Taking drugs is the choice of that individual person. The violence, increased police presence and harassment, making these niggas into these mythical Robin Hood type figures is far more damaging. So yeah it's weird the way these niggas get celebrated and held up as if they weren't directly harming the very community that they will now be coming back home to. Shit is just weird to see...
It's not weird to see. High level criminals in any society are always respected because they decided not to play the game the society expected of them. They tend to born in less than ideal conditions and instead of being a square and going to college and getting a 50K job like the billions of people who aren't rich do, they decided to be criminals from a young age and pull themselves up out of poverty or mundane society.
It's not that we care about the community, because criminals don't represent the community. Criminals are violators of the community. It's the fact they broke out of their situation by their own power and did it their way. Criminals like Big Meech, Lucky Luciano, Pablo Escobar, back in ancient times would've been Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar types that conquer the world. These guys were teenagers and young adults leading multi-million dollar operations.
Plus it's America, America itself is fascinated with criminals from street level gangs to the Mafia. During the Golden Age of the Mafia, Mafioso weren't Robin Hood figures, they were celebrities that everybody knew, from Hollywood to the White House and they operated in the open. America put Pablo Escobar on the Forbes list.
It's when Black criminals like Big Meech or Freeway Rick or Alpo become big and they wasn't as wealthy or powerful like Lucky Luciano or Pablo Escobar it's, "Why do you celebrate them, they destroyed the community and your neighborhoods."
It was already fucked up, they just capitalized on it and managed to make something of themselves, illegal or not. Ain't that what life is about, taken advantage of your situation? If everything is fucked up, somebody is gonna realize that wider society don't give a fuck and do what they want.