"Heroin Highway:" The Expansion of The Urban Drug Market into Rural New England

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Crime & Deviance

Abstract

Although heroin and fentanyl-laced heroin have become increasingly available in rural areas of America, we still do not know much about how they are getting to them and who is transporting them from urban drug markets. Toward addressing this gap in our knowledge, I will present on fieldwork from a Western Massachusetts town in a rural area. I will show how an experienced supplier who had relocated from Brooklyn, New York had recruited vulnerable drug dealers to drive down to that borough for him, returning with bulk quantities of heroin and fentanyl-laced heroin for distribution around local neighborhoods and in nearby towns. Across the Puerto Rican men, the African-American men, and the black men of Caribbean descent, all of whom had relocated from various cities around the northeast, and also across the local white men who had grown up in my field site, common motivations for joining him in this interstate operation will be discussed throughout as the following: the inability to find employment, the lucrative profits, and the draw of being associated with his infamous criminal organization.

Author

• Nicholas Kearns, Yale University