Geeking Up and Throwing Down: Heroin Street Life in Detroit

This paper reports the results of a field study of 15 street‐level heroin dealers in Detroit, Michigan. The techniques used by these heroin dealers are different from those described in most previous literature. The Detroit dealers do not conform to the traditional “hustling” model. They operate within a bureaucracy, do not generally sell heroin to fund their own habit, are relatively young, and largely lack an approval ideology for their activities.