^but a lot of heroin threads might as well be jersey threads....
for my contribution....i've lived in the city about 1yr and been hanging out down here for many...quite a few of those years doing smack on and off. so here's what it looks like from where I'm sitting::
Why NY is diff from Jerz (hai, lacey!

)
Open air markets do exist in the city but not like they did in the heyday and it is almost completely dead in Manhattan and it's an ongoing fight e.g. the DEA and NYPD narcotics are upon on rooftops in Washington Heights with telephoto lenses and shit people every day. There are of course people with huge balls who attempt to do it anyway, or those who have influence with the police to get a tip off or get left alone ... corruption is still immense. But mostly it has been taken off the corners because it a a sort of quality of life broken windows thing. LE cares a lot more about than than the number of bags makin their way into the city. The best dope in the city is mostly out of Jersey & to lesser extent Philly. Some users in the city find it easier to go to JErz where there is not only an abundance of cheap and high quality dope but actual functioning open air spots. But plenty of dope does make it into NYC. It is sold in big bulk to midlevel dealers who then work with some custies and then also to people who work as end level distributiors. They will do business with a cell phone and either meet up some place or deliver, not many work out of a fixed location if they are smart. Some of them will work with just abou anyone who has the cell phone# and there are some larger delivery services that will work with whoever has the # of a central dispatch which will then send people out but this business paradigm is much more prevalent with weed or coke. Dope is a little bit more on the down low. And at the very bottom of the food chain is the ubiquitous junkie who will middleman deals with a real dealer, sometimes operating with randoms from off the street (and just as likely to scam, but there are some honest ones, particularly punk type kids if you get to know them and don't come off as a huge custie), and sometimes with people they know. Inevitably dealing with these people will be proportionately taxed and sometimes you will even find your bags tapped (unmarked, unstamped bags that really invite this sort of treatment are not uncommon in bklyn & the LES, on the one hand it is often fire dope, not very stamped on at the source, but on the other, the number of iterations of distribution you find yourself on
after the source will determine whats in your bag. Overall though the quality of the product has been excelent of late (and in the morbid calculus of how to measure this quantity,people are dying from OD's; in related news, Fentanyl does not seem to be uncommon.) the dope trade is alive and welll, but changing, in that you gotta know people. But the dope "Scene" penetrates just about everything, from hipsters to ravers to psychonauts to people who just dabble in one drug or another. For a porportion of people who involve themselves with one drug or another, it always winds up with dope, so if you involve yourself with drugs in any significant way, you'll be able to network yourself to a bag. The question is, do you want to? Because more than just a high, it's a choice and a path ... and where it ends is not always pretty (I recently relapsed for maybe 10 days or so after a 4 1/2 month abstinence, and I also have the (swine?) flu. feels bad man.)