Illicit Markets Involve New Approaches If Not More Stuff
The informal economy is the half-visible, semi-monetised, irregular but vital activity that surrounds and underpins the formal economy. Illicit markets are an outgrowth of informal economies, rather than the other way round. They are the bits of informal economies that have been criminalised. The move to digital economy has changed illegal and informal markets in new ways. Informal markets increasingly broker digital processes such as microwork and distribution of mobile airtime. Cryptomarkets mimic and embed some of the values of the formal economy and other systems such as crimeware leverage large-scale network effects. One of the ways cryptomarkets work is to test what goods are viable. For example, weapons are rarely sold on the cryptomarkets, but not for want of trying. To do this, a shared cultural understanding is needed for what is, and what is trying to be achieved.
Illicit Intoxication and Normal Addiction in the ‘Machine Zone’
Culture is created materially, through the devices we interact with, and embedded in our bodies (Dennis 2016). A part of algorithmic and material cultures is the zone aspect, a place which creates separation from everyday rhythms, networks and places. Markets are zones in this sense, with their own rules, cultures and systems. Schüll (2012) identifies ‘the machine zone’ in her study of gambling machines in Las Vegas. The zone is where the players enjoy total focus as they sit in front of the screen and interact with the machine. They play in front of gaming machines that by proxy deliver jolts of dopamine. The setting is designed to focus attention through a combination of tactile and sensory design which obliterates the periphery and speeds up play. The machines and the environment are carefully designed to maximise ‘Time on Device’, their metric of value. This is a devilish bargain the players willingly sign up for. It turns out that the players do not like winning, and are not in it to win it. Winning is troublesome for them as it breaks the machine zone. The player is atomised, focused on the interaction with the machine. Schüll saw that people kept playing when someone is having a cardiac arrest and being treated. The machine zone is designed to maintain a flow of attention and also a financial flow, using handy cash machines and electronic payment systems to keep the money going.
I was struck by the similarities between the machine zone and conversations I have had with student smart drug users, who report similar effects when taking modafinil. Modafinil was introduced as a treatment for the sleep disorder narcolepsy. It is one of a set of smart drugs or study drugs that are popular among university students in North America and Europe. The drugs are taken to improve memory, recall, and task salience (Jensen et al. 2016). Students taking modafinil report experience a simplifying, satisfying task salience in which they focus wholly on what is in front of them, whether exam cramming, reading or writing. There is a deep delight in separating oneself so wholly from other stimulation. As with most intoxications, the benefit is also a risk. Gamblers and study drug users forget to eat, drink, interact with friends or so much else and have to carefully plan to remind themselves to do these things. When you forget to eat, you realise how much memory and habit is embodied. Pharmaceutical companies produce a new drug indicated for a specific condition such as anxiety and immediately seek to expand the zone of its application to other conditions like dieting. Smart drug users are doing much the same and indeed a common illicit use of medical amphetamines is for weight reduction. We can see then the illicit as produced by the licit, for example, in demands to use smart drugs. Uber drivers, Amazon workers, cam girls, and all will face working requirements that are often fast paced and require them to be always ‘on’. It is uncertain as to whether these drugs improve cognitive ability or just keep people on task or awake for longer. In this way the capitalist economy creates demand, or a need, for illicit drugs.
Likewise, the economy is intertwined with intoxcation. As the work of Dennis and Farrugia (2017) and others shows, intoxication is rooted in culture and nature, which gives it its partly involuntary feel. This involuntary element, the sense of being swept along, of having the body respond separately from the mind to triggers, is what makes it so potent. Each form of intoxication is a material culture. Intoxication experiences are systematised and designed into environments. The historically novel binge-drinking cultures of the 1990s and early 2000s in the UK were a product of the creation of new alcohol commodities and spaces (Measham and Brain 2005). Alcohol companies allied with local and national governments to drive changes in the law allied with product innovation to permit intense, focused consumption. That was the machine zone of alcoholic intoxication. Illicit intoxication has been both a rider on those processes and an escape from them.
The Work of Culture in the Context of the Illicit
A common perspective shared by many drug, alcohol and tobacco users is the presentation of the drug as an agent: it is doing something to them. The viewpoint is shared both by sympathisers and those with an interest in portraying illicit drugs as alien, disease-like entities. In fact drugs have to have cultural work done to them before they can be consumed. Work just means the activity that surrounds the drug and the user, which makes drug use palatable and desirable. From seeking out the substance, haggling, swapping or just posing at a bar to obtain it, practicing holding smoke in one’s lungs and injecting, these activities are shared, practical and symbolic. All users do that, all of them work on themselves and the drug they consume. We often submerge this aspect of drug use because it raises difficult questions. It is not so easy for outsiders to be sympathetic, or to place blame at door of the usual culprits—alcohol and tobacco industries, government failures to regulate the market—when we understand the huge work users put into using drugs.
Culture might seem redundant in the machine zone or in a material context. However, I argue that it performs crucial functions and in a sense the material context of intoxication is congealed culture and politics. Intoxicants have a quality of in-betweenness. Culture does the work of legitimation and normalisation, and de-legitimation and stigmatisation. It can reconcile the desire for pleasure with the needs to display order and compliance (Pennay 2012). The illicit context makes some of these functions much more salient. Shared cultural understandings are needed to communicate tainted knowledge and to manage economies of scarcity (Bourgois 1998). Cultural competence and recognition is important in managing drug supply and consumption where those functions are not served by the formal governance system. One way we can think of this critically is the extent to which the concepts researchers use are coherent: are addiction, recovery intoxication, pleasure, and harm coherent concepts or are they quite contingent? What is their contingency built on? It is helpful to view them as concepts with historical and cultural stability, supported by socially validated systems such as the medical system, the legal system, institutions like psychiatry and addiction treatment, academic disciplines like sociology, pharmacology and so on. They act together to produce a stable ontology, reifying their logics and symbolic structures (Manderson 1995; Seddon 2016).
The stability and shared understanding is structured through ritual, a set of defined acts that are functional and meaningful (Collins 2004). Consumption rituals are powerful tie signs indicating in/out group membership and marking social time and space (Gusfield 1987). The array of practices and knowledge around an intoxicant produce it as an effective object with characteristics that vary by time and place and are not solely dependent on its physical nature (Gomart 2002). Almost all accounts of intoxication include a ritual aspect (Becker 1953) but this perhaps reflects a research bias. By its nature, ritual is observable, describable and accountable, and the ethnographic methods used with drug users will tend to pick up on ritual. Culture also manifests in cue reactivity, risk management, and dose titration. These activities which are vital to make intoxication effective are part of embedded algorithms shared by users. They can be seen on internet message boards, darknet discussion forums and in the unspoken learning that takes place when users gather.
These rituals transform. Lévi-Strauss (1969) defined civilisation as the distinction between the raw and the cooked. Drugs are likewise cooked, transformed. The argot of heroin users has ‘cooking up’ as the process of preparing heroin for consumption. Cooking techniques vary depending on form (Strang et al. 1997). Brown heroin requires heat and acid, white heroin less heat and no acid. Cooking is any transformation. Mixing a cocktail is cooking. What I mean by ‘cooking’ here is the combination of preparation, memory work and body work that goes into preparing intoxicants and making intoxication experiences. Both the drug and the user’s body is ‘cooked’ in this process, turned into a system for drug consumption. It transforms the user between two states.
Transition is a common feature as transitions exist between multiple states. There are age transitions as part of the life course. One is the shamanic ritual inducting an adolescent into adulthood which pushes the body of the subject of the ritual using drugs. Yage, tobacco and ayahuasca may all be employed. The adolescent goes through death and rebirth, visits the spirit world and returns with their status changed permanently. The process of transforming the self necessitates looking inward. The value of intoxication is in making the user become more what they are, or should be; or getting away from themselves, or taking themselves out of the self. Transitional rituals are about inducting adolescents into culture, into society. The transformational drinking that goes on in Western adulthood is justified in terms of stripping away socialisation, getting one out of one’s ‘stuck in a rut’ adult habits.
The process involves evoking multiple cues. Cue reactivity has been examined as an automatic response that is often activated by ritual cues or elements of ritualised practice. Cues are the tastes, sights, interactions and actions that have attached to conditioned associations with drug use in the mind of the user. In the case of the group of largely recreational users and examples of use in recreational contexts used here, the cues are built up as part of the process of drug associated learning. Cue reactivity studies foreground sensory inputs such as images, smells, tastes and textures. Cues can also involve familiar conversational terms, money, paraphernalia and other associations. Cue reactivity has been explored as promising an apparently objective measure of extent of substance dependence. However, self-reported addicts may show both aversive and appetitive responses to the introduction of familiar intoxicant-related cues (Rodríguez et al. 2005). Users become skilled in generating these effects along with making the substance itself a usable drug through ritualised practices such as preparation and sharing. Thus cue reactivity is a process that provides an element of somatic feedback in ritual practice. The somatic feedback element is a mediator of sensual practice, exploring the combination of preparation, sequence, setting, expectation and working on the body that produces a desired, or sometimes unwanted, outcome.
Ritual is also present at other aspects of the illicit intoxication. The legal process is highly ritualised, with expected denunciations, appeals to rehabilitation, and performances of suffering and penitence. Diagnosis also has its ritual element when it links generalised diagnostic categories of addiction, infection and overdose to the specific case (Rosenberg 2002). The disease entity of addiction is made culturally recognisable and inscribed in the body of the user in that moment of judgement.
Like ‘substance’ and ‘set’, the setting of intoxication is malleable and situated. This is most commonly approached in terms of spatial settings—coffeehouses, crack houses, clubs, parties, pubs and nightscapes. Criminalisation creates material realities of surveillance, opacity and punishment. Prison is a site of drug use and exchange (Fleetwood 2009), as are illicit consumption sites which involve a material culture of harm and harm reduction (Parkin 2013). There is an intoxication topography of these spaces and examines how they combine with ritual practice and social habit. It argues that a key element in setting is other people, specifically other users. In some settings, such as nightclubs, the presence of others is part of the setting to be consumed, intentionally developing a collective emotionality. In the new experience economy, these settings are closely managed in order to contribute to a commodified intoxication experience. Settings like hospitals, rehabs clinics function as re-inventive institutions (Scott 2010). Rather than having the self mortified, as in the total institutions, the client gives up their pre-institutional self voluntarily.
Symbolic Order and Power
One function of illicit intoxicants is their role in classification of objects and experiences into a symbolic order that divides the sacred from the profane. They are powerful mediators of social structure. Power and resources come to the fore in when managing a marginal existence. In situations of structural violence, adaption and survival are managed and negotiated. Female Thai heroin users find that socially prescribed role as woman conflicts with male heroin user role. They have to be public rather than domestic (Haritavorn 2014). Women users cannot live alone because of their role in a patriarchal society so are dependent on violent men. The male heroin user is more culturally recognised and acceptable than the female (Taylor 1993). Social sorting, structuring and marginalisation shaped the cultural valuation of drug users. Older drug users are typically marginalised (Anderson and Levy 2003) whereas older male drinkers in drinking cultures are valorised (Campbell 2000). Racial blackness and whiteness play a role too, particularly in the governmental response (Netherland and Hansen 2016).
There is a symbolic order to protect (Gusfield 1997). Ritual deferment is built into cultural practice, as in when women heroin users injected by partners. There is a gift economy here which is related to power. Giving a ‘gift’ without reciprocity asserts power (Mauss 1954). Colonial administrators and Muslim imams in South Africa proposed no-alcohol drinking for the Africans, but permitted it for whites. Continued drinking is a claim of personhood (Nugent 2014). Controlling accesses to alcohol was key to social hierarchies in imperial Ethiopia. Peasants were required to supply nobles with a form of alcohol. Later on, colonial mine owners tried to produce alcohol to keep miners in their compound, undermining the role of African women who produced alcohol. 1928 in Natal it was illegal to sell alcohol to black Africans. The shebeen was created, a liquor shack, illegal but important to black African life. White cultural discourse about alcohol undermined the sociality of black people. Black Africans were not considered to be ‘full people’, and it was thought that they could not drink alcohol responsibility. Later in the twentieth century, black South Africans were targeted as a growing consumer market by the alcohol industry, and drinking then became re-coded as a symbol of black modernity, subordinate but legitimated.
Related to that structuring aspect, culture makes behaviours and experiences legible, or impenetrably illegible. They may do this through mythic statements, origin stories, journey narratives that circulate and shared in user cultures. One narrative is that of recovery from addiction. Drug users perform legibility, for example, when users proclaim they are competent subjects because they bleach their injection works (Campbell and Shaw 2008). Users show to the researcher what they know to be a legible cultural performance directed at outside ethnographers, law enforcement, therapists or public health workers. In doing so, they make themselves partially legible. That action is also a strategic one and may hide other equally significant motives such as using drugs for pleasure which is hidden by the dominant cultural narrative of the desire-less addict (Dennis 2017). Treatment programmes have their own cultural norms and performances which make the user legible and ‘worthy’, as a drug user who uses without pleasure and wishes to reassert their agency over the drug. Initial studies treated drug users’ gratification as unintegrated and anti-social (Robbins 1969), and there is quite a bit of that still. Does legalising cannabis in Uruguay change the culture? Should we ignore it? The way in which it is legalised or decriminalised is crucial. In Spain and Uruguay, there is a requirement to join a cannabis club in order to consume legally. This enforces specific locations for sharing knowledge and learning the ropes. The legal context then generates sites for cultural transmission, much like a British pub would have at one time been the main site of reproducing a male-dominated alcohol consumption culture.
The instrumental/recreational dichotomy may come into play there. The main feature distinguishing smart drug use from other kinds of illicit intoxication is that it is motivated by external demands: fitting in rather than standing out. This legitimates it in the eyes of many users, but not for some fellow students who consider it simply cheating. In my research, more experienced smart drug users were keen to differentiate themselves from novice users who they saw as not being fully in charge of their smart drug use and as purely responding to immediate demands such as having to take several work shifts in a row combined with essay submissions or study for exams. In some cases, their reason for smart drug use was to reject perceived conformity with alcohol intoxication culture and to allow them to take part in social events without drinking. The norms of leisure culture in developed societies drive smart drug use, as do the structural demands placed on students: to combine work and study, to graduate with qualifications enabling them to get good jobs to be pay off debt Instrumental drug use is more legitimated because it corresponds to the demands of an economy driven by monetisation of education, of leisure, of interaction. In the digital age this is the context, one of live tracking data which means those who participate in the economy are valued as algorithmic performers, showing structured, directed fun on Instagram or Facebook. Culture is then about value . It allows people to make value judgements, and the process of economic valuation is fundamentally a shared agreement about meaning.
There is a persistent myth about the trade which is that your top notch weed is dank, fat, thick smelling crystal covered nugs. It isn’t a coincidence. Dealers, big commercial growers, seedbanks and breeders keep this myth alive. Commercial farmers who trade in large volumes. We are more like an artisan collective. Our aim is making the best product not the most money. There is vast and deep gulf between commercial indicas which grow rapidly and sativas. Commercial growers use indica because it will grow quickly and they push that as defining what is high quality. Vendor ‘HomieGrown’
In this case, the seller cannot rely on the buyers’ cultural knowledge about cannabis quality to signify what they mean by quality and wants to differentiate it from potency, seen as a cheap trick of commercial growers. In this example, we see a conflict about motivation and value and whether commercial growing of illicit cannabis is lower status than the more ideologically motivated kind of grower (Ancrum and Treadwell 2017).
Looking for Culture
The material culture of intoxication is created within global flows, technoscapes and the residue of past efforts. There is no natural, herbal high here, untroubled by cultural norms, political economies and human meddling. Opium, cannabis and coca are all cultivars, plants bred to enhance their intoxicant qualities. Objects have the power of embodying all kinds of relationships and dispositions, of pleasure, pathology and recovery. They can delimit, though not dictate, the terms of their use. Intoxicants mediate such issues as social class (wine), gender (sugar) and savoir-faire (absinthe). In the rhetoric of intoxication, each quality is constructed in relationship to others such that the sweetness of sugar only exists in relation to the bitterness, acidity, saltiness, sourness and umami of other substances. Material culture reproduces and affirms these social relationships. Social relationships become in part relationships between objects. The complex back-and-forth constantly regenerates the materiality of intoxication within an algorithmic culture.
The category of the illicit has also had an impact on scientific knowledge and in particular has tended to reduce knowledge about illicit intoxication to the behaviour selected samples of users in treatment or otherwise performing as chaotic, unstable and un-functional (Decorte 2011). Academic research has its cultures and priorities, and while research showing controlled illicit drug use is likely much more common than chaotic or addictive use, that does not endear academics to governments (Stevens 2007). A part of the culture of illicit intoxication is therefore the cultures of civil service departments, lecturers and researchers who act as gatekeepers to knowledge about the illicit and who give that knowledge force and structure. While users of different drugs share knowledge, academic tribes are quite culturally homogenous and tightly bounded (Becher and Trowler 2001). They maintain their shared ideology through rituals of reproduction at conferences, in meetings and in academic journals and through in-group terminology. Like drug users, academics share folk tales and war stories. Academics are also made up through algorithms. The power of the performance metric and citations core grows stronger each passing year.
The concept of culture has to be adapted. There has sometimes been a background assumption that much contemporary illicit drug use such as smart drug use and the use of recreational drugs bought over the internet lead to de-cultured drug use, without the rich folklore of the urban righteous dopefiend (Agar 1971). However, research had tended to focus on the public, the street junkie and the male. So we look for the cultural in flamboyant performance. The domestic, the private and the female drug user were rather missing or subordinate or thought of as without culture in this sense. Culture is just as much a part these places however, and of relatively atomised and instrumental uses of drugs. What there is less of is a sense of drug using culture as a separate set of spaces and values with its own demographic, performances and symbols. In that sense, my view is that the validation of illicit intoxication culture is going to be needed, an approach that traces it throughout different spaces, both digital and material.
Drug Markets in Institutions
The array of practices and knowledge around a psychoactive substance produce it as an effective object with characteristics that vary by time and place and are not solely dependent on its physical nature (Gomart 2002). Almost all accounts of intoxication include a ritual aspect (Becker 1953) but this perhaps reflects a research bias. By its nature, ritual is observable, describable and accountable, and the ethnographic methods used with drug users will tend to pick up on ritual. The way to move the discussion on is the role of cue reactivity in ritual, uses in risk management and titration.
In terms of risk management, it appeared that the more potent a substance was perceived to be, the more precise and measured the rituals surrounding it were (Carnwath and Smith 2002). Sensory dose titration was based on the experience and skill of users and the perceived potency of drug (for example, one that causes pain in consumption is potent). Smoking was a more practiced cue. Cannabis is taken to be a ‘soft’ drug, with a wide variation in effects, and generally of low risk. The ritual preparations described by participants were fairly lax about the amount used, and emphasised the performative nature of the ritual. Other users accepted whatever the roller decided to put in. They would then comment on the quality of the ‘smoke’. A ‘good smoke’ had the right combination of smokeability and potency, but was not too strong or too mild. In the examples given of snorting substances, the group members took much more care over the titration of the dose, carefully ensuring lines are evenly distributed. There was greater concern here with managing the dose, as the drug and the method of consumption were seen as more risky. Perceived chemical potency equated risk. The ritual had the function of managing risk, ensuring an adequate level of intoxication while avoiding overdoses or other problem reactions. In other cases, such as ecstasy in pill form used in a clubbing setting, there was no opportunity to titrate the dose. Instead, sometimes a part of one pill would be consumed by one group member in order to test its quality and content.
Drug users perceived it being more possible for illicit drug use to be normatively integrated into an otherwise alcohol-focused party or other social gathering than cigarette smokers. This perception may be a bias reflecting the relatively drug and alcohol savvy make-up of the group. Nonetheless it does fit with more general sense in which smokers are seen as merely ‘unhealthy’ while illicit drug users are seen as risk-taking. Illicit drug users were not necessarily outside the ideology of healthfulness, provided they were seen to manage the risks of their drug use and confine it to social settings. Rituals were used to manage and mediate risk. From a public health perspective, it was notable that the most personal damage was associated with drinking in the night-time economy, in the form of sexual harassment, vomiting, being excluded from nightclubs and hospitalisation.
The ritual was part of the learning process for new users and the process of generating anticipation for experienced users. Rituals could be designed to combine the drug, set and setting (Zinberg 1986), for instance by preparing the ‘set’ ensuring the ‘drug’ is distributed and consumed and that the setting supported the desired form of intoxication. This aspect of the ritual further heightened anticipation, the ‘buzz’ and excitement of looking forward to intoxication. In the case of alcohol, skill was demonstrated through consumption, such as that of the drinker supremely able to handle large quantities of alcohol in the pre-drinking ritual. To contrast, in the case of illicit or unlicensed drugs such as cannabis, methoxi and medicinal drugs rituals focused much more on the preparation of the drug. Skill was demonstrated through confident, competent processing of the drug into a state fit to be consumed. Authenticity and expertise was demonstrated in this way (Haines et al. 2009). A rough equality of consumption was sought in snorting and smoking joints. Splitting lines into equal measure, those who hold onto a joint too long will be reprimanded as ‘Bogarting’ or smoking the joint far more or for far longer than considered fair (Sandberg 2013).
Sexual divisions and sexual scripts are part of nightlife (Ronen 2010). There is a distinction between the recreational drug economy and the commodified night-time economy. There was sense of illicit drug rituals themselves being gendered in these accounts. Men and women bought and sold drugs, cut lines and rolled joints. However, this probably reflects the kinds of drug rituals recorded. Skilled drug preparers are predominantly male in the research literature, though in the examples given here women were skilful drug procurers and producers. There was a clear gendering in dress and demeanour in preparation for going out to mainstream clubs. Female accounts in particular recognised the different pressures exerted on women in the heterosexual night-time economy, and this was also noted in the accounts of some male students. Disciplined embodied femininity was demonstrated though the considerable effort fake tanning required. In contrast, the atmosphere of the underground club could be experienced by both men and women as a valued time-out from some of the demands of the heterosexual economy of display.
One function rituals serve is to maintain social order and legitimate power (Hearn 2012). Some of the rituals described maintain a status hierarchy though performed egalitarianism. In this example, power relations are affirmed through invoking equality. These accounts emphasised senses in transition, for example from childhood to adulthood, through different taste cultures, from private to public femininity. Disgust and distaste were present in many accounts. Distaste could be a warning sign of a mismatch between intoxication and setting, or an undesired femininity, a gender order that reduces female subjectivity to writhing display. Taste and disgust was a way of judging sociality and evaluating the ‘worth’ of situations. Sensory responses, in particular embodied disgust and repulsion, can be explored as ways of enacting social scripts.
Conclusion
Drug users and dealers took to the digital rather faster than researchers did. That may have been because it short circuited both the econmic restrictions and the cultural stigmatisation of their activity. Markets have cultures, and criminal activity is culturally mediated and materially embedded. Economic exchanges may take a second to happen, but their consequences last a lifetime. They may be seen in the bodies of long term injecting drug users, or the culturally disconnected spaces of deprived and left behind areas. Cultural forgetting is a the way people at the core of the global economy have of dealing with people and places that are troublesome and peripheral. One of the cultural advantages of criminal markets is they link to and create economic life around some of these spaces. They can give cultural meaning and direction, or they can be ways of people achieving culturally normal goals, showing themselves to be entrepreneurs or high rolling consumers (Merton 1938).