On a side note, those dealers had pretty long hours, they’d be there from before 7am some times (and people buying too). It was also sad to see that most of their customers seemed to be residents of the nearby affordable housing buildings.
There's no arrangement needed, the entire state of CA has effectively decriminalized drug possession. Getting busted for dealing with just a small stash sufficient to support a few hours of selling amounts to a slap on the wrist.
So unless the dealer is A Problem, there's not really any interest in wasting time on it. You're not putting them behind bars by catching them, you're just generating busy work for yourself as a cop, and wasting resources in general.
The same scene can be observed in any CA urban center. There is still some enforcement in the lesser populated/rural parts where police are bored and looking for reasons to mess with the lives of poor addicts though.
With legalization, you get rid of black markets and dealers, taxes flow and product quality rises.
Decriminalization just means that addicts and dealers don't get fucked as hard when caught.
The experience certainly inspired me further on the path of entrepreneurship.
Gang tattoos to limit the mobility of their labor, duopolies to minimize conflict but maintain most of the benefits of a monopoly, squeezing upstream suppliers by playing them off each other, geographically-differentiated pricing and much more.
The violence is obviously the biggest difference, but even the rest serves as a warning not to drop regulation entirely.
You don’t need a government necessarily to enforce those rights, but free exchange of goods and labor cannot exist if violence is possible to coerce those exchanges.
Enforcing legally binding contracts, for example.
In doing so, you no longer need to keep business within a tightly controlled group (family?) or enforce it with chainsaws.
Neither apply to selling heroin on the street.
It's illegal, so it's hardly a free market.
I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems that the way we manage affordable housing in the US contributes to the problem. Vienna and Singapore can teach us a lot about how to do this better: https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
At that time at least, SFPD targeted dealers.