Handbag Pushers

Like many people, I'm watching The Wire on DVD. This makes me aware that Baltimore is very like many European cities (eg Athens). I will explain:

In The Wire, gangs of black fellas hang out on street corners and sell drugs to passers by. In Europe it's exactly the same except that for some reason the drugs are replaced by handbags. I don't really understand why this is. My best guess is that each handbag contains a dose of heroin. The bags are the equivalent of the little glass phials used by the tv dealers. The European guys are cleverer though and have worked out that the police can see the drugs through the glass and so a handbag is a much better thing to hide the heroin in.

An alternative theory (not mine) is that they are selling handbags to finance organized crime. I think this is unlikely unless the crime they are organising is to steal more handbags (which is how the drugs trade works).

I don't think that The Wire would have been as successful if it been about handbags instead of drugs.

Although, and this has only just occurred to me, maybe it is an allegory about the european handbag trade! Yes, I think that's it.