The idea that nerds and engineers have not gotten involved in the drug trade is really wrong. Even if you have no insider knowledge, there is overwhelming evidence of a highly sophisticated, safe, abundant and financially diverse industry. Shoot, all we need to look at is purity and availability rates of narcotics to conclude that there must be more production and distribution than the handful of super massive manufacturing facilities that we associate with major cartels. The murder rate in totality is not high enough to associate a necessary massive physical risk with involvement in the drug trade. Even if SR was 10 times as large as they were, they would still be a small fraction of the overall drug marketplace.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the drug trade is inherently tied to the physical manufacturing and trading of product. DPR built something which he could almost completely trade his physical risk, but none of the actual vendors were able to do so. Everyone of them, barring some tiny personal labs, were involved in the exact same physical drug trade on a procurement basis that every other drug merchent is involved in.