Mythology Crime Criminal Justice. I A Reaction/Response

Mythology crime criminal justice. I a reaction/response article called "Why drug dealers live moms?"

There are some very good points made in the article which originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine entitled, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms." However, many of these points are couched within crass, offensive writing and within other points that appear dubious or, in other cases, are outright fallacies. On the whole, however, this article does a decent job of deconstructing myths about drug dealers and the lifestyles that they adopt to further themselves within this enterprise. The article also includes some fairly sapient information regarding the nature of gangs in the United States. As such, the overall effect is that the discerning reader, such as one who has a degree of insight into these two topics extending beyond that of some of the people referenced in the article, is left surprised at some of the author's naivete and also at some of his frankness and rectitude in the wake of what can only be termed his mistakes.

The most important information gleaned by a read of this article is an answer to the titular questioned posed within it. The answer, of course, is the ills of capitalism that are practiced everywhere within American from agriculture to the corporate world, from street gangs and drug dealing to prostitution. Essentially, drug dealers frequently live with their mothers because they are poor. This fact, and its correlation to capitalism, is roundly underscored by the subsequent quotation from the author in what is probably his finest moment of the essay.

In other words, a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage…the gangs wages are about as skewed as wages in corporate America. A foot soldier had plenty in common with a McDonald's burger flipper (Author).

With this one quotation, the author is able to undo the myth that drug dealers have cushy, easy jobs. The same myth applies to people in the music business (a fact which the author points out as well). People perceive this industry as glamorous, and for the owner or the couple of partners that own major record labels -- such as Universal, for instance -- the money and lifestyle lived is every bit as sumptuous as anything Hollywood has ever concocted about the subject. But for gophers trying to earn their way at a boutique, independent label and for the vast majority of people in this industry, they are merely trying to survive.

Therefore, the real point of perplexity in reading this document is: why does the author believe that this question is worthy of dedicating an entire chapter in his manuscript? The reason, however, is fairly disturbing. The author has written this article to expose the myth that drug dealing is an exorbitantly lucrative profession as something of fiction. Yet one would only need to consider the source of this myth -- the media and all of its myriad news reporting, television shows and Hollywood movies -- in order to prudently discern the fact that the notion of dealing drugs as an ideal luxury profession is fairly ridiculous. In fact, when examining the source of the myth, the author alludes to this very fact which the subsequent quotation, in which he discusses statements made by police about drug dealing, implies. "drug dealers were armed with state-of-the-art weapons and a bottomless supply of cash…The media eagerly glommed on to this story, portraying crack dealing as one of the most profitable jobs in America" (Author). This passage is important because it essentially proves that the perception of easy-money coming from drug dealing is little more than media hype. As such, it is readily discerned as such by prudent readers and viewers of the media, which makes those same readers surprised that the author feels the need to dedicate as much text as he does to disproving a myth that was never founded in reality.

Still, there are several misconceptions related to drug dealing that this article is able to clarify. The purported dissemination of wealth is just one of them. Another is that all drug dealers are just ignorant, illiterate people who are inherently lazy and who would rather sell drugs than get a real job. The depiction of the leader of a Chicago gang, J.T., who earned a collegiate degree and was working in corporate America before he chose to apply a corporate business model to selling crack, helps to shatter this unreality. Still, the most important myth is that the selling of drugs, particularly crack cocaine in the African-American community, is somehow beneficial. As the preceding quotations indicate, there will only be an extremely limited number of kingpins who horde the majority of the wealth associated with the institutionalized selling of crack cocaine. However, the fact that African-Americans are selling one of the most addictive and deadly substances known to man to one another, is the most disturbing and parasitic aspect about drug dealing which is never thoroughly discussed. People think about the violence, the money, and the material trappins associated with drug dealing (which too few dealers account for), but they rarely consider that

Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for all black

Americans, not just crack users and their families, you will see that the group's postwar progress was not only stopped cold but was often knocked as much as ten years backward (Author).

From this perspective, selling drugs (and crack) is not glamorous or something to aspire towards. It is chemical warfare engineered by the government and created almost exclusively to destroy the militant Black Power movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. And virtually none of the people discussed within this article, from J.T. To any of his employees or to the gangs that sell the substance, consider or are even aware of this fact.