<font color="0000ff">Source: NYU News
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True confessions of... A student drug lord
Part three in an eight-part series. Next week: True confessions of... a Stern cheater
by Meena Hartenstein
Contributing Writer
At 20 years old, Jack*, a Stern School of Business sophomore, retired from dealing marijuana. In just a year of selling the drug, he raked in about $50,000.
"If you really want to know," Jack said conspiratorially, "there were really only three dealers at NYU. I was one of the three."
The roots of an enterprise
It started off by chance, Jack said; the lucrative business just fell into his lap.
Early in the first semester of his freshman year, Jack moved into an off-campus apartment with Ben*, a drug dealer Jack characterized as "pretty bad at it." Drowning in debt and on the run from creditors, Ben came to Jack for help, saying, "they're going to break my legs," Jack said.
From the moment he met Ben, Jack was critical of his business choices, and he realized it was only a matter of time before he would supplant him.
Ben was more than $11,000 in debt, and Jack, in an effort to bail out his roommate, took over his business and balanced the books, using the experience he gained as a small-time dealer in high school.
"[Ben's] flaw was that he just smoked his product," Jack said. "That's how he ended up with all this debt and that's how I got in this position."
Once he took charge of Ben's enterprise, Jack decided to keep selling. Through Ben, he had "a connection and a customer base," which Jack said enabled a smooth transition into the large collegiate market.
Soon Jack was making between $2,000 and $5,000 a week, depending on the demand. "The week you get back from Thanksgiving is ridiculous," he said. "Everyone's just gone home and seen their parents and they come back, like, 'Oh man, I've gotta smoke some weed.'"
"The week before midterms is terrible," he added. "Nobody wants to buy."
Selling almost exclusively to small-time, on-campus dealers, Jack was able to limit the number of business contacts he made, avoiding sleazier drug buyers while raking in the profit.
"The margins aren't as high percentage-wise," he said. "But it's still a lot of money, and you deal with much less shady clientele."
Jack compared his business model to that of a fellow dealer, who sells marijuana directly to people who smoke and has about 150 customers. Jack, who only had six customers last year, said he made more money with less risk. "Think how many bad things could happen if 150 people know you're dealing," he said.
The pros and cons of dealing
Jack used his illicit earnings to buy a plasma-screen TV, airplane tickets to visit friends and dinner at elite restaurants like the Peter Luger Steakhouse, his favorite indulgence.
"It's $100 a head, and everyone around you is 45," he said, recalling his costly dining experiences. "You look around, and you're like, 'Wow, I'm 20.' And you just laugh and laugh."
Yet with all the perks Jack got from being a dealer, he also got one thing he didn't want: full-time paranoia.
"You've constantly got to be thinking about who owes you money, whom you owe money to, and who knows you're dealing," he said. "It's a constant hassle."
Sometimes, he added, the paranoia was too great a burden to shoulder comfortably. "One day I got out of a taxicab, and I had a bag full of weed and a pocket full of money, and I opened the door into a traffic cop that was issuing a ticket," he said. "I was so freaked out. That's like life flashing before your eyes."
The end of an era
"All of a sudden, it didn't feel right," Jack said gravely. "One of my friends got arrested, another one got robbed, and I lost money on both of those deals."
Since he was interested in preserving his immaculate police record, Jack decided it was time to call in his chips. "I was happy to quit while I was ahead," he said.
Today, Jack says he is financially secure enough to avoid drug-dealing for good. And in his absence, the NYU drug game is undergoing some changes.
When he retired, Jack sold his customers to one of NYU's two other primary marijuana dealers. Now that one of them is about to graduate, "Basically all of NYU's traffic goes through one guy," Jack said, adding that the new drug lord commands a great deal of traffic.
"NYU is a big drug school, it definitely is," Jack said.
Now that he's out of the illicit business, Jack's making his supplemental income in a more legal, more mundane fashion: investing in the stock market.
"I find the market allows the same amount of risk as far as losing it all but makes up for it by eliminating the possibility of getting robbed or arrested," he said.
Retired though he may be, Jack said he would find it easy to get back into the game if he really had to. "If someone was like, 'Jack, I need some,' I could deliver," he said.
* The names Jack and Ben are aliases constructed to protect the subjects' identities. </font>