So today I was coming home from seeing my baby sis and I took the train from the Bronx into Manhattan. I got off on 125^th street and Lexington and I crossed the platform to the downtown 6. In the middle of the platform there is a magazine stand that sells everything from bottles of water to booty magazines. I decided to buy a magazine and it wasn’t of the booty mag variety! LOL The name of the magazine is ASIS: Artists, Streets, Info, and Style. The magazine is in the same vein as DonDiva and FELON magazines. I come home and I opened the magazine and began reading not really knowing what to expect because I would normally read DonDiva, but the magazine was nowhere to be found at that particular stand.

When I began reading the magazine there was an article that jumped out at me because it was talking about the real costs of drug dealing. I have never been a drug dealer although I know quite a few and the ones who were closest in age to me I always wondered how come I had a legit gig and they hustled yet there was no real difference in lifestyle? I secretly laughed at one of my boys who sold weed because in my mind I figured he made enough to eat Chinese food every night and have just enough left over to re-up (go back to buy more drugs for distribution.) LOL All jokes aside I came across this startling and provocative statistic that said the average dealer makes $3,640 a year. A YEAR?! Not a day or even a week, but A YEAR!!! If this statistic is fairly accurate that means I damn near got more back on my tax returns than the average dealers yearly income. This is preposterous!

Now all these so called rappers claiming to be “trappers” and “D Boys” talking this “trapping out the bando,” a “bando” is short for “aBANDOned house,” are being extra as hell! Ain’t no way in hell you are really riding around and getting it making $3,640! All these rappers talking about “bricks” must be talking about literal bricks because $70 a week is roughly what I spend on food. All these rap songs talking about all this money they made off the streets and how lavish their lifestyles were before the rap money came in are dangerously embellishing and fatally exaggerating because the misguided youth who take what they say as truth are headed straight to the penitentiary or the grave. From reading that one startling statistic it has become ever so clear to me how brothers can be stuck on Riker’s without money for bail. If they are in jail on drug charges these misguided brothers simply did not make enough money on the streets to bail themselves out of jail if caught. This causes brothers to cop out to plea bargains that are designed to speed through the judicial process without tying up taxpayer money with a trial. These brothers have to fight the case from behind the wall instead of facing trial while not being incarcerated.

Now I am sure some dealers make way more than $3,640 a year and I am sure there are dealers who make significantly less than $3,640 a year. My question is to the brother’s who feel the drug game is worth getting into are they fooled by the illusion of power and financial freedom or is it not a mirage and there really is money to be made? If it’s the former than how do they feel once in jail for drug possession knowing that they risked their freedom for crumbs? If it’s the latter, I want to know how much do they actually make to make the risk of jail worth the reward of drug sales? Unfortunately I won’t ever know the answers to these questions, but what I do know is I hope young folks won’t continue to get tricked into making big money selling drugs just to get trapped behind bars or in a coffin all for some punk-ass $3,640…YOU’RE WORTH SO MUCH MORE!!!