Remember that huge bust of a heroin ring based in Windsor Terrace? Isn't it weird how that just kind of happened, like it was no big deal? Well, maybe it really wasn't such a big deal, maybe there are worse things happening, or larger busts going on, or people have just become desensitized to the problem of drugs in the city. Today The Observer heads to the neighborhood and examines the issue.
Three guys from two separate crews lived on a particularly hot block of 17th Street, and one of them fancied himself a rapper, RNR.... "Lessons You Must Learn" takes place outside the bodega on the corner of 8th Avenue. "Money over everything," he declares on the quiet street....
A gentleman who lived right in between the rapper and his accomplice complained, "Drugs have been an open secret on 17th Street for a long time, and I still don't know if they've done enough about it," he said. "The Bloomberg administration-with all their cuts-is it going to get worse?" Minutes before, The Observer noticed an idyllic Brooklyn scene, the man walking his daughter and her friend back from soccer.
What it gets to is how even in the nicest of neighborhoods, drugs exist. Just because the price of real estate increases or a new restaurant opens up, it doesn't mean drugs disappear--as one woman told The Observer, people "forget that doctors use drugs and lawyers use drugs, and they go about it in a more slick way." That doesn't make it acceptable, of course, but it might help explain why what seems like a significant bust goes largely unnoticed.
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