A Drug Dealer on Economists' Theories About Drug Dealing

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What do actual drug dealers think about economists’ research on drug dealers?  NPR’s Planet Money asks the question of drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross, and gets some illuminating answers.  Ross doesn’t remember charging a “risk premium” to deal: “When you come from where I was when I started selling drugs, you feel hopeless. You don’t think you’re going to live past 24 years old. Go to jail, come out with stripes. Really wasn’t any risk. Everything I had going on at the time, it was nothing. I was like a lump on a log. The risk most people would look at — you could get killed, go to prison — was okay.”