Drug Dealers

From Trails and Errors: the Defensive Tactics of Closed-market Drug Dealers

Mike Salinas-Edwards, from the The University of Manchester, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Traditional and New Forms of Crime and Deviance,” under the title “From Trails and Errors: the Defensive Tactics of Closed-market Drug Dealers”. Here is the abstract: This paper presents findings from an ESRC-funded ethnographic study into a social network (n=25) within which various illicit drugs were traded at numerous levels (retail, wholesale and cross-border smuggling). This criminal collective operated for over 5 years. During this period the bulk of their trade remained hidden, primarily a consequence of the trade’s discreet nature. Yet individuals progressively devised, implemented and imitated peers’ protective strategies to guard themselves from possible prosecution. Failure to implement ‘basic’ risk mitigation techniques resulted in the successful prosecution of the only two participants punished for their crimes. Conversely, the implementation of the techniques allowed detected dealers to either remain in the trade, or to exit the market without legal repercussions. This paper presents and evaluates the principal methods used to insulate participants from the evidence of their lucrative, yet discreet drugs trade.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

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Further Reading

• “From Trails and Errors: the Defensive Tactics of Closed-market Drug Dealers”, by Mike Salinas-Edwards (Proceedings)