International Journal of Drug Policy 12 (2001) 371–374

Book Review

www.elsevier.com/locate/drugpo

Illegal Drug Markets: From Research to Pre-vention PolicyMangai Natarajan and Mike Hough, Crimi-nal Justice Press, Monsey, New York, 2000,329 pp. ISBN 1-881798-24-0 (cloth); 1-881798-25-9 (paper)

It is one of the truisms of the drugs fieldthat, whereas the vast bulk of public expendi-ture is devoted to enforcement measures ascompared with treatment and prevention,when it comes to research expenditure thereverse is true. As a result the evidence baseon drug markets is remarkably thin. There is,of course, both a demand side and a supplyside to any market, and admittedly we knowmore about the demand side in terms ofself-report prevalence studies. Nevertheless,there is more to demand side economics thansketchy prevalence estimates—so-called ‘life-time prevalence’ estimates, which are so oftendeployed in drugs research, would undoubt-edly be regarded as little more than a futilegesture in commercially driven market re-search. Indeed, the economics of marketchoice would be a dull game if it only in-cluded questions such as, ‘Have you everbought a beefburger?’’ or ‘Have you everbought a car?’

It is no doubt partly a consequence of theillicit nature of drug use that even on thedemand side of drug markets we know verylittle about the nuances of consumer prefer-ence, price sensitivity, brand loyalty etc.

Where the supply side is concerned, it is safeto say that we know even less. What we doknow is largely restricted to the behaviourand organisation of retail level dealers. Whenit comes to middle and upper-level operatorsin drug markets, we know next-to-nothing. Itis a safe estimate that there are not manymore than half-a-dozen research studiesglobally which have focused at this level ofdrug distribution, a remarkable state of af-fairs given the large amounts of public moneydevoted to attempts to curb internationaldrug trafficking.

This edited collection on Illegal Drug Mar-kets is therefore most welcome, and includescontributions which both try to illuminatethe nature of drug markets and also to sug-gest why the area is so under-developed inresearch terms. It seems entirely appropriatethat the opening chapter, which concernscrack distribution in New York, is from thelong-term series of ethnographic studies thathave been coordinated by Bruce Johnson,Eloise Dunlap and others. This crack distri-bution study which ran for nearly 10 yearsfrom the late 1980s had been preceded by astudy of heroin use and dealing in Harlem, sothat the work of this team from NDRI mustcount as one of the major contributions toour understanding of street markets,grounded in the urban poverty of America’sunderclass. The conclusions to this overviewof their work are fundamentally pessimistic.

0955-3959/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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Law enforcement appears to have little effecton New York’s markets for heroin, cocaineand crack, and when it does have some im-pact dealers’ responses are flexible and theyadapt new strategies to circumvent enforce-ment. The poor, moreover, are going to re-main poor (if not even poorer) and illicitdrug markets will be the only means of eco-nomic sustenance for several thousand NewYorkers.

In another study from New York, RicCurtis and Travis Wendel offer a three-foldtypology of drug markets: freelance distribu-tors who work as individual entrepreneurs;‘social bonded’ businesses, usually smallteams with some commonality in terms ofethnicity, or kinship and neighbourhood ties;and corporate-style distribution systemswhich evidence more hierarchical relation-ships and a greater division of labour. Devel-oping a case study based on changes inobservable drug markets in Manhattan’sLower East Side, the authors argue that vari-ations in the organisation of drug marketsare embedded in the social and economiccircumstances of the local community, andthat these variations might account for someof the difficulties encountered by law enforce-ment operations.

Despite notions of organised crime con-spiracies as tightly governed hierarchicalstructures whose tentacles reach around theglobe—a view shared by popular images oforganised crime, and also those often propa-gated by enforcement agencies themselves—there seems to be a marked tendency for drugdealing networks to be small and flexible.This is illuminated in the chapter by JohnEck and Jeffrey Gersh who, in a study ofwholesale dealers in the Washington-Balti-more area, depict drug trafficking as a ‘cot-tage industry’. A more hierarchical structureis described by Mangai Natarajan in a highlyinnovative network analysis of a Colombian

based cocaine distribution system which op-erated in New York in the 1990s. The re-search involved a conversational analysis,based on wiretapped telephone conversationsbetween members of the organisation. Na-tarajan suggests that wiretaps could offer animportant research resource which couldprovide a better understanding of differentkinds of drug dealing network, not all ofwhich possess the ‘corporate’ structure de-scribed in this study.

On the demand side of drug markets,Sheigla Murphy and Karina Arroyo utiliseethnographic data from a number of previousstudies concerned with women drug users toexplore how women, who are considerablydisadvantaged in the male world of drugdealing, negotiate their way within drug mar-kets. Reflecting similar research from Aus-tralia (Denton and O’Malley, 1999) theauthors conclude that women are able todeploy different skills in these negotiations,to achieve a position as ‘judicious consumers’of illicit drugs. Women nevertheless remainvulnerable, and experience different levels ofconstraint than men.

A chapter by Howard Parker also focusseson the consumer/purchaser side of drug mar-ket relations. He examines how young peoplein Britain who participate in the recreationaldrug scene around clubs and raves obtaintheir drug supplies—most commonly can-nabis, amphetamines and Ecstasy. His evi-dence suggests that young people typically tryto avoid contact with ‘real’ dealers, and thatdrug purchases are more commonly madefrom friends, or friends of friends. Thismeans that recreational drug markets becomeextremely diffuse at the lower retail level,close to the point of consumption, and hencedifficult to police. Parker also takes the viewthat it is by these means that recreationaldrug users protect themselves from involve-ment in the criminal sphere of the drugstrade.

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Nevertheless, contact with ‘real’ dealersdoes have to be made by someone within ayoung person’s friendship network, and thosearranging bulk purchases on behalf of theirfriends are in an ambiguous position sincethey will often obtain a quantity discountwhich might also mean that they make apersonal profit (Ward and Pearson,1997).‘Friends’ and ‘dealers’ are blurred posi-tions within these transactions, and an under-lying concern in Parker’s account is that thelaw’s interpretation of these friendship net-works is that all participants are involved indrug dealing—and hence subject to heavypenalties if caught. He also suggests thatrecreational drug networks are being targetedby dealers using aggressive marketing tacticsto ensnare young cannabis smokers in the useof more dangerous drugs such as heroin andcocaine. The ways in which friendship, social-ity and commerce inter-connect in the struc-ture of low-level drug markets deservesfurther research, although one must expresssome reservations about the conspiratorialslant which Parker lends to his otherwisejustified concerns on the spread of heroin usewithin recreational drug using networks.

A second British study by Shakeel Akhtarand Nigel South examines heroin use anddealing in a South Asian community in theNorth West of England. Their account isbased around a case study of an individualheroin user–dealer, buying heroin in ounceand half-ounce units, and selling in ‘wraps’ or‘bags’ valued at £15 or £25. As they indicate,considerable amounts of money can be gener-ated in this way. Heroin typically sells at£700–£1000 per ounce in the UK, and a £15bag might contain no more than 0.2 g ofheroin—a potential return of more than£2000 on the initial outlay. Britain’s SouthAsian (Pakistani and Bengali) communitiesare among the very poorest, and patterns ofheroin consumption are a relatively recent

occurrence. Looking to the future, the au-thors stress the lack of confidence in theBritish police within South Asian communi-ties, which will they argue make it moredifficult to control what has the makings of avery grave social difficulty.

Other chapters in this absorbing book areconcerned with different aspects of drug mar-ket phenomena. Martin Killias and MarceloAebi discuss the impact of Switzerland’sheroin prescription experiment, and concludethat by targeting heavy-end users it had somesuccess both in reducing crime and possiblysuppressing illicit markets. JohannesKnutsson examines how changes in Swedishdrug control policy might have influencedtrends in drug use and arrest rates. GeorgeRengert and his colleagues show what a geo-graphical analysis of drug markets can offer,and Vincenzo Ruggiero discusses the role ofAlbanian immigrants in Italy’s drugs econ-omy where they have effective control of thecannabis market. All in all, this is a rich andvaried diet.

In two concluding chapters, Nicholas Dornand Peter Reuter discuss a number of policyconsiderations. Dorn looks at performancemanagement and performance indicators,and while his account is alive to the very realdifficulty of establishing performance targetsin a clandestine environment (that is, bothtraffickers and enforcement and intelligenceagencies) he attempts to offer a way aheadwhich goes beyond cynicism. Although surelythere must be some room for scepticismabout the extravagant (some would, indeed,say meaningless) performance indicatorsadopted by the UK national drugs strategy.What can it possibly mean, for example,given the current state of knowledge, to saythat a key performance target is to reduce theavailability of heroin and cocaine by 25% in2005 and 50% in 2008? We do not even havesurveys on the demand side that are suffi-

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ciently powered to measure meaningfulchanges in self-reported drug use (Gore,1999). This is the kind of ‘evidence base’rhetoric that produces cynicism not only inresearchers, but also among practitionerswhere it might further deepen their alreadysceptical attitude towards objective externalscrutiny of their work, that is towardsresearch.

Reuter asks a number of searching ques-tions about how research and policy concernsmight be joined up more effectively in thisarea. He suggests three contrasting forms ofmotivation for research into drug markets:prurient curiosity, although he does not ex-plain why curiosity has to be prurient; scien-tific interest in illegal markets and the role ofprohibition in market behaviour; and raisingthe effectiveness of enforcement and theharms resulting from drug availability. Heconcludes that researchers will have todemonstrate the utility of research to lawenforcement agencies if they are to generatetrust and gain access to the kinds of informa-tion which they need to conduct research.

The circularity of that formulation is prettychilling, and indicates how far we have to go.My own formulation of the problem wouldbe not too different, but based on a clash ofcultures—policing philosophies and social

science—even though both are grounded ininvestigation and evidence. On the one side, apreoccupation with the short-term, and withopportunistic enquiries to get a prosecutionor ‘result’. A preoccupation, that is, withevidence that is irrefutable. On the other side,it is a longer, possibly never ending game, ofconjectures and refutations.

References

Denton B, O’Malley P. Gender, trust and business:women drug dealers in the illicit economy. BritishJournal of Criminology 1999;39(4):513–30.

Gore S. Effective monitoring of young people’s use ofillegal drugs. British Journal of Criminology1999;39(4):575–84.

Ward J, Pearson G. Recreational drug use and drugdealing in London’. In: Korf D, Riper H, editors.Illicit Drugs in Europe. Amsterdam: University ofAmsterdam, 1997.

Geoffrey PearsonGoldsmiths College,

Uni�ersity of London,New Cross,

London SE14 6NW,UK

E-mail: g.pearson@gold.ac.uk