Lunchtime inside Lexington Market: Amid crab stands and fruit stalls, shoppers and merchants bustle and buzz. It's a crowded, multiracial scene, a testament to the energy and random fellowship of city life.
Just outside the market's main entrance on Eutaw Street, a different kind of commerce is taking place. Here, beside a picture window extolling the history of the nation's oldest continuously run public market, an illegal trade in prescription medications flourishes.
In a city where sidewalk sales of heroin and cocaine are notoriously common, illicitly sold medicine may hardly seem like a major problem. But some market vendors say it seems to be getting worse and is diminishing the appeal of one of Baltimore's foremost attractions.
MijizaDorsey sells jewelry from a cart at the market. She said that during the 15 years she has worked there, once-sporadic traffic has become more prevalent.
"People are afraid to take out their wallets," Dorsey said. "Business is good - don't get me wrong - but it could be much better, if there weren't all those people outside."
While high-ranking city law enforcement officials readily acknowledge that black-market pills are widely available around Lexington Market, they deny that the area has a drug problem. Some Lexington Market vendors flatly dismiss the notion that there is drug traffic on the sidewalk.
Lexington Market officials declined repeated requests for comment.
On one sunny Thursday, a small, thin, stoop-backed man in a blue windbreaker paces along the front of the market, offering Xanax and "dings" to bystanders. A couple of days later, as the sky threatens rain, a tall, gentle-faced man walks the same route, reeling off a staccato patter in the manner - if not quite at the volume - of a ballpark beer hawker.
"You can get any kind of pills here," he says, adding apologetically that for heroin you need to go a few blocks west.
Police say the commerce in prescription drugs has long been part of the Lexington Market streetscape and is fed by the proximity of several hospitals and addiction-treatment centers.
The pill trade "is an ongoing problem, going on for years, but it's very minor, and we don't have the violence associated with it, either," said Maj. Steven McMahon of the Central District, which includes Lexington Market. McMahon said nearly 40 pill-related arrests took place near the market last year, and that 20 have been made this year.
