Edwin Desamour, the executive director of Men in Motion in the Community, says he’s in a “tug-of-war” with neighborhood drug dealers. Brad Larrison for Al Jazeera America

This, according to Desamour, has a creeping affect on the drug trade.

“Men come home and want to change their lives around, and they do try,” said Desamour, who served eight years in prison for a fight-turned-homicide that he was involved in at age 16. “They knock on doors, take classes on life skills, [how to do] interviews … but when they did everything they had to do, their record was used against them, and it’s discouraging after a while. Some guys at the end of day, they don’t want to be out there, but they end up back in it. There’s no justifying, but they have to feed their families that have to somehow survive.”

For others, usually a younger generation, he said, they’re not bad kids, but they’ve been blinded by the drug lifestyle since birth. They see only the drug dealers with nice cars, new clothes, and girlfriends. They grow up aspiring to have their own heroin corner.

“They have street dreams. They don’t see college. They’re not exposed to nothing but that,” said Desamour. “Our job is to show them, ‘No, that’s not a way of life. We can do better.’”

“It’s like a tug of war with us and the drug dealers,” he added. “They say there’s that kid that lives in the middle of it and makes it. But not everybody’s that kid.”

Philadelphia’s homicide rate has dropped from the highs of the mid-2000s, when it earned the nickname Killadelphia. Still, there were 277 murders in the city last year, many of them tied to the drug trade. Retired Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsay told The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year that drug-related killings increased 55 percent in 2015 from the year before.

Drug dealers are responsible for much of the city’s violence. But as for addiction, Cram said, it’s the demand that drives the supply, not the other way around.