The sales begin at dawn on Chicago’s West Side. A group of young men stand vigilant on the sidewalk of a greystone-lined street. Down the block a car turns the corner and approaches. The occupants are quickly recognized as customers, white people visit these streets for one reason. The sellers call out, “rocks, blows!” the classic refrain, the car pulls to the curb, engine running. One of the hooded men steps to the driver’s open window, receiving the order, “a jab”. He takes a wad of five twenty dollar bills, and then drops thirteen foil packets tied in a plastic baggie onto the driver’s lap. The transaction is complete, the car departs. Throughout the day, thousands of heroin sales will be conducted throughout the sprawling West Side, employing more workers than any legitimate business in the area. Chicago leads the nation in heroin related emergencies and is, by all accounts, the nation’s heroin capital (Moore). Heroin addiction is not only widespread within the city, its usage is widespread in the surrounding “collar counties”. Public concern over Chicago’s growing addiction epidemic prompted by media portrayals of young, suburban addicts represents a shift in public attitude towards addiction. Many law enforcement agencies are similarly adopting harm-reduction strategies, targeting addiction as opposed to addicts themselves. In affluent DuPage county, fatal overdoses have doubled between 2007 and 2012 (Pratt). In response, county police recently began carrying naloxone nasal spray which can be used to immediately reverse potentially fatal heroin overdoses (Ruzich). This response exemplifies the greater shift in law-enforcement strategy regarding addiction. However, Chicago’s heroin problem is as much one of supply as it is demand; heroin represents a vast and lucrative industry. The heroin problem in Chicago is an exceedingly complex issue encompassing historic, social and economic elements. Reforms in law-enforcement strategy regarding heroin distribution, parallel to those targeting addiction, are imperative for a successful eradication of the drug. Heroin is a commodity like that of any legal industry. Various organizations trade the product along its route to the consumer, allowing each to specialize in a particular industry corresponding to its available resources. In Chicago’s heroin trade, the Sinaloa cartel provides the invaluable services of production and transportation. From a poppy field in southern Chihuahua, to the drive shaft of a pick-up advancing across the Texan plains, the cartel assumes complete responsibility. Once the illicit product arrives on the city’s doorstep however, “the most powerful Mafia organization in the Western Hemisphere” turns the valuable commodity over to those organizations more adept at operating within the expansive urban environment (Beittel). Chicago’s Mexican-American gangs purchase heroin from cartel operatives and then the valued commodity is wholesale to the retailers; predominantly Black street gangs (Cattan). With decades of established presence on the West Side, heroin distribution is a major business for the area’s various street gangs (Dumke). However, the market’s recent expansion has decentralized the industry allowing smaller, loosely affiliated gang factions to thrive (Main). Top-down gang control which once characterized the city’s heroin economy is being replaced with a more classic American free-market (Main). Opportunities for employment are available for non-gang affiliated residents. The street level workers are often day-laborers who work for gang factions on commission, often making profits of more than a hundred dollars per day (Dumke). As long as heroin consumption in Chicagoland continues at current levels, raw material is imported en masse, and licit employment opportunities are unavailable, West Side residents will continue to seek a living-wage in the heroin market, an industry inherently tied to violence and incarceration. As is the case in all facets of the US economy, the poorest workers tend to suffer the greatest risks for the smallest relative profits. Arresting low-level heroin dealers is not only an ineffective strategy at tackling heroin sales, such law-enforcement policies propagates the underlying socio-economic disparities which allow heroin sales to thrive in the first place. At best, law-enforcement based agencies can temporarily shut-down an individual drug organization with a high-profile arrest, leading to a reduction in quantity of available heroin. But as basic economic theory dictates, a decrease in supply, leads to an increase in price and incentivizes new entities to enter the market. The Chicago Police Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law-enforcement agencies have only a limited ability to reduce heroin sales on the West Side. The open-air heroin market on the West Side is the result of local socio-economic c