Drugs—It’s All About the Money!
Drug dealers cause so much suffering and despair. They feed the habits of addicts who are trapped with the uncontrollable cravings of addiction. They create new drug habits in those who are not informed about the terrible dangers of illicit drugs. They do it solely for the money—an income from the devastation of a life. They may see the horrors they cause, but push off the guilt when they hold cash in their hands.
A drug dealer can make over $, a year, selling making money drug dealing individual users. The best customer to have is a wealthy professional who is a hard-core addict because they always pay. Geld verdienen vanuit huis 2022 dealers only sell in bulk to dealers lower on the totem pole, and they make a little less. No matter the level of the dealer, it is obvious the money is good—but at what cost? Some who become aware of the havoc they cause in addicted lives want to change. The realization of the destroyed lives they have caused finally comes to haunt them.
An ex-drug dealer was interviewed and talks about how it making money drug dealing all about the money. He went from selling drugs and being addicted to living a sober life.
He says, “It’s all about the money. I got into the drug biz because the money was good. I justified whatever I had to do to get the money. God made weed and cocaine, and it’s my job to move it. Sooner or later though, I figured out that I’m killing all my friends.
“If I front somebody a little bit of dope and he don't have the money—what am I going to do? Let him go? No, making money drug dealing, I’m comin’ to collect! Then I figured out when he leaves town with his wife and making money drug dealing, I’m responsible for that. That’s when the game starts to change. When I realize—you know what? I’m not such a good guy. So the place that I went to in order to balance the scales was Narconon.”
At Narconon income producing investments comparison and alcohol rehabilitation programs around the world, addiction is addressed with a combination of nutrition, a thorough detox and life-skills training. Each recovering addict is assisted and guided through the process of rebuilding his or her life, repairing damaged relationships, and preparing investing in stocks chapter 12 answers take a place among those living sober, productive lives.
Psychosocial Correlates of Adolescent Drug Dealing in the Inner City
J Res Companies to invest in now uk Delinq. Author manuscript; available in PMC Dec
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Potential Roles of Opportunity, Conventional Commitments, and Maturity
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Michelle Little, Arizona State University, Tempe;
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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michelle Little, Arizona State University, Program for Prevention Research, P.O. BoxTempe, AZ ; www.oldyorkcellars.com@www.oldyorkcellars.comim
Michelle Little is a postdoctoral fellow in the Prevention Research Center at Arizona State University. Her doctoral research focused on the psychosocial adaptation of serious juvenile offenders within secure facilities
Laurence Steinberg is the Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Temple University and the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. His research concerns normative and atypical development during adolescence and the influence of parents and peers on psychosocial development
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Abstract
This study examined a model of the simultaneous and interactive influence of social context, psychosocial attitudes, and individual maturity on the prediction of urban adolescent drug dealing. Five factors were found to significantly increase adolescents&#x; opportunity for drug selling: low parental monitoring, poor neighborhood conditions, low neighborhood job opportunity, parental substance use or abuse, and high levels of peer group deviance. The relation between drug-selling opportunity and adolescents&#x; frequency of making money drug dealing selling was partially mediated by adolescents&#x; alienation from conventional goals and from commitment to school. With the effect of drug-dealing opportunity controlled, making money drug dealing, adolescents&#x; temperance was associated with a lower frequency of drug selling. Youths with greater resistance to peer influence reported a higher frequency of nonmarijuana drug dealing. Adolescent autonomy also predicted making money drug dealing nonmarijuana dealing in conditions of low drug-selling opportunity. The results are discussed with respect to the social service needs of serious juvenile offenders.
Keywords: juvenile offenders, adolescent development, drug dealing, maturity
Rising rates of drug-related juvenile arrests have led to increased concern for the safety and well-being of inner-city minority youth. In the United States, juvenile arrests for drug crimes increased from 5 to 11 percent of all juvenile court cases between and (Office of Making money drug dealing Justice and Delinquency Prevention ). This increase was especially high during the period between andwhen adolescents&#x; self-reported drug making money drug dealing declined, suggesting that the rise in adolescent drug-related arrests during this time period was a result of juveniles&#x; rising participation in drug selling rather than drug use (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine ). By their own admission, between 10 and 17 percent of inner-city male adolescents in Baltimore (Li and Feigelman ) and Washington, D.C, making money drug dealing. (Bush and Ianotti ) sold illicit drugs during the s. This rising trend in adolescent illicit drug selling has been linked to youths&#x; exposure to violence, making money drug dealing, increased drug use, weapons use, criminal versatility, and death (Altschuler and Brounstein ; Black and Ricardo ; Stanton and Galbraith ; Van Kammen and Loeber ).
Social concern for adolescents&#x; increased participation in drug crimes has spawned both empirical and ethnographic studies of making money drug dealing antecedents of adolescents&#x; drug market participation since the s. To date, empirical researchers have focused on contextual (e.g., community and familial risk factors; Altschuler and Brounstein making money drug dealing Fagan ) or individual (Li et al. ; Weinfurt and Bush ) factors as potential precipitants of drug dealing by adolescents. Minimal empirical attention has been paid, however, to the simultaneous or interactive influence of social context and individual attributes on adolescents&#x; decisions to deal drugs.
To better understand why particular adolescents within disadvantaged contexts choose to participate in drug dealing, this study had two aims. The first aim was to provide an empirically based psychosocial profile of adolescent drug dealers who derive income from their sales of drugs. The second aim was to examine psychosocial mechanisms underlying adolescent drug dealing using a social-interactionist perspective as a theoretical vantage point. The social-interactional approach to criminal decision making emphasizes the role of making money drug dealing in actively choosing to commit crimes and suggests that criminal decision making reflects the interaction of motivation and social context (Cornish and Clarke ; Fagan ). Fagan () has further elucidated the applicability of this perspective to adolescent criminality by suggesting that adolescent criminal motivations are closely linked to their interactions within salient developmental contexts, such as the family, school networks, and neighborhood peer groups.
The model examined in the current study had its theoretical starting point in studies of adults&#x; decisions to participate in instrumental crimes (Fagan and Freeman ; Nagin and Paternoster ). Social scientists suggest that adults&#x; motivations to commit instrumental crimes may be affected by the relative economic investment strategies short term of the activity, the availability of alternative activities (e.g., jobs and schooling), making money drug dealing, individual characteristics (e.g., low making money drug dealing, and the calculation of relative costs in terms of the likelihood of legal sanctions (arrest, probation, incarceration; Fagan making money drug dealing Freeman ; Freeman ; Nagin and Paternoster ). Similarly, the model in this study proposed that juvenile offenders&#x; frequency of drug selling is linked to (1) their perceived opportunity for drug selling, (2) their perceptions of social and economic benefits and their relative investment in alternative sources of conventional opportunity (e.g., school and work), and (3) their capacity to weigh the risks and benefits of illicit market participation. Thus, the model of drug dealing for the current study posited potential sources of adolescent contextual drug-selling opportunity, social motivation for drug selling, and individual restraint from participating in illicit drug markets within an inner-city context. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders making money drug dealing in an inner-city environment.
The Social Context of Inner-City Adolescent Drug Dealing
Social scientists have observed that rising poverty rates in urban centers gave rise to urban adolescents&#x; increased opportunity to sell illicit drugs during the past two decades (Fagan ). When urban manufacturers eliminated nearly 1 million jobs during the s and s, inner-city young adults turned to flourishing illicit drug markets for income (Wilson ). At the same time, adolescents were enlisted to sell and traffic drugs so that adult dealers could avoid harsh penalties associated with adult sanctions for selling heroin and crack cocaine (Leviton, Schindler, and Orleans ). With the acknowledgment that local markets could no longer offer what was considered a living wage, making money drug dealing, adolescents&#x; favorable view of drug sales as a means to profit rose considerably. This was reflected in a 22 percent rise during the s in the number of youth reporting that they could earn greater income from crime than from conventional employment (Freeman ). By the early s, urban adolescents increasingly acknowledged the availability of illicit market opportunity (Li and Feigelman ).
Prior studies have further established that peer influence plays a critical proximal role in inner-city youths&#x; decisions to sell illicit drugs. Adolescents&#x; perceptions of the acceptability and profitability of drug dealing are shaped most directly by peers and young adults within their communities (Li et al. ; Ricardo ; Making money drug dealing, Peterson, and Kaljee ). Notably, too, adolescents&#x; perception that everybody is doing it is associated with persistence making money drug dealing drug selling (Li et al., ).
While faced with increasing neighborhood social disorganization, families making money drug dealing been impeded in preventing their youth from participating in illicit markets. Most specifically, rising rates of adult substance use and abuse in inner-city areas have contributed to adolescents&#x; access to making money drug dealing drugs and their acceptance of drug selling as a normative opportunity (Altschuler and Brounstein ; Black and Ricardo ; Dunlap ). Diminished neighborhood social control has also impeded parents&#x; control over adolescents&#x; associations with delinquent peer groups in contexts in which the drug trade has flourished (Paschall and Hubbard ), making money drug dealing. Furthermore, the converging burdens of familial poverty and social isolation interfere with effective parenting and create tensions within the parent-child relationship (Brody et al. ). Not surprisingly, adolescents who report deriving substantial income from drug dealing within urban areas also report very low levels of parental monitoring, both concurrently (Altschuler and Brounstein ; Chaiken ) and prospectively (Li, Stanton, and Feigelman ).
In the present study, neighborhood and family risk factors were proposed to influence adolescents&#x; opportunity for drug dealing. It was expected that in neighborhoods of high physical and social disorder, low local job opportunity, and high peer deviance adolescents would be more likely to have access to illicit drugs and drug-using customers. At home, adolescents&#x; exposure to parental drug use was hypothesized to increase access to drugs and acceptance of drug use and sales. Furthermore, given that successful drug dealing requires time and a certain degree of planning, it was expected that adolescents with more available unsupervised time (i.e., lower parental monitoring) would have greater opportunity to participate in illicit market activity and maintain customer bases.
The Potential Role of Perceived Pay-Off from Crime and Alienation from Conventional Commitments and Aspirations in Motivating Drug Dealing
A number of investigators have suggested that urban social disorganization and access to the drug market have directly affected adolescents&#x; perceived social incentives for participating in drug dealing (Ricardo ; Whitehead et al. ). As first suggested by strain theorists, youths&#x; experience of the related strains of low social status and reduced socioeconomic opportunities creates pressures that motivate criminal participation (Cloward and Ohlin ). Similarly, empirical studies affirm that the primary lure of illicit drug selling is the potential attainment of an income that is typically unattainable for youth in impoverished neighborhoods (Reuter, MacCoun, and Murphy ). For example, drug-dealing youth acknowledge that wages attached to available licit opportunities would not replace their profits from drug sales (Huff ). Thus, the pursuit of illicit market income for youth is predicated by a tacit acknowledgment of the limits of their socioeconomic position.
In addition to instrumental gain, youths&#x; participation in illicit markets may provide perceived social reward and esteem that they perceive as unattainable in other contexts (Collision ). For example, Li et al. () found that the valuing of external rewards of dealing (It is important to wear the best tennis shoes ) and perceptions of respect for criminal activity were significant predictors of adolescents&#x; intentions to sell and drug selling. Their findings suggest that the perceived social and economic pay-offs from illicit market activity serve as critical social reinforcement for adolescents&#x; persistence in illicit drug selling.
From a developmental perspective, the potential social and economic pay-offs from drug dealing should be most attractive for those disadvantaged adolescents who have the least confidence in their potential to compete in developmentally appropriate arenas of opportunity (e.g., in school and after-school jobs). In turn, adolescents&#x; social alienation from both academic commitments and conventional goals (jobs, career, parenthood) serve as further incentive for participating in illicit drug markets. In support of this contention, interview data suggest that drug dealers are less likely to be attending or performing well in school and less likely to report academic or vocational goals (Black and Ricardo ; Uribe and Ostrov ).
In accord with the current literature, three sources of social incentive were posited to mediate the relation between contextual opportunity and adolescent drug dealing in this study: perceptions of the perceived pay-off from crime, low commitment to school, and alienation from conventional goals and expectations. It was expected that drug involvement in adolescents&#x; homes and communities would increase adolescents&#x; perceptions of the perceived pay-off from illicit market activities and decrease adolescents&#x; commitment to school and conventional long-term goals. In turn, we hypothesized that adolescents&#x; alienation from conventional sources of success (school and goals), as well making money drug dealing their belief in the perceived pay-off from crime, would be important incentives for drug dealing.
The Role of Individual Differences in Adolescents&#x; Restraint from and Participation in Drug Dealing
Despite the potential for convenient economic return, adolescents who participate in the illicit drug market must also be willing to accept the risks of violence, injury, legal sanction, and even death. The risks making money drug dealing with drug dealing have been documented in research and media accounts and survey accounts suggest that adolescents are well aware of the dangers associated with drug dealing (Reuter et al. ). A number of individual attributes have been suggested as potentially affecting youths&#x; willingness to participate in risky behaviors, including psychosocial immaturity (Cauffman and Steinberg ), making money drug dealing, emotional dysregulation (Steinberg ), and the immature development of executive brain function (Steinberg et al. ). However, to date, the role of individual differences in adolescents&#x; make fake money pass marker test to making money drug dealing the risks to pursue an income from drug dealing has not been examined systematically in either ethnographic or empirical studies.
In the current study, we posited that developmental differences in maturity play an important role in adolescents&#x; willingness to accept such risks and, ultimately, their propensity to participate in illicit market activities such as drug dealing. Specifically, we suggest that specific maturational dispositions interact with features of adolescents&#x; social ecology to affect their participation in illicit market activities (Cauffman and Steinberg ). These dispositions include (1) autonomy,1 as epitomized in a secure sense of oneself among others and a sense of self-reliance; (2) temperance, which is characterized by the ability to delay gratification and evaluate situations before acting; (3) future orientation, which allows for an understanding of the long-term consequences of one&#x;s decisions or actions; and (4) resistance to peer influence, making money drug dealing, which is indicative of a secure sense of oneself and one&#x;s values with respect to others.
We hypothesized that maturational dispositions affect adolescents&#x; propensity for illicit market activities in different ways. Foremost, the tendencies to delay gratification bitcoin investor seriö s quality formulate long-term goals (i.e., temperance) may be most instrumental in foregoing illicit opportunities, particularly within disadvantaged contexts that present the greatest opportunity for and acceptance of illicit market activities. Adolescents&#x; evolving capacity to understand the long-term consequences of illicit activities making money drug dealing also buffer them from involvement with drug dealing, making money drug dealing. Autonomy, by contrast, would be an important dispositional asset for a youth who is trying to protect his or her corner on an illicit market and thus was expected to be positively associated with drug selling. Finally, resistance to peer influence may also be viewed as an important asset for an adolescent dealer. The limited research examining personality characteristics of adolescent drug dealers has depicted them as fearless risk takers, who are sometimes liked, sometimes feared, and not picked on by their peers (Weinfurt and Bush ). This profile suggests that adolescents who are socially competent enough to lead others and enterprising enough to manage small customer bases would make the most successful dealers. Thus, we hypothesized that whereas adolescents&#x; temperance and future orientation would making money drug dealing their propensity to engage in drug dealing, their dispositions toward autonomy and resistance to peer pressure would increase it.
We also hypothesized that adolescents&#x; opportunity for drug dealing would interact with individual differences in maturity to influence drug selling. We expected that drug-dealing opportunity at home and in the community would interfere with adolescents&#x; restraint from drug dealing because the perceived social benefits of drug dealing may be most evident to adolescents in conditions of high drug-dealing opportunity. Thus, making money drug dealing, it was hypothesized that temperance and perspective would have the greatest buffering effect on drug-dealing activity in conditions of low drug-selling opportunity. By contrast, it was expected that the promotive effects of autonomy and resistance to peer influence on drug dealing would be magnified under conditions of high drug-dealing opportunity, where the illicit market might demand and shape aggressive, assertive, and independent behavior.
Methods
Participants
The sample for this study consisted of making money drug dealing serious juvenile offenders from the Philadelphia sample of an ongoing longitudinal study, Research on Pathways to Desistance (RPD). All participants were between the ages of 14 and 17 years at the time of their initial enrollment in the study. The sample was predominantly minority. As shown in Table 1, almost three-quarters ( percent) of the participants were African American, percent were Hispanic, percent were Caucasian or White non-Hispanic. 5 percent were Native American. 2 percent were Asian American, and 2 percent were of other ethnic or racial backgrounds. Parental education, which was used as a proxy measure of socioeconomic status, indicated that this sample was drawn from a predominantly disadvantaged population. The parents of nearly one-third of the sample ( percent) had not earned high school diplomas at the time of the interviews.
Table 1
Sample Demographic Characteristics (n = )
| Characteristic | M (SD) | Percentage (n) |
|---|---|---|
| Age | () | |
| Ethnicity | ||
| &#x;African American | () | |
| &#x;Asian | (1) | |
| &#x;Hispanic | (84) | |
| &#x;Native American | (3) | |
| &#x;White, non-Hispanic | (63) | |
| &#x;Other | (12) | |
| Parents&#x;educational level | () | |
| &#x;Some graduate or professional school | (2) | |
| &#x;College graduate | (11) | |
| &#x;Business or trade school/some college/graduate of two-year college | (94) | |
| &#x;High school diploma | () | |
| &#x;Some high school | () | |
| &#x;Grade school or less | (15) |
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More than two-thirds of this sample (73 percent) had histories of prior arrests before referral to this study. Approximately 17 percent of this sample (n = ) had been charged with drug-related offenses either at the time of referral for the study or previously. Drug-related charges included the possession of illicit drugs, possession with intent to sell illicit substances, and the sale of illicit substances. The mean number of drug-related charges of those subjects was (SD = ), with a range of 1 to 6 and a median of 3. Most of the adolescents who had been arrested previously on drug-related charges had at least 3 drug-related charges in their records ( percent, n = 54).
Sampling
Data for the present analyses came from the baseline interviews of a larger sample of 1, adolescents who were participants in a prospective, longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders in two major metropolitan areas. Adjudicated adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17 years at the time of their committing offenses were recruited from the courts. Eligible participants included all felony offenders, with the exception of those adjudicated on less serious property crimes, as well as offenders adjudicated on misdemeanor weapons or sexual assault offenses. Because drug-law violations represent such a significant proportion of the offenses committed by this age group, and because male adolescents account for the vast majority of those cases (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention ), the proportion of male adolescents recruited with histories of drug offenses was capped at 15 percent of the sample at each site so that the heterogeneity of the RPD sample would not be compromised. Details of the recruitment process and the recruited sample are making money drug dealing in Schubert et al. ().
The sample chosen for this study (n = ) was limited to male participants in the mid-Atlantic study locale because preliminary analyses showed that the rate of self-reported drug dealing was higher among participants in that metropolitan area than in the southwestern study locale. The number of adolescents who reported selling nonmarijuana drugs was significantly higher in the mid-Atlantic locale, Ç2(1) =making money drug dealing, p as was the reported frequency of both marijuana dealing, M =SD = compared with M =SD =F(1,) =p and nonmarijuana dealing, M =SD = compared with M =SD =F(1,) =making money drug dealing on the basis of raw score reports. Female adolescents were not included in this study sample because this study&#x;s model was designed in accord with previous literature regarding male adolescents&#x; participation in drug dealing.
Procedures
Participating juvenile courts provided the names of individuals eligible for enrollment, and cases were assigned to interviewers who contacted juveniles and their families. Interviewers met with confined juveniles in their juvenile facilities and with juveniles who were on probation in their communities.
Baseline interviews, administered in two private two-hour sessions, were used for this study. Interview questions were read to juveniles from a computer, making money drug dealing. When responding to sensitive material (e.g., criminal behavior, drug use), respondents were encouraged to use a portable keypad to input their answers. Adolescents were paid $50 for their participation.
Measures
Drug Dealing
Drug-dealing frequency was derived from questions from the Self Report of Offending (Huizinga, Esbensen, and Weiher ). Participants were asked whether and how many times they had sold marijuana and non-marijuana drugs in the calendar year prior to their interviews. Item responses were transformed into a trichotomous scale to ensure optimal reliability with minimal reduction of validity (Huizinga et al. ). This trichotomous measurement approach making money drug dealing sporadic drug selling from higher volume drug dealing based loosely on the daily calendar (i.e., a weekly vs. a nonweekly basis).2 Adolescents who reported no drug selling in the one year previous to baseline interview were coded as zero (no drug dealing) on this scale. Adolescents reporting selling drugs less than once per week (i.e., fewer than 52 times) received a score of one, and adolescents reporting selling drugs once per week or more (52 times or more) received a drug-selling frequency score of two. A latent construct of drug dealing indexed by rates of marijuana dealing and nonmarijuana drug dealing was used in all structural equation models. In addition, making money drug dealing, univariate outcomes of marijuana dealing and nonmarijuana dealing were used in selected path analyses when predicted multivariate associations were not affirmed, making money drug dealing. The reliability of the drug-dealing measure, consisting of the marijuana-dealing and nonmarijuana-dealing scales, was affirmed in preliminary analyses (Cronbach&#x;s ± = best investment app for beginners, mean interitem r = ).
Income from licit jobs and drug-dealing activities
Adolescents&#x; weekly incomes from licit jobs and drug dealing were assessed with several open-ended questions focusing on adolescents&#x; licit and illicit employment histories. Four variables were derived from adolescents&#x; responses to employment-related questions: weekly licit income, weekly illicit income from drug selling, the mean number of months adolescents had ever worked at legal jobs, and the mean number of months making money drug dealing had sold drugs.
Drug-Dealing Opportunity
Drug-dealing opportunity was assessed from five indices: neighborhood conditions, perceived opportunity for neighborhood work, parental monitoring, parental substance use and abuse, and peer delinquency.
Neighborhood conditions
The quality of neighborhood physical and social conditions was measured using a item self-report measure (Sampson and Raudenbush ). Participants were asked how often they saw conditions of social disorder (people smoking marijuana ) and physical disorder (garbage on the streets or sidewalks ) in their neighborhoods. Responses were rated on a four-point rating scale from one (always) to four (never). The internal consistency of the measure is excellent (total-score ± = ).
Perceived neighborhood job opportunity
A five-item scale was used to measure adolescents&#x; perceptions of neighborhood work opportunity (e.g., Employers around here often hire young people from this neighborhood ). Responses were coded on a five-point scale from one (strongly disagree) to five (strongly agree). For the purposes of latent construct development, this scale was reverse scored, so that higher scores indicated lower perceived job opportunity and higher illicit drug-selling opportunity within the latent construct. Preliminary analysis showed that the reliability of the scale was good (± = ).
Parental monitoring
The Parental Monitoring Inventory (Steinberg et al. ) was adapted for this study to assess caregivers&#x; knowledge of the adolescents&#x; behaviors and monitoring behaviors. Parental monitoring questions focused on a single individual whom an adolescent indicated as primarily responsible for the youth. Eight items were coded on a four-point, making money drug dealing, Likert-type scale ranging from one (doesn&#x;t know at all/never) to 4 (knows everything/always). For this study, items were reverse scored and averaged so that higher scores indicated lower parental monitoring.
Parental substance use and abuse
This item was measured by four adolescent-report questions developed for the RPD study. A parent drug involvement scale was derived using three anchors: one (no drug use), two (parent currently uses illicit drugs), and three (parent currently has a drug problem).
Peer delinquency
The Peer Delinquency-Antisocial Behavior Scale was created for the RPD project from a subset of questions used by the Rochester Youth Study to assess the proportion of peers within adolescents&#x; peer groups who have participated in antisocial activities (Thornberry et al. ). Adolescents were asked how many of their friends had ever been involved in 10 delinquent activities. Responses were coded on a five-point scale from none to all. The reliability of this measure was good (± = ).
Drug opportunity cluster
Cluster analysis was used to identify two naturally occurring clusters making money drug dealing subjects distinguished by their opportunity for drug selling, (i.e., high vs. low opportunity). Factor scores for drug-dealing opportunity derived from the initial confirmatory factor analysis of drug-dealing opportunity were used to weight the drug opportunity variate characteristics, and then a K-means cluster analysis was used to derive cluster groups. Examination of differences between the resulting groups showed that the high-drug-dealing opportunity cluster (n = ) was characterized by significantly higher levels of physical and social disorder in the neighborhood, lower perceived job opportunity in the neighborhood, lower parental monitoring, higher rates of parental drug use and abuse, and higher levels of peer delinquency than the low-drug-selling-opportunity cluster (n = ).
Perceived Pay-Off from Crime
Perceived pay-off from crime was a latent construct measured with two indices: legal cynicism and perceived social pay-off from crime.
Legal cynicism
Legal cynicism was chosen as an indicator of perceived pay-off from crime because it is a measure of an individual&#x;s antisocial attitude toward legal norms (e.g., There are no right or wrong ways to make money ). If an individual holds a negative view of legal norms, he or she will perceive fewer negative consequences of crime, in terms of moral utility, than an individual who values legal norms. Adolescents&#x; reports of legal cynicism were measured using mean total scores of five items adapted from a longer measure (Tyler ). Items were scored on a four-point, agreement scale. Although preliminary reliability analyses showed that reliability was modest (± = ), the mean interitem of this five-item measure was acceptable (r = ).
Perceived social pay-off from crime
The item scale measuring perceived social pay-off from crime was also chosen to represent the latent construct of perceived pay-off from crime because it assessed individuals&#x; perceptions of direct social pay-off from antisocial activities in terms of received respect from significant others as a result of criminal participation (Nagin and Paternoster ). Adolescents were asked to judge the likelihood of the positive outcomes (i.e., social respect) of various crimes using a four-point, Likert-type scale. The internal consistency of the measure of perceived social pay-off from crime was good (± =mean interitem r = ).
Conventional Goals and Expectations
A item measure adapted from the National Youth Survey was used to assess adolescents&#x; conventional goals and expectations (Menard and Elliot ). Items from the measure tapped adolescents&#x; conventional aspirations (e.g., How important is it to you to earn a good living? ) and expectations (e.g., What do you think your chances are to earn a good living? ). Participants responded on a five-point, Likert-type scale ranging from one (not at all important/poor) to five (very important/excellent), with higher scores indicating greater optimism concerning future opportunities and/or success. Both scales showed adequate internal consistency (± = for aspirations, ± = for expectations).
Maturity
Four aspects of maturity were measured: future orientation, resistance to peer influence, autonomy, and temperance.
Future orientation
An eight-item modified version of the Future Outlook Inventory was used to assess adolescents&#x; tendency to consider the future consequences of their actions. Adolescents were asked how often statements were true for them, using responses making money drug dealing from one (never true) to four (always true). The mean score of the eight items was used to measure future outlook. Preliminary analyses showed that the future orientation scale showed good reliability in this sample (± = ).
Autonomy
The Psychosocial Maturity Inventory Form D was used to measure autonomy for this study (Greenberger et al. ). Two scales measuring identity (e.g., I change the way I feel and act so often that I sometimes wonder who the &#x;real&#x; me is [reverse coded]) and self-reliance (e.g. Luck decides most things that happen to me [reverse coded]) were summed to derive a measure of autonomy. Both scales consisted of 10 items scored on a four-point, Likert-type scale ranging from one (strongly disagree) to four (strongly agree). Higher scores indicated more mature behavior. Both scales showed good reliability in the RPD sample (± = for identity, ± = for self-reliance).
Resistance to peer influence
Adolescents&#x; capacity to make independent decisions despite the social influence of peers was measured using a item self-report measure (Steinberg ). Adolescents choose who they are most like on 10 sets of adolescent-descriptors differing in terms of weight given to peers&#x; opinions. Adolescents then rate how true each description is for them. Total scores were calculated by transforming subjects&#x; responses to a four-point scale and summing item responses. The internal consistency of the measure of resistance to peer influence in this sample was good (± = ).
Temperance
Fifteen items from the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory making money drug dealing used to measure temperance (Weinberger and Schwartz ). Items were scored on a five-point, Likert-type scale ranging from one (false) to five (true). Reliability tested in the RPD sample was good (± = ).
School Commitment
Adolescents&#x; reports of school commitment were measured using a 7-item scale derived from a longer item measure of school bonding (Cernkovich and Giordano ). Items (e.g., Schoolwork is very important to me ) were measured on a five-point, Likert-type scale ranging from one (strongly disagree) to five (strongly agree). Preliminary analysis showed that the school commitment scale had good reliability (± = ).
Data Analytic Procedure
The first aim of the main study analyses was to provide a sociodemographic profile of high-volume adolescent drug dealers in this sample. A series of cross-tabulations and analyses of variance were used to examine the prevalence of lifetime stock investment singapore guide current illicit drug sales and adolescents&#x; reported profits from drug sales at baseline interviews. Paired-samples t tests were also used to compare adolescents&#x; profits from drug selling with their licit incomes and their tenure in drug selling compared with licit jobs.
The second aim was to examine a model of the mediation of contextual risk factors on adolescent great sources of passive income dealing by specified social attitudes. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to consider hypothesized links among study constructs. The results of SEM analyses provide estimates of direct and indirect effects that may be used to assess mediational hypotheses. Sobel&#x;s test statistic was used to examine the statistical significance of indirect (i.e., mediated) effects (MacKinnon et al. ). The remaining study hypotheses concerned the strength of associations between maturity factors and drug dealing and bitcoin investor ervaringen plus in the strength of these associations in contexts of high versus low drug-dealing opportunity (moderational hypotheses). A series of structural equation models and path analyses were used to examine the strength of the associations between maturity factors and (1) the frequency of any drug dealing, (2) the frequency of marijuana dealing, and (3) the frequency of nonmarijuana dealing, making money drug dealing, with membership in clusters of drug-selling opportunity controlled. We then used multiple group making money drug dealing in AMOS software to assess between-cluster differences in the strength of the associations between maturity factors and drug dealing.
Four fit indices were used to examine the fit of structural equation models: the chi-square statistic, the comparative fit index (CFI), the normed fit index (NFI), and the root mean making money drug dealing error of approximation (RMSEA). CFI and NFI values greater than indicate that a measurement model is an excellent fit to making money drug dealing observed data; values between and indicate that a model shows an adequate fit to the observed data. The RMSEA provides an unbiased estimate of residual covariance between the estimated population covariance and the sample covariance matrices. Browne and Cudeck () suggested that RMSEA values of or less indicate that a model shows a close fit to the observed data in relation to the model&#x;s degrees of freedom. An RMSEA value in the range of to indicates a reasonable fit, and values above indicate an inadequate fit.
Results
Prevalence of Drug Dealing in the Sample
As shown in Table 2, more than half of the sample reported that they had ever sold marijuana ( making money drug dealing, slightly fewer ( percent) reported ever selling nonmarijuana drugs, and nearly one-half of the sample ( percent) reported selling drugs in the year prior to the interview. In terms of specialization, the prevalence of dealing nonmarijuana drugs in the year previous to baseline ( percent) was nearly identical to the prevalence of marijuana dealing in the previous year ( percent), and many participants reported ever selling both marijuana and other drugs ( percent).
Table 2
Prevalence and Frequency of Drug-Dealing Outcomes: Marijuana Dealing, making money drug dealing, Nonmarijuana Dealing, and Both Marijuana and Nonmarijuana Dealing (n = )
| Variable | Percentage (n) |
|---|---|
| Drug outcomes | |
| &#x;Ever sold marijuana | () |
| &#x;Ever sold nonmarijuana drugs | () |
| &#x;Sold any illicit drugs in the previous year | making money drug dealing colspan="1"> () |
| Drug specialization | |
| &#x;Never sold illicit drugs | () |
| &#x;Ever sold only marijuana | (97) |
| &#x;Ever sold only nonmarijuana drugs | (53) |
| &#x;Ever sold both marijuana and nonmarijuana drugs | () |
| Frequency of drug dealing in the previous year | |
| &#x;Number of times sold marijuana in previous year | |
| &#x;&#x;Zero (did not making money drug dealing marijuana in previous year) | () |
| &#x;&#x;One (sold marijuana less than weekly [less than 52 times]) | () |
| &#x;&#x;Two (sold marijuana weekly or more [52 times making money drug dealing more]) | (95) |
| &#x;Number of times sold nonmarijuana drugs in previous year | |
| &#x;&#x;Zero (did not sell nonmarijuana in the previous year) | () |
| &#x;&#x;One (sold other illicit drugs less than weekly [less than 52 times]) | (81) |
| &#x;&#x;Two (sold other illicit drugs weekly or more [52 times or more]) | () |
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Slightly more than one-fifth of the sample what to look for when investing in cryptocurrency percent) reported selling marijuana less than weekly, and close to one-fifth ( percent) reported selling marijuana at least weekly. This pattern was reversed for nonmarijuana dealing, with percent of the sample reporting selling nonmarijuana drugs less than weekly and more than one-fifth of the sample ( percent) reporting selling nonmarijuana drugs weekly or more than weekly.
The Economic Profit of Adolescent Drug Dealing
Participants who sold illicit drugs derived substantial income from drug sales, making money drug dealing. Adolescents who reported weekly incomes from drug sales (n = ) reported a mean weekly income of $1, (SD = $1,), which was considerably greater than the mean weekly income of $ (SD = $) adolescents reported from licit employment (n = ).
Despite notable limitations of self-report estimates of illicit drug income,3 participants&#x; reports of their incomes from drug selling showed reliable associations with their reported patterns and frequencies of drug selling. For bitcoin investopedia today, reported incomes from drug sales correlated with the reported frequencies of both marijuana, r() =p and nonmarijuana, r() =making money drug dealing, p selling. Furthermore, participants&#x; reported nonmarijuana drug selling was associated with higher profits from drug selling. As shown in Table 3, weekly income from selling only nonmarijuana drugs (M = $1, SD = $2,) or both marijuana and nonmarijuana drugs (M = $1, SD = $1,) was more than double the weekly income from selling only marijuana making money drug dealing = $, SD = $), F(3,) =p
Table 3
Comparison of Weekly Incomes from Licit and Illicit Activity among Drug Dealers and Non-Drug-Dealing Offenders
| Average Weekly Licit Income (SD) | Average Weekly Income from Drug Dealing (SD) | |
|---|---|---|
| Never sold drugs | $ ($), n = 50 | |
| Sold marijuana only | $ ($), n = 22 | $ ($), n = 39 |
| Sold nonmarijuana drugs only | $ ($), n = 13 | $1, ($2,), n making money drug dealing 42 |
| Sold marijuana and nonmarijuana drugs | $ ($), n = 58 | $1, ($), n = |
| Sample | $ ($), n = | $1, ($1,), n = |
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The relative economic benefit of drug dealing for this sample of juvenile offenders was examined by comparing their self-reported weekly incomes from licit jobs and illicit drug selling. The results of a paired-samples t-test, t(68) = &#x;, p showed that adolescents who participated in both licit work and illicit drug dealing derived substantially greater incomes from illicit compared with licit activities. Adolescents who reported both licit and illicit market incomes reported an average illicit income that was 41 times their average licit income (M = $1, SD = $2, vs. M = $, SD = $). In addition to receiving significantly greater income from drug dealing than licit work, adolescents who participated in both legal jobs and drug-market activities spent almost 3 times as many months involved in drug selling than licit market activities ( vs. months), making money drug dealing, t() =p
Mediators of Drug Dealing: Prediction of Drug Dealing from Opportunity Factors, Conventional Commitments, and Perceived Pay-Off from Crime
A structural equation model was used to examine hypothesized relations between drug-dealing opportunity factors, social-incentive mediators (perceived pay-off from crime, conventional goals and expectations, and school commitment), and drug-dealing frequency (see Figure 1). Descriptive statistics for the observed measures used in the mediational analyses are summarized in Table 4. Preliminary correlational and regression analyses suggested that drug-dealing-opportunity factors were significantly associated with proposed mediators and that the proposed mediators were significantly associated with drug dealing.
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Figure 1
Note: All factor loadings are standardized and significant at the alpha level.
Table 4
Means and Correlations of Observed Study Variables for Mediational Analyses
| Variable | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | real money making surveys rowspan="1" colspan="1">7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | M (SD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Neighborhood conditions | 1 | () | ||||||||||
| 2. Neighborhood job opportunity | ** | 1 | () | |||||||||
| 3. Parental drug use and abuse | ** | 1 | () | |||||||||
| 4. Parental monitoring | ** | ** | 1 | () | ||||||||
| 5. Peer delinquency | ** | ** | ** | ** | 1 | () | ||||||
| 6. Legal cynicism | making money drug dealing rowspan="1" colspan="1">** | ** | ** | 1 | () | |||||||
| 7. Social pay-off from crime | ** | * | ** | ** | ** | ** | 1 | () | ||||
| 8. Goal expectations | &#x; | &#x;* | &#x; | &#x;** | &#x; | &#x;** | ** | 1 | () | |||
| 9. Conventional aspirations | &#x; | &#x; | &#x;** | &#x;* | &#x;** | ** | ** | 1 | () | |||
| School commitment | &#x;** | &#x;** | &#x; | &#x;** | &#x;** | &#x;** | ** | ** | ** | 1 | () | |
| Marijuana dealing | ** | * | ** | *** | * | ** | &#x; | &#x;** | 1 | () | ||
| Nonmarijuana drug making money drug dealing rowspan="1" colspan="1">** | ** | *** | ** | ** | ** | &#x;* | * | *** | *** | 1 | () |
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The results of the structural equation model showed that the mediational model fit the data according to RMSEA (), Making money drug dealing (), and NFI () criteria (see Figure 1) and that the model accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in drug-dealing frequency (R2 = ). As expected, youths who reported higher drug-dealing opportunity reported more frequent drug dealing (b =p ). Although the effect of contextual factors on drug selling was large in magnitude, inspection of indirect effects showed that this effect was partially mediated by adolescents&#x; conventional goals and expectations (indirect effect = &#x;, p ) and their school commitment (indirect effect = &#x;, p ).4
Contrary to study hypotheses, perceived pay-off from crime did not significantly mediate relations between drug-dealing opportunity and drug dealing. Although drug-dealing opportunity significantly predicted perceived pay-off from crime (b =p ), the association between perceived pay-off from crime and the frequency of drug dealing was not significant (b = &#x;, p ), and the resulting indirect effect was not significant (indirect effect = &#x;, p ).
Maturity and Drug Dealing
The next set of analyses examined hypothesized relations between maturity factors and drug dealing in a series of structural equation models and path analyses with drug-dealing-opportunity cluster included as a covariate. Preliminary analyses of correlations showed that neither autonomy nor future orientation was significantly associated with either marijuana dealing or nonmarijuana dealing. Thus, we did not include these maturity factors in initial structural and path analyses.
As shown in Table 5, the results of the initial multivariate structural equation model predicting drug dealing from maturity factors and membership in drug-dealing-opportunity cluster showed a good fit to the data, Ç2(3) =p CFI =NFI =RMSEA = Consistent with study hypotheses, adolescents reporting higher levels of resistance to peer influence sold drugs more frequently (B =p ). However, adolescents&#x; temperance was not significantly associated with their frequency of drug dealing (B = &#x;, p ).
Table 5
Prediction of Drug Dealing from Drug-Dealing Opportunity and Maturity
| Outcome | Predictor | ² Weight | Ç2(df) | CFI | NFI | RMSEA | R2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drug dealing | Drug opportunity | ** | (3)* | |||||
| Resistance to peer influence | * | |||||||
| Temperance | ||||||||
| Marijuana dealing | Drug opportunity | *** | (1) | |||||
| Resistance to peer influence | ||||||||
| Temperance | making money drug dealing rowspan="1" colspan="1">Nonmarijuana dealing | Drug opportunity | *** | (1) | ||||
| Resistance to peer influence | ** | |||||||
| Temperance | &#x; |
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Two univariate path analyses were used to examine the effects of maturity factors on specific drug-selling outcomes (marijuana vs. nonmarijuana dealing), with membership in drug-selling-opportunity cluster controlled. Youth with higher levels of temperance showed lower levels of marijuana (but not nonmarijuana) selling (B = &#x;, p ), and youth who were more resistant to peer influence participated in higher levels making money drug dealing nonmarijuana (but not marijuana) dealing (B =p ).
Contextual Moderation of the Prediction of Drug Dealing from Maturity Factors
We next compared the effect of each maturity factor on drug-selling frequency between the contexts of high and low drug-selling opportunity using multiple group analyses (see Table 6). The sample was split into two groups on the basis of preliminary cluster analyses that identified clusters of high versus low drug-dealing opportunity. Between-cluster differences were compared by constraining the regression weight of interest to be equal across groups and then comparing the resulting chi-square fit to an unconstrained model, making money drug dealing. The magnitude of the difference was measured by a chi-square difference value. Both multivariate and univariate drug outcomes were modeled in separate analyses.
Table 6
Comparison of Moderational Effects: Maturity Effects between Drug-Dealing Opportunity Clusters
| Drug-Dealing Opportunity Cluster (unstandardized regression estimate) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Predictor | High (n = ) | Low (n making money drug dealing ) | Ç2 Slope Difference |
| Drug dealing | Autonomy | &#x; | ||
| Future orientation | &#x; | |||
| Resistance to peer influence | &#x; | |||
| Temperance | &#x; | &#x;* | ||
| Marijuana dealing | Autonomy | &#x; | ||
| Future orientation | &#x; | |||
| Resistance to peer influence | &#x; | |||
| Temperance | &#x; | &#x;* | ||
| Nonmarijuana dealing | Autonomy | &#x; | ** | * |
| Future orientation | &#x; | |||
| Resistance to peer influence | * | earn money online trusted sites rowspan="1" colspan="1"> | ||
| Temperance | &#x; | &#x; | ||
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The results of multiple group analyses showed that the effect of autonomy on the frequency of nonmarijuana drug selling varied significantly across drug-selling-opportunity clusters, Ç2(1) =p Comparison of the effects of autonomy on drug dealing in the clusters of high and low drug-selling opportunity showed that autonomy was positively associated with nonmarijuana drug dealing in the low drug-selling-opportunity cluster (b =p ) but not associated with drug dealing in the high drug-selling-opportunity cluster (b = &#x;, p ). No between-cluster differences in links between other maturity factors (resistance to peer influence, temperance, and future orientation) and drug-dealing outcomes were found.
Discussion
Consistent with study hypotheses, community, family, and peer factors were the strongest correlates of adolescents&#x; frequency of drug dealing. Specifically, adolescents who sold the most drugs were more likely to live in contexts characterized by high physical and social disorder, low parental monitoring, high rates of parental substance use and abuse, and high levels of peer deviance. These results highlight the converging influence of broader socioeconomic factors as well as developmentally anchored risk making money drug dealing on raising adolescents&#x; opportunity for drug dealing within innercity areas. Our results support the contention that adolescents&#x; illicit market participation is constrained by both local market supply and the informal social control of parents, peers, and neighbors.
The results of making money drug dealing present study offer new perspective on potential sources of incentive and restraint for adolescents&#x; pursuit of criminal careers in illicit market activities. Specifically, our results suggest that adolescents&#x; alienation from sources of prosocial opportunity (e.g., making money drug dealing, school) and diminished expectations for conventional success (earning a good income, starting a career), were important incentives for drug dealing, as predicted from contextual opportunity. Furthermore, we found that individual differences in maturity also affect adolescents&#x; restraint from dealing; within a given context, adolescents with different degrees of psychosocial maturity may behave differently.
Although longitudinal data were not available to affirm causal inferences, our results support the notion that youths&#x; cumulative experience in high risk, inner-city contexts is explicitly linked with their increasing alienation from conventional goals and subsequent illicit market participation. Furthermore, this making money drug dealing results affirm findings of previous research depicting the eroding effect of inner-city contexts and familial disadvantage on youths&#x; motivation for conventional success and restraint from illicit market participation. Previous contextualization of inner-city youths&#x; motivations for drug selling has reflected themes of surviving familial and racial disadvantages (Williams ), the normative acceptance of illicit opportunity among disadvantaged young men (Whitehead et al. ), and early independence from the informal control of family in efforts to seek material success (Ricardo ). Prospective follow-up of the current sample will elucidate the causal role of contextual risk factors and social incentives on adolescents&#x; decisions to pursue illicit market careers.
This was the making money drug dealing study to explicitly link specific maturity factors to youths&#x; frequency of drug dealing. We hypothesized that individual differences in maturity would affect adolescents&#x; willingness to accept the risk and demands of drug dealing and found that maturity factors did affect adolescents&#x; propensity to sell illicit drugs. Making money drug dealing, adolescents&#x; impulse control (temperance) restrained their frequency of marijuana dealing, and adolescents&#x; resistance to peer influence had a positive effect on their nonmarijuana dealing. This pattern of results highlighted differences in social motivation for selling marijuana compared with nonmarijuana drugs. Given that nonmarijuana drugs are more difficult for adolescents to obtain and protect, dealing nonmarijuana drugs requires greater initiative, independence, and risk tolerance than dealing marijuana. Thus, adolescents&#x; resistance to peer influence is an important asset for high-volume nonmarijuana dealers. By contrast, marijuana dealing in this sample followed a predominantly sporadic pattern, suggesting a number of intentions, including the desire to make quick money, the desire to share marijuana among friends, making money drug dealing, and the desire to earn money to buy marijuana for use, making money drug dealing. As a result, it is not surprising that self-control buffered the frequency of marijuana sales. Continued research is needed to further elucidate relations between adolescents&#x; drug dealing intentions, their use of drugs, and their sales of specific drugs.
Perhaps the greatest limitation of this study is that data were drawn entirely from a population of serious juvenile offenders. Accordingly, the internal validity of the models examined may be threatened by this sampling bias, because the simple effect of offender status on the outcome (drug dealing) may not be systematically accounted for without a control group of nonoffenders. Yet at the same time, careful analyses of multiple psychosocial and social factors that may affect delinquent outcomes within juvenile offending populations may shed light on sources of unexamined heterogeneity within juvenile justice populations, as well as the social and psychological mechanisms underlying broader risk transmission.
A second notable limitation of this study is that it was cross-sectional. As a result, although the mediational model presented implies a particular temporal order of causation (i.e., that lowered school commitment leads to drug dealing), temporal order may not be affirmed without longitudinal analyses. Prospective study of this sample will be necessary to affirm the proposed temporal relationships of study variables.
Contrary to study hypotheses, adolescents&#x; perceptions of the perceived social pay-off from crime did not mediate relations between drug-dealing opportunity and drug dealing. Although this finding making money drug dealing contrary to findings reported by Li et al, making money drug dealing. (), it is supported by surveys showing that a majority of urban adolescents (80 percent) do not admire drug dealers (Reuter et al. ). One potential explanation for this null finding is that adolescents do not seek social respect from dealing and rather are primarily driven to sell drugs by simple economic incentive.
By their own reports, juvenile offenders in this sample derived considerable incomes from drug sales, which could serve to reinforce continued illicit market participation. In accord with previous studies, making money drug dealing, adolescents&#x; profits from drug dealing were considerably greater (41 times) than their reported incomes from licit activities (Reuter et al. ). However, contrary to results of previous studies, adolescents in this sample did not necessarily participate in drug dealing sporadically (Reuter et al. ). In fact, more than half of the sample reported participating in illicit drug markets for more than a year, and those adolescents who participated in both licit jobs and drug selling spent almost 3 times as many months involved in drug selling than they spent working at licit jobs. This pattern of results suggests that income from drug sales is an important source of incentive for continued criminal involvement and at the same time may act as a disincentive for investment in conventional goals. Longitudinal follow-up of this sample may offer insight as to the potential incentive of economic profit from drug dealing on adolescents&#x; escalation in criminal markets.
A second unexpected finding was that self-reports of autonomy were associated with a higher frequency of drug dealing for adolescents within contexts of low drug-selling opportunity but had no effect on dealing in high-opportunity contexts. One potential explanation for this finding is related to supply and demand, making money drug dealing. Adolescents may have more ready access to drug markets in high-opportunity contexts as a result of greater neighborhood disorganization and lower informal control over youthful misbehavior, making it less necessary that a potential dealer be enterprising. In essence, autonomy may be more of a developmental asset for successful dealing within lower opportunity contexts.
Conclusions
Our study findings highlight the impact of social and economic disadvantage and job insecurity on minority adolescents&#x; precarious transition to young adulthood within the inner city. In the context of an increasing economic divide between status and ethnic groups in urban areas, youths&#x; expectations for the future have been constrained by the notably apparent limits of their local communities, making money drug dealing. In turn, adolescents&#x; alienation from conventional sources of success is an important incentive for continued illicit market involvement, which brings the potential for making money drug dealing sanctions and increased criminal embeddedness (Hagan ).
The results of this study suggest that juvenile courts&#x; emphasis on time-limited punitive restrictions (probation, detention, making money drug dealing, incarceration) to juvenile drug crimes does not provide inner-city youths with adequate psychosocial resources for redirecting their lives (Leviton et al. ). Given that the prevalence of adolescent drug selling has risen in the historical context of diminishing employment opportunities for young minority men, judicial responses to youth drug involvement that emphasize adolescents&#x; participation in vocational skills training would no doubt aid in youths&#x; redirection from illicit market participation. Not surprisingly, studies have making money drug dealing that community-based educational and vocational programs contribute to positive adult adjustment (e.g., lower rates of recidivism, higher rates of employment) among formerly incarcerated youth (Lipsey making money drug dealing Wilson ).
Acknowledgments
We thank Elizabeth Cauffman, Laurie Chassin, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Piquero for their comments and making money drug dealing during preparation of this article. This study was supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (grant MU-MU), the National Institute of Justice (grant IJ-CX), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, making money drug dealing, the Arizona Juvenile Justice Commission, making money drug dealing, and the Pennsylvania Commission making money drug dealing Crime and Delinquency.
Footnotes
1In their original conceptualization, Steinberg and Cauffman () and proposed three aspects of psychosocial maturity: responsibility, temperance, and perspective. In the model tested here, we split responsibility into two of its constituent components: autonomy and resistance to peer influence.
2We transformed the raw score reports of nonmarijuana and marijuana dealing in two additional ways in preliminary analyses to confirm that our chosen transformation method produced reliable making money drug dealing. We found that the trichotomous coding we chose produced very similar results across all study analyses when compared with (1) a six-point categorization based on the daily calendar and (2) a trichotomous coding of drug-dealing frequency based on a scaling of zero (no dealing), one (lower 50 percent of drug-dealing frequency scores), and two (higher 50 percent of drug-dealing frequency scores).
3The accuracy and reliability of self-reports of drug market income are limited for a number of reasons (Fagan and Freeman ; MacCoun and Reuter ). Most notably, making money drug dealing, in this study, adolescents were not asked to distinguish between their gross and their net profits from drug crimes, and the reported incomes from drug sales were demonstrably skewed. There are a number of overhead costs related to drug dealing, including the cost of the illicit drugs, making money drug dealing, or the percentage an individual drug dealer would be expected to return to his or her supplier (Johnson et al. ). Relative net profits from drug sales may also be affected by a dealer&#x;s social position within illicit markets. Dealers participating in organized drug selling reported higher profits from their sales than those who sold drugs independently (Fagan ).
4Although the pattern of correlations showed that mediational effects were in the hypothesized direction (i.e., negative), the results of SEM showed that the direct effects of the mediators on the outcome were in the opposite direction (i.e., positive). One potential explanation (among many) of this counterintuitive finding is that it represents a suppression effect. In making money drug dealing contexts, the magnitude of a direct effect between an ebest investment securities variable and an outcome increases by the inclusion of a third variable (MacKinnon, Krull, and Lockwood ). However, whether this explanation of our counterintuitive findings is correct web hosting to make money further theoretical and empirical analysis.
Contributor Information
Michelle Little, Arizona State University, Tempe.
Laurence Steinberg, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.
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< SUMMER SCHOOL 3: Profit & Cocaine
(SOUNDBITE OF BRICE MONTESSUIT AND CHARLES CASTE-BALLEREAU'S "LOST SITUATION")
ROBERT SMITH, HOST:
This is NPR, making money drug dealing. Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY Summer School, your eight-week fast track to riches and power, or at least an understanding of how those things work. This is class No. 3, "Profit & Cocaine." I'm Robert Smith. Market linked term investments Wednesday till Labor Day, we are tagging along with you to the beach, to the park to teach you the essential principles of econ Oh, and did we mention there is going to be a test? Pass a few simple questions at the end of the course, and we'll put your name on a PLANET MONEY diploma suitable for framing, not suitable to be used as an educational credential.
In class one, we talked about how economists think about individual decisions - costs and benefits, opportunity cost. Class two sorted out those decisions into a market, complete with prices and supply and demand, making money drug dealing. And now here in best investment rate of return uk three, we're going to get down to the business of business. What makes a product sell? What are the risks and rewards of being an entrepreneur? And how do you keep competitors out?
Economists often like to look at the extreme cases of something in order to see the principles at work underneath. And that's what we're going to do in this class. The subject of today's lesson and story was one of the most notorious and successful crack dealers in Los Angeles in the s and s.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
RICKY ROSS: My name is Ricky Ross. I'm known on the streets as Freeway Rick. Well, when I sold drugs, if they'd have told me they was going to legalize it, I would've been mad because I knew that that was going to drive the price down.
SMITH: We should note there's also a successful rapper and music executive named Rick Ross. He took that name as an homage to Freeway Ricky Ross, but the two of them have no connection.
Today on Summer School, we take a look at the economics of drug dealing and do a reality check with an actual drug kingpin. And then at the end of the episode, we'll bring in our economists in residence, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, who will show us how the lessons learned on the street can be used to think about how all businesses work.
This episode, "Lessons From A Drug Kingpin," first aired inand I hosted it with Alex Blumberg, who went on to be something of a kingpin himself in the world of podcasting. OK. Let's do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
ALEX BLUMBERG: We have in front of us a pile of academic papers talking about the economics of illegal drugs, and they all arrive at a surprising conclusion, making money drug dealing. The conclusion is this; when you make drugs illegal, you end up making drug dealers richer, and you increase the level of crime.
SMITH: And you don't end up reducing drug use by that much, which we should remind people is the whole point of making drugs illegal - to stop people from using drugs and to lower the amount of crime.
BLUMBERG: So here we have these policies that are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, making money drug dealing. And let's lay out the theory of why that is. OK. So the economics of this are, when you make something illegal, you make it harder and riskier to produce. Stock investing companies the case of drugs, you have to sneak them across the border. You have to pay people more to transport them since they're facing jail time. You have to hire armed guards to, you know, protect your supply. There's all of these added costs, which simply drives up the price. So illegal cocaine is many more times expensive than it would be if it were legal.
SMITH: And any economist can tell you what happens next. Making money drug dealing the price of something goes up - surprise - fewer people buy it. Take bananas. If they were bucks a bunch, no one would buy bananas. But crack is different. The demand is what they call inelastic. No matter what it costs, people are willing to pay for it. I mean, it's addictive. So increasing the price just means that more money goes to drug dealers.
BLUMBERG: And to the criminal behavior they engage in - bribing people, buying guns, threatening, hurting or even killing people. That is the theory. But one thing missing from these economic papers - actual drug dealers.
SMITH: And this brings us to Freeway Ricky Ross. He started dealing cocaine in Then he moved into crack. Then he worked his way up to becoming one of the biggest crack dealers in LA. He was arrested in and given a life sentence, making money drug dealing. But inhe was given parole and released.
BLUMBERG: And we thought, here is a perfect person to run these economic theories by and see if they check out.
SMITH: Let's do it. Theory No. 1 - making drugs illegal drives up the price - check.
ROSS: The most I ever made in one day was $3 million went through my hands.
SMITH: Wow.
ROSS: I could make - off of a million bucks, I could make anywhere fromtoprofit. It varied to who I was selling to and what time of the month it was - you know, a lot of variables on how much I made - if I was giving it to them on credit, stuff like that. Making money drug dealing - but I was sure to makeoff of every million, and sometimes I could make as much as ,
BLUMBERG: Let me just ask you, like, how much of the cost of the drug that you were selling was because it was illegal, I guess?
ROSS: Probably - oh, making money drug dealing, wee (ph) - maybe a thousand times, making money drug dealing. You can probably get a kilo of cocaine over in Colombia or Peru for maybe safest way to buy cryptocurrency or maybe even less than that, you making money drug dealing, if it wasn't illegal because maybe the farmers probably would sell it for, well, it's possible (ph) a moneymaker bluffs farah of lettuce 'cause it grows over there, you know, wild. So, I mean, the price probably would drop dramatically. You probably could get a kilo for what it costs about a pack of cigarettes (laughter) - maybe cheaper.
BLUMBERG: Keep in mind Rick bought his kilos of cocaine for $10, All right. So next, we ran another part of the theory by him - that at least some of the money he's getting is going to increased crime. Again, check.
ROSS: Well, I had a crew. You know, I had a crew of anywhere from 30 to 40 guys. And that varied, too, from what was going on, you know, how good business was, how many rock houses I was running at the time. You always had appearance of toughness. And I did. You know, I had guys around me that were ruthless and were tough. You know, if I gave the word, they would hurt you.
BLUMBERG: How much - how many guns did your operation have?
ROSS: Who knows?
(LAUGHTER)
ROSS: We bought guns regularly 'cause guys would throw guns out the window when the cops get behind them. And we'd lose guns all the time. And it was mandatory when we on the street. Like, if we at the park playing basketball, we had to be strapped, making money drug dealing, or if we at my tire shop, where we sold drugs from, then we would have guns there.
SMITH: Yeah. It's really amazing the level of expenses that a big-time drug dealer has, making money drug dealing. I mean, the drug money wouldn't just be for his crew. He would spread it around. I mean, making money drug dealing drug money would find its way into all sorts of other illicit activities in the neighborhood. For instance, he had money that he'd just distribute to the big players around the 'hood.
ROSS: You know, I had a fund, also, making money drug dealing, you know, where I take care of what's called the big homies. You know, these are the guys that when I grew up were the shot callers, the guys that ran the neighborhood. And, stock investing companies know, I took care of them. In my neighborhood, anybody can get killed at making money drug dealing time, and for me to walk around the streets the way I did would be dangerous for a lot of people. Most people couldn't do what I did. You know, they couldn't walk around South Central Los Angeles in the middle of Hoover Crip gang or the Swans and live the way I lived - you know, free and open, going to car washes. You know, they kidnap drug dealers in South Central. And I had a special type of pass that most people don't get, and that's because of my good ties that I shared in my wealth.
BLUMBERG: So you basically - it was sort of like you were paying protection money to these people, right?
ROSS: Absolutely. You can call it protection money or big homie money or whatever, but it's all the same thing, absolutely.
BLUMBERG: But it was money going to people who
ROSS: Didn't sell drugs, but they were robbers.
BLUMBERG: Who would be violent. Yeah.
ROSS: They were robbers. They was killers making money drug dealing jackers, as we call them. Absolutely, making money drug dealing. These guys didn't mind going to jail.
SMITH: So clearly, the academics are right here. Drug money goes to crime. I guess that's not a big surprise. But not all of the money goes to crime and bribes and shady stuff. For example, Freeway Rick Ross owned a lot of real estate - crack houses, cook houses, places he stored his money.
BLUMBERG: There were other expenses - like a huge expense - bail bondsmen. Guys in his crew that he worked with would get picked up by the cops, and he would need to make sure that they would stay loyal to him, so he would do whatever it took to get them out of jail. And, making money drug dealing, of course, the criminal justice system knew that he was a big-time drug dealer, so they set these bond prices really, really high, so that cost him a lot of money.
SMITH: Yeah. And another group of people who were profiting off of the big-time drug dealer - lawyers. He had lots of lawyers, and they charged him a lot of money. And they came into play when he would have these interesting disputes with the cops.
ROSS: What happened is they had raided a couple places, making money drug dealing, and there were large amounts of money and no drugs. And they would confiscate the money, and then we would go to court, and the lawyers would get the money back. And that really frustrated them.
BLUMBERG: Wait; so they would raid one of your houses. There would be a whole bunch of money there. But there wouldn't
ROSS: Right.
BLUMBERG: Be any drugs.
ROSS: Right.
BLUMBERG: So you would go to the - you would actually go and say, making money drug dealing, I'm an honest businessman; that was my money; they have no right to take my money.
ROSS: Absolutely. I wouldn't go myself personally.
BLUMBERG: No, of course not.
ROSS: I had people in the system set up to where we could claim the money.
SMITH: You know, they found in a house in South Central - that's $, Wouldn't that naturally - wouldn't you naturally think that's drug money?
ROSS: I mean, would you think that if it was Beverly Hills?
SMITH: True enough. True enough.
ROSS: And even if you think that, you'd have to prove it, you know, in court. It's not what you think. It's what you can prove.
BLUMBERG: Right. And they couldn't prove that it was drug money, so you got it back.
ROSS: Absolutely. And they got frustrated with that. So what they started doing is they started - when they come into the house, making money drug dealing, they would bring their own drugs, and then they would plant drugs. And that makes it tougher for you to come to court and say, you know, your honor, I had $, in here, and it's missing (laughter), because now there was two kis (ph) in there, too. So now you got to tell the judge, your honor, the kis (ph) different word for money maker mine, but the money is.
(LAUGHTER)
ROSS: I think that's a - you know, a hard pitch.
SMITH: So we have these quasi-legal expenses. I mean, the money is going to people who probably pay taxes on it - lawyers and bail bondsmen. But then there are the expenses that are sort of in between. You know, they're under the table, making money drug dealing, but on the face, there's nothing illegal about these expenses. You know, take all the cash that Ricky's making, making money drug dealing. Every business just deposits it in their account. Freeway Rick couldn't do that.
ROSS: Counting ,can be time-consuming.
BLUMBERG: How did you count the money? Who did you get to count the money?
ROSS: Well, in the end, 'cause money became a chore, so I hired a couple girls, and it was their job to count money all day.
BLUMBERG: That's another cost of something being illegal. You have to hire people to count it, whereas making money drug dealing you just take it to a bank, you know, you
ROSS: Absolutely. And then you got to worry about if they steal it
BLUMBERG: Right.
ROSS: Because it's making money drug dealing So - yeah. And you can't go and you can't file a claim against your underground drug money counters if you think they're skimming.
ROSS: No, no.
BLUMBERG: So even though he's paying these women and they're not explicitly doing anything illegal - like, just counting money isn't illegal - but there is also a social cost even here. In other words, these women are probably young. They're coming in. They're seeing this big-time drug dealer. They think this is the way to make money - going into drugs.
And that was, of course, also part of the social cost of what Rick was doing, aside from the fact that crack is incredibly, making money drug dealing, you know, addictive. It decimated inner-city communities. Creating the idea that, like, this is the only way out, this is the only making money drug dealing to get rich - that's also a big part of, like, the social cost of drug dealing.
SMITH: And we should say that as Rick is going through his internal dialogue about his own costs, making money drug dealing, he did not bring up a lot about the fact that this did devastate cities and he was partially responsible for it.
BLUMBERG: Right, although now he says on his website that he feels bad about that and he's trying to undo some of the damage that he caused.
Now, there are a couple of the academic theories - the economists' theories, though, that did not check out when we ran them by Freeway Rick. For example, there is this one theory you see cited a lot in the literature that one of the factors that drives up the cost of drugs - you have making money drug dealing compensate people for the risk - the risk of going to jail, the risk of getting shot or killed.
So, you know, it's just generally people who have dangerous jobs tend to make more money - miners, people who work on fishing boats - you know, those fishing boats out in Alaska. You need to pay them more since what they're doing is so risky, making money drug dealing. And the theory is that the same thing would apply to people in the drug trade. But that theory, at least in Rick's case, did not check out.
ROSS: Well, you know, first of all, when you come from where I was when I started selling drugs, you know, you feel hopeless. You don't think you're going to live past 24 years old. Going to jail, come out with stripes - really wasn't any risk. I mean, everything that I had going on at the time was nothing. You know, I was like a lump on a log. So the risk that most people would look at - I mean, you know, you could get killed, go to prison - was OK.
BLUMBERG: So you didn't really think - you weren't thinking, like, I'm taking a lot of risk here; I have to get it compensated.
ROSS: No, no. I didn't making money drug dealing - I mean, making money drug dealing, the compensation was already enormous and overwhelming. I couldn't believe that it paid so well.
BLUMBERG: You would've done it for a lot less, is what you're saying.
ROSS: Oh, absolutely.
(LAUGHTER)
SMITH: Talking to Rick, we realized that there's something here that economists don't take into account. There was this emotional component to the work that Rick was doing. At least when you get to Rick's level, drug dealing is complicated, it's multifaceted, it's engaging.
BLUMBERG: Yeah. Like, Rick was basically a CEO. He was a manager. He was a publicist. He was his own accountant. He was even the head chemist.
SMITH: So, Alex, let's making money drug dealing back up for a second here and look at this situation. Society was doing everything it possibly could to make Ricky Ross' life miserable. His product was illegal. His costs were enormous, making money drug dealing, as we've established. He was a hunted man.
BLUMBERG: Literally a hunted man. He said that there was a police task force in LA devoted entirely to putting him in prison.
SMITH: But despite all the money and the effort that the most powerful nation on Earth was spending to make Rick Ross give up his job
ROSS: Making money drug dealing loved it. I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt I was powerful. I felt I'd came - I didn't have to answer to nobody. I mean, it was a dream. It was every man's dream to be free.
BLUMBERG: Do you miss it?
ROSS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'd rather be doing that than anything else, almost. Everything else became almost, like, secondary to my work.
SMITH: You know, making money drug dealing, it's funny. You were talking about how great it was for a while, and one of the words you used was the freedom of it. And yet, when you describe this in detail, I'm not hearing a lot of freedom. You had this making money drug dealing force, people are out to kill you, and spotters, and you're sneaking around in the middle of the night.
BLUMBERG: You have to be up at every morning.
SMITH: You're moving houses back-and-forth. This didn't sound - this sounds like a man making money drug dealing has very little freedom in his life.
ROSS: Well, you know what? When you look at it from that angle, it is. But when you look at it from where I came from, then I felt like I had all the freedom in the world.
BLUMBERG: How much of it was just sort of, like, the actual job, and how much of it was just the feeling of being good at something and running this enterprise well?
ROSS: Well, you love the feeling of - that you're good. So it didn't feel like it was a burden, you know, to sneak around at night. I've been sneaking around at night since I was, you know, 17 years old, stealing cars. You know, so this had became - it's like when you're saying - making money drug dealing saying that it's not freedom, but from where I come from, this is a way of life. This is the way we live. It's nothing wrong with living like that, sneaking around at night, hiding. You know, we've been making money drug dealing all our life.
BLUMBERG: So, Robert, one question remains at the end of our journey here with Freeway Rick. What does this all mean? I mean, are we saying we should be legalizing crack? I mean, if we really did want to make the Freeway Ricks of the world go away, we would take away their earning potential, I guess, right?
SMITH: Yeah, by legalizing drugs and dropping the price. And some of the economists we spoke to said, yeah, of course. Making it illegal makes dealers richer, making money drug dealing. It creates more violence and crime and doesn't do that much to drive down demand. So clearly, legalize it.
BLUMBERG: Other economists, though - they weren't so sure. Peter Reuter has written a book about the illegal drug market. He's written many, many papers. He is a big expert in this field. And he says, legalizing something like crack, there would definitely be trade-offs.
PETER REUTER: Legalization would dramatically reduce crime. Obviously, the drug market crime would disappear and many drug-related crimes, where it's sort of - that's in best short term investment plan in singapore business. Economic-compulsive crimes - that is, crimes committed in order to pay for expensive illegal drugs - that would go down a lot, too. What goes on the other side - I'm making up the number here - 5 million more persons addicted. That's a big number. How do we compare the bad outcomes in the two cases - a very large increase in addiction with a very large decrease in crime? You know, making money drug dealing, I take them both to be real, but I don't know how - that's a value judgment
BLUMBERG: How do you - which is better, and which is worse?
REUTER: As to which is better.
BLUMBERG: Yeah, yeah.
REUTER: Right.
SMITH: And as for Rick, when it comes to the legalization, it's complicated for him. A lot of the reason Rick says he got into drugs in the first place was because he was illiterate. I mean, think about that. Everything we've just heard - he ran a multimillion-dollar business empire without being able to read and write. He learned to read and write in prison.
BLUMBERG: And his basic take is - and a lot of academics would agree with him, by the way - you need to making money drug dealing the demand side of this equation. Try and reduce the reasons people want to use and sell crack in the first place. So that would mean addressing the desperation that drives people to become addicts or that drives them to become dealers.
And that is Rick's new job. Since getting out of prison, he now travels around and talks to youth groups and schools - anybody who will have him, basically. And he lays out the other side of this economic equation that you're in when you're a drug dealer, making money drug dealing, which is it's hard to retire as a drug dealer, making money drug dealing. You get shot or you go to prison. And once you go to prison, everything you've made, all the money you've made - it's gone. A multimillion-dollar business that you've spent years and years building, developing expertise in, developing income producing investments comparison connoisseurship for cocaine - it can all be gone in a second.
(SOUNDBITE OF HENRI LANZ, making money drug dealing, SKINNY WILLIAMS AND WILLIAM RAPPAPORT'S "HAIL THE KING")
SMITH: After the break, we will bring in our Summer School economists, and we'll discuss what Ricky Ross - Freeway Ricky Ross - can teach any entrepreneur about how to run a business.
(SOUNDBITE OF HENRI LANZ, SKINNY WILLIAMS AND WILLIAM Global investors meet chennai highlights "HAIL THE KING")
SMITH: We are back with PLANET MONEY Summer School - class No, making money drug dealing. 3, "Profit & Cocaine." And listening along with us are certified famous economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan.
BETSEY STEVENSON: Hi.
JUSTIN WOLFERS: Hey.
SMITH: So is Rick Ross - is he in a good business? Like, is this the kind of situation that businesses dream about being in?
WOLFERS: Rick Ross is a good economist, and that he is selling a product that has a characteristic economists call inelastic. When there's inelastic demand for something, people keep buying it even making money drug dealing the price rises. So therefore, the cops are boosting his bottom line.
SMITH: We should make sure we clearly define our vocabulary words here - inelastic demand. When we talked about demand last week, we said that for most products, when the price goes up, people buy less of the products. But there are a few products where there's not an easy substitute, so that when the making money drug dealing goes up, making money drug dealing, people may buy a little less of it, but they will keep buying the product - inelastic demand.
WOLFERS: That's exactly right. The amount by which high prices scare people away is not very much. That's what inelastic means.
SMITH: And if you can find something with inelastic demand, I mean, that's - that is a very good business opportunity.
WOLFERS: That's the good news for Mr. Ross
SMITH: Yeah.
WOLFERS: Which is he can bump up his price a fair bit and he's not going to lose many customers.
SMITH: And there's a different addictive substance that you talk about in your textbook.
STEVENSON: Coffee.
SMITH: Coffee.
WOLFERS: Coffee. And so coffee - some of us are, in fact, addicted. And there are some national chains that jacked the price up and charge $4 for a venti latte. And that is taking advantage of my inelastic demand for coffee.
SMITH: But this wasn't - this was a big insight of Howard Schultz and Starbucks because 20 years ago, coffee did feel like this substance with elastic demand. Like, it was cheap. You could get it anywhere. It was generally kind of bad coffee. Nobody seemed to care that much.
STEVENSON: Right. But this comes to this idea of substitutability. Back then, when all coffee tasted terrible, making money drug dealing, there wasn't much of a difference between two different cups of coffee, so why would you pay more for the coffee at one diner versus the coffee at another diner? Coffee was treated almost the way we think about gasoline at different stations. So if you have the price of gas is much higher at a station across the street, then why would you buy from them? The gas between the two stations is going to fuel your car the same.
WOLFERS: Yeah.
STEVENSON: Well, people used to think coffee - the two different cups of coffee, they're going to fuel my body the same. And the insight that Howard Schultz had was maybe there are actually some important product differences across coffee.
WOLFERS: He's also creating caffeine addictions. The greater those caffeine addictions, the more inelastic people's demand and, therefore, the greater is his ability to raise prices. It's really important to Howard that you don't just want one coffee a day - that you need three and you need them making money drug dealing matter what the price.
SMITH: Which, you know, if we're going to tell business stories, is also similar to Apple and the iPhone. There are substitutes, but they've worked very hard to make you think if you are an Apple phone user that that is a special object of which there is no substitute and which, apparently, making money drug dealing, you will spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on.
WOLFERS: Robert, one of my kids smashed my iPhone yesterday, and I just tried to buy an Android, and Betsey is yelling making money drug dealing me that I can't possibly do it. And I think she is something of an Apple addict. And I did try to point out that at the price of a thousand dollars for a phone making money drug dealing perhaps her demand was a little too inelastic, and maybe I should try one of the lower-priced alternatives.
STEVENSON: You did just hit on a, like, actual debate in our household.
WOLFERS: But it's also something - Apple does this consciously.
STEVENSON: It's making money drug dealing the case. It could make its product more useful if it had an iMessage that worked with the Android phones, but it would make an Android phone a closer substitute for an iPhone.
SMITH: I did think with Rick Ross, because, making money drug dealing, like, he goes through this whole thing about, oh, you know, his profit and inelasticity and how much money he makes and the cost of supplies and everything, and you listen to it and you're like, well, why wouldn't everyone be in this business? Like, this is a great, great business to be in.
WOLFERS: You are aware we put drug dealers in prison? And that's a pretty bad lifestyle choice.
STEVENSON: So
WOLFERS: There's another important concept here, which is what economists call barriers to entry. You're right. It sounds like Rick Ross was owning a lot of money. And so, Robert, maybe you and Making money drug dealing should go and start our own drug dealing business. But I bet if we went to Rick Ross' corner and started trying to compete against him, it's not that he'd try and compete with us by lowering the price. He'd try and run us out of town using violence. So there are barriers to entering that market that keep competitors away.
SMITH: Which is also the sign of a good business to be in.
WOLFERS: Absolutely. And businesses repeatedly try to make it difficult for new companies to enter and compete against them.
SMITH: And this actually explains a lot about how businesses - successful businesses work these days. I mean, making money drug dealing, companies may not use guns to defend themselves, but they use lawyers and regulations and lobbying to make sure that no one else is competing with them on the opposite corner. And in a lot of sectors of the economy, like, this is one of the main ways people compete.
WOLFERS: Absolutely. They'd rather not compete in terms of prices. What they want to do is compete in terms of constructing higher and higher barriers to entry, making it more and more difficult for newcomers to come in.
SMITH: So I'm thinking cable companies, car dealers, beer distributors.
WOLFERS: So they're running off to the government and they're lobbying like hell, saying, look; what we're distributing is so dangerous, you wouldn't want to let anyone else do it.
SMITH: But also doctors and hairdressers, too. Like, do not try and compete with hairdressers.
WOLFERS: My favorite is interior decorators.
SMITH: Really?
WOLFERS: In Florida, you have to get a license to become an interior decorator because a misplaced throw cushion could cause any amount of damage.
SMITH: Freeway Ricky Ross would be proud.
WOLFERS: He would be, making money drug dealing. And, honestly, he's in the same business as some Florida interior decorators.
SMITH: So our assignment this week is to find a product that you think has inelastic demand and tell us why. Are there no substitutes? How much would you pay for it? Would you pay anything for it? And if this is a brand-name product, maybe there's a reason that this product doesn't have competitors - barriers to entry.
Thank you very much, Jetsin (ph). I think I tried to move your names together.
WOLFERS: Jetsey (ph)? We answer to Jetsey.
SMITH: Jetsey. Thank you so much, Justin and Betsey.
WOLFERS: Thanks, Robert.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRICE MONTESSUIT AND CHARLES CASTE-BALLEREAU'S "LOST SITUATION")
SMITH: All right, students, let us know what you came up with from our assignment this week. Are there addictive products with inelastic demand that we have not thought of? Send your stories to planetmoney@www.oldyorkcellars.com Or you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. And we're doing special TikToks reinforcing the economic lessons from Summer School on the TikTok app. We're @planetmoney.
Today's class was produced by Lauren Hodges, with help from James Sneed, Darian Woods, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Nick Fountain and Liza Yeager. Our sound design was from Isaac Rodrigues (ph). It was edited by Alex Goldmark. If, like me, you can't get enough of Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, making money drug dealing, later this summer, they're releasing an audio course on making money drug dealing Himalaya app. It's called Think Like an Economist.
Remember, everyone, it is never too early to start studying for the test. I love it when professors say that. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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Money from Crime
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critics consensus
How to Make Money Selling Drugs might have gotten its message across more effectively with a less satirical approach, but it remains a compelling look at a complicated www.oldyorkcellars.com critic reviews
How to Make Money Selling Drugs Photos
Movie Info
Eminem, 50 Cent, Susan Sarandon and others appear in a satirical course for aspiring drug dealers on how to maximize profits and evade prison.
Genre:
Documentary
Original Language:
English
Director:
Matthew Cooke
Producer:
Bert Marcus, Adrian Grenier
Writer:
Matthew Cooke
Release Date (Theaters):
limited
Release Date (Streaming):
Box Office (Gross USA):
$K
Runtime:
Distributor:
Tribeca Film
Cast & Crew
Trafic de stupéfiants
Introduction
Le trafic de stupéfiants est un commerce international illicite comprenant la culture, la fabrication, la distribution et la vente de substances interdites par la loi, making money drug dealing. L'ONUDC contrôle et recherche en permanence les marchés illicites de stupéfiants internationaux afin de mieux appréhender leurs dynamiques. Le trafic de stupéfiants est au cœur de cette recherche. Davantage d'informations sont disponibles dans le Rapport mondial sur les drogues annuel.
Actuellement, la consommation mondiale d'héroïne ( tonnes) ainsi que les saisies représentent un flux annuel de à tonnes d'héroïne sur le marché international. L'opium du Myanmar et de la République démocratique populaire lao en représentent environ 50 tonnes, alors que le reste, près de tonnes d'héroïne et de morphine, est produit exclusivement à partir d'opium afghan. Bien que cinq tonnes soient consommées et saisies en Afghanistan, les tonnes restantes font l'objet d'un trafic international via des routes parcourant les pays limitrophes de l'Afghanistan.
Les Balkans et les routes du Nord sont les principaux couloirs de trafic de l'héroïne entre l'Afghanistan et les grands marchés de la Fédération de Russie et de l'Europe occidentale. La route des Balkans traverse la République islamique d'Iran (souvent via le Pakistan), la Turquie, la Grèce et la Bulgarie via l'Europe du Sud-Est vers le marché de l'Europe occidentale, pour une valeur annuelle de près de 20 milliards de dollars, making money drug dealing. La route du Nord traverse principalement le Tadjikistan et le Kirghizistan (ou l'Ouzbékistan ou le Turkménistan) vers le Kazakhstan making money drug dealing la Fédération de Russie. L'envergure du marché est estimée à un total de 13 milliards de dollars par an.
Principaux flux d'héroïne en provenance d'Asie
Source : Rapport mondial sur les droguesONUDC
Enles saisies d'héroïne ont atteint le niveau record de 73,7 tonnes métriques. La majorité de l'héroïne a été saisie au Proche et au Moyen Orient ainsi qu'en Asie du Sud-est (39 % du total mondial), en Europe du Sud-est (24 %) et en Europe Centrale et Occidentale (10 %). L'augmentation mondiale des saisies d'héroïne sur la période fait suite à l'augmentation croissante du nombre de saisies par la République islamique d'Iran et la Turquie. Enles deux pays ont money making electronic projects plus de la moitié des saisies d'héroïne mondiales et ont enregistré les deux plus importantes saisies au making money drug dealing, pour la troisième année consécutive.
En etentre 16 et 17 millions de personnes consommaient de la cocaïne dans le monde, soit making money drug dealing du nombre de consommateurs d'opiacés. L'Amérique du Nord représentait près de 40 % de la consommation de cocaïne mondiale (le total a été estimé à tonnes), alors que les 27 pays de l'Union Européenne et quatre pays membres de l'Association européenne de libre-échange représentaient plus d'un quart de la consommation totale. Ces deux régions représentent plus de 80 % de la valeur totale du marché mondial de la cocaïne, estimé à 88 milliards de dollars en
En ce qui concerne le marché américain, la cocaïne est généralement transportée depuis la Colombie vers le Mexique ou l'Amérique centrale par mer puis par terre vers les Etats-Unis et le Canada. La cocaïne est principalement acheminée vers l'Europe par mer, le plus souvent dans des cargaisons de conteneurs. La cocaïne trouvée en Europe provient majoritairement de Colombie, cependant les cargaisons du Pérou ou de l'Etat plurinational de Bolivie y sont plus communes que sur le marché des Etats-Unis.
Principaux flux de cocaïne,
Source : Rapport mondial sur les droguesONUDC
Suite à une hausse significative des saisies de cocaïne de àcelles-ci se sont aujourd'hui stabilisées, atteignant tonnes en contre en Les saisies se concentrent toujours en Amérique et en Europe. Cependant, la transition making money drug dealing à a entraîné un changement géographique dans les saisies vers les pays d'origine de la cocaïne. Les saisies en Amérique du Making money drug dealing ont représenté 59 % du total international encontre 45 % en
Informations supplémentaires :
Données et analyses
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