The illicit drug business runs like any reputable business would. The drug is manufactured, then shipped out to drug dealers at a wholesale price, then these buyers turn around and sell the drugs to retail sellers on the street once they are in the United States.
At the retail or street level, there are two types of models that drug dealers fall under, the freelance model and the business model (Levinthal, 2012). Drug dealers that are independent and do not know the individual that they are selling the illicit drugs to falls under the freelance model. Individuals under the freelance model are on their own and are not part of any drug organization.
They sell only on cash basis and cash at the time of the trade. Individuals who are under the freelance model may have a lot of buyers and some of these buyers is a one-time thing while others may establish a relationship with them and buy more on a regular basis. These individuals usually sale marijuana, LSD, and Ecstasy. The LSD and Ecstasy are usually sold at parties, concerts, and nightclubs.
The business model is more structured than the freelance model. There is crew boss, runners, and lieutenants in the business model. The business models has a crew boss at the center of it all who is fronted the drugs from the wholesaler (Levinthal, 2012 p. 96). The crew boss then fronts the drugs to the runners (street dealers) who are males from inner cities and range in ages from fourteen to twenty-three (Levinthal, 2012 p. 96).
The drugs are sold at a retail price on the streets and then it flows back up to the crew boss where they will pay of the wholesale seller at the price they negotiated at the beginning. The lieutenant is the one who makes sure that the runners are not robbed and all the money reaches back to the crew boss. The crew boss may have up to twenty runners working for them and they are paid with either money or drugs.
Illicit drug use is not only in the urban areas of the nation but the rural areas get hit just as hard. Death rate in higher in the rural areas because of the lack of medical facilities. Individuals that use crack cocaine or heroin and overdose on the drug may not be as assessable to hospitals as someone that overdoses in urban areas (Cósmem da Silva, Catozzi, Paloma, Lucchese, Alves, & Vera, 2017).
I have experienced situations where I was at restaurants or clubs and went to the bathroom and was confronted to buy drugs. This was in rural areas in Tennessee where things like that just does not happen. Restaurants where little kids come in and out of bathrooms and now individuals are in there selling the kids drugs. Street level drugs have gotten so out of hand that dealers are confident enough to sell their drug like this. Situations like this across this country is why the war on drugs is so important.
