"Street" selling is the bottom of the chain and can be accomplished through purchasing from prostitutes, through cloaked retail stores or refuse houses for users in the act located in red-light districts which often also deal in paraphernalia, dealers marketing merriment at night clubs and other events, or directly from dealers who have purposefully engaged adolescents (typically). Many users sell in order to fund their own drug use. Although most are in it for the monetary outcome, some view narcotics dispensing and consumption as a means of insurrection and orchestrate it for that cacoethes. They refrain from intensive processing and abstain from umpteen 'business' practices. Although most dealers market to a changeless customer base, these mavericks may be overly advertised on hacker/phreaker/drug/etc. forums and between friends and cohorts.
U.S. Government guide to spending on illegal drugs (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/drugfact/american_users_spend/)
U.S. DOJ history of illegal drug trade (http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/deamuseum/museum_illegaldrugs.html) (rather self-serving and biased, represents DEA as triumphant over drugs)
If you have been charged with a federal drug importation or smuggling crime, you should be aware that sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences have been made harsher since September 11th, 2001.
At the drug defense law offices of Patrick J. Artur and Associates, we thoroughly investigate the circumstances of your drug importation charges, as well as the investigation and procedures for collecting the drugsmuggling evidence against you.
Smuggling investigations are complex, and mistakes are often made.
A mule is a lower-echelon criminal recruited by a smuggling organization to cross a border carrying drugs, or sometimes an unknowing person in whose bag or vehicle the drugs are planted, for the purpose of retrieving them elsewhere.
The main organized drug cartels deal primarily with the most compact (thus easy to smuggle) and profitable substances cocaine, heroin, MDMA (ecstasy), and methamphetamine, and it is these that are the primary focus of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
Legal drugs like tobacco can be the subject of smuggling and illegal trading if the price difference between the smuggled-from and the smuggled-to country are high enough to make it profitable.