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> The logical consequence of preventing overdoses is that his customer base will have less churn, expand more over time, and be more profitable.

street dealers aren't that sophisticated in my experience. If there's competition they just kill each other. They don't have to worry about demand because addiction handles it for them. All the actual street dealers i've encountered ( quite a few in my 20s ) were basically the equivalent of a vending machine.

edit: well i will admit one clever setup i saw in old East Dallas. A drug house started taking copper as payment for drugs because, at the time, copper scrap was very valuable. So like the dealer would take a bunch of copper pipe in trade for drugs. It made for a rash of ridiculous copper thefts, like breaking into and stealing all the wire out of the walls in apartment construction sites.




I'm not describing any sophistication on the part of the dealers; what I'm attempting to describe is more akin to the proliferation of a species in a given ecological niche if more food were introduced. If the drug users die less, the dealers have more customers and make more money, and everything else follows from there.




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