EPISODE 46
"JUST
WORDS"

Welcome to JUST WORDS.  The stories of working people in our community.

I'm Marc Steiner

Donny is a young man who grew up on the east side of Baltimore.  This is the story of his journey into the streets, and how he became a drug dealer.

How I fell into it was 96, 97. My 14th birthday, I smoked a blunt. Chronic, whatever people might call it. I decided, I liked smoking weed, I didn’t want to keep buying it. I was never a dumb person or nothing, and I didn’t want to keep buying it when I could buy a whole bunch for myself right then and there. So as I did that, the fiorst time I did that, I said, I got all this, everyone keep looking for it. I might as well start selling it. I started with just weed. I started smoking weed, my habit increased more as I started selling more weed, and I never went on any corners or anything like that when I first started out. I didn’t start going on corners until I was 16 or 17. I graduated from selling weed to selling cocaine, cause I never used cocaine and I never used heroin but I always smoked weed. So I came to my senses that I couldn’t sell weed and smoke weed, so I’ll sell something that I won’t smoke or use. So I started selling cocaine. I always tell myself it was an experiment, but one that went too far. Once I bgot on the streets, it was a different ballgame. Could trust anyone. Everyone was on their own thing, on their own agendas. Nobody was thinking long term, because that’s not a long term game.

It was more than just a desire to get cheap drugs that inspired Donny to begin dealing. It was his desire to be free from the control of his mother, and to do that, he needed financial independence.

She was always business orientated, graduated from the Baltimore culinary arts school downtown. She was a multitalented person, always did a whole lot of things. Once me and my mother got into problems…we had different understandings. It is not the same to be raised by your mother as it is by a man, or a father rather. He was a recovering addict himself, an addict at the time. really wasn’t no contact between us. I would see him some holidays or he would call. She was the provider but once I started experimenting with selling drugs and providing for myself, it was definitely nothing you could tell me. I was close-minded. I didn’t want to hear none of that. I just wanted to do what made me happy and made me feel like I fit in.

Next week, we’ll learn how far this desire to fit in took Donny.

Just words is a production of the Center for Emerging Media, produced by Jessica Phillips, through a grant from OSI-Baltimore: investing in solutions to Baltimore’s toughest problems, with audacious thinking for lasting change, on the web at OSI-Baltimore.org.
Visit JUST WORDS on the web at centerforemergingmedia.org, or
email us, at justwords@wypr.org

Music: Mickey Freeland