Small-time drug dealers are rethinking the way they do business because of the coronavirus pandemic.
5 min read
Jerry - an alias he uses to protect his identity - has sold cocaine, marijuana and MDMA - known as ecstasy or Molly on the street - since moving to Brussels from Albania in 2016. His clientele is regular enough that when he changed his business hours due to a national lockdown, he updated his WhatsApp profile in three languages.
Pretending to be food delivery couriers and hiding packets of cocaine inside their helmets is a strategy some dealers employed in recent years to avoid busts. Fearing arrest before Belgium's lockdown, Jerry recently hired an associate to do deliveries on a bicycle. Across the border in France, law enforcement agencies noticed the illegal drug trade visibly changing in the weeks after the government imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 17. Vehicles that speed through the country delivering caches of imported drugs - what the French call “go-fasts” - no longer moved on usual routes by the end of the month, Le Monde newspaper quoted a report by narcotics police as saying.
At a public housing project in the Vénissieux area, the chair a revolving cast of young marijuana runners used to greet customers and take orders is empty. Instead, prices for different amounts are handwritten on the walls of an apartment building like a chalkboard listing a restaurant's daily specials.
In his case, Jerry suspects the coronavirus' impact on the sex work industry accounts for much of the falloff in sales. Prostitution is not illegal in Belgium but is currently banned because of social-distancing requirements, and the sex workers he knows are buying less cocaine, he said.
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