Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 11, 1990 TAG: 9007110068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Dealing is a risky part-time job, said a report by the Rand Corporation Drug Policy Research Center. A year of selling drugs on D.C. streets carries a 1.4 percent chance of being killed - a fatality rate 100 times that of the general work force.
The Rand study of Washington's open-air drug market in the late 1980s is the first systematic examination of street dealing's role in the economic life of poor youths. It depicts a bleak situation.
"Even creation of considerably higher paying legitimate jobs probably wouldn't get us very far," said economist Peter Reuter, the principal author. "Dealers would still have smaller total incomes than they can earn now by supplementing their regular wages from drug selling. Also, many of them have expensive drug habits."
The report, "Money From Crime: The Economics of Drug Dealing," is based on data covering the 11,430 Washington residents charged with drug selling from 1985-1987, confidential interviews with 186 convicted drug dealers on probation, a 1988 Urban Institute study of the District's ninth and 10th graders and other D.C. crime statistics.
The researchers found two-thirds of those arrested for drug dealing had regular jobs elsewhere.
But the dealers made far more by moonlighting in the drug trade. The median earnings for illegal drug sales was about $30 an hour. For their legal jobs, it was $7 an hour.
These findings are "disturbing," the report said, because they indicate "job creation . . . may do little to reduce willingness to participate in drug markets."
The report also dispelled the notion of all drug dealers getting rich. Even those who sold daily (only three out of eight) had median gross sales of $3,600 a month and net earnings of about $2,000.
That is twice as much as they could expect from full-time legitimate employment, the report said, but not the kind of payback "from which Mercedes or great fortunes spring."
Though dangerous, the work is hardly tedious.
"Few dealers in our sample reported working long hours at drug selling. Even those who reported dealing on a daily basis sold only an average of four hours per day," the report said.
More than 90 percent of the D.C. residents charged with drug dealing were black men age 18-29. Only 36 percent had high school diplomas.
For poorly educated urban males, the report said, drug dealing provides "an opportunity for a few hours of more highly paid work to supplement their primary jobs."
However, the work carries high risks. For each year of selling drugs one or more days per week, there was a 22 percent chance of imprisonment, a 7 percent chance of severe injury and a 1.4 percent chance of being killed.
by CNB