Mapping the experience of drug dealing risk environments: An ethnographic case study

Abstract 

Background

The traditional approach to understanding the economic dimensions of risk environments is to examine the forces that determine the activities of social actors. Drug dealing poses a particular problem for risk environments as dealing and drug dealers are often thought to be out of the scope of harm reduction interventions. However, local level drug dealing can be an important feature of local economies in marginalised communities, and the sharp distinctions between users and dealers may not always hold.

Methods

Ethnographic evidence is used to describe how two drug dealers experience risk. Two domestic spaces, the house of a heroin and amphetamine dealer respectively, are used to illustrate the relationships between structural forces, experience and physical space.

Results

One key mechanism through which risk environments mediate the relations between structural forces and individuals is through the modification of every day space. Rather than simply being a container for action, space is made through experience. This case study illustrates how two drug dealers orient themselves in space in relation to a complex amalgam of sensations, memories, inscriptions and intentions. Rather than simply being effects of structural oppression, these drug dealers are active participants in the local drug economy. The risk environment and associated economic processes become embodied into the dealers’ and their physical environments.

Conclusion

Drug dealers shape, and are shaped by, their risk environments. A ‘determinants’ approach to understanding the economic dimension to drug use risk environments needs to be refined. Community resilience policies such “neighbourhood renewal” need to take into account the embodied aspects of economic structures in the experience of drug use and drug dealing. The economic relations, the processes that disable the transformation of different forms of capital, the memories and the practices that make drug users, are embodied. Community resilience policies need to bring into focus the embodiment of the economic dimensions of risk environments if they are to successfully reduce harm.

Keywords: Injecting drug use, Risk environment, Drug markets, Social determinants, Ethnography, Spatiality