Youths Social Institution Of Street Drug Trade

Lee D. Hoffer’s “Junkie Business: The Evolution and Operation of a Heroin Dealing Network” is an ethnography that details the buying and dealing of the highly addictive drug, heroin, in the particularly homeless area of Denver, Colorado called “Larimer” from 1995 to the year 2000. The majority of the book focuses on the partnership of two heroin dealers, Kurt and Danny, and examines their daily lifestyles and the transitional periods they faced during their operations. On a much broader level, Hoffer wanted to characterize the heroin dealing occurring on the consumer-oriented side of the heroin dealing business, as well as understand the evolution of Kurt and Danny’s operations. Hoffer’s virtually unlimited

The book being reviewed in this papers is Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers by Scott Jacques and Richard Wright. This book is written on the context of 30 different individuals from a small location referenced as “Peachville” in Atlanta Georgia (Jacques & Wright 1). Each of these known individuals during their time in high school were selling drugs. Marijuana was the particular substance to be sold, but few dove into other illicit drugs including ecstasy, cocaine etc. (3). Generally speaking, the first questions that appears is what pushed these students to dive into the prospects of peddling and using drugs? Better yet, why continue to use them? The 7 chapters included in this book contain various stories of popularity and financial gains and losses along with the destruction of relationships.

In Claire’s Sterk’s book, “Fast Lives: women who used crack cocaine”, she uses information from observation, conversations, interviews and group discussions to explain how using crack affects active users. She also shows how they started using, how they survived, how they developed and maintained relationships with friends and family, and how they were mothers and drug users at the same time. In addition, Sterk started Project FAST, the Female Atlanta Study to identify the impact of drug use patterns on lives of active female users. In this study, most of the women’s stories are similar but yet different in many ways to each other. While curiosity and peer pressure caused these women to experiment with drugs, others were

This helps to confirm the “white flight” theory about the population decline and how it led to urban decay. However, the article also refers to the decline of the automobile industry due to foreign exports and increased competition. The decline of the auto industry and population decline in Detroit could be connected. This article raises another question that relates to how the auto-industry impacted the rise and fall of Detroit. This is another sub-question that can be researched in hopes of solving our main research question.

The issue of drug abuse is a sad reality in every community, and drug prohibition is present across the globe. Whether it is under the guise of protection of family values, or public safety, prohibition disrupts more than it maintains. Many people view drugs as a problem but they can also be viewed as a problem solver. This essay will address the socioeconomic issues with prohibition of hard drugs, and argue for their legalization.

In the 1980s millions of people in inner-city communities, predominantly minorities were left unemployed due to deindustrialization and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. As explained in the New Jim Crow “The decline in legitimate opportunities among

This article, In Search of Respect, “Selling Crack in El Barrio” reflects on the lives of inner-city dealers and their struggle to integrate into legal job markets. The crack industry that surrounded them provided respect and enough money to provide for their families. However, these men were not just interested in drugs but the reasons why most would chose this life over legal ways. Even if it didn’t provide consistent income they would not be made feel less of a person by managers while being paid minimum wage. Both Cesar and Primo discuss how their lives could be different if they were to get legal jobs but they can’t seems to walk away from dealing because they can make more. They would have different friend, live in different neighborhoods,

This research proposal will explore the dependent factors that determine why impoverished adolescent Black Males turn to crack cocaine as a means of survival. Survival is defined as, the act of or facts of surviving, especially under adverse or unusual circumstances. Generally, Black Adolescent males engage themselves in crack cocaine by way of dealing or trafficking. This study is important because there are many underlying factors that are not studied in regard to why this population turns to crack cocaine as a means of survival.

Detroit was once the center of it all. The motor city people called it. The industrial city of the world, Detroit, was a bright eyed city. This city is where the legendary music record label originated, Motown Records. In the 60’s as stated in the video, “people were thriving...but Motown was booming”. The automotive industry’s assembly-line helped African-Americans reach middle class economically which is an aspect of the “American Dream”. Around the mid eighties, the Japanese constructed automotive plants in the southern parts of the USA. First, Detroit began to decline economically when a few of the largest vehicle companies started to suffer financially. In 2005 layoffs from automotive industry reached 70-80,000 people. As stated

The expansion of the big three auto producers, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors led the charge. In addition to dominating the auto industry, the big three were largely responsible for the success of local business throughout Detroit. Direct suppliers towards the auto companies themselves, and the subsequent services provided to the auto workers and their families composed the majority of Detroit business. The rapid expansion of the auto industry resulted in the industry’s decentralization with the city limits of Detroit and caused the expansion of the outlying areas surround Detroit. The decentralization of industry had profound effects on the geography and on the population of the city. The movement of jobs out of the city accelerated the process of suburbanization, as autoworkers who could move followed their jobs. This trend is demonstrated by Census data, showing that following the creating of new auto plants outside the city of Detroit resulted in the total population dropping by nearly 300,0000 citizens by 1960. Following this decentralization, the auto industry suffering from international competition and rising oil prices, was unable to sustain the levels of economic output seen in years prior; and as a result, became a less desirable place to live for both workers looking to relocate and current residents.

In addition to the escapism that frequent drug use may provide extremely disadvantaged individuals, the severe poverty and almost total lack of decent employment opportunity characterizing these communities has made drug dealing among the most lucrative and attractive, if locally despised, sources of employment. Despite the fact that the vast majority of all lower-class residents resist this temptation, drug sales is a form of employment in an otherwise extremely poor and opportunity-deprived environment that can provide the symbols of success so valued in society. As E. Anderson (1999) has noted on these issues,

In the early twentieth century, Detroit developed as the center of the automobile industry so it attracted a lot of people to come to find jobs in the city. As a result, on that time, Detroit’s population growth and reached the peak in 1970 with the total population of 1.8 million people. After that year, within six decades, the number of population decreases constantly by percentage of almost 60%. Finally, in 2013, Detroit total population was only 688,700 people.

“The three-headed monster of urban renewal, interstates and economic recession vastly altered the landscape of Detroit in the 1950s and would loom large as a socio-economic minefield that would cause the city to blow up in 1967s” (The road to ‘67). Urban renewal is the revitalization of decaying neighborhoods, and Detroit experienced much of it. 1950 was the year that Detroit reached it’s peak with a population of about 1.8 million people. But as the 1950s progressed, the American industry began its downward spiral back to normalcy, and with it went the once youthful, booming city of Detroit,

Preston Simmons, 14, was shot and killed by four men near the Castle Hill Housing Projects in East Brooklyn. One of them pulled a 9-millimeter automatic pistol from his waist and shot Preston twice, once in the head and once in the body, and then shot him nine more times as he fell to the snow. ' 'This kid was full of holes, ' ' said Vincent Pizzo, chief of detectives for the housing police (Sack 9). This is a common occurrence in housing projects across the nation. Even worse, the people living in these areas have no hope of things improving such as Denise Butler, Preston’s girlfriend. Denise has Simmons’ baby on the way and expects her child to live a life parallel to Preston’s in which he lived in poverty, watched his family struggle, and, as a result, felt pressure to become a marijuana dealer. ' 'If he 's still living around here, ' ' Miss Butler said of her expected child, ' 'I guess he 'll be selling drugs, will be forced to sell drugs, or will have a lot of bad habits ' ' (Sack 5). With an exception to a few who plan to “make it out,” this is the mindset of many living in these areas that are flooded with violence, drugs, and gangs. Denise Butler already expects her future child to be selling drugs...better yet, she proclaims he will be FORCED to sell drugs. With the environment she lives in and where she projects herself to be in a couple of years, she believes it will force her son to sell drugs. It is the same circumstances under which Preston found himself.

Sugrue analyzes how there are multiple factors to discuss when talking about the demise of Detroit, while hinting that white-flight and de-industrialization weren’t the direct result of the racial conflict during the sixties, but rather an outcome of the urban maladjustment that was noted earlier by Gregory. The one factor that stuck out and caught my attention was job discrimination. played a hand in the decline of Detroit. Most people got up and left the South because of the lack of civil rights at the time, but another driving factor was an opportunity to be paid for work, but within retail, it was obvious; storeowners did not want blacks to be viewed as the face of their precious companies and scare off white customers. It wasn’t as blatant within chemical industries and machine shops because of the use of hierarchies. Detroit was an industrial juggernaut throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st, southerners viewed this as an opportunity to better their lives because one wouldn’t need any prior education, it being all manual labor. This resulted in a large number of people moving into the city in hopes of finding work within the industrial field, but that’s not to say that African Americans coming into this field didn’t face any discrimination. In fact, Blacks were only rarely found in the skilled jobs and instead worked all the dangerous jobs because the owners of these industries viewed them as expendable pieces. Sugrue puts these thoughts to paper by stating, “Employment discrimination in postwar Detroit appeared endemic, but it also seemed inconsistent and capricious. The plight of black workers had improved as a result of the Second World War. Defense mobilization create unprecedented economic opportunities’. In addition, industries varied in their openness to African American employees. (Sugrue