Understanding Drug Dealing and Illicit Drug Markets

This book examines the drug dealer in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective and considers the increasingly blurred demarcation between illegitimate and legitimate drug markets. It explores the motives and drivers of those involved in drug supply and dispels common and stereotypical myths and misconceptions surrounding illegal drug markets and those who operate within them.

The drug dealer has become one of our foremost contemporary ‘folk devils’. Those who trade in substances prohibited by law are the subject of array of inaccurate myths and urban legends. Criminology has tended either to shoehorn drug dealers into neat typologies or portray them as ‘victims’ of an uncaring, predatory post-modern society. In reality, we know relatively little about the complex and diverse world of drug markets and our concentration inevitably falls on low-end ‘retail’ dealers who operate in the most visible sectors of the illegal economy. Bringing together an international group of experts, this book considers perspectives from around the world, including UK, USA, South America, Spain, India and Australia.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers across criminology, law, sociology, criminal justice and public health, and will be essential reading for those taking courses on drugs, drug markets and substance misuse.

Tammy C. Ayres is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on drugs, prisons and terrorism.

Craig Ancrum is a senior lecturer in Criminology at Teesside University. His research teaching is around drugs and drug markets, local crime and consumerism, violence and ethnographic methods.