Reading through this old ass thread I still think there is a lot of weight behind the kind of comments like 'all dealers are mexican/black/etc'
Its not a matter of stereotype or race, but with something like heroin where trust is so important, due to law and police and such, you will make sure that you're associates are people you can trust (read: manipulate with nonreal bonds and fuck over, but hey maybe im the only one who has an unkle thats an asshole everytime i borrow a DVD because of mysterious ghost scratches). So say you start running a gamut on the heroin trade somewhere right, who are you gonna hire to work the product?
Well you may have one or even 10 friends youd trust with your life, but fact of the matter is you need more manpower. So you hire family, blood bonds, and those blood bonds tie in to other blood bonds. Also, a lot of impovershed people hustle at the street level because a college student wouldnt be caught on the corner peddling dimebas, he's got too much to lose, and while immigrants arent always impovershed and being impovershed doesnt mean your an immigrant, many immigrants are impovershed, and who do they call? People frmo back home.
And so what you have is a system where blood is used as a credential, because really nothing else can be. And blood is a pretty shitty credential as it is anyways, but with something like trust it is only human nature to trust people who grew up like you, who went through similar shit as you, who know what youve been through.
I mean who do you call when youre in trouble right? Most of us call family. Its not a racial issue, its one of trust, culture.
Aside from that, illegal drug markets is a market of power because of the regulations around it. Whenever there is power to be had, monopoly develops, and when only one firm is selling heroin, suddenly 'everyone who sells heroin is black/italian/mexican/etc". Its the same in any economic system where there is power. You want to make drug dealing multicultural, you legalize it. to remove corruption you must remove any possibility of power, make it so any bloke can sell heroin, and suddenly no hands need to be greased because people only make enough to make a living.