A Changed Landscape?

Abstract

This chapter traces the emergence of county lines, noting operational and cultural shifts in drug supply and distribution. Over the past several years, the evolution of UK drug markets has gathered national attention from the government, media, and public. This has centred upon the emerging development and expansion of drug distribution and supply networks from urban centres to provincial towns — in a process known as ‘running county lines’. This shift has been facilitated by advances in technology, that is, mobile phones. Technological advance has profoundly altered transactional practice for ordering, supplying, and distributing illegal drugs. The chapter then looks at the principle of flux and turbulence in the social field of the gang before considering county lines via the prism of marketing, business enterprise, and entrepreneurialism. It centres county lines within a transactional framework of customer relationship management and business decisions, and establishes the central premise of building competitive advantage.