Drug Economy Research Articles

Enduring flows: The transit of drugs in contemporary Honduras

Since the 2000s, Honduras has expanded its role as a transit hub for international cocaine trafficking, with tonnes of cocaine passing through the country every year. Nevertheless, research on illicit drug flows in the country – and more generally across transit areas – remains limited. This resides in a tendency within both academic and institutional discourses to depict illicit flows as detached from societal structures, with little implications for the realities they touch. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of publicly available official US court documents on drug trafficking in Honduras and semi-structured interviews with experts on the country’s drug economy, this article addresses this gap by exploring the movement of US-bound cocaine shipments across Honduras. It explores whether, and how, transient activities such as illicit drug flows become embedded in the territories they traverse. The discussion shows the extent to which the drug trade has become embedded within Honduras’ political and territorial realities, concluding that drugs do not merely pass through transit spaces but become integrated into them. Drug traffickers rely on relationships they establish with both legal and extra-legal actors – including other drug traffickers and state officials – to receive and move drugs across the country. These relationships allow them to obtain access to ‘points of passage’ such as clandestine airstrips, security checkpoints and road networks – all of which are crucial infrastructures for facilitating the transit of drugs. Furthermore, the article reveals both legal and extra-legal actors’ role in exerting control over these logistics infrastructures and therefore in enabling the transnational flow of illicit goods. These insights contribute to broader debates on illicit flows, organised crime and the control of passage points along trade routes, while also shedding light on the often-overlooked role of transit countries like Honduras in the transnational cocaine trade.

Beyond “Pressure”: Peer Influences on e-Cigarette Use in Young Australian Narratives of Vaping

Background In the early 2020s, Australian media and public health organizations described the rapid rise in youth e-cigarette uptake, portraying this as a “peer pressure” problem wherein vulnerable young people were being led or bullied into vaping by the “cool” kids. Yet, the peer pressure framing of vaping fails to account for young people's rituals of nicotine consumption and ways social drug economies are organized. Methods In 2023, we conducted qualitative interviews and ethnographic research with 24 young people ages 17 to 25, both vapers and nonvapers, in New South Wales, Australia. We investigated their embodied experiences of vaping, observations of peers’ vaping practices, and beliefs about vaping policy. We analyzed their accounts for themes and here report our findings, illustrated with participants’ quotes and an ethnographic portrait of a Sydney high school vape seller. Results The notion that young people are “pressured” into vaping lacked emic meaning for our participants. Their accounts reveal three ways that vaping is social beyond “pressure.” First, social vape market offers entrepreneurial teens money-earning opportunities, mediated by social networks and markers of peer esteem, prestige, and trust. Second, vapes are exchanged as both gifts and commodities in sharing economies, offering social opportunities and scripts for recreational interactions. Third, e-cigarettes as material objects provide esthetic and gustatory pleasures that are both individually enjoyed and socially performed in rituals of taste and display. Discussion These three perspectives on the sociality of vaping help nuance our understanding of how and why young people vape, and also suggest why public health outreach efforts may not be effective when they reduce youth vaping uptake to peer pressure. As youth vape use is on the rise in Australia, these perspectives matter for understanding this important social phenomenon and may help policy development move beyond simplifications of youth cultural motivations.

Easier, faster and safer: The social organization of drug dealing through encrypted messaging apps

AbstractEncrypted messaging apps like Telegram have become an increasingly attractive tool for drug dealing. The combination of easy opening and closing of user communities, powerful anonymity features, and operability on smartphones is changing the way drugs are delivered at the end of the chain. However, much of the recent research on Internet‐based drug markets has focused on cryptomarkets, but also on social media and the clear web. Drawing on economic sociology literature on marketplaces and partial organizations, this article fills this gap by analyzing the social organization of drug economies based on messaging apps. We argue that this form of drug trade enhances the experience of both selling and consuming drugs. Based on a unique set of in‐depth interviews with drug sellers and users belonging to four different Telegram groups in Argentina, this article shows that Telegram communities offer a wider variety of substances, speed up drug delivery, create the perception that police detection is unlikely, and promote drug specialization among sellers. This research expands our understanding of how technology and specific organizational forms transform both drug provision and consumption.

‘County lines’: racism, safeguarding and statecraft in Britain

Government policies relating to dealers in ‘county lines’ drugs trafficking cases have been welcomed as a departure from punitive approaches to drugs and ‘gang’ policing, in that those on the bottom rung of the drugs economy of heroin and crack cocaine are no longer treated as criminals but as potential victims and ‘modern slaves’ in need of protection. However, our research suggests not so much a radical break with previous modes of policing as that the term ‘county lines’ emerged as a logical extension of the government’s racist and classist language surrounding ‘gangs’, knife crime and youth violence. Policies implemented in the name of safeguarding the vulnerable also act as a gateway for criminalisation not just under drugs laws but also modern slavery legislation. The government’s discovery of, and responses to, ‘county lines’ hinge on a moral crisis in the making, which ultimately deepens the state’s pre-emptive and violent criminalisation of the ‘Black criminal other’ at a time of deep political crisis.

Optimization of intravenous administration of hydroxocobalamin in pediatric emergencies - HYDROX-OPTIMIS study

IntroductionProcedures to prepare and infuse intravenous drugs are poorly documented. ObjectiveTo determinate the optimal mode of hydroxocobalamin administration in children in emergency care. MethodsWe identified three modes of administration: (1) connect infusion tubing to the vial, start the infusion and interrupt it when the desired dose has been delivered; (2) remove from the vial the volume corresponding to the excessive dose and connect infusion tubing and (3) extract from the vial the required volume to be delivered and infuse directly. Experimental study: 25 nurses performed each of these three procedures for children weighting 15 and 30 kg. Speed and precision were primary end-points; ease, safety and drug economy were secondary end-points. ResultsMode 3 was the fastest (42[37–61] sec) followed by modes 1 and 2 (p < 0.05). Mode 3 was the most precise (100[100–100]%) followed by modes 1 and 2 (p = 0.001). Mode 3 was the easiest (10.0[9.0–10.0]) followed by modes 2 and 3 (p = 0.001). Modes 1 and 3 allowed administration of a second dose whereas mode 2 did not. ConclusionTaking the required volume from the vial and infuse directly was the fastest, the most precise, the easiest and most economical mode of administration. It should be recommended.

Drugs, frontier capitalism and illicit peasantries: towards a comparative research agenda

ABSTRACT A defining character of drugs-affected frontier regions is their dynamic instability and their boom-and-bust cycles. These are violent and disturbed landscapes, in which illicit drug economies play a transformative role. But not all frontiers are the same, and nor are the ‘illicit peasantries’ who inhabit the ‘narco-frontier’. In this article we explore the complex dialectical relations between frontiers, drug economies, illicit peasantries and peasant politics. In doing so we develop a new comparative framework, that provides a heuristic for studying the commonalities and differences across narco-frontiers and the mechanisms behind these differences.

Peace through coca? Decolonial peacebuilding ecologies and rural development in the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma, Colombia

While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups across the Global South, this article reveals that coca has alternative uses based on its nutritional and cultural value. Drawing on the experience of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma in Colombia, the country’s first community to receive state authorisation to experiment with coca for non-alkaloid purposes, we ponder whether coca can be a catalyst for peace. Lerma has been a large coca producer for decades, which enveloped it in relations of subordination and exploitation tied to illicit economies and armed conflict. Based on qualitative research over a six-year period, we analyse Lerma’s project to overcome capitalist logics driving peasant dispossession through Colombian history and intra-community violence by diverging from production for the drug economy in favour of agroecological coca. In conjunction with other community-based programmes, Lerma’s production of organic coca as part of its food sovereignty project suggests a process of decolonial peace at work, whereby the community breaks from oppressions tied to the rule of armed groups and capitalist markets. This reveals the ecological dimensions of peace, which requires community organising and sustainable relations between humans and land.

Precarious Lives, Precarious Treatments: Making Drug Treatment Work in Northern Myanmar

ABSTRACT We explore how precarious livelihoods intersect with precarious treatments for heroin dependency in a setting affected by longstanding conflicts and an illicit drug economy as well as by recent events of pandemic and political change. Working with 33 qualitative interviews with people who inject drugs in Kachin State, northern Myanmar, we explore how drug dependency treatment, especially methadone substitution, is made to work in efforts to sustain everyday livelihoods. Our analysis attends to the work that is done to enable therapeutic trajectories to emerge as “generous constraints” in precarity. We trace methadone substitution as an emergent intervention of livelihood survival.

Negotiating an Illicit Economy in the Time of COVID-19: Selling and Buying Dilemmas in the Lives of People Who Use Drugs in Scotland.

The impact of COVID-19 itself and societal responses to it have affected people who use drugs and the illicit drug economy. This paper is part of a project investigating the health impacts of COVID-19 related control measures on people who use drugs in Scotland. It examines their roles and decisions as economically situated actors. It does this within a moral economy perspective that places economic decisions and calculations within a context of the network of social obligations and moral decisions. The paper uses a mixed methods approach, reporting on a drug trend survey and in-depth interviews with people who use drugs. It finds they were affected by restrictions in the drug consumption context and changes in the supply context, both in terms of what was supplied and changes in the relationship between sellers and buyers. Face to face selling became more fraught. Participants in more economically precarious circumstances were faced with dilemmas about whether to move into drug selling. The double impact of loss of income and reduced access to support networks were particularly difficult for them. Despite the perception that the pandemic had increased the power of sellers in relation to their customers, many full-time sellers were reported to be keeping their prices stable in order to maintain their relationships with customers, instead extending credit or adulterating their products. The effect of spatial controls on movement during the pandemic also meant that the digital divide became more apparent. People with good access to digital markets and easy drug delivery through apps were in a better position to manage disruption to drug sales contexts. We make recommendations in relation to how policy can respond to the interests of people who use drugs in a pandemic.

Pathways to Drug Dealing in the Middle and Upper Classes: Early Marginalization, Relative Disadvantage and Countercultural Opposition

Abstract Drug dealing is widespread in all sectors of society but is still studied predominantly in disadvantaged urban areas. We identify three main pathways to drug dealing based on qualitative interviews with middle- and upper-class individuals in Oslo, Norway. First, problems in the family and school and a lack of belonging in affluent neighbourhoods intersected with drug use and eventually led to recruitment into the illegal drug economy. Second, criminal entrepreneurship developed among relatively disadvantaged people who dealt drugs in an affluent low-risk context. Third, dealing emerged from involvement in drug liberalization and medical marihuana countercultures. The first pathway is similar to trajectories in disadvantaged urban areas, while the others reveal the importance of studying drug dealing in the upper layers of society.

Taking Care of Business in a Male - Dominated Drug Economy: Income Strategies, Risks, and Opportunities of Women Who Use Drugs.

BackgroundStreet level drug economies are often described as hierarchical and gender-segregated arenas where men hold high positions and control the supply of drugs, and where women are confined to marginal and low-level positions. Few studies have explored income strategies, risks and opportunities of women who use drugs within drug economies in the Nordic countries.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to analyze women's stories about “taking care of business”–making money and securing drugs–in a local drug economy. The study focuses on the women's gender enactments, the strategies they use to achieve success, and the barriers and risks they face in their everyday endeavors.MethodsThis article draws on informal conversations and in-depth qualitative interviews with 27 female drug users in Malmö, Sweden during periods of fieldwork between 2009 and 2012.ResultsThe interviewed women had established themselves as entrepreneurs in the local drug economy, working hard for their money. However, only a few held middle or high positions, and all women described encountering gendered obstacles and risks in their efforts to take care of business. The patriarchal and sexualized nature of the drug economy meant special prerequisites for the women's income strategies and gender enactments. Three main income strategies were distinguished in the women's stories: (1) using femininity and sexuality, (2) proving tough and dangerous by using street masculinity, and (3) establishing trust, being professional, and keeping a low profile. These strategies involved different advantages and disadvantages, as well as different types of risk.ConclusionsThe results show that it is possible for women to achieve success in male-dominated drug economies, but that this is associated with major challenges. Gendered social hierarchies, structures and norms seem to influence the women's gender enactments, opportunities and risks. However, factors such as type of drug use, degree of drug dependence and social position, was also decisive for their possibility of taking care of business. This points to the importance of combining a focus on gender with a focus on other determants of power relations and vulnerabilities, when studying the everyday lives of people who use drugs.

David A. Guba Jr. Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France; Benjamin Breen. The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade.

Two exciting new books, David Guba Jr.’s Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France and Benjamin Breen’s The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, trace the rise of the globalized drug economy in Western Europe and its relationships to colonial empire (1600–1900), connecting Europe to the Americas, Africa, and India, and to the construction of drugs in European ­imaginaries. These cultural histories describe drugs as social ­constructs, embedded in specific Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French ideas of race, politics, law, colonial empire, and commerce. We discover ­cultural reasons why some pharmacodynamic plants have become lawful medications and others illegal drugs, and how European publics experienced the expansion and ­globalization of pharmacy from the early modern period to the present. A feast for the mind and a delight to the eye, Breen’s intellectually ambitious The Age of Intoxication takes the reader on a world tour of...

‘Trap Life’: The psychosocial underpinnings of street crime in inner-city London

Abstract This article explores urban men’s involvement in the drug economy, examining the conditions in which they become ‘trapped’ in difficult lifeworlds and identities. Through an ethnographic exploration of what disadvantaged urban men term ‘trap life’, this article demonstrates how different ‘trapper’ identities, enacted to manage economic, social and psychological vulnerability, allows an understanding of the varied motivations to take part in criminality and violence. Whilst the terms ‘dangerous’, ‘pathological’ and ‘criminal’ are deployed to account for street lifestyles, such stereotypical imagery with roots in history, media, political discourse and policing practices, downplays the humanity of men living on the margins of society and neglects their version of reality. Far from being exclusively violent perpetrators, urban men are especially vulnerable as they are trapped in a never-ending existential crisis, which prevents successful transitions into mainstream life. I demonstrate that the issue of violence and the 21st century drug business must be placed in broader psychosocial contexts to provide a better understanding and perhaps one-day inform therapeutic and other practice interventions specifically tailored for those seeking to exit ‘trap life’.

Stomping Ground: Living Against Gentrification in Humboldt Park

Abstract: This ethnographic portrait, rather than covering debates from the voluminous gentrification literature, centers two Puerto Rican residents who are experiencing the threat of erasure as everyday life. The lives of Rosalyn Velásquez and Rafael Lugo span the struggles of early migration, racial segregation, intense poverty, gang violence, the drug economy, and legacies of community building in the aftermath, as outsider investment and white newcomer buyers transform their blocks. Although they do not see themselves as heroes, victims, or full-time activists, they deliver—without academic jargon—personally and historically informed analyses of their neighborhood, revealing economic survival strategies, self-affirmations of dignity, and profound local knowledge. They describe sights, sounds, smells, and conversations out in the streets, but also webs of reciprocity and mutual aid that link them to multigenerational extended family and to grassroots community agencies and education programs, whose efforts signify safety, uplift, and improvement. They reveal the welcomes they have themselves extended toward white newcomers—despite knowing their effect on local property values and taxes—whose racialized fears and isolation from the Latino community mean they rarely reciprocate. These two life course interviews counter multiple myths upon which gentrification depends and affirm the critical consciousness of so many people across the United States today who are living against gentrification.

Too strange to believe: Magical realism and Cold War politics in Narcos

The first episode of Narcos, the Netflix TV series inspired by the life of Pablo Escobar, begins with the programmatic intertitle: ‘Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason why magical realism was born in Colombia’. It is this ‘too strange to believe’ philosophy of the gaze that underlies the United States–Brazil–Colombia co-production series echoing the Drug Enforcement Administration version of events, commodifying the rise of Colombia’s drug economy for global audiences. Narcos places more value on realism than it does on the magical (although the two poles of attraction are inseparable, mutually enriching each other). The shift towards the insertion of heavy doses of non-fiction in the TV series is worth the utmost attention because it opens the way to a consideration of the differences between outsider and insider perspectives on culture and race, and the way they emerge on-screen. Magical realism in Narcos is also a tool to unmasks the war on drugs as a US hidden agenda to create antagonism. After 1989, an intensification of the rhetoric against narco-traffic became a pretext to respond to the upcoming geopolitical tensions, while simultaneously perpetrating the structural domination typical of the Cold War era.

“Stay Down”: Moonlight and Negative Affect as an Analytic

“Stay Down”: <i>Moonlight</i> and Negative Affect as an Analytic

Intersections of race, gender and the drug economy: Placing drugs in HIV discussions in Brazil

While much research now demonstrates how social inequalities can drive HIV transmission, relatively little attention is given to the spatialized 'intersections' of race, class, and gender. Using this approach, this article considers an understudied phenomenon in Brazilian HIV discussions, the importance of the drug economy in shaping intimacy in favelas. Drawing on interviews with young women in Rio de Janeiro, it documents the intimate relations between young women and male drug workers to situate HIV vulnerability at the juncture of three social-spatial changes: (1) the rise of a drug economy that provides some racialized men, marginalized from mainstream society, with opportunities for work; (2) the precarious economic position of racialized women; and (3) the gendered dynamics including violence that can shape intimate relations. The paper shows how these relationships are contested by women who can cast their partners as living a 'wrong life.'

Modes of governance and the everyday lives of illicit drug producers in Afghanistan

Prevailing studies on illicit drug economies in violent contexts are typically concerned with whether illicit drugs are a driver of insecurity, or vice versa. This paper provides additional nuance to the literature by considering the interaction between different governance arrangements and the everyday life of people involved in the drug economy. Drawing from a systems-lifeworlds approach, we present evidence from interviews and life histories collected in four district case studies in two borderland provinces of Afghanistan. We find that governance in government-controlled areas tends to be more fragmented, negatively affecting the livelihoods of small-scale drug producers and traders. However, we also find exceptions to this trend, where stable governance arrangements emerged under state control. While authority tends to be less fragmented in Taliban-controlled districts, illicit drug producers fared much worse under Daesh rule, showing stark variation in the effects of insurgency rule on the drug economy. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that participants in the illicit drug economies thrive in ungoverned environments, our findings show that there is considerable, if selective, demand for predictable rule-based political authority, albeit pragmatic enough to allow an open-access illicit drug economy to operate.

An exploratory study of women who use and sell drugs in China.

This study offers rare empirical data and insight about the experiences of women who use and sell drugs in China and their participation in the drug economy. Drug selling is traditionally viewed as a male job in China and commonly overlaps with drug use practices. While this largely male-dominated economy has been widely documented, very little is known about the experiences of women. Drawing on interviews with twelve women, this exploratory study aims to shed light on the lives and experiences of women who use and sell drugs in China. Findings indicate that for study participants, entering into the drug selling economy was primarily driven by motives of maintaining their own drug use. Our analysis also shows that participants kept their drug selling within limited social circles. Instead of seeking to make large profits, they often aimed to "help friends" and secure drugs for their own use. Women who sold drugs in our study usually affiliated themselves with their male partners, often purposefully utilizing feminine characteristics and practices to serve gendered roles in drug selling. In doing so, this paper brings to light the gendered nature of drug selling practices and drug market relations in China and more broadly.

Beyond harm-producing versus harm-reducing: A qualitative meta-synthesis of people who use drugs' perspectives of and experiences with the extramedical use and diversion of buprenorphine

IntroductionThis review synthesizes the literature on the perspectives and experiences of people who use drugs to better understand motivations and behaviors related to the extramedical use and diversion of buprenorphine. Given the particular social construction of buprenorphine against methadone, and the centrality of concerns around extramedical use in delivering opioid agonist therapies, a focus on extramedical buprenorphine use can provide an important lens through which to analyze treatment for opioid use disorder. This review is framed within persistent tensions between potential harm-producing versus harm-reducing effects of extramedical use that have long been described for opioid agonist therapies. MethodsThe research team conducted a qualitative meta-synthesis based on a systematic search of eight databases as well as hand searching. The review includes all primary qualitative and mixed-methods studies related to the perspectives and experiences of people who use drugs on extramedical buprenorphine use. The study team carried out three rounds of qualitative coding using NVivo 12, and constructivist grounded theory and the constant comparative method informed the synthesis. ResultsThe review includes twenty-one studies. Findings are organized into the following three themes: 1) the experiences of people who use drugs (PWUD) with extramedical use of buprenorphine and their motivations to engage in it (including the desire to self-medicate and achieve “stability”, to manage ongoing use of other opioids, and to “get high”); 2) the relationship between extramedical use and formal medical opioid agonist therapy programs; and 3) the established drug economy of extramedical buprenorphine. ConclusionsThe review identified varied and often divergent perspectives and experiences with extramedical buprenorphine use. An examination of the reported “normalizing” effects of extramedical buprenorphine suggests this practice as extending medicalized discipline beyond the clinical environment. Taken together, these findings identify a need to move beyond the tension of harm-reducing versus harm-producing effects toward forms of health care and promotion that focus on the needs, perspectives, and priorities of people who use drugs.