There’s a persistent mythology around drug dealing that it’s about flash, status, or rebellion. Movies and music videos paint dealers as people chasing luxury and power for the thrill of it. But this narrative misses something fundamental: for many people who end up selling drugs, it’s not about wanting to be a kingpin. It’s about looking at their options and doing the math.
When you’re born into poverty in America, you’re playing a game where the rules seem designed to keep you losing. You can work full-time at minimum wage and still not afford rent in most cities. You can go to an underfunded school where college seems like a fantasy for rich kids. You can watch your parents work two or three jobs and still struggle to keep the lights on. And you start to understand that the legal paths out of poverty are narrow, steep, and often blocked.
Now compare that to dealing. The money is immediate. There’s no application process, no background check, no one asking why you don’t have a permanent address or why there’s a gap in your work history. You don’t need startup capital that you’d never qualify for anyway. You don’t need to wait two weeks for a paycheck that won’t cover your family’s expenses. The barrier to entry is practically zero, and the returns, relative to any legitimate work available to you, can be extraordinary.
This isn’t about glamorizing anything. Dealing drugs destroys communities, fuels addiction, and perpetuates cycles of violence and incarceration. But we can’t address why people make this choice if we refuse to understand the cold calculation behind it. For someone looking at ten-hour shifts at a fast-food restaurant versus making the same amount in an afternoon, the decision becomes less about morality and more about survival.
The people who become successful dealers, the ones who last and make real money, tend to treat it exactly like what it is: a business operating in a market. They’re responding to supply and demand. They’re managing risk. They’re thinking about logistics and customer retention. Many are smart, strategic thinkers who might have thrived in legitimate business if they’d been born with different zip codes and different opportunities.
The tragedy is that this efficiency, this clear path to income, comes with catastrophic costs. The risk of violence is constant. Incarceration is almost inevitable eventually. The impact on your community can be devastating. You’re contributing to other people’s addictions and all the misery that follows. But when you’re weighing these long-term consequences against immediate desperation, against hungry siblings or eviction notices or medical bills you can’t pay, the calculation gets complicated.
What makes someone a successful dealer isn’t a love of danger or a desire for street credibility. It’s often the same skills that make anyone successful: understanding your market, being reliable, managing your operation efficiently, and reinvesting strategically. The best dealers are business-minded people who saw an economic opportunity in an underground economy because the legal economy offered them nothing remotely comparable.
This is why simply telling people “just say no” or “get a real job” is absurdly inadequate. When the real jobs available pay seven dollars an hour with no benefits and no advancement possible, when the education system has already failed you, when every legitimate door seems closed, dealing stops looking like a moral failure and starts looking like rational economic behavior.
The solution isn’t to romanticize or excuse dealing. It’s to recognize that people generally don’t choose hard, dangerous, morally compromising work because they think it’s cool. They choose it because they’re trapped in systems that offer them nothing better, and they’re trying to survive. If we want people to stop dealing, we need to make the legal alternatives actually competitive. That means jobs that pay living wages, schools that prepare people for real opportunities, and communities where the conventional path to stability isn’t a pipe dream.
Until the legal economy offers something approaching the financial returns of the illegal one, some people will keep doing the math and arriving at the same conclusion. Not because they’re bad people, and not because they think dealing is fun. But because when you’re desperate and looking at your options, sometimes the most efficient path is also the most destructive one.
