaler. 

The declining prevalence of crack \ 

Crack sales and use were never as popular on the Lower East Side as they were in 

other parts of New York City, but crack continues to be sold and used there even if it has 

! 

become virtually invisible. Daily crack users who live in the area appear to have no # 

problem getting the drug, but occasional users, users from outside the neighborhood, or 

those who appear as though they do not “belong” to the crack scene find their access is 

extremely limited. One African-American multi-substance user who frequently smokes 

crack, talked about how dramatically the scene had changed from a few years earlier 

when dealers were soliciting strangers on the street to buy crack: 

Oh shit-you better know somebody, Son, if you want to cop [buy] down 

here now. A person like you would get a person like me to go and cop for 

you-that’s how you would do it. Otherwise, don’t try that stuff out 

here-you approach the wrong person, you could get beat or get beat 

down, Son-you just can’t do it like that-like back in the day-you can’t 

do it like that no more. 

Crack sales, like most drugs in the neighborhood, are increasingly done via house 

connection or personal contacts, and users are, in many ways, more indistinguishable 

from other neighborhood residents. As crack distributors and users have become more 

embedded in the social fabric of the neighborhood rather than starkly visible in the street, 

the appearance is that crack has disappeared on the Lower East Side. Clearly, however, it 

88 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
...., 

has not. For example, Sabrina, a woman in her 30s who is enrolled in a methadone 

program in the area, recalled an occasion when she smoked crack in her apartment and 

around her building. What differentiates her account from those of crack smokers who 

were active during the 1980s and 90s is the degree to which she describes a life that is 

unremarkable in so many ways: her drug use is concealed not only from the police but 

also from those closest around her, a feat that many once thought was impossible because 

0 

of the compulsive behavior thought to be an outcome of using the drug. 

I came back to my house. I went upstairs to my room. And ya know, I 

don’t like smokin’ in my house-I don’t even smoke cigarettes in my 

house. But me, I wanted to sneak-I put the fan on-went towards the 

window. I put it in the stem, took the pull-ooh, this is good! I put it 

away-my father called me for something-I put it away. I said, “Uh, uh, 

that is good!” I start to cleanin’ up-to start to movin’ around the house. I 

said, “Look it, there you go.” But as I’m cleanin’ up I picked up one of my 

books. I read a couple a Scriptures and I got on my knees and started 

prayin’. Then I got up, I went in the bathroom, I washed my face-‘cause 

I started to sweatin’ and perspirin’ ‘cause I was nervous thinkin’ “I’m 

gettin’ ready to start, I’m gettin’ ready to start.” I said, “No, just let me 

get out the house, lemme get out the house.” 

So I just went to the store and bought me two little cigarettes. Came back 

across the street. I said, “Um, there’s ten dollars I’m thinkin’ about now,” 

ya know. I knew I had to have three for my carfare to come to the 

program the next day. So what did I do? I walked my butt all the way 

over to the other side so I could get nickels. Okay? So as I go over there 

to get this nickel .... I went and smoked that nickel real quick-went in the 

next buildin’ I make like I’m goin’ in the buildin’ to visit somebody. 

Pushed for the elevator-people in the lobby I didn’t want them to know 

nuttin’-so I went in the elevator and nobody was in the elevator with me. 

Puffed that real quick. Went back down the steps-went back down the 

steps! Got off the elevator on the third floor-now this is a building that I 

don’t live in-so I went back down the steps. Came out the building, 

89 

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position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
started walkin’ towards my buildin’ again. And as I’m walkin’ I’m 

thinkin’ “Oh Sabrina, man, you’re messin’ up big-time.” Here comes my 

Bible teacher. I said, “Well, God must’ve heard one a my prayers this 

mornin”’ 

Like Sabrina, many crack users and distributors managed to embed their activities 

in the fabric of the neighborhood in ways that made them virtually invisible, but a small 

segment of the crack using population continued to participate in buying, using and 

income-generating activities that attracted attention. In uptown Manhattan and in some of 

the outer boroughs, crack markets were often accompanied by robust markets for other 

illegal sector goods and services. In Brooklyn, for example, chop shops and scrap metal 

’ 

yards were booming businesses in neighborhoods that featured large street-level crack 

markets. On the Lower East Side, some crack users fueled their use of the drug through 

sales of stolen goods or other contraband, but these activities, though visible, were 

modest as compared with these types of activities present in the outer boroughs. One 

long-term multi-substance user, complained about how difficult it became to “hustle” on 

the Lower East Side over the last few years, but his description of the “good old days” 

leaves the impression that street-level crack users on the Lower East Side were always 

constrained by limits on their income-generating activities. 

It was much easier to get money back then because we used to go around 

and look in the garbage and find clothes or things that people throw away. 

You could take it right there, like on St. Marks. You would take your 

clothes or whatever you find and just lay it out in the street and people 

would walk by and actually shop and buy it, you know. And people used 

to buy those things. And we used to take that money and buy a little 

90 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
crack-mostly crack-one thing that everybody was usin’ then. And you 

have the guy that sell the crack-he be like walkin’ around, you 

know-and he right there. So when you get enough money to buy some 

crack-boom-you buy it from him. Boom, take a little hit and get high 

right there. It was awright. 

Today, as far as lettin’ people like myself-makin’ a little bit a money-to 

me [the neighborhood] is not better, you know. But to somebody else 

that’s doin’ good-somebody workin’ on Wall Street, they got money, 

they don’t have to stoop to the level that I would do to get money-to 

them, it might be better. But to me, it’s more fucked up now, you know. 

See, ‘cause like to be honest wit’ you, this year I think I went to jail about 

seven times, ya know-six or seven times already-this year. And all for 

bullshit-little petty bullshit, ya know-jumpin’ the turnstile, vending 

without a vending license, counterfeit sellin’ bootleg CD’s and shit like 

that, ya know. And domestic dispute, observed buyin’ drugs-I’m gettin’ 

into details-possession, ya know. 

In venting his frustration about how difficult it had become to “hustle” on the Lower East 

Side, Earvin reveals how street-level activities have become increasingly visible to the 

police. Having been jailed “six or seven times already” [Jan-Aug 011, he felt targeted. 

When I want to cop something, I got certain people I deal with so I can get 

my shit. And I try to make sure it’s correct, ya know. I’m not tryin’ to 

go-like I say-go to jail. I gotta couple a Chinese people I deal with, ya 

know and they give me something that’s legit compared to the bullshit 

they sellin’ out here as far as sleepin’ pills and all that shit. ‘Cause out 

here they sellin’ you anything these days-they sell you rat poison and tell 

you it’s dope, you know what I’m sayin’. 

Me-basically, I been fuckin’ with drugs so many years that you ever hear 

that saying, “You get tired and fried.” And no matter how tired I get, I’m 

always findin’ a way to get back into it-and I’m really tired a gettin’ 

high, I’m really tired of it, ya know. But it’s just like they say, no matter 

how far you go, you’re always gonna run into it. It’s just-I guess I don’t 

know how to say no or you know. Mostly, I do heroin, crack-I still 

smoke every now and then, ya know-a speedball every now and then. 

91 

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This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

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Street Survivors: the persistence and social isolation of pharmaceutical and 0 methadone markets 

The street-level markets least affected by the changes that took place in the 

neighborhood over the last decade have been the markets for diverted pharmaceuticals 

and methadone. Indeed, sales in these markets have increased over the last few years as 

many long-term and/or hard-core users can no longer afford to maintain heroin, cocaine 

or crack habits, and these drugs have increasingly been used as substitutes when users 

cannot find or afford the drugs that they would prefer to use. One reason why these 

markets have been so unaffected by the larger, neighborhood-level changes that have 

transformed others is that the participants in them are so socially isolated and they form a 

a relatively self-contained scene with its own rules, logic, and timing. One heroinkocaine 

user and part-time dealer who is a client at a local methadone program describes these 

markets that have persisted while others have largely disappeared. 

Mostly everybody can’t sustain a big [heroin] habit. They’re boosting 

[shoplifting] on the side, and other small shit [to make money]. They’re 

doing a lot of pills and meth [methadone]. Most of them don’t have what I 

call dope [heroin] habits anymore. They get high when they get a chance. 

Xanax, or sticks as they call them, are the crowd’s favorite.. .Percocets, 

and stuff that will give you a “down head.” Most people buy it off the 

street from guys who get it from doctors who write them scripts. Once a 

month, they get like 90 pills. They get five bucks apiece for them. They 

pop them with the meth and a cup of coffee. The customers for the pills 

are people from the [methadone] program, but many of them have their 

own clients too. There are white guys selling them too. In fact, they’re the 

biggest sellers of pills around here. They’re mostly guys in their 30s and 

40s. Mostly whites and Latins buy them, but a few blacks too. The market 

is an all-day thing. There’s always some wheeling and dealing going on, 

92 

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but the busiest time of day is 11 in the morning to 3pm. That’s the main 

time that people cop their meth, and they meet these guys afterward. 

When street-level transactions dominated heroin, cocaine and crack sales in the 

neighborhood, local drug users, including methadone program participants, found 

employment with the pany corporate organizations that operated on the Lower East Side, 

but as these businesses closed, workers found their daily routines dramatically altered. 

I, 

Many trace their decline in heroin use to this period. One former heroin seller and current 

’ 

methadone patient noted that, 

There’s no shootin’ dope9 down here-every once in a blue moon you 

find someone who wants you to buy a bag. You wanna sell it to him, you 

sell it to him. Now you see, what’s happenin’ to me here-the pills are 

startin’ to hit-the pills have hit me now with the meth. I have a time 

schedule. Twenty minutes before I get my methadone I eat my pills-it’s 

like a ritual, right. Oh, the pill business is boomin’. Yeah, you use the 

Medicaid so you can only use your script [prescription]. Your Medicaid 

card can get the pills only once a month, otherwise they’ll catch up to you 

and put a restriction on ya. So what you have to do is go to different 

doctors. And nobody wants to give up a doctor [to their friends], ‘cause 

the more doctors you give up, the doctor’s sooner or later gonna get busted 

and turn youse all away. So everybody holds onto their doctors like it’s 

their wallet. 

Besides a clientele, like Mikey, that has been forced to substitute one drug for another, 

there are other features that distinguish these markets from the ones they largely replaced. 

In particular, the pharmaceutical and methadone markets are almost strictly freelance 

“Shooting dope” refers to heroin suitable for injection (as opposed to sniffing). It is a common complaint 

from older heroin users that heroin currently available in New York is unsuitable for injection. 

93 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
operations, and because of the way in which dealers must acquire their limited supplies, 

organization among the distributors is virtually impossible to coordinate or sustain. These 

are likely to remain freelance markets whose established and inward-looking participants 

have few enduring links to other markets, except as occasional buyers of small amounts 

of cocaine, crack or heroin. Moreover, it is interesting to note that, in this marketplace, 

t 

the dealers with the greatest influence are those with the best access to drugs, and the fact , 

that they are all white (reversing the usual ethnic hierarchy that characterizes street-level 

drug markets) underscores their greater access to and use of health care resources. 

Many users who participated in these socially distinct markets cobbled together a 

mixture of heroin, methadone and various pills to tide them over from day to day. Far 

from the out-of-control drug user that was emblematic of the 1980s, these drug users 

found their days extraordinarily structured and predictable. In addition to becoming much 

more varied in their consumption of drugs (mixing and matching many combinations), 

many hard core users found that they had to employ a similar strategy to make money: 

I have a routine-a set routine. At nighttime I put everything out I need in 

the morning. I do my cleaning-all that shit and all that stuff, shower and 

shave-I do all that shit at night. I wake up in the mornin’, I can be outta 

the house in ten minutes. I get a cup a coffee out by the train. I usually try 

to buy one pill aheada time so I don’t gotta go ‘round lookin’ for a pill 

‘cause I like to take ‘em at the same time. Did that-had one pill aheada 

time, ‘cause I borrowed it from yesterday ‘cause somebody paid me back. 

And then I came here. After that, I started walkin’ towards-up by Police 

Plaza-and past it, up there. Walkin’ into like Rite-Aids and stuff, lookin’ 

for Visine and baby milk [to shoplift]. They could have all the alarms on 

‘em and they don’t go off, ‘cause it’s metal and it doesn’t correspond with 

94 

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position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
-- 

the machines. Over on the comer here I get two dollars a can. So I hit 

every store for four dollars-four cans-I go to five stores. I don’t do 

more ‘cause I don’t wanna get in trouble. Five stores is twenty 

dollars-that’s one bag [of heroin]. I walk around some more. Do it again. 

If I really needed something I might take six-and get it over with quick. 

Now I got my thirty-five or thirty-eight dollars-I got that money. Then, 

on the way home, I stop-in Queens-spend two dollars to buy like a’rice 

pudding or something and go buy some-I have a microwave at 

home-go buy something to eat. Maybe if I had bread and go get the best 

meat-so burgers and stuff like that-so I go home and cook that. Then, I 

either wait for customers to come or call them up, get my two bags [of 

heroin], watch television till three o’clock in the morning-Star Trek’s my 

last thing-and go to bed. Wake up in the morning with the alarm 

clock-I told you again, everything is laid out. I just get up, boom, go in 

the bathroom, refreshen up and all the clothes are set. All the pills are in 

the pocket-if I have any-the money’s in the pocket. There’s nothin’ I 

forget. 

This user had settled into a routine that allowed him to predict, with considerable 

e - 

accuracy, the combinations and amounts of drugs that he was likely to consume on a 

daily basis. Even though he continued to use a couple of bags of heroin daily, he could 

not generate enough cash to allow him to use at a level that might have once been 

possible in the neighborhood. As such, he supplemented the heroin with various pills and 

methadone. Many of his peers, however, acknowledged the futility of trying to maintain a 

heroin habit in the current climate, and were content to allow the state (through 

Medicaid) to take over that function through the use of pharmaceuticals. For example, 

one pharmaceuticaVmethadone user said that he had given up his long-term heroin habit: 

No, I’m not dibbin’ and dabbin’rengaging in occasional use of heroin 

without having a “habit”]-I take a blast once and then, ya know-cool 

my nerves, and to relax. And maybe a beer. But the hard drugs-I don’t 

95 

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take ‘em because ya know, number one there ain’t no drugs like it used to 

be out here, you know. If you want dope-and it’s stupid to want dope 

anyway when you on a methadone program-that’s just a waste of money, 

ya know. I see all the people, “Where’s the dope, where’s the dope, 

where’s the dope.” I don’t need that-where’s the dope that kills them? 

[laughs] How you wanna have dope that kills them? It ain’t like that no 

more. There’s no dope down here and the best thing is get on a program 

man-people wastin’ money like crazy. It’s not worth it man. 

Technology, social class and drug markets 

Since at least the mid-1960s and lasting well into the 1990s, the drug business on 

the Lower East Side appeared to have changed little. For example, many of the features 

of heroin markets described by Preble and Casey (1969) in the late 1960s-the ubiquity 

of street-level transactions, the domination of vertically organized businesses, the 

proliferation of well-defined roles in the drug business, the standardization of product 

packaging-remained virtually unchanged well into the mid- 1990s. Like other 

businesses, however, the drug business has also been responsive to the latest 

technological innovations, especially over the last 10 years. Advances in communications 

and personal computing have been particularly important to shifts in drug markets and 

the researchers have observed a number of important changes in this area. The late 1980s 

saw the introduction of pagers to the drug business, but they were initially used primarily 

to allow distributors to communicate with each other. Somewhat later, in the early 199Os, 

the use of pagers to allow customers to contact dealers became more popular, but it was 

not without problems. For example, on the Lower East Side, and many other 

96 

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neighborhoods around New York City, public telephones were used by customers to page 

dealers when they were nearby, thereby allowing them to arrange for a location and/or 

time to meet. When law enforcement realized that public phones were being used to 

conduct drug transactions, phones in particular areas were blocked from receiving 

incoming calls. This made paging a distributor from a nearby payphone virtually 

impossible since the distributor would not be able to call back to make plans with the 

customer. The exponential growth of cell phones in the mid-l990s--especially once cell 

phones and phone service became a highly competitive business, and falling prices made 

them accessible to many New Yorkers-made public telephones, and to a much lesser 

degree numeric pagers, somewhat obsolete in the drug business. Prepaid cellular service 

was especially popular among drug dealers since it was available to those who had bad or 

e 

no credit and had the added advantage of allowing dealers to avoid leaving a paper trail 

that could be followed by law enforcement. Even with the benefit of anonymity that 

prepaid cellular service seemed to offer distributors, many of them continued to be wary 

of relying too heavily on technology. Below, one dealer worries about the false sense of 

security that the new technologies offer: 

Everybody’s leery about selling right now. Everything is going on inside 

now. Inside-beeper’ shit like that. Cell phone. And even that’s startin’ to 

be a trap now. Yeah, ‘cause [the cops] startin’-they got a way of 

monitorin’ them shits now. They got these vans that be parked in different 

locations, you know what I’m sayin’-and it picks up their conversation. 

It gets all through that Web [internet] shit, you know. 

97 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Though law enforcement officials are concerned about the potential for the 

internet to be used as a tool to coordinate retail drug sales, we found no distributors who 

were using it, or who planned to use it, to establish or maintain business contacts with 

their customers. As might be expected, the computer was used for record-keeping and 

other menial tasks, and the researchers even documented an example of a computergenerated image that was printed and taped as a “stamp” on retail bags of heroin; 

however, with one notable exception (described below), the researchers did not find that 

computer technology was used to facilitate drug sales. 

The class segmentation of markets has been facilitated by technology that makes 

it easier for relatively closed groups of dealers and users to maintain contact with each 

other while excluding others. At the same time, there is also evidence that technology can 

a 

also be used to bridge the gaps of race, ethnicity and class that have grown so pronounced 

since drug markets moved off the street. 

As drug sales moved off the streets and buying drugs became much more 

dependent upon personal connections, the ability of white or middle- and upper-class 

drug users to buy drugs from dealers who lived in the public housing projects was 

substantially diminished. To compensate for the disappearance of these anonymous 

markets, many users who did not live in the area, but at one time bought drugs there, 

began to develop personal connections for a variety of drugs. Several white, middle class - 

0 heroin dealers who began selling in the late 1990s saw their business increase over the 

98 

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expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
duration of the project, and they developed a stable of steady customers. Like their 

customers however, these dealers (who were invariably users themselves) also had rather 

limited access to wholesale supplies, often relying on a single source to buy “bundles” or 

“packages” once or twice a week. While their wholesale suppliers proved to be quite 

reliable and the quality of the heroin fairly steady, it was difficult for these white retailers 

to make much profit, often earning just enough to sustain their own habits, but not much 

more. As such, they were often eager to find less expensive sources of heroin, but 

because markets had grown more separate and the participants more distrustful of each 

other, this was usually difficult to accomplish. In one instance, Bobby, a white heroin 

dealer asked one of his customers for assistance in finding another source of the drug. 

a 

A very weird thing happened to me yesterday. Bobby was complaining 

that he can’t make any money because the dope from his connection is too 

expensive. Since he knows that I go to Harlem to cop sometimes, he asked 

me if I could hook him up with someone up there. I told him that I’d ask 

this kid up there who might be able to do it. So later, when I went uptown, 

I ran into this kid, Pablo, and told him that I had a white guy downtown 

who wanted to buy an ounce or so of dope and asked him if he could hook 

him up. Pablo said, “maybe I can help him out.” So, he says to me, “we 

gotta go uptown,” and he flagged down a cab and we jumped inside. On 

the way uptown-I had no idea where we were going-he asked me if I 

had ID. I thought that was a weird question, but I didn’t really think about 

it at the time. We got up to 161” Street, near Riverside and Pablo took me 

to the second floor of an apartment building. When the guy answered the 

door, I was surprised to see all the computer equipment inside. Near the 

front door, they had a computer station set up, just like an office. There 

was a guy sitting behind the desk and he told me to sit in the chair on the 

other side of him. This was too weird, I thought. I wondered whether 

Pablo had misunderstood me. Maybe he thought that I was looking for a 

job because the place he brought me to was set up like an office and the 

99 

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position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
guy across the desk started to interview me like I was applying for a job. 

At one point, I turned to Pablo and asked him, “You know I want to buy 

dope, right?” He said, “yeah, I know.” The guy at the computer gave me 

about a half-hour interview. He wanted to see two forms of ID and even 

asked me my mother’s maiden name, all kinds of questions. When he was 

finished, he said, “We’ll check this out and get back to you.” I got back 

into the car with Pablo and drove back downtown. He told me that if 

everything checked out ok, they guy would call me back and then we 

could do business. 

The outcome of Bobby’s request underscores the segmentation that currently exists 

within the market and the difficulties that wholesalers, retailers and users have in 

conducting business with each other. Given heroin’s stable price and purity, it is obvious 

that there is ample supply of heroin in New York City, but changes in the social and 

technical organization of distribution have created bottlenecks in the market so that v 

e demand is never satisfied. Even though they do not ensure safety, personal connections 

are nearly axiomatic for those who participate in these drug markets, but reliance upon 

personal connections is a difficult way to build a customer base. The use of high tech 

methods to screen potential customers is an explicit recognition of the often ephemeral 

nature of ties between users (in this case, heroin users) and signifies an attempt by 

businesses to reduce their reliance upon recommendations from existing customers as a 

precondition for participating in the market. 

DEALING AS LABOR 

Motivations of distributors 

100 

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Through an examination of the motivations of the distributors in our sample, this 

section explores the allures of drug-dealing as a form of labor. While the financial aspects 

of drug distribution have been the subject of much lurid attention from the media, few get 

rich selling drugs. As in the non-criminalized economy, workers are sometimes subject to 

savage exploitation. On the other hand, dealing offers young workers many things legal 

jobs don’t: autonomy, responsibility, “respect,” the excitement of “getting over” on the 

e 

police. Few non-criminal entry-level jobs offer an opportunity for decision-making or 

rewards for thinking, but rather reward conformity and docility. By contrast, a young man 

who can think of new ways to outwit the police is likely to win the adulation of his peers 

and immediate financial rewards. In drug dealing, alienated youth hope to find a way to 

make money, while remaining aloof from forms of employment which do not accord with 

0 

norms and values which are important to them. They hope to find work which embodies 

and flows out of their sense of identity, a form of labor which at least seems to transcend 

the alienation which characterizes most working-class labor. 

Few studies have dealt with drug dealing as a social formation: most of the 

existing literature is concerned with eradicating distribution, not understanding or 

contextualizing it (Curtis and Wendel 2000). Understanding of the social realities of drug 

use and distribution has been further skewed by the criminal justice data sources 

employed by most studies. Because criminal justice in the United States is so heavily 

e color-coded, such data sources, and the studies that derive from them, hugely overstate 

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the participation of minorities in drug distribution and hugely understate the participation 

of whites, particularly those of under-arrested social groups. It allows white middle-class 

a 

Americans and the criminal justice system a comfortable distance from the “problem of 

drugs,” by fostering a stereotype of drug dealing as something people in ghettos do, as a 

problem which can be policed away. 

Recent American criminology has become dependent on number-crunching: 

seeking correlations between various factors which seem related to crime: race, class and 

so on. Causal explanation need not be the sole interest of criminologists. An entirely 

different sort of theory may be required to explain the living reality of crime. Such a 

theory will focus on structural factors leading people into criminal behavior, while 

avoiding the trap of determinism by giving free play to human agency, decision making, 

a 

and indeed stupidity. Ethnographers, who spend extended amounts of time with the 

people they are researching, are better positioned to get at information about the 

meanings and motivations attached to criminal behavior by active offenders themselves 

Katz, for example, in his discussion of the seductions of crime emphasizes crime 

as an exciting activity and as a project of self invention (Katz 1988). The criminal 

reconstitutes himself as the hard man, the gangster, the outlaw biker. Ferrell approaches 

study of those behaviors which society sanctions as criminal, by examining the 

experience of criminality as collective social activity and thus as culture. Maher (1997) 

a - 

has argued that criminal cultures largely reproduce the sexism, racism and class structure 

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of “legitimate” society. Maher spent two years in ethnographic observation of women’s 

roles, as sex workers, drug distributors and users in Bushwick (Brooklyn) and analyzes 

the ways in which the world of criminalized labor reproduces the stratified relations of 

the races and the sexes in the dominant political economy (Maher 1997). 

a 

In one of the few studies of dealers who were not poor or working-class inner city 

minority group members, Adler’s ethnographic work examines the lifestyles and 

motivations of a group of smugglers and high-level distributors of cocaine and cannabis. 

She concludes that their dominant motivations are materialism and hedonism (Adler 

1985:97). Of the two, Adler says that hedonism is a “more compelling” reason for 

participation in dealing than material rewards: “Southwest County drug traffickers 

pursued a lifestyle filled with the pleasures of unlimited drugs, sexual promiscuity, 

personal power, high status, freedom, risk and excitement.” (Adler 1985:98) Adler also 

discusses the importance of a dealer’s reputation and ranking in the “prestige hierarchy.” 

(Adler I985:99) The determinants of this ranking she mentions are: Character- integrity, 

generosity, not being greedy, reliability, self control with regard to drug use and physical 

courage; Business acumen: business sense, technical knowledge (including knowledge 

about the product), connections, ability to collect debts, good judgeement as to people 

and good money management skills; Avoiding the law (Adler 1985: 100-1 18). Adler 

0 

discusses two primary ways that people become involved in dealing: through selling to 

a - 

support personal use, who entered the trade at a low level, or through social acquaintance 

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with successful dealers and observation of their allegedly glamorous “decadent” 

lifestyles, who entered the trade at a high level (Adler 1985:123-28). 

Willis (1977) seeks to explain how working-class youth both create and learn to 

accept their place in society. Attitudes towards school, masculinity, authority and work 

, 

are explored in this ethnographic work. Willis’ analysis of how working class kids make 

choices in the labor market emphasizes the importance of the values of the informal 

group of peers; a sense of insider knowledge of how the world works; fast easy money, 

needed both to finance sub culturally mandated consumption, and to contribute to the 

4 

sense of knowing how the world really works; excitement; opportunities for masculine 

expression (“A trade is judged not for itself, or even for its general financial return, but 

for its ability to provide the central, domestic, masculine role for its incumbent” (Willis 

1977: 150)); and most importantly cultural identification with workmates (Willis 

1977:96). Selling drugs sounds like the ideal form of employment for a person who 

shares the values Willis discusses. Dealing offers ample fulfillment to all the categories 

of needs he discusses and additionally the excitement of “getting over.” Willis’ analysis 

of how working class British youth “damn” themselves to lives of manual labor finds a 

grim parallel in American society. Black and Hispanic youth “damn” themselves to lives 

of crime because in later life they are locked into attitudes and decisions forged when 

they were teenagers or school children. In many inner-city communities, crime and drug 

0 dealing were the only growth industries during the 1980s and early 1990s. A young man 

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raised in such a neighborhood, rationally analyzing the structure of opportunities facing 

him, could reasonably conclude that affiliation with an established drug dealing 

organization or freelance entrepreneurial drug dealing were among his best option. As 

young white men in the 19” century were urged to “Go West, Young Man” to seek their 

fortunes, during much of the last 30 years society seemed to be urging young black and 

Hispanic men to “Go Bad, Young Man” in pursuit of the same goal. 

Over the last several decades, a number of researchers have examined the motives 

of drug distributors (e.g., Adler 1985, Anderson 1999, Bourgois 1995, Jacobs 1999, 

Johnson et al. 1985, Reuter et al. 1990, Williams 1989), but, with the exception of Adler, 

they have tended to focus primarily on young minority populations. For example, in 

discussing the mostly black freelance street sellers in St. Louis, Jacobs, like most other 

researchers, found that “[clrack dealing emerges for many as the most ‘proximate and 

performable’ way to meet immediate financial needs” (Jacobs 1999:26). While he 

stresses that “[oln the streets money is everything,” Jacobs also says that “income from 

crack sales is almost never as high as sellers report it to be” (Jacobs 1999,27). He says, 

however, that most dealers “lack the cultural capital necessary to engage in legitimate 

business” (Jacobs 1999:28). While few are surprised by this finding, and indeed this 

research found similar motives among young minority dealers, we also found similar 

motives among white, middle-class distributors. As two white freelance distributors 

commented: 

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It starts with doing favors for friends, but it’s a capitalist society, that’s the 

way we were brought up, thinking well if I’m going to do this I should 

make money from it, but we never decided to do anything, deal. 

I’m 24 years old and I’m making more money than my father, who has a 

very good middle-class job. Of course, he pays taxes. I have a file drawer 

full of money wrapped up with rubber bands in bundles of a thousand. 

It turned out dlaling was the middle-class dream job, something I was 

really good at that paid well. My parents told me to find something I was 

good at and do it. So I sell drugs. Since I was dealing to other middle-class 

college kids and yuppies, it never really occurred to me that I was a 

criminal for years. It just built up and built up. 

A bunch of my friends worked as moped messengers, so I started doing 

that and so did this other kid, about my age, Bill. We switched to bicycles 

after a while. We started selling weed together. At first, he was my 

assistant, but not wanting to in a hierarchy over him, plus he was my 

friend, so he became my partner. 

a In the past, many black and Hispanic youth worked for vertically organized 

corporate distributors, but this has changed: the social organization of drug distribution 

has been altered, under the influence of profound changes in youth subcultural values 

(Curtis 1998), as well as policing practices and gentrification (Wendel in press). Today, 

many black and Hispanic youths are freelance distributors or sell as part of a sociallybonded group (Curtis and Wendel 2000), and considerations of autonomy have become 

more important to the members of these groups. Jacobs also stresses the importance of 

autonomy: “[tlhe cultural ethos of the street corner renders any form of subordination 

unacceptable” (Jacobs 1999:32). In some ways, the transformation of the corporate style 

of distribution offers much more opportunity to find autonomy. Where franchising 

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,1 

defines the relationship between the owners and their retail labor force the issue of 

autonomy is deceptive. Franchisees are not, in fact, entirely autonomous from their 

0 

suppliers, but given that they no longer have managers watching their every move on the 

street, they are able to maintain the appearance of being one’s “own man.” Williams says 

that dealers climb the career ladder through “hard work, skillful, intelligence and a little 

luck,” as well as an ability to handle money, limit cocaine use, “deal with buyers, and 

control a weapon” (Williams 1989:45). He says that teenage dealers are expected to “act 

like sales people in any business,” limit drug use, “keep accurate records and avoid 

arrest” (Williams 1989:s). One owner of a corporate delivery business commented about 

the need for professionalism: 

They [previous management] were just totally unprofessional. They [the 

workers] didn’t get the job done, because there were very few people who 

took it seriously, who actually worked at it. Just people that were like 

“Yeah, I got a job I can sit down and get high with.” I didn’t, you know, I 

took it seriously. That’s the thing, man I’m telling you. I’m sure there’s 

better, better product elsewhere. I’m not sure, sometimes we do pretty 

good too. But and I’m sure you can get better deals, but I mean the fact is, 

is like, I mean it gets there on time, we show up. 

A worker in a delivery service also talked about the need for professionalism on 

the job that is peculiar to this business: 

One company I worked for would bum out if I looked too grungy. The 

customers would complain that it seemed suspicious that I was coming 

into their apartment and leaving so shortly afterwards, week after week. 

The whole thing in the lobby is on a million cameras, it makes you totally 

paranoid until you realize how small a scale you’re dealing with, and how 

many people live in buildings that doormen don’t really care about, how 

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many doormen there are in the building and how they work on different 

shifts. One way I deal with people who get their weed the same time every 

week is to have them tell their doorman that I work for whatever company 

they work for and say I have to drop the weekly reports or some shit like 

that for them to check on. Pretty soon I become a part of the scene, I even 

develop a little ‘hey how ya doing’ thing with some of the regular guys. 

That’s another reason it’s better to work with a small company. The bigger 

companies have a lot fuck-ups working for them who look like fuck-ups. 

People with real nosey doormen should know to meet the delivery guys 

somewhere else. If you dress normal though, and don’t look like a 

messenger nobody will notice you. That’s how the real smart dudes 

operate. If you wear a tie you can go anywhere in the straight world 

without attracting any attention, if you got a tie on some of the places I go 

everyone thinks you’re a cop. 

Williams argues that teenagers are drawn into drug dealing “simply because they 

want jobs,” but also they are “pulled by the flash and dazzle” and “ pushed by the desire 

to ‘be somebody”’(Wil1iams 1989:s). In addition to the financial rewards, Williams 

argues that “another strong motivating force. . . is the desire to show family and friends 

that they can succeed at something. Moving up a career ladder and making money is 

especially important where there are few visible opportunities” (Williams 1989: 10). 

Aggressiveness, intelligence and cunning in the face of danger and risk-masculine 

“virtues”-are also important (Williams 19893). Williams also notes that successful 

dealers enjoy high status on the street (Williams 1989: 102), in contrast to those “lames” 

who work in legitimate employment” (Williams 1989:103). Jacobs says that on the street 

“[clrack revenue is valued first and foremost as a means to achieve respect and status 

where these are companion qualities and, literally, are worn on one’s sleeve” (Jacobs e 

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1999:29).Jacobs denies that crack dealers are drawn into dealing by “feelings of 

excitement” or “joys of hustling and getting over,” because, he says, selling drugs is 

“overwhelmingly boring, tedious, and routine’’ (Jacobs 1999:34). I 

Many dealers of all ethnic backgrounds in our sample continued dealing (at least 

part-time) even when they had non-criminal work, including quite well-paid work. This 

I 

would seem to argue that there are motivations which. transcend the simply pecuniary.10 8 

As one white dealer told the researchers: 

There‘s just the whole James Bond thing, you know. Walking by a cop 

with a shitload of drugs on you and he has no clue. It’s fun. Or walking by 

these pathetic yuppies and you’re thinking I have $20,000 on me and 

you’re kissing ass in a suit. 

Williams notes that “[m]ost of the kids are users as well as dealers” (and thus 

importance of limiting consumption) (Williams 1989:8), and describes levels of 

consumption of cocaine, alcohol and cannabis which would likely prove unacceptable in 

many more conventional workplaces. The dealers Jacobs studied claimed to rigorously 

avoid crack, but were enthusiastic consumers of alcohol and cannabis (Jacobs 1999:38). 

Many of the dealers in our sample were similar: 

I basically got into dealing through wanting to smoke more than I could 

afford to buy, it was never a decision like Oh I’m going into business. In 

lo It might, of course, be argued that these dealers were simply supplementing their legitimate incomes by 

“moonlighting” in the (lucrative) underground. However, both the fact that many dealers do not in fact 

make all that much from dealing, coupled with the many comments from dealers which clearly indicated e 

their love for “the game” serve to amply contradict this interpretation. 

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8” grade, I’d buy an ounce and sell 314 of it [to break even], that was 

usually the rule. The weed I would get, like Colombian gold, delicious 

buds for $40 an ounce, I would sell quarters for $15 or make 6 dimes out 

of an ounce. I sold just to friends in school. 

The discounts isla good thing about the job, I smoke a lot of pot. You can 

take drugs or have beer and not have to worry about the boss getting 

pissed. 1 

We were messengering during the day and mostly selling weed at night. 

We were doing a lot of acid too, there was a time when we’d do a tab 

every day at 3, so it would start to come on at about 4 for the last hour of 

work and then we’d be peaking at about five. 

Jacobs says that “crack selling offers” leisurely “and more profitable work in 

which offenders, can determine their own hours, work patterns, and related occupational 

habits’’ and that the requirements of “a normal job” “are not acceptable” to the people he 

studied (Jacobs 1999:33). These themes resonated with our sample of dealers too: 

The hours were good, 2 to 9 is good, you have time to get home be out in a 

bar by 11:30. Not having to be in the same place all day, you can dress 

how you want, I mean I never had a job with a uniform, [when I work in] 

catering I drive a truck, I’m not a waiter. You can do what you want when 

you want. The customers, 80% you could tolerate, 10% were really cool, 

10% were just rude, paranoid and rude. They expect the same service 

you’d get from a five star restaurant that delivers. They’d bitch at you if 

were over thirty minutes getting there. It’s a service, it’s not a right of life. 

The owners, they were much better than most bosses, Harry wasn’t really 

a boss, it wasn’t like that. It was more what do you call it, camaraderie, 

they just made a lot more money than we did. The other people, on 

occasion we’d hang out, go to a bar. Dick I’d see almost every night in 

this one bar, punk rock bar. Jack I’d hang with at Ted’s, do drugs. 

I mean fuck, sleep ‘til noon, start answering the phone whenever I feel like 

it, what’s wrong with that? I can dress however I want, haircut, tattoos, 

whatever and not have to listen to any shit. Sometimes I get bored, I sit 

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and shoot beer cans with my air pistol or listen to really loud music. Or 

just get high.. . 

Widely disparate outcomes, which we argue are largely determined by race, 

follow on the decision to enter into drug dealing of youths of a wide variety of class and 

ethnic backgrounds. The criminal justice outcomes experienced by the white drug dealers 

who participated in our studies can be simply summed up: by and large, there were none. 

In a 5-year study of heroin distribution and use in New York City that the researchers 

began in 1996, only one white dealer in the sample was imprisoned. Only one of the 

white dealers who participated in the current study was incarcerated during the study 

period. By contrast, the black and Hispanic dealers who participated in the two studies 

were almost all veterans of one or more prison “bids” or were arrested or imprisoned 

during the study periods. 

a 

The negative consequences of participation in drug distribution for white dealers 

were not those caused by the criminal-justice system. Rather, white dealers often 

mentioned how difficult it was to “leave the underground” and re-enter the world of uncriminalized work. There were several reasons for this. First, they mentioned the 

difficulties inherent in leaving self-directed work and working for others, sometimes for 

the first time in years. Second, they often made considerably less money after ceasing 

drug distribution. Profits in the drug trade can of course be considerable, and persons who 

entered into drug distribution because their only alternative employment opportunities e 

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were routine, menial and tedious were likely to find that their post-dealing options were 

remarkably reminiscent of those that led them into dealing in the first place. Whatever 

entrepreneurial and practical skills dealers gained during their tenure in drug distribution 

are largely undocumented and hardly the stuff of which successful resumes are made. 

Third, a person who has supported himself exclusively through his distribution activities 

is likely to have long gaps in his employment history, gaps which cause prospective 

employers to look askance and render reentry into legitimate employment all the more 

difficult. Still, there are pressures to get out of the business: 

Paranoia got to me and I was burned out too. My wife didn’t want me 

doing anymore either. You’re out there every day doing the same thing, 

people get to know you, they know what’s going on, doormen.. . it wasn’t 

comfortable. Was I more afraid of getting busted or ripped off? Neither 

really. I guess both. It was just getting to me. I didn’t want to be looked at 

every day like that. That’s all they think of you as, the pot guy, and I’m 

more than that. I was sick of it. Paranoia was there but it was more people 

thinking of you as just the pot guy. I’d rather be known for playing music 

than delivering weed. I’d do it again if it was absolutely necessary, but not 

here in New York, I don’t need it, I have a good job. I’d recommend it to 

some people, if I had a friend who was looking for work and it was the 

right friend. It’s a great way to learn New York, it’s an easy way to earn a 

lot of money. It needs someone with a carefree attitude about life. 

Someone who just does things because they’re there. Rules don’t apply to 

a lot of people, rules are made to be broken and they’re broken everyday, 

like my father always said. Someone who knows that.. .I’m moving back 

to Arizona, my wife Sylvia is finishing grad school and she has a lead on a 

job out there. 

Having entered into a life of drug dealing for quite similar reasons, white youths 

and black/Hispanic youths face widely different outcomes. Racial profiling leads to 

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blacks and Hispanics being arrested at rates which are highly disproportionate to their 

rates of drug use, and, this paper argues, participation in drug distribution. In addition to 

this far greater risk of arrest, black and Hispanic drug dealers suffer an additional burden 

not shared by their white counterparts. They face higher rates of incarceration on 

conviction for the same offense and longer a sentences. Thus they are far more likely than 

white dealers both to bear the stigma of past incarceration, to have suffered the negative 

socialization so characteristic of modern American prisons, and upon release from prison, 

they enjoy fewer economic opportunities. 

Violence and drug distribution 

The relative absence of any mention of violence associated with participation in 

drug markets over the duration of the study was remarkable given the history of drugrelated violence on the Lower East Side.l This, after all, was the neighborhood where 

Goldstein (1985) collected the data that resulted in his benchmark paper on drug-related 

violence. Old-time hard drug users who had lengthy criminal careers and were veterans 

of the period when violence was commonplace in the area agreed that the era of street 

crime and violence was over. 

Every now and then I do my thing, to try to make ends meet. I don’t like it 

‘cause it’s too scary out here to get busted, ya know what I mean-nobody 

Although this study has little to report with respect to drug-related violence, the authors have recently 

completed a 5-year study of heroin in New York City funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse 

(“Heroin in the 21’’ Centruy” #R01 DA10105-05) that will have much more to say about drug-related 

violence, especially the phenomenon of robbing drug dealers (Jacobs 2000). 

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wanna get busted. These are the chances we take. I’d rather hustle than hit 

somebody upside the head and take their shit like some assholes out here 

be doin’-I don’t condone that. I’m against all that violence, stupidity-ya 

know, hurtin’ old people and shit like that. That-I’m against. 

Drug dealers were far more likely to be involved in violent crime as victims than 

as perpetrators. For the most part, dealers were extremely paranoid about being robbed, 

especially house dealers, many of whom recounted horrifying tales of home invasionstyle robberies and one of whom told of witnessing the murder of a close business 

associate, after he himself had been brutally tortured. For the most part, dealers were 

philosophical about these robberies: 

They [the Chelsea loft mentioned above] stopped [dealing] eventually 

because there were a lot of robberies, not just them but a lot of people, 

Shiva Steve, Bill and his girlfriend got tied up, John uptown got robbed 

twice [although the second time was a setup by a “friend”]. They were 

robbed a few times by guys dressed as Con Ed guys, everyone said they 

were cops, they were going about six years. They didn’t just give up the 

first time they got robbed because they lived there and they were making a 

lot of money. 

The corporate marijuana delivery service described at length above has been 

robbed several times, three times by thieves posing as customers and twice by staff 

members. In each case, the organization’s response was to tighten procedures to prevent 

reoccurrence, but otherwise to absorb the loss as a cost of doing business. For example, 

the service became unwilling to meet customers on the street or in cars, not out of fear of 

arrest during transactions in these more public locations, but because of a fear of “street 

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kids” detecting their activities and following and robbing the runners. As one of the 

owners noted: 

We don’t do street deals anymore. None. And I think [cutting out] the 

street deals have less to do with fear of cops, more to do with the fear of 

people. Other people. [What do you mean?] Like the people preying upon 

us, you know, street kids. 

He contrasted their responses to the robberies to that of distributors involved in heroin 

and cocaine sales: 

Those guys who are preying on us, preying on delivery people. If they’re 

gonna be jumping some of those guys, they’re gonna get killed, because 

the heroin guys are doing this now too. They’re just gonna be killed, no 

getting around it. The heroin guys on the bikes, the coke guys, I mean 

those are crews. We’re a bunch of people, but we’re not in any goddamn 

crew, you know. We don’t have like some blood ethic that’s keeping us 

going. Bunch of kids trying to pay bills, nothing more, nothing less. Very 

innocuous. 

No dealers in our sample said they carried a gun while selling drugs and few kept 

firearms at home. Many commented that this was because they feared that the courts 

would look more sternly on carrying a gun than on selling drugs. For example, one 

Hispanic ecstasylmarijuana dealers told the researchers: 

I’ve never worried about customers ripping me off, but at one point-just 

in case-I did make sure I kept a weapon underneath my bed. I had like a 

sawed-off shotgun, and it was always loaded. But I never carried it when I 

went out and did deliveries. Never! That’s the worst thing-to get caught 

in the street with a weapon like that. I didn’t really worry about that stuff 

‘cause it was people that I knew for a while and I wouldn’t go to 

somebody’s house with a lotta pot. If I got ripped off what would they 

get-like whatever they thought was like sixty dollars worth of pot or two 

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eighths or a full bag of a quarter-just like sixty or seventy bucks or 

whatever. 

The owners and managers of corporate street dealing organizations had a history 

of dealing with disloyal employees and disputes with competitors through public displays 

of violence. By contra$, the corporate delivery organizations which exist today are 

diametrically opposed to violent solutions, and generally employed a carrot rather than a 

stick to manage their labor force. One corporate owner, discussed how he handled the 

discovery that employees had put the corporation at risk by selling cocaine and ecstasy in 

conjunction with their strictly marijuana business: by paying employees more as an 

incentive to avoid side businesses (see above): 

Some of the guys got ideas to make more money by bringing their own 

things along and those things that they were bringing were different drugs. 

So when we found out they were doing that, it was just like, first of all it’s 

like “Fuck you, what are you doing that for?” and second of all “Alright, I 

guess it’s obvious, you need the money.” So, this gave them a vested 

interest and it seems to have done a pretty good job. 

Since the delivery organizations have no “turf’ to defend and little idea where the 

competitors are active, there is little incentive to engage in violence with competitors. 

In many of the delivery businesses there was considerable paranoia about being 

detected by the police. Dealers change their contact numbers with some regularity and 

use a variety of direct marketing methods to alert chosen customers as to the change. In 

addition to assuaging nervous drug deliverers about the threats from police, it provides 

e them the opportunity to drop problematic customers from the rolls. Still, freelance 

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dealing or delivering drugs for a service are jobs that are both physically demanding and 

psychologically stressful. Below, one dealer comments about how constant worrying 

drove him out of the business: 

Then I worked for a guy that supplied those guys [a delivery service] with 

weight. So I would like deliver pounds to people. I only did that for a 

couple of months because it was givin’ me an ulcer. You’d go to his house 

and pick up like three or four pounds, take the train back to my house and 

then just sit on it. He’d call and like give you an address, give you a 

weight-and it was never less than a quarter pound-and you would just 

go and do these deliveries. And you’d just sit around and do whatever it 

was you were doing, and then you’d get a call, “Go ride over to the West 

Village or Uptown.” This was really nerve wracking-you have two 

pounds of weed in your bag and four thousand dollars in cash or 

something and you run a red light [while bicycling] and you’re like, “Oh 

my God.” There were only like four or five customers, like delivery 

service people-like maybe three delivery services. And then just random 

dealers-you’d go up and meet them at their apartment and they’d buy a 

pound. 

DISCUSSION 

As far as customers, the customers will always be there. I think they’d 

probably rather have it delivered than have to go out. Think about it, if you 

wanna do something you don’t want your boss seein’ you do, it would be 

a helluva lot easier to have some guy buzz your buzzer and walk into your 

apartment than you have you slurpin’ around the streets doin’ it, you know 

what I mean? When I was twenty-one it was still exciting to score some 

drugs. Kids still do the same thing. But I think that as far as-it doesn’t 

make a neighborhood better not having the drugs on the street. I don’t 

know. Maybe in the little bodegas that were sellin’ the drugs that I knew 

that all closed down-shit, they closed down years ago and other things 

came in. Or they couldn’t afford to pay the rent-who knows. 

In many ways, the commentary above summarizes much of what this research 

discovered over the two-year research period. At the same time, the changes that the study 

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observed cannot be reduced to a simple formulaic understanding: it was a period of rapid 

change in many respects, and drug markets were part of that transformation. This study 

0 

examined the range of illegal drugs that were present on the Lower East Side, and did so 

by employing an analytic strategy that emphasized the technical organization ‘and the 

social organization of distribution. For this study, the location of sales was selected as a 

critical component of the technical organization of distribution to focus upon and they 

were grouped into three categories: 1) street-level sales, 2) indoor sales, and 3) delivery 

services. 

By definition, street-level sales occur outdoors, but beyond that, they vary greatly. 

Street-level markets on the Lower East Side were once characterized by transactions 

between anonymous buyers and sellers in a blatant fashion that was obvious to passers by 

and police alike, engendering many complaints from community residents. In the current 

period, street sales, if they happen at all, usually occur between buyers and sellers who 

know each other intimately and whose transactions are scarcely visible to outsiders. 

Indoor sales took place in a wide variety of locales, including apartment or “house” 

connections, storefronts, bodegas (small neighborhood grocery stores), nightclubs, afterhours clubs and bars. In the 1970s and OS, most indoor sales on the Lower East Side took 

place in and among the abandoned buildings spread throughout the neighborhood. Those 

locales have long since disappeared. The number of bodegas that sell drugs have 

a decreased dramatically as vigorous policing and substantial reductions in the Hispanic 

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population of the neighborhood and their confinement to the Eastern edge of the 

neighborhood have curtailed this option. 

a 

The remaining storefront locales that offer drugs are often specialized boutiquestyle establishments, better-suited to the upscale flavor of the neighborhood. They 

typically offer a single substance-usually marijuana-to a discreet but diverse clientele. 

House connections became more prominent as an option following the disappearance of 

street-level sales, especially among white heroin users who have extended networks of 

acquaintances that they can and do activate to maintain a steady supply of the drug. Bars 

and clubs on the Lower East Side have long been known for the degree to which drugs are 

readily available-especially cocaine and “club drugs” like ecstasy-but with the 

disappearance of street sales and the time-limited operation of delivery services (who 

generally do not conduct business late into the night as to not arouse suspicion) club and 

bar dealers have found their niche considerably expanded in the current period. 

Delivery of drugs removes transactions from the streets and risky indoor venues 

and offer consumers the opportunity to have drugs delivered directly to home, office or 

other safe locations. This form of distribution, which scarcely existed ten years ago, has 

rapidly become the predominant form of distribution for most drugs on the Lower East 

Side. There are basically two forms of delivery sales: delivery services and beeper dealers. 

Delivery services employ “runners,” who may travel on foot, by bicycle, car, taxi or 

a public transportation. The deliveries are typically made to the homes or workplaces of the 

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customer. The customer pays a premium price reflecting insulation from the risks of a 

street transaction, as well as for the convenience represented by home delivery. By 

contrast, beeper dealers wait for customers to call them on a pager, which digitally 

a 

transmits a phone number for the dealer to call the customer back so that they can plan a 

meeting location, rather than lingering on street corners or in the lobbies of buildings. This 

practice offers a much greater degree of security for the dealer, since he/she is not forced 

to wait at a particular location (which may have become known to law enforcement) to 

meet customers and knows in advance who he or she will be selling to and how much they 

4 

want. Beeper dealers can avoid areas known to be “hot” (under police surveillance), 

instead transacting business in areas not known for drug activity 

Other features of the technical organization of distribution were also notable 

during the research period. The extraordinary growth of “secondary markets” for all drugs 

was one of them. Our use of the term secondary market refers to more than simply a small 

group of friends who buy and share drugs together. The critical feature of the secondary 

market is the use of a person-a middleman-who is not a “professional” dealer to 

facilitate the purchase of drugs, and is a person who, in essence, works as an agent for the 

consumer rather than the distributor. The growth of secondary markets is seen as the 

outcome of the class segmentation of drug markets. As some groups of users are socially 

and geographically distant from the sellers, the existence of intermediaries is critical to the ~ -- 

flow of drugs, but bridging the divide between these diverging groups continues to be a 

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I-..,, 

challenge to distributors and users alike. For example, crack continues to be used by a 

significant number of whites who generally do not get arrested (Rohde 1998), but the 

0 

greater integration of crack sellers and minority users into the fabric of the community on 

the Lower East Side has made it that much more difficult for whites to buy crack there. To 

a large degree, the proliferation of “house” connections is an outgrowth of this increase in 

secondary markets. The growth of franchising, though in many ways better defined as a 

reformulation of the corporate model, may also be seen as related to the proliferation of 

secondary markets. The extension of credit has always been critical to the functioning of 

drug markets; however, its importance is underscored in the current period where 

transactions can no longer take place in public places or involve large numbers of people 

at one time. 

a 

The study also examined how recent advances in technology have affected drug 

markets. Previous researchers have dwelled upon the increased sophistication in weaponry 

that accompanied the crack boom of the 1980s, but they largely ignored the importance of 

changes in the equipment and technology used in retail drug distribution and the 

significance of those innovations in drug markets. For example, the popularization of 

delivery services can be seen as a direct outcome of the widespread diffusion of 

telecommunications technology like pagers and cell phones. Delivery services also 

typically use computers to keep track of their often-extensive lists of clients. Some ~- 

forward-looking entrepreneurs have even begun to explore the internet as a vehicle by 

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which retail sales can be carried out. While some observers seem only interested in 

understanding how drug distributors use technology to stay one-step-ahead-of-the-law, the 

use of technology to define, differentiate and separate drug markets along class lines, and 

0 

to a lesser degree by race and/or ethnicity, appears to be one hallmark of the current trend 

in drug markets on the Lower East Side. 

t 

The study also selected distributors that fit into three ideal types of social 

organization representing a conceptual sequence of increasing complexity: 1) freelance 

distributors, 2) socially bound businesses, and 3) corporate-style distributors. The ckical 

defining characteristics of freelance distributors are 1) a lack of formal hierarchy, and 2) 

the absence of a division of labor. Our model of freelance distribution was built upon 

a 

observations and interviews with distributors from the crack era who operated in a blatant, 

cavalier and often violent manner that earned them resentment from neighborhood 

residents (Curtis 1996, Sviridoff et al. 1992). By contrast, the freelance indoor and 

freelance delivery distributors that this study observed and interviewed depend, for their 

very existence, on invisibility, and relationships between potential competitors, when there 

were any, were surprisingly collegial if competitive, and generally supportive. 

The next level of organizational complexity is what is described here as a sociallybonded business. As the name implies, organizations of this type are usually based upon 

extra-economic social ties, typically kinship, race, ethnicity, nationality, and/or 

a neighborhood. Those who make up the group share some common feature (or set of 

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features), beyond simply making money, that binds members of the group together. While 

freelance and corporate-style distributors are very specific and easily recognizable forms 

e 

of distribution, socially-bonded businesses exhibit wide variation. Some are quite 

egalitarian in their structure and functioning resembling collectives of freelancers (like the 

Jamaicans in Washington Square Park) while others are hierarchical and appear almost 

\ 

! 

corporate-like in the way that they operate. 

Corporate-style distributors are the most complexly organized of our three ideal 

types. At one time on the Lower East Side, the dominant corporate model featured several 

levels of hierarchy and considerable functional specialization within the organization. By 

contrast, during the current period, corporate organizations are much “flatter” and exhibit 

a 

much less job specialization. Of course, the associations between persons involved in 

these businesses are still primarily based on making money, and “runners,” for example, 

clearly see themselves as employees, but the organizations lack the tensions that 

characterized their street-level predecessors. 

Street-level corporations dealt with the issue of trust and loyalty by instilling terror 

through the routine use of public “beat-downs,” humiliations and killings, and many hired 

“enforcers” expressly for this purpose. When street-level enforcement activities increase, 

the estrangement between ownership, management and labor is often seen in the increased 

incidence of street-level violence between them (Curtis 1996). For example, in 1998, one 

0 corporate heroin-selling organization on the Lower East Side called “The Cut Throat 

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, , 

Crew,” punished a female worker “over the nonpayment of $700 for drugs” by throwing 

her off the roof of 60 Avenue D (Ross 1998). By contrast, corporate delivery services are 

characterized by the highest degree of trust of employees, since they are routinely 

“fronted” drug supplies of a thousand dollars retail value. They tend to employ only close 

friends of existing employees and attempt to generate camaraderie and espirit de corps 

among members of the organization through paying employees well, providing perks (e.g., 

free or discounted drug supplies for personal use), and sponsoring social functions such as 

Christmas parties. 

e 

One disadvantage to constructing typologies is that they are not conducive to 

describing change. The three ideal types of social organization employed in the study do 

not adequately capture the complexities that were observed in the field. The growth of 

secondary markets and franchising, for example, are developments that, in many ways, do 

not fit neatly within the tripartite model that the researchers began with. Clearly, drug 

markets evolve over time, and they can become more or less complex as they change, and 

as new distributors enter the market they introduce new wrinkles to the drug business. 

Despite its inadequacies, the typology outlined in this paper provides a framework for 

systematically describing drug markets, thereby allowing and facilitating comparative 

analysis. The Lower East Side is clearly different from other neighborhoods in New York 

City, and this research identified a group of factors -- especially, the combination of ~- 

a gentrification, intensive policing, a concentration of nighttime entertainment spots, and the 

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influx of a relatively uninhibited upwardly mobile population-that would complicate 

comparisons with other neighborhoods. While each neighborhood will undoubtedly have a 

different constellation of factors which exert influence on the configuration of local drug \ 

distribution and consumption, we are not suggesting that researchers return to a form of 

“historical particularism” (Harris 1968:250-289) where every place and event is unique, 

thus making it impossible to systematically compare and contrast anything. While the 

Lower East Side is unique in some ways-as a trend-setter in many areas of social life, 

including art, music and drug fashions-it has often been “ahead of the curve” in teks of 

I 

national drug trends, and it may offer insight and clues that resonate with developments 

taking place in other neighborhoods. 

Clearly, the technical and social organization of distribution change over time, but 

what explains such change? Conventional wisdom asserts that variation in the intensity 

and style of policing are a primary force that shapes drug markets. Given the New York 

City Police Department’s assault on drug distribution in minority neighborhoods and the 

body count generated in the “war on drugs,” it would be surprising indeed if there were 

not a substantial effect. However, a number of other factors are significant as well. 

Consumer preferences shape markets as decisively as policing. Drug distributors are also 

victims of predatory crime (both by rivals and those who realize dealers are unlikely to 

report robberies) and this can become a factor. Capital and labor market flows in the noncriminalized economy also affect drug markets, both directly and by shaping the 

125 

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neighborhood settings in which distribution takes place. Finally, all the other factors that 

shape neighborhoods affect drug markets: class, ethnicity, residential and other land use 

patterns and so on. Of course, none of these factors exist in isolation; they are all 

0 

constantly interacting in complex and multifarious ways: drug markets affect 

neighborhoods, which affect policing, which affects drug markets and so on. 

The typology also serves to beg the question of why distinct forms of distribution 

arise and flourish at specific historical junctures in particular places. To unlock this 

mystery, we must look beyond limiting confines of drug research and realize that illegal 

substances are not simply about altering consciousness or making money, but ultimately, 

they are rooted in and tell us much about political economy. For example, it is no 

coincidence that street-level drug supermarkets operated by corporate-style distributors 

0 

were located in blighted minority neighborhoods. These urban backwaters had long been 

neglected by governmental agencies (except, perhaps, law enforcement), and the vacuum 

created by their malign neglect allowed drug organizations to fill the void. While such 

organizations were certainly about making money, they were often equally concerned with 

building and exercising power and authority. Such developments are not unlike situations 

found in other places and times when governments abdicate their responsibility or cede 

authority to local power brokers (Hess, 1998). The current style of corporate drug business 

is quite different in that respect. For these distributors, participation in the drug economy 

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does not bestow social status (positive or negative) in the wider community and is not a 

source of local power or authority. 

Seen through the lens of political economy, the study of drug markets may 

progress from being an evaluative yardstick for law enforcement officials and 

policymakers to making significant contributions to theory development and the wider 

analysis of topics like power, authority, the state and other factors which more typically 

occupy the time of social scientists. For example, the greater class fragmentation of drug 

markets in the current era is, in some ways, diametrically opposite the class barrier 

meltdown observed during the “freebase” era of cocaine in the early 1980s when people 

from an extraordinarily wide variety of backgrounds rubbed elbows while using the drug 

(Agar in press, Hamid 1991, Curtis 1996). 

An assessment of the relative impacts on drug markets of demographic shifts, landuse changes, and law enforcement activities 

The recent history of the interaction between policing strategies and drug 

distribution strategies can be divided into three distinct periods: 

0 The “hands off’ era: From roughly 197312 to 1983, drug markets operated more 

or less openly, with little interference by police (Moore 1977, Zimmer 1985, 

Wendel and Curtis 2000). Crime rates increased steadily and there was a sense 

that the police could do little about crime, which was seen as caused by 

underlying social pathologies the police were powerless to affect. 

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,.... 

0 The “shooting fish in a barrel” era: Beginning with Operation Pressure Point in 

1983 and continuing with the Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT), the New York 

City Police Department returned to aggressive street drug enforcement. Arrests 

soared, but so did violent crime. Drug markets were often displaced a few blocks 

or temporarily closed, only to reopen after interventions ended (Zimmer 1987). 

Then, crack emerged as a major market. Street sales boomed, often facilitated by 

freelance user-distributors. But then crack use and sales began to decline. Crime, 

after increasing steadily for many years, also began to decline: property offenses 

peaked in 1988, while violent crime began to drop in 1990 (DCJS). 

0 The “whipping a dead horse” era: By 1996, drug markets had adapted to the new 

climate of street enforcement by moving indoors and shifting to mobile 

telephone-enabled delivery (Curtis and Wendel ZOOO), Police adapted by pursuing 

a policy of ever more stringent enforcement of ever more petty regulations 

(Horowitz 1998, Marzulli 1998, Rohde 1999), attempting to continue with the 

tactics which had, in their view, caused crime to decline. Resentment against 

police in minority communities erupted in protests after several well-publicized 

incidents of police abuse of civilians (Dwyer 1999, Kocieniewski 1999, Purdy 

1997). Residents of minority neighborhoods who had once viewed large corporate 

drug distributors with abhorrence began to adopt a similar view of the police. 

The wide open drug markets which characterized so many of New York City’s 

minority and working class neighborhoods in the 1970s and early 1980s were a product 

of neighborhood residents taking advantage of the confluence of a number of trends in 

a 

l2 The year following the publication of the Knapp Commission report. 

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the political economy of New York City. These included the withdrawal of all but the 

most minimal and reactive policing from large areas of the city, coupled with a general 

cutback in other city services (Marcuse 1980, 1982). Simultaneously, the recession of the 

mid-1970s led to an evacuation of private capital from theses same areas (Bratt et al. 

e 

1986, Shefter 1985, Tabb 1982). These trends combined to create a vacuum in the areas 

of governance and exercise of violence and territorial control which was filled by drug 

distribution organizations. This process is reminiscent of the rise of mafia and other 

forms of “amateur government” in areas where state authority was withdrawn or never 

, 

fully established (Gambetta 1993, Hess 1998, Hobsbawm 1959). 

The 1970s in New York City and the nation were characterized by an overall 

sense that urban problems, especially including crime, were ultimately beyond the ability 

of government to solve. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling et al., 

1974) had been interpreted to suggest that police patrol ultimately could make little 

difference in levels of crime and public perception of crime. The experiment had 

employed proactive, reactive and mixed policing strategies and appeared to indicate that 

none worked significantly better than any other. This lent credence to the belief that 

crime was a social problem largely outside the ability of police to control or prevent. The 

City of New York’s finances reached a crisis point in 1975, as the city faced the 

possibility of municipal bankruptcy (Shefter 1985, Tabb 1982). A philosophy of “triage” 

in the delivery of municipal services was adopted: as in an emergency room, limited 

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resources should be concentrated where need is very urgent and where chances of success 

are highest (Marcuse 1980, 1982). The triage philosophy was applied to a wide range of 

city services from housing inspections to policing. Since police could not, it was thought, 

keep up with the burgeoning crime rate and police resources were limited; only the most 

serious crimes were addressed and minor offenses were often ignored. 

0 

During the 1970s, drug enforcement was minimal, certainly in comparison with 

the intensive efforts of today. In the aftermath of the Knapp Commission, officers were 

discouraged from intervening in drug markets: “While there was no written policy 

forbidding uniformed officers from making such arrests, the intent of commanders was 

made clear in a number of ways” (NYPD 1994b:13). The Police Department also 

suffered personnel cuts due to the atmosphere of belt-tightening in city government 

brought on by the fiscal crisis, suffering a 16.1% decline between 1974 to 1984 (Shefter 

1985: 145). 

a 

The decline in government expenditures and efforts to solve the problems of 

troubled neighborhoods was matched by a withdrawal of private sector investment in vast 

swathes of the city. Banks refused to make real estate loans in many working-class and 

poor neighborhoods, a practice known as “redlining” (after the red lines they would draw 

on maps indicating the areas they would not lend to) (Meyerson 1986; Tabb 1982:96). 

This policy of disinvestment, coupled with a sagging economy which hit the urban poor 

particularly hard led to a deterioration of housing stock and the closing of many small 

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local businesses which had provided employment. Another significant consequence of 

these trends was widespread abandonment of residential buildings, as landlords found 

that the rents paid by poverty-stricken tenants would not support the costs of heating and 

0 

city taxes (Tabb 1982:92). Abandonment created the physical infrastructure for many of 

I 

the “shooting galleries” and “crackhouses” which subsequently flourished in these 

derelict structures. Many buildings in poorer neighborhoods were also burned by 

landlords seeking to cash in on insurance proceeds (Tabb 1982:94), which contributed 

both to the depopulation of vulnerable neighborhoods, but also to the sense of them”as 

areas where the rule of law and government had been abandoned. 

In the 1980s, New York’s economy began to revive, as the stock market climbed 

steadily until the crash of 1987. The real estate market rebounded strongly and 

investment returned to some communities that had been abandoned in the 1970s, both 

from private investors and government programs. Rather than abandoning property to be 

seized by the city for unpaid taxes, landlords began investing in their property. A wave of 

conversions of apartment buildings from rentals to cooperatives began, as landlords 

sought to evade the city’s rent stabilization laws and increase the profitability of their 

properties. The city began renovating many of the substantial number of buildings which 

the city had acquired during the 70s wave of abandonment, as well as selling some back 

to private developers and landlords. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 forced 

e 

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banks to make mortgage loans to many of the inner-city neighborhoods they had 

“redlined” in the 1970s. 

The East VillageLower East Side area was one of the first to gentrify since 

property was cheap there and developers were swift to take advantage of newly-available 

mortgage funds. There were large numbers of city-owned buildings in the area and it 

represented the only substantial area of Manhattan south of Harlem that was not already 

primarily upper-middle class. As such, it was seen by the real estate industry as ripe for 

redevelopment. The “hip” reputation the area had gained during the 1970s era of 

abandonment and decay was the ironic marketing hook used to transform and repopulate 

it (Mele 2000). Abandoned and semi-abandoned buildings began to be renovated and reinhabited. Gentrification continued and indeed accelerated. Abandoned buildings and 

vacant lots became a thing of the past, as property in the area came to be far too valuable 

to leave idle. 

Operation Pressure Point in 1984 saturated the Lower East Side with police who 

aggressively arrested users and dealers. It was the New York Police Department’s first 

venture into large-scale street-level drug enforcement since the release of the Knapp 

Commission report. Thousands of arrests were made during the campaign and the New 

York Police Department proclaimed it an unqualified success, setting the stage for the 

city-wide Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT) program (1988-93) (Sviridoff et al. 1992). 

Like Operation Pressure Point, the TNT disrupted markets and succeeded in dispersing 

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them. This disruption was evident when a TNT intervention was in progress, but it often 

had little sustained impact on long-established markets. The Tactical Narcotics Team 

0 

approach involved short-term highly intensive interventions in geographically contained 

areas. The theory was that intensive enforcement would so disrupt drug markets at a 

particular locale that they would be unable to resume even when the intensive 

I 

intervention ceased. However, TNT proved to be a limited success for several reasons q 

(Curtis and Sviridoff 1994). First, the limited areas led to geographic displacement: 

distributors moved over a few blocks outside the TNT area (sometimes only temporarily), 

though this effect varied considerably and was less evident in the Very study than other 

neighborhoods that received the intervention (Curtis 1996). Second, there was what 

might be called temporal displacement, which took several different forms: a) pausing: 

a 

While TNT was in the immediate area, business would come to a halt (just as dealers 

often stop selling during after-school hours, to allow children to get home without being 

confronted by blatant drug sales). Distributors knew that TNT would move on to another 

site and simply waited for them to leave only to resume sales; b) “TNT days:” 

Distributors rapidly noticed that TNT interventions followed certain patterns despite 

Police Department rhetoric that claimed enforcement activities were not predictable. 

They avoided working on those days; and c) weekends: Due to the reluctance of officers 

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to interfere with weekend plans, TNT was almost never active on weekends. Distributors 

responded accordingly. l3 

As the New York Police Department returned to street-level enforcement, 

arresting ever-greater numbers of distributors and users, neighborhood redevelopment 

also began to chip away at the physical infrastructure of abandoned and under-utilized14 

spaces where much drug distribution and consumption took place. Areas which had 

consisted of little more than long stretches of abandoned buildings began the process of 

renovation and redevelopment. Stores returned to neighborhoods where purchasing any 

kind of product (other than illegal drugs) had long been all but impossible. In many 

communities, neighborhood activists began initiatives to prevent crime and improve 

conditions, particularly for young people. Young people responded to these 

improvements by behaving a great deal more civilly than the age cohorts which had 

preceeded them (Curtis 1998). Notably, they avoided use of heroin and crack, as well as 

the heavy drinking of fortified malt liquors, instead preferring to smoke copious amounts 

of marijuana, often rolled in the “blunts” which came into fashion during this era. 

The gentrified drug markets that now exist on the Lower East Side represent a 

major shift in drug distribution in New York City. Such businesses depend for their 

l3 Such day-to-day variations probably had more impact on sales in heroin markets, due to the daily 

consumption pattern characteristic of heroin use. Cocaine on the other hand is more often used a “party” or 

weekend drug, and there may thus have been a less significant impact on cocaine markets. 

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existence on “blending into the woodwork,” rather than the sort of highly public touting 

which was characteristic of the most notorious of the old school of corporate fixedlocation dealing. One consequence of bringing drugs to the customer, rather than the 

customer to the drugs, has been a reductiodelimination of the potential (or incentives) for 

violence of the “turf war” type (Goldstein 1985). In fact, since the very goal of such 

‘distributors is to be invisible to anyone except their customers, the shift towards such 

distribution tends to eliminate all the secondary or spillover effects of drug distribution 

on non-market participants. By geographically dispersing drug transactions to many 

different locations, the awareness of non-participants is substantially diminished. 

As the murder rate has fell to a thirty-year low” and crime in general greatly 

decreased, misdemeanor arrests rose to an all time high. In fact, if murders continue to 

occur at the rate at which they occurred during the first month and a half of 2002, the 

murder rate in the borough of Manhattan will be the lowest in 100 years (Weiss 2002). 

Offenses which once drew verbal cautions or summonses during the “triage era” came to 

routinely result in arrests. The perception that police had come to focus on trivial offenses 

because of the absence of serious crime was not confined to academics and street-corner 

drug dealers. Former Police Commissioner William Bratton stated that “I could foresee 

exactly where we are today- police being used to go after petty, obscure offenses. 

0 

l4 “Under-utilized” by legal activities, at least. 

135 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
They’re so driven by the numbers now that as they have less and less [crime] to work on, 

they start going after things that are really far-fetched” (Horowitz 1998). The police are 

making more drug arrests than ever before, but for much less serious offenses (see 

Appendix 111, a chart and table of drug arrests in New York City from 1990-99). The lone 

a 

exception to this pattern of declining numbers of arrests is misdemeanor cannabis arrests 

(41,777 in 1999, up from 26,111 in 1997). Almost eight times as many misdemeanor 

cannabis arrests were made in 1998 as in the last year of the previous mayoral 

administration. 80% of these arrests were made by the undercover Organized Crime 

I 

Control Bureau, which represented a great increase in the share of their effort focussed on 

marijuana arrests: 18% in 1993,40% in 1998 (Marzulli 1998). The Narcotics Task Force 

searched 26.7 persons for every one arrested. An astonishing 37.9 Hispanic New Yorkers 

were searched by narcotics officers for each arrest made (Office of the Attorney General 

1999: 112). 

Measuring the effectiveness of law enforcement interventions in drug markets and 

areas known for drug market activity is difficult. Should the measure of success be the 

number of arrests? Arrests are easily generated if officers are under sufficient pressure to 

make them. If police interventions are truly successful the illicit behavior should decline. 

Thus arrests should logically also decline, not increase or remain steady; that is, if the 

intervention “works.” However, the New York Police Department has traditionally 

a 

136 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
regarded officers who do not make enough arrests as “unprod~ctive.”~5 Moreover, if a 

arrests do not decline, this may be the result of increasing effort to make each arrest. 

The large volume of arrests that this approach generates has definite 

consequences for the neighborhoods where the arrests are concentrated (Rose and Clear 

1998). According to Drucker (1999) “Drug enforcement.. . may itself be considered 

, 

another adverse outcome of drug use- a measure of social morbidity with enormous I 

negative consequences for those caught up in the criminal justice system. [But]. . ..drug 

law enforcement can also be viewed as an independent variable- a causal factor 

responsible for worsening many of the social and public health problems we normally 

attribute to drug use per se.” Large numbers of young men in New York’s most hardpressed neighborhoods end up with long criminal records as a consequence of shuttling in 

and out of jail on short term sentences. Their already tenuous ties to conventional 

institutions and legitimate economic opportunities are weakened while, perversely, their 

opportunities for criminal activity are expanded through contacts made while locked up. 

Furthermore, as the young male populations of whole neighborhoods become inured to 

repeated contacts with the criminal justice system, the deterrent effects and stigma 

attached to such contacts diminish. In many poor neighborhoods, incarceration is now 

a 

l5 For example, until recently the section summarizing police arrest activity in the Department’s Statistical 

Report: Complaints and Arrests was entitled, “Who did the work.” 

137 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
seen as an inevitable rite of passage for young men, a coming of age. It is ironic and 

troubling that this should become the case during an era of declining crime rates. 

Some have claimed that New York City’s declining crime rates are a consequence 

of the vast increase in police aggressiveness under the Giuliani administration. This claim 

does not stand up to empirical examination (see, e.g., Cuneen 1999, Greene 1999). In 

fact, the crime rate in New York City began to decline prior to Mayor Giuliani’s term, 

which began in 1994. Violent crime in New York City had been declining since 1990, 

when it peaked at a rate of 2,385.6 per 100,000 people (Department of Criminal Justice 

Services). Murder and robbery both peaked that year, driving up the violent crime rate, 

and then both began to decline. Property offenses actually peaked several years earlier, in 

1988 (during the third term of Ed Koch) and have been declining since. The city’s overall 

rate of index offenses also peaked in that year, because property offenses are so much 

more numerous than violent offenses. Arrests for violent felonies peaked in 1989, a year 

before violent offenses did. Such arrests declined from 1989 to 1993. In 1994, Giuliani’s 

first year in office, violent felony arrests increased again, although not to 1989 levels and 

then again began to decline. 

Drug markets reflect and reproduce patterns in the larger society of which they 

form a part. As the Lower East Side was abandoned by real estate investors and city 

government in the 1970s, new structures arose in the subsequent vacuum of authority and 

opportunity: drug dealing corporations with elaborate management hierarchies which 

138 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
reproduced those of the non-criminal economy. Beginning in the mid- 1980s, as the 

investment in buildings returned as a result of a tightening real estate market, the New 

York City Police Department, under Mayor Koch, began “re-criminalizing” drugs and 

violence in neighborhoods which had seen both formal and informal structures of social 

control collapse. Police began a long steady assault on public drug dealing and other forms 

of misbehavior. Markets were at first slow to adapt to, the changed conditions on the I 

streets and the police were able to make huge numbers of arrests and seize large amounts 

of illicit commodities. They were at first less successful at eliminating drug markets; even 

the most public ones. Short term, geographically-focussed interventions encouraged 

dealers to avoid selling on certain days known to be “TNT days” or to move a few blocks 

away (Zimmer 1985). Gradually, police became more sensitive to the social organization 

of distribution (Curtis and Wendel 2000) and began attempting to dismantle organizations, 

rather than rack up arrests or product seizure totals (Harnett and Andrews 1999, Blair I 

1999). This approach, combined with the steady drumbeat of arrests and a declining 

overall market for drugs (especially crack), led drug markets to adapt. The era of the 

public corporate distributor was over. 

Drug distribution continues to flourish today. Although gentrification and 

aggressive policing have reconfigured and recaptured the public and semipublic spaces in 

which drug distribution took place in the 1970s and 1980s, users continue to obtain drugs - 

0 with little difficulty. As the neighborhood has gentrified, so have the drug markets. 

139 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Changes have occurred both in the technical organization of distribution (delivery and 

indoor markets of various kinds have come to predominate) and in the social organization 

a 

of distribution (large corporate structures are less common and flourish only in the \ 

delivery segment of the business). 

I 

In general, law enforcement interventio'ns have had little lasting impact on drug 

use patterns and are only partially responsible for the ,major transformations which took 

place in drug markets in New York City over the last fifteen years. To understand why 

drug distribution and consumption styles change, it is necessary to look beyond law, 

enforcement to the roles which illegal drugs play in the wider political economy of the 

United States. But, while eliminating the use of drugs is something which is simply 

beyond the powers of any law enforcement agency to accomplish, containing public drug 

markets is possible. The New York Police Department should continue doing what it has 

proven to be quite good at: containing and controlling public drug markets. Public drug 

sales have been eliminated in most of New York City. Violence has declined 

tremendously. Of course, drugs continue to be sold and used throughout the city, but, 

today, drug markets seldom impinge on the lives of non-participants. In our view, the 

measure of success of narcotics enforcement should not be defined as eliminating drug 

distribution and use, but rather, reducing to the lowest possible level the harm to 

individuals, families and neighborhoods that may be associated with such activities. 

a 

140 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
--. 

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146 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
APPENDICES 

I Typology of drug distribution, 1998 

I1 Typology of drug distribution, 2001 

I11 New York City drug arrests, 1990-1999 (Chart and table) 

IV Map of Lower East Side (Community District 3) 

147 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Appendix 1 

Technical 

Distribution 

’ Organization of 

S treet-level 

Indoor Sales 

0 

Delivery 

Tvpolo_~p of Drup Distribution. 1998 

Social Organization of Distribution 

Socially Bound 

Freelance Distributors Businesses Corporations 

Marijuana Crack Cocaine 

PCP Heroin Crack 

Heroin 

Heroin Cocaine Cocaine 

Marijuana Heroin Heroin 

Methamphetamine Marijuana 

“Rave” drugs 

Heroin Marijuana Cocaine 

Marijuana “Rave” drugs Heroin 

Methamphetamine Marijuana 

“Rave” drugs “Rave” drugs 

“Rave” drugs refers to newly-emergent drugs (e.g., Ecstasy (MDMA) and “Special 

K’ (ketamine)) popular among young people who frequent “raves” (dance parties 

featuring “techno” and “jungle” music). 

The markets indicated by boldface represented the dominant forms of distribution for 

those drugs in the neighborhood during preliminary research. 

148 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Appendix I1 

Technical * 

Organization of 

Distribution 

S treet-level 

Typology of Drug Distribution. 2001 

Socially Bound 

Freelance Distributors Businesses Corporations 

Marijuana Heroin None 

Crack 

“Rave” drugs 

Cocaine 

Marijuana 

Methamphetamine 

“Rave” drugs 

Indoor Sales 

Delivery 

Marijuana Marijuana 

“Rave” drugs “Rave” drugs 

Heroin 

Marijuana 

Methamphetamine 

Cocaine 

Heroin 1 None? 

Notes: 

0 “Rave” drugs refers to newly-emergent drugs (e.g., Ecstasy (MDMA) and “Special 

K” (ketamine)) popular among young people who frequent “raves” (dance parties 

featuring “techno” and “jungle” music). 

The markets indicated by boldface represented the dominant forms of distribution for 

those drugs in the neighborhood during the research period. 

149 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Appendix I11 

Y 

150 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Appendix IV 

151 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
New York City Drug arrests, 1990-1999 

45,000 

40,000 

35,000 

. 30,000 

25,000 

20,000 

15,000 

10,000 

5,000 

0 

- Opiate felony 

-m- Opiate misd. 

--t- Cocaine felony 

-m- Cocaine misd. 

+I+ Crack felony 

-o- Crack misd. 

+ Cannabis felony 

- Cannabis misd. 

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
New York City Drug arrests, 1990-1999 

\ 

I 

! 

0 Opiate felony Opiate misd. Cocaine felony Cocaine misd. Crack felony Crack misd. Cannabis felony Cannabis misd. 

8 1991 15,091 8,53 1 4,505 1,917 2 1,202 10,145 81 1 3,591 

.- E g 1992 15,282 8,227 3,810 1,701 19,466 8,732 697 4,38 1 

19,275 13,93 1 3,399 2,562 18,128 14,111 885 7,930 

20,120 18,011 3,380 3,810 16,902 16,754 1,053 1 1,304 

1996 20,045 17,856 4,09 1 2,813 18,215 13,694 1,268 17,233 

1997 17,563 17,762 3,754 2,938 15,653 13,086 1,420 26,111 

1998 19,161 18,322 3,112 2,519 11,816 12,875 1,350 40,680 

1999 16,338 16,611 3,249 2,121 14,341 12,070 1,345 4 1,777 

0 

0 

3 1990 14,985 9,436 5,579 2,966 24,543 13,260 872 4,557 

6 - o 61993 15,597 8,998 3,083 1,578 17,744 8,891 746 5,399 tag= 

0 

L .- 

a 3 1994 

.- CXO 

0 01995 zma 

Source: Crime Analysis Unit. 199 1-2000. Statistical report: Complaints and arrests. New York: New York Police Department Office 

of management Analysis and Planning 

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view

expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.