They make better wages selling drugs.....the market is huge in ghettos’s and the business easy to obtain...and create more addicts to sustain their business. Which is how they see it.
They want what they know they cannot attain without the work to get there. Jobs are not what they want....they want the good life they see others have who do work for it.
I remember hearing a SW broadcast a decade or so ago about the drug trade in Baltimore. It reported that it’s highly fragmented, comparatively speaking, leading to a lot turf-war deaths.