It's good to remember sometimes that DNMs are not the only business model for obtaining drugs besides sashaying down a street to score some shit. "Serving All Your Heroin Needs":
...The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery. Dealers circulate a number around town. An addict calls, and an operator directs him to an intersection or a parking lot. The operator dispatches a driver, who tools around town, his mouth full of tiny balloons of heroin, with a bottle of water nearby to swig them down with if cops stop him. ("It's amazing how many balloons you can learn to carry in your mouth," said one dealer, who told me he could fit more than 30.) The driver meets the addict, spits out the required balloons, takes the money and that's that. It happens every day -- from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because these guys keep business hours. The Xalisco Boys, as one cop I know has nicknamed them, are far from our only heroin traffickers. But they may be our most prolific. As relentless as Amway salesmen, they embody our new drug-plague paradigm. Xalisco dealers are low profile -- the anti-Scarface. Back home they are bakers, butchers and farm workers, part of a vast labor pool in Xalisco and surrounding towns, who hire on as heroin drivers for $300 to $500 a week. The drug trade offers them a shot at their own business, or simply a chance to make some money to show off back home -- kings until the cash goes. Meanwhile, in the United States, they drive old cars with their cheeks packed like chipmunks', and dress like the day workers in front of your Home Depot.
The heroin delivery system appeals to them mainly because there is no cartel kingpin, no jefe máximo. It is meritocratic -- so unlike Mexico. They are "people acting as individuals who are doing it on their own: micro-entrepreneurs," said one phone operator for a crew who I interviewed while he was in prison. They are "looking for places where there's no people, no competition," he said. "Anyone can be boss of a network." Thus the system distills what appeals to immigrants generally about America: It is a way to translate wits and hard work into real economic gain. The money, meanwhile, helps paper over the Mexican small-town animus against drugs, and the guilt many feel at watching their product reduce kids just like them to quivering slaves. They are decidedly nonviolent -- terrified, in fact, of battles for street corners with armed gangs. They don't carry guns. They also have rules against selling to African-Americans because, as one dealer put it, "they'll steal from you, and beat you."
The Boys started out on the fringes of the drug world in West Coast cities. In the late 1990s, they moved east in search of virgin territory. They avoided New York City, the country's traditional center of heroin, because the market was already run by entrenched gangs. The city still has enormous supplies of dope coming through it, mostly imported now by traffickers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and by Dominicans who buy it from Colombians. But New York is no longer the country's sole heroin hub. They also skipped cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, where black gangs control distribution. The Xalisco Boys migrated instead to prosperous midsize cities. These cities were predominantly white, but had large Mexican populations where the Boys could blend in. They were the first to open these markets to cheap, potent black-tar heroin in a sustained way. The map of their outposts amounts to a tour through our new heroin hubs: Nashville, Columbus and Charlotte, as well as Salt Lake City, Portland and Denver.
...In places like Columbus, the Xalisco Boys stumbled onto multitudes of new addicts, many of whom were already hooked on opioid pills that doctors had prescribed. Their heroin was cheaper than the pills, yet provided a similar high. And their delivery system made heroin conveniently available to suburban white kids who possessed the trinity of American prosperity, essential to the Xalisco system: their own cellphones (to call the dealer), cars (in which to meet the dealer) and private bedrooms (in which to shoot up and hide the dope)...They have kept their edge by betting not on guns but on marketing. Just as pharmaceutical companies promoted prescription pills to doctors as the solution to demanding chronic-pain patients, the Xalisco Boys promoted their system as the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency. The everyday solution for white suburban addicts afraid of rummaging around Skid Row for dope. Only a phone call away; operators standing by. Today, they are our quietest traffickers. And our most aggressive. Other heroin dealers wait for customers to come to them. The Xalisco Boys drive after new ones. They hang out at methadone clinics offering patients free samples. They offer price breaks and occasionally make customer survey calls: Was the dope good? Was the driver polite? Any customers showing signs of quitting get a visit from a driver plying them with free hits. They are the only network of Mexican traffickers I know of that manufactures its own product, exports it wholesale into the United States and then retails it on the street in tenth-of-a-gram doses, thus controlling product quality, price and customer service. The police try to combat them, but they are like the Internet of dope -- a crew can shut down as quickly as a website. One strategy is to arrest drivers, confiscate their cars and apartments. That raises the business costs of the crew owners back in Xalisco, who continue to oversee drug production and recruit new drivers from Mexico. Arresting these owners would be more effective, but we'd have to depend on Mexican law enforcement -- which is hobbled by corruption, and stretched thin by far more violent drug networks -- for that.
(Apparently based on his book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.)
Some comments from former users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9403455
I bet the drivers' tips are terrible