Drug Economy Research Articles

Organised Crime in Late Apartheid and the Transition to a New Criminal Order: The Rise and Fall of the Johannesburg ‘Bouncer Mafia’

The Johannesburg bouncer mafia, a series of violent and competing groups, dominated the city’s underworld from the late 1980s until the early 2000s. While the bouncer mafia was one of several emerging criminal networks at the time, although the most prominent in respect of Johannesburg’s changing illicit drug economy, they provide a useful example of how organised crime originated during South Africa’s transition: a fact often commented on, but little understood.A study of the bouncer mafia may yield important conclusions for the rise and fall of criminal groups. Informed by the experience of members themselves, this account provides an opportunity to study the conditions under which organised crime groups take root during periods of political, economic and social transition, including how such groups recruit, consolidate, compete and how they may decline and be replaced. The narrative is told in three phases, their growth, consolidation, transition and decline.The Johannesburg bouncer mafia was born out of a set of tough, white, working-class boxing and sports clubs in Hillbrow and south and east Johannesburg. Sharing a background of apartheid-era military service, the bouncers evolved from independent ‘heavies’ into a set of registered private security companies competing for turf and control of the illicit drug trade. Changes in the prevailing political and socio-economic environment of the country during the transition to democracy were reflected in structural changes in the city’s night-time economy; this led to the consolidation of the bouncer mafia, which, by early 2000, had concentrated into one company, Elite, assuming almost complete control of protection of the drug trade in clubs.A series of prevalent factors and changes in the industry precipitated the dramatic decline of the bouncer mafia: socio-economic transition altered not only the racial profile of key areas, but also the face of policing, resulting in a weakening of the networks between bouncers and the police. The increasing recruitment of African bouncers by clubs themselves – primarily from Congo and Nigeria, they were cheaper than their white counterparts, more easily available when the former white bouncer recruitment networks dried up, and less prone to violence – facilitated a shift in control of the city’s drug trade to Nigerian criminal networks, thereby laying the foundation for a critical component of modern organised crime in Johannesburg.

Chillin, buzzin, getting mangled, and coming down: Doing differentiated normalisation in risk environments

Aims: This paper examines differentiated normalisation through the lens of young drug users from a marginalised neighbourhood where drugs are readily available, prevalence rates are high, and a flourishing drugs market operates. Methods: The paper draws from the ethnographic fieldwork component of a research study aimed at exploring patterns of drug use, associated drug-related harms and the operation of the local drugs economy in the risk environment of a Dublin neighbourhood (O’Gorman et al., 2013). The study uses a critical interpretivist methodology to explore the role and meaning of drug use from the users’ perspective. Findings: The narratives of these marginalised young people illustrate how drug use and drug choices are shaped by different intentions, avowed identities and diverse structural, temporal and socio-spatial settings. Their routines and drug repertoires echo the (mainly) reasoned consumption choices, the cost–benefit analyses and the emphasis on pleasure and fun ascribed to recreational drug users, including those who underpin the normalisation concept. However, their drug using practices continue to be rendered deviant due to their experience of social exclusion; exclusion from consumption-orientated lifestyles and from the night time economy; and their inclusion in the informal drugs economy. Conclusion: Normalisation is relative (not just differentiated) to the social status of the drug user. A reconstructed normalisation thesis inclusive of class (and race, and gender) could explore why the use of similar drugs and similar drug using behaviours by different social groups is differentially accommodated and accepted by mainstream society.

The symbolic economy of drugs.

This essay reviews four recent studies representing a new direction in the history of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical science. To this end, it introduces the notion of a symbolic economy of drugs, defined as the production, circulation, and reception of signs that convey information about drugs and establish trust in them. Each of the studies under review focuses on one key signifier in this symbolic economy, namely the brand, the patent, the clinical trial, and the drug itself. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the economy of symbolic goods, I conceptualize these signifiers as symbolic assets, that is, as instruments of communication and credit, delivering knowledge, carrying value, and producing authority. The notion of a symbolic economy is offered with a threefold intention. First, I introduce it in order to highlight the implications of historical and anthropological work for a broader theory of the economy of drugs, thus suggesting a language for interdisciplinary conversations in the study of pharmaceuticals. Second, I deploy it in an attempt to emphasize the contributions of the recent scholarship on drugs to a critical understanding of our own contemporary ways of organizing access to drugs and information about drugs. Finally, I suggest ways in which it might be of use to scholars of other commodities and technologies.

The Intimate Entrenchment of Philadelphia's Drug War

The ‘war on drugs’ has been an important discursive and juridical tool for maintaining a spatialized order in the city. Scholars have gone to great lengths to document the victimization and exploitation of this war's ‘victims’ – primarily black and brown young men in cities across the globe. While applying a spatial analytic to understand the global effects of the ‘war on drugs’, it is also necessary to attend to the drug economy's situated, micro-practices of territory, politics, and governance. This paper contributes such an understanding by applying a feminist and urban geopolitical frame to understand the intimate practices of the drug war in US inner cities. It draws from a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories collected in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, and offers a discursive analysis of local newspapers and policy documents to understand the framing of Grays Ferry as the front line of the ‘war on drugs’. Through such a framing the city block becomes a site of contestation as the spaces targeted by the drug war also serve as spaces of survival for residents. Through a feminist analysis of the city block, I demonstrate the resistance to the drug war is a fight for survival by residents.

Credit and Trust

Objectives: This study examines the use of credit, or “fronting,” in the illegal drug economy. We study how fronting affects transaction costs and insulates against law enforcement in drug distribution networks and what role fronting plays in the management of interpersonal network ties. The emphasis is on the cooperative dimension of credits. Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with 68 incarcerated drug dealers in Norwegian prisons. Most were mid-level dealers (66 percent), dealing with many different drugs, but amphetamines were the main drugs distributed (38 percent). Using qualitative content analysis, we explore their perspective on the fronting of illegal drugs and associated practices in the illegal drug economy. Results: We find that dealers are generally skeptical toward fronting drugs, and accepting fronted drugs, but that this practice still is common. The main reason is that the practice secures a faster turnaround. Credits are embedded in social relationships both economically and socially. Previous social relationships are often a prerequisite, but fronting is also used to build trust. Conclusion: Although transaction cost economics captures the economic dimension of credit, insights from economic sociology and in particular the social embeddedness approach are necessary to understand the interplay between economic and social factors when drugs are fronted in the illegal economy.

Savvy Sellers: Dealing Drugs, Doing Gender, and Doing Difference

We present findings from two exploratory studies of San Francisco Bay Area women involved in illicit drug sales who saw both advantages and disadvantages to being women in traditionally male-dominated drug economies. We interviewed 160 sellers of street drugs and 50 sellers of prescription drugs during 2006–2009. Women perceived gender as a cover and managed their vulnerabilities by performing gendered actions and at times going against traditional gender expectations to protect themselves in harsh drug markets. The intersecting factors of race and type of drug sold played a crucial role, revealing the complex nature of women's social location in their drug-selling worlds. Study limitations are noted.

Stories of Violence: A Narrative Criminological Study of Ambiguity

Violence features in human life, not only as actual physical confrontation but also as stories. Stories of violence are particularly important in violence-prone subcultures and among those partaking in the illegal drug economy. Drawing on narrative analysis, this study examines stories of violence among a population of incarcerated Norwegian drug dealers. Four widespread story types are identified: business narratives, intimidation narratives, moral narratives and survivor narratives. We explore the content of these stories and the work they do for tellers while keeping a keen eye on their ambiguous nature. We argue that stories and storytellers plurivocality is often missed when stories of violence are described within established criminological traditions.

Fortifying or Fragmenting the State? The Political Economy of the Opium/Heroin Trade in Shan State, Myanmar, 1988–2013

ABSTRACTOver the past twenty-five years, the government of Myanmar (Burma) has consolidated control over large parts of Shan State, neutralizing much of the threat posed by armed groups and strengthening its hold over revenue extraction. During this period Myanmar has retained its position as the world's second largest producer of illicit opium, much of which is converted into heroin within the country's borders. This article explores the relationship between state-building processes and the illicit opium/heroin economy in Shan State since 1988. The author has four aims. First, to reassess the theoretical assumptions that equate illicit economies with state fragility and demonstrate instead why illicit drug economies can become embedded in processes of conflict reduction and state consolidation. Second, to explain why establishing control over Shan State has become so important to the Myanmar government's state-building ambitions. Third, to analyze how the state's engagement with the drug trade has become a vital part of its attempts to consolidate control, in terms of financing military expansion and brokering deals with strongmen who are able to govern local populations. Finally, to assess how these strategies embody a form of “negotiated statehood” in which the state's growing control has been defined by attempts to manage, rather than monopolize, the means of coercion and extraction.

WOMEN'S GENDER PERFORMANCES AND CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY IN THE ILLEGAL DRUG ECONOMY

Based on interviews with 32 female drug dealers in Norway, this study investigates different gender performances among women situated in the illegal hard drug economy—a context with strong gendered “rules of the game.” Using grounded theory methods, I have identified four predominant patterns in which women enact their gendered identities being part of the drug economy: performing emphasized femininity in the context of marginalization; performing street masculinity; employing a feminine business model; and last, flexible use of cultural repertoires. The findings suggest that different gender performances among dealers are rooted in variations in the cultural tool kits they have at their disposal. I find that the content of women's cultural tool kits varied with three sociodemographic factors: 1) age, 2) time of entrée to the drug economy, and 3) educational and employment history. Combined, these influenced the type of gender performances the dealers tended to use as well as their position in the drug market hierarchy. The research suggests that those dealers using cultural repertoires flexibly are the most successful as they skillfully employed the model best suited for the context they were in.

Kvaišalų geografija posovietiniame mieste: nelegali narkotinių medžiagų apyvarta ir narkomanija Klaipėdoje, 1990-2010 m.

This study explores transformations of local drug geography in Klaipeda, 1990-2010. Using spatial analysis of geocoded data about 1351 cases of drug crime (manufacturing, storing, possession, and sale) and 1510 registered drug users, we researched spatial-temporal patterns of drug crime and drug abuse in changing post-soviet urban environment. Data for this study was provided by Klaipeda Police Headquarters and Klaipeda Centre for Addictive Disorders. We found, that key changes within local drug geography started in 1997-1999 and were caused by development of new economy expanding drug sale to anonymous customers. Since the collapse of the Soviet regime, drugs were mostly manufactured, circulated and used within underground social networks of drug users. The main features of those networks were trust and direct communication among drug users and dealers, who regularly were drug users also. Therefore drugs were locally produced, stored, sold and used in the same places; places of drug abuse and drug crime regularly overlapped. Nevertheless spatial patterns of such underground networks were more accidental in their nature, they had not clear attributes of spatial identify within urban environment. But newly emerging drug economy was based on commodity-money relations between drug dealers and drug users and new market regime clearly differentiated places of drug sale and drug use. Drug sale moved from blocks to the night clubs, marketplaces and surroundings of huge shopping centres. Sociologically such change within drug economy of post-soviet city might be interpreted as a shift from subcultural networks, where local knowledge and practices of street pharmacology were transmitted to new users, to the conspicuous consumption of branded and recreational drugs.

High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis

Cannabis, including hemp and its psychoactive counterpart, has a long but largely overlooked historical geography. Situating the topic within varied perspectives such as world‐systems theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and the moral economy of drugs, this paper charts its diffusion over several millennia, noting the contingent and uneven ways in which it was enveloped within varying social and political circumstances. Following a brief theorization, it explores the plant's early uses in East and South Asia, its shift to the Middle East, and resultant popularity in the Arab world and Africa. Next, it turns to its expansion under colonialism, including deliberate cultivation by Portuguese and British authorities in the New World as part of the construction of a pacified labor force. The fifth section offers an overview of cannabis's contested history in the United States, in which a series of early 20th‐century moral panics led to its demonization; later, the drug enjoyed gradual liberalization.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, ed. An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia: The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland Southeast Asia. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013, x+214p.

An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia: The Illegal Trade in Arms, Drugs, People, Counterfeit Goods and Natural Resources in Mainland Southeast Asia Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, ed. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013, x+214p.In the context of regional integration, Mainland Southeast Asia is subject to considerable economic activity and cross border trade. An intimately related question concerns extra-legal cross-border activities, such as the trade in drugs, wildlife, contraband, and people. The scholarly attention to these topics is rather large both within Southeast Asia and beyond. However, few attempts have been made in bringing together these different forms of both conceptually and empiri- cally. This is what An Atlas of Trafficking in Southeast Asia attempts to do. As editor Pierre- Arnaud Chouvy makes clear in the introduction, the aim is not merely to juxtapose these different forms of trade, but to provide a regional and systemic understanding of the variety of smuggling and trafficking activities (p. 3) as well as illuminating synergies between them.The book brings together several authors with considerable expertise within the region. The various chapters cover diverse topics such as the trafficking in drugs, arms, logging, wildlife, counterfeit goods, and humans. These different forms of trade are supplemented by several color- ful maps which visualize trafficking routes and patterns in Mainland Southeast Asia. One of the key claims the book is making is that there is considerable overlap between these trade routes and that they have significant historical trajectories. For example, as argued by David Capie, one cannot appreciate the arms trade in Mainland Southeast Asia without considering the post-conflict situation in several of the countries. Similarly, the contemporaneous drugs trade can only be understood in light of previous drug economies which were often blessed and even actively encouraged by West- ern powers.The book is rich in detail and one of its main strengths is its illumination of the various con- nections between these different economies. In Burma, a country which is subject to considerable inter-ethnic tension, semiautonomous armed groups depend on drug production; similarly drug reduction policies in Thailand are directly related to out-migration, prostitution, and human traf- ficking in Northern Thailand.All the chapters consider policy implications. It would have been interesting if the policy implications of regulation and prohibition had been analyzed more explicitly in a comparative frame- work. For example, Vanda Felbab-Brown's discussion of the certification of logging (p. 134) raises extremely interesting questions in terms of how this relates to its labor-equivalent (i.e. current certification of labor recruitment firms in the context of legalizing labor migration between Thailand and several of its neighbors).The conceptual framework, which is outlined in the introduction, relies on Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham's influential book Illicit Flows and Criminal Things (2005), where a key conceptual heuristic is the interrelation between the (il)legal and (il)licit. A key concern of Schendel and Abraham's work is to critically interrogate the inherent state-ism which is common- place in much analysis of trafficking and smuggling. For this reason one must avoid treating con- cepts, such as illegality, as self-evident. Although An Atlas of Trafficking is often similarly critical of such concepts, it commonly slips precisely into seeing like a state (Scott 1998) in the way it maps trafficking practices in Mainland Southeast Asia. For example in the context of human trafficking, it argues that it is necessary to examine trafficking routes and key border sites. But this is to echo the state's vision of trafficking which privileges state-borders over the work condi- tions of migrant laborers. The danger here is ironically (yet fortunately) illuminated by David Feingold in his chapter on human trafficking. …

On Mules and Bodies: Black Captivities in the Brazilian Racial Democracy

This article situates the past decade’s boom in Brazil’s prison population in the context of the country’s enduring system of racial domination. Prison demographics are analyzed in relation to the role that race and gender play in configuring both the ‘regime of legality’ and contemporary urban war against particular territories and bodies in Brazil. The article also pays close attention to gendered captivities of disenfranchised black women trapped as ‘mules’ in the underground drug economy. Ethnographic fieldwork in a São Paulo women’s prison provides the basis for a critique of the regime of punishment that structures black lives in the neoliberal city.

‘A culture of sharing’: Drug exchange in a Norwegian prison

Despite growing numbers of drug users in prisons all over the western world, drug exchange behind bars has received little scholarly attention. The few studies that exist describe the prison drug economy as mainly following market-based principles of exchange. However, ethnographic fieldwork in a closed Norwegian prison reveals something different: prisoners share their drugs, rather than selling them. In this article, I describe and try to explain this ‘culture of sharing’. Drawing on anthropological theories of exchange, drug sharing is understood as continuous gift-giving. The gift perspective allows us to see how sharing is shaped by motives of caring, compassion and solidarity, while it simultaneously emphasizes the self-interest embedded in such drug exchanges. The article argues that sharing is a highly effective form of drug exchange because there is a strong commitment to reciprocate when a prisoner receives drugs. The ‘culture of sharing’ is both contingent upon and produces social relations between prisoners. On the one hand, it offers an inclusive and solidary community for drug using prisoners; on the other hand it is upheld by strong social controls, by which deviations from accepted norms of conduct (i.e. failing to share) are sanctioned in a variety of ways.

The Clash of Aristocratic and Bourgeois Virtues in 'The Wire'

We use the classes of systematized ethics in Deirdre McCloskey's "The Bourgeois Virtues" to understand characters in HBO’s "The Wire" and the story of "The Wire" to understand the bourgeois ethics of the marketplace. McCloskey argues that the introduction of a new system of bourgeois ethics, distinct from the age-old ethical systems of the aristocrat, peasant, and priest classes, is responsible for the exponential growth in world GDP per capita since 1800. We explore the difference in ethical systems present in both "The Wire’s" West Baltimore drug economy in the 2000s and the world economy around 1800, aristocratic and bourgeois, and the challenge in transitioning from the broad poverty maintenance of the former system to the wealth-creating potential of the latter. The story of "The Wire" provides a rich case study in this clash.

Trajectories to Mid- and Higher-level Drug Crimes

While the Nordic countries represent a zone of penal moderation, drug offences remain subject to harsh punishment. Based on 60 interviews with incarcerated drug dealers, we present four trajectories and turning points to the higher tiers of the illegal drug economy. The first trajectory is characterized by criminal entrepreneurship, but three other trajectories were equally evident: (1) Many drug dealers experienced poor parenting, parental substance abuse and early involvement with substance-using peers; (2) for others, marginalization processes started in adulthood, related to job loss and the breakdown of intimate relationships; (3) for some, drug dealing was interwoven with substance abuse. The findings suggest that drug control policies rest on misleading ideas about the trajectories of persons convicted of drug crimes.

A indústria farmacêutica e psicanálise diante da "epidemia de depressão": respostas possíveis

O crescimento de diagnósticos de depressão verificado na atualidade vem acompanhado da ampliação do mercado da indústria farmacêutica, do comércio de antidepressivos e do fenômeno da medicalização da vida. O objetivo do estudo teórico é analisar os fatores que subjazem ao que o sociólogo Philippe Pignarre denominou de "epidemia de depressão", fenômeno complexo que não deve ser reduzido a fatores unicamente biológicos ou sociais, mas carrega em seu bojo uma economia de fármacos em expansão. Serão levantados alguns dados sobre as estratégias da indústria farmacêutica para ganhar o terreno em expansão dos diagnósticos e elevar seus medicamentos ao patamar de produtos a serem consumidos, tornando-se um dos setores mais rentáveis do mundo. Em seguida, questiona-se o estatuto da psicanálise na sociedade medicalizada, a partir das críticas que esta tem recebido nas últimas décadas, sobretudo na França, revelando a incapacidade do sujeito contemporâneo de expressar em palavras o sofrimento que o acomete.

Hashish as cash in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village

BackgroundThis paper discusses how hashish produced by the local population of Tyup, Kyrgyzstan became an important source of cash in an agricultural semi-subsistence economy. MethodsThe paper is based on a research study conducted between 2009 and 2010 that adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. I gathered 64 semi-structured interviews, 147 structured interviews and made ethnographic observations of the livelihoods of the people of Toolu village in Tyup region. ResultsThe local population of the region became involved in hashish production due to a cash deficit in both the agricultural economy and wider society from the beginning of the 1990s. Privatization of land as a consequence of the neoliberalization of the economy left many families with small share lands which are insufficient to provide market surplus. Agricultural products, therefore, are mainly consumed by the majority of farmers, turning the economy of the region into a semi-subsistence agricultural economy. In the context of such a cash deficit economy, wild-growing cannabis plants are used not only as a cash crop but are symbolically turned into a form of cash and a source of informal credit. People can pay for goods with hashish as well as obtain advance payments and credits for it. I argue that hashish making assists the agricultural rural economy by allowing people to obtain goods, advance payments and credits to use for the cultivation of land, their everyday needs and maintaining social relationships. I also argue that many local farmers, who do not consider themselves as criminals, were able to become involved in this activity by shifting the meaning of hashish and hashish making from an illegal activity to a culturally valued and justifiable form of economic activity. ConclusionThis allows me to show that the local drug economy in Tyup serves as a lens through which to examine the strategies through which illegal and illicit drug production becomes culturally acceptable. Understanding of hashish production in this local context of the semi-subsistence agricultural economy operating in a constant deficit of cash provides rich data for effective evidence-based policy.

The Moral Economy of Violence in the US Inner City.

In an 8-week period, there were 16 shootings with three fatalities, three stabbings, and 14 additional "aggravated assaults" in the four square blocks surrounding our field site in the Puerto Rican corner of North Philadelphia. In the aftermath of the shoot-outs, the drug sellers operating on our block were forced to close down their operations by several mothers who repeatedly called the police. Drawing on the concept of moral economy (Thompson, Scott, Taussig), Mauss's interpretation of gift exchange, and a political economy critique of hypercarceralization in the United States, we understand the high levels of US inner-city violence as operating within a moral logic framed by economic scarcity and hostile state relations. Residents seek security, self-respect, and profit in social networks that compel them to participate in solidary exchanges of assistive violence dynamized by kinship and gender obligations. A hierarchical, extractive drug economy fills the void left by deindustrialization, resulting in a dynamic of embodied primitive accumulation at the expense of addicted customers and chronically incarcerated just-in-time street sellers at high risk of assault. Nevertheless, the mobilization of violence organizing the illegal drug economy also follows ethical norms and obligations that are recognized as legitimate by many local residents.

Economic and Political Restraints for Reducing the Drug Economy in Afghanistan

S+F (Securit y and Peace) is the leading German journal for peace research and security policy. S+F aims to serve as a forum linking civil society and the armed forces in the areas of science and politics comprising of research analysis, insider reports and opinion pieces. Decisions on publication are made on the basis of the contribution made by a text to national and international discussions on peace and security issues; from scientific aspects of arms control, to questions of nation-building in post-war societies. Every issue of S+F is focussed on a particular theme. In addition to contributions devoted to the central theme, texts addressing general aspects of peace and security research are also published. Contributors can choose whether to have the text evaluated by the editorial team or by way of an external evaluation process (double-blind peer-review).