The end of European empires contributed to the rise of methodological nationalism. That is the set of infrastructures and habits of mind that treats each nation-state a single coherent container of a population. Global datasets like that held by the United Nations are typically aggregates of national ones so preserve this principle that the nation is a singular research unit. That has problems: it assumes internal homogeneity and coherence over external influence and cross-national dynamics. There is a danger of seeking like a state in analysis rather than seeing in terms of material relations that can span borders and might have more in common with each other than the ‘home’ state. This approach will challenge us in many ways. In sociology the standard model is pretty much one of exploitation, the powerful centre imposing homogenisation on the periphery. The standard model is out of date and misses how the periphery is itself productive, or is not even especially peripheral. I am using the concept of the matrix to capture the different arrays of forces that work to distribute commodities, people and cultures across borders.

There is a hidden history of drug trades that contributed to or were part of the rise of globalisation and the pre-eminence of Western Europe. “Psychoactive commerce” provided intoxicants in huge quantities. Drugs became commodified.  Their production ceased being for local use and became for sale, usually to another part of the globe.  Began from the colonial age onwards, when European countries began colonising other parts of the globe. This went for wine, spirits, tea, coffee, tobacco, opium and later cocaine and cannabis. Were these developments specific to narcotic globalisation or just globalisation that happened and caused narcotic trade to be globalised with it?  Historian David Courtwright’s argument is that one of the forces driving globalisation was the developing demand in modern European countries for stimulants and narcotics.  In vaguely historical order: tea, tobacco, coffee, opium, cocaine.  Narcotics were of decreasing historical importance though.  The last in this list, cocaine, relied on globalisation to come into being as a mass drug, but the demand for it in no way drove globalisation, unlike the others mentioned.

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 which become, in part, relationships between objects. The complex back-and-forth between the drug, its cultural signification and material matrix of production and consumption constantly regenerates the materiality of intoxication within an algorithmic culture.

We now see Opium closely bound up with geopolitics. However there are many myths to the opium wars. One is that the population was addicted. However opium was commonly used in England, India and China at the time and ill effects were limited – other than some people smoking away in languor (Dikotter, Zhou and Laamann, 2006). Opium use was mostly moderate. A more subtle picture emerges than the drug being forced on China. China had a well developed intoxication culture. The 1895 Royal Commission on Opium in India also viewed opium as beneficial, a cash crop, medicine and recreational intoxicant. The standard Opium War narrative treats the world outside the West as passive and victimised.

Let us take an intoxicant focused view. In this the capacity for intoxication was enhanced by capitalism. Capitalist trade is a route for intoxication. Continuing this theme of the global transition of methamphetamine. Meth is cheaper to produce and is produced in greater volumes than ever. The market has shifted from Mexico/Northern America and the Golden Triangle to Europe, South Asian and Africa. The Asia-Pacific market estimates at $61billion. In many African countries it has displaced cannabis. As in  North America, meth occupies left-behind communities, takes the space of those marginalised by economic development.  The meth market in Africa is highly centralised and controlled, with strong cross region integration and stable pricing. The South African meth market is well established, with production moving to cheaper spots such as Nigeria/West Africa. Meth is also being smuggle from Afghanistan via Pakistan, displacing the old heroin route.

Years ago we would never have thought that buying MDMA would involve a distributed accounting ledger which is now one of the world’s major consumer of electricity and microchips. Bitcoin and the darknet cryptomarkets is one part of the emergence of a global integrated system of addicting, treating, and intoxicating selves. It goes well beyond that to agricultural innovation in the Rif, laboratory production in Afghanistan, rapid testing of new psychoactive substances in China, and the world empire of pharmaceuticals. We used to call Colombia and Afghanistan narco states: nations where the illicit economy had taken over swathes of government and policing such as to replace formal governance with shadow government by cartels. Now the narco state is a global material matrix of licit and illicit, pharma and tech companies, organised crime and criminal entrepreneurs. 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. 

Eligh, Jason. 2021. A Synthetic Age The Evolution of Methamphetamine Markets in Eastern and Southern Africa. Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

There’s been much referencing to techno-social hybrids and as with anything else the term can lose its specificity as it becomes used to refer to any novel combination or arrangement of technologies. Almost any technology we encounter is a combination of other systems so if we are not to just use the term to identify novelty we need to understand hybridity as a process that reaches across ontological boundaries. Markets are very effective hybridising systems that connect, automate, flatten and rationalise. Classical economics seeks to treat the market as an abstract whole, while sociology looks at how it is encountered as a material, cultural entity. There are different markets overlaying each other. There is the abstract market as a set of operating concepts. There is the material market as the connected set of different exchanges which may not be directly in touch with each other. Finally there is the material implementation of specific market contexts, whether a street market, or a darknet cryptomarket.

For a long time, researchers, policymakers and law enforcement have referred to ‘the drug market’ as a generic term for aggregated global drug production, trafficking and distribution systems. This approach is useful as it allows us to understand how disparate individuals and places are connected without an organised or cartel arrangement being at work. It cannot be left at that though as markets create and normalise effects that are specific to them. Mirroring developments in capitalist societies, I recently observed the emergence of what might be called conscious markets, where drug dealers and buyers have a distinct understanding of themselves as operating within and according to market principles – seeing themselves as and expected to behave as service providers and consumers. That has implications for drug normalisation, access, pricing, quality, product diversity and availability. There is also a growing acknowledgment of the disruptive potential of technologies – notably the digital – to transform illicit drug markets and future use patterns.

In a straightforward sense all markets involve technologies. An accounting book is a technology. Even if these are not tangible, they exist and have effects: adding and subtracting mentally is a technology, amortising debt is a technology. Technologies channel, reproduce and extend human capacities. In another sense, markets conduct specific technological functions, epistemological and ontological.

Markets work as as epistemological devices. They construct drug quality, assign value to labour and risk. They assemble knowledge from different sources and also destroy or fragment some kinds of knowledge. Epistemology shades into ontology. They define illicit drug quality in specific terms that can be measured, and as they can be measured, that becomes the definition of the object. They distributed drug testing techniques and in so doing make only those qualities ‘speakable’.

They also work as ontological devices. The growing availability of a range of drugs at the same source promotes a psychoactive repertoire. That is where users incorporate a range of substances for specific context based effects. They define some use types and users as rational consumption, and others as deviant ‘rubbish’ consumers. Defining and using debt according to these principles is a technology. Strategic pricing is another approach used by many dealers. Some maintain high prices in order to show their product as a Veblen good – reassuringly expensive. Others keep prices stable in order to maintain their client base or market position. Price therefore is another ontological entity which does not necessarily signify the harmony of supply and demand. The hybrid therefore is a system that combines different logics to create new ontological configurations. Pricing as as a data surveillance technique is a hybrid, combining market intelligence and surveillance/disciplinary logics.

‘I just got out of prison and asked my sister how much it would cost to start a business. She said $500. I got a grand from my husband, I bought two ounces of cooked up crack. Opened this place at one of my sister’s friend’s house … I had a little crew. About eight of us: seven women.’ Denise, in Sommers, Baskin and Fagan, 2000.

We often focus on big old scams like Bernie Madoff ‘s ponzi scheme and Enron which are clearly fraudulent, big bucks ripoffs. However it is less common to encounter major league criminality of this kind in everyday life. Normal scams are more likely to form part of the social fabric. These might be the near-pyramid scheme structures of multi level marketing businesses which promise the opportunity to integrate entrepreneurship and wealth generation into people’s day to day lives. MLMs are based on a seductive proposition: use your spare time to sell a product that virtually sells itself. Nutrition supplements, leggings, whatever they may be. MLMs target people who might be not doing too well financially but have some free time and a reasonably good family and friendship network they can sell to. As part of the sales pitch they present people who have made enormous amounts from selling the product. The MLM requires the would be agent to pay a chunk of money to buy product, which they are then required to sell. In addition – the vital ‘multi-level’ bit – they recruit people under them to also sell. They receive a cut of the sales of these ‘downline’ distributors. MLMs pre-date the gig economy by a long time though they have some elements in common in terms of the promise and the hidden costs. Their economics depend on their agents providing time and infrastructure that is costed at zero – storage and sales space, or in the case of ride hailing companies, the cost of the car.

In Sommers, Baskin and Fagan’s ethnography, Denise describes some of the elements of her business. It starts with investment capital borrowed from elsewhere, and success requires recruiting a sales team to provide a downline. Like an MLM drug dealing has some elements of the same normal scam. The myth of affluence keeps people in – the bling, the cars, the easily obtained riches. An attraction of gang membership is sometimes that gang leaders are the only people who are publicly affluent. These riches are out of reach, but tangible to foot soldiers. Even the wealthier members find that once they deduct outgoings profits are smaller than expected. For the vast majority profits are only workable by costing critical inputs at zero, such as their own time, and also discounting risk. At least selling leggings will not usually end up putting you in jail.

We live in a society which places self-reliance and self-creation at the heart of its conception of the self. The economy is meant to be defined by agility and flexibility. However these economic outcomes can only be achieved at significant hidden cost. Degradation of fixed capital, costing critical inputs at zero, and creating a radically pyramidal financial structure are deeply pathological and burn through vast resources. The normal scam is a normalised part of the structure of economic life and is at the heart of platform capitalism. It almost passes without comment that business risks are socialised or pushed onto the bottom of the pyramid, and that the labour and resources of the majority are expected to be valued at zero.

‘Laugh at [the ads] because when you’re in active meth addiction you don’t really care what the outside world is saying and you surely don’t care what the Internet has on it. … While you’re an active meth user, it plays no role in your recovery or wanting to get recovered.’ Melanie, in Marsh, Copes and Linnemann, 2017

The image of the meth crisis in the US and Canada is presented as one of ‘white trash’: intersection of race and class failure in the context of decay. The ‘Faces of Meth’ campaign began in 2004 with an Oregon Sheriff’s department using mug shots of meth users over time. The before and after shots showed physical and personal decline, with features intended to provoke revulsion: decaying skin, sagging faces and so on. There are longstanding issues here: we know from the history of anti-drug campaigns that shock tactics don’t work, and are usually not addressed at potential users primarily but are intended for a wider audience to show: something is being done; and these people are not you. Then there are issues with the images themselves: these reify meth as the problem, regardless of e.g. malnutrition, domestic violence, violence of the prison-criminal justice complex, the health care system, the use of other drugs, other elements of material suffering.

The images are crafted to reifies meth as a problem of rural, marginalised working class white people. Not e.g Robert Downey Jr. They commodify the drug problem, turning it into a series of shock value images to be consumed, for example, a Youtube video with 8 million views. The mug shot is part of a networked criminal aesthetic, taking in mug shot websites, jail cam, the Cops Tv show etc. The audience consume the ‘gritty realism’ on offer. Users are ‘framed’ without context. The white subjects of the pictures imply a contrast with ‘black’ African American crack-cocaine users. The latter were presented as violent, urban and lawless. The ‘white trash’ meth users are presented as self-victimising and polluting, a lost underclass. You could interpret this as putting the problem back in its racial box: drug problems are bracketed off as being about ‘they’ and not ‘we’. A fascination with the transgressive.

The pictures show we can’t expect any evidence to speak for itself. These show a bodily deformation which is not consistent across meth users and which is not reducible to this one habit in itself. We have to look at consumption practices and contexts to understand more how a drug affects the body. The campaigns did not change public perceptions. Nobody looks at that photo and thinks ‘that’s me’. Over the time of the campaign in Montana meth became more acceptable. This is normal – for example, with mephedrone reports of death spiked interest in buying it. What do meth users think? Users never think they are like ‘those’ users. Rather than rejecting the visual system promoted by Faces of Meth, users place themselves outside it even if they are objectively in that group demographically. Many found the representation funny or unserious. The ‘virginity’ image de-familys users, implying they wouldn’t ever have a normal sex life.  They did not long term changes they attributed to meth, such as boyfriends behaving violently.

They saw their addiction is too potent to be overcome by these messages. But also said that smoking meth would avoid these problems which largely came with intravenous use. IV users tend to be at the bottom of all user status orders especially heroin, cocaine and meth. There was a strong emphasis on ice (chrystal) meth being ‘clean’ and homebrew ‘shake and bake’ being dirty, making people ‘crazy’.

Marsh W, Copes H and Linnemann T (2017) Creating visual differences: Methamphetamine users perceptions of anti-meth campaigns. International Journal of Drug Policy 39: 52–61. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.09.001.

Linnemann T and Wall T (2013) ‘This is your face on meth’: The punitive spectacle of ‘white trash’ in the rural war on drugs. Theoretical Criminology 17(3). SAGE Publications Ltd: 315–334. DOI: 10.1177/1362480612468934.

The aim of this article will be a crime script analysis of a counterfeit currency vendor and their community. Crime script analysis breaks a crime down into its fundamental protocol and generally proposes points where crime control can intervene.

Much research and intervention focuses on electronic money laundering and large scale counterfeiting. This article will examine the micro-process of last mile distribution and the interface between user purchase and practice.

Counterfeit notes posted on ‘Benjamin’s’ thread:

The real thing from the US Federal Reserve. The US government provides a toolkit for tellers to spot genuine currency, including some tips such as ‘If it has “For Motion Picture Use Only” or the word “Replica” on it, it could be fake.’

The US dollar was originally minted in deference to the Spanish ‘piece of eight’, the silver dollar, and the quarter was in reference to American’s use of the Spanish two-quarter dollar. Spanish and Mexican currency were in widespread use and legal tender until 1857. Political conflicts raged over the metal content of dollar coins, pegging the dollar to the Gold Standard, and recently the value of a fiat currency in comparison to cryptocoins. The global nature of the dollar as a reserve currency makes it tempting to fake and hard to update, as new versions can be seen as untrustworthy.

This post concerns a vendor of counterfeit dollars who sells through a darknet market. ‘Benjamin’ (gender unknown) introduces themselves in what becomes a long thread where buyers return to critique their product. Benjamin responds by defending the product, saying that buyers are using it improperly, and eventually agreeing that the counterfeit notes are not what they were.

Benjamin had a number of buyers who were very positive about the product. As problems emerged they were accused of being sock puppet accounts. These acolytes proposed that if people were finding problems getting the notes accepted they were doing it wrong. They were following the wrong strategy, or were inherently suspicious individuals who invited greater scrutiny. Benjamin endorses these readings:

‘”However, some customers (no need to name, just check my feedback) seem to either have RIDICULOUSLY high standards (are there any higher than these bills?) or plainly wish to sabotage this operation… What a shame.”

In their discussion the buyers mentioned how they slipped the counterfeits into the supply chain. Their varied tactics were aimed at laundering bad notes into good. Buying a small value item with $50 or $100 notes and obtaining change would do that. However there was a risk that cashiers would be more likely to scrutinise or refuse large value notes for small value items. Others worked in businesses with a large cash throughput and were able to swap out notes. There was a sense that these were not major players and would be buying small amounts to use in ways that would not attract attention.

Buyers put forward justificatory strategies for using counterfeit currency. There was a big picture political justification in terms of banker and government greed. Then there were micro-justifications that the fraud was harmless and that cashiers would not be punished for accepting the notes.

A crime script analysis of the process of using the currency would look like this, separated into the currency manufacturer and the final end point user of the notes:

The control condition refers to possible points for crime control intervention.

A further analysis is invited which treats the counterfeit notes as part of an actor-network. In this perspective the discourse around it, the production and distribution system, is part of a set of practices that produce the product as a workable entity.

Typically ‘performance and image enhancement’ drugs refers to a set of drugs taken to improve physical performance or appearance, or work on the body in ways that confirm to a particular set of expectations. Anabolic steroids taken to improve athletic performance or status in a bodybuilding subculture would be one example. Fat burning hormones or appetite suppressants can also be taken to speed weight loss.  Beyond that we have a range of substances used to enhance sexual performance and cognitive ability, augmenting brain training apps, ‘smart’ drug use with Ritalin. Some of these drugs have notable effects on the brain. Then practices of using psychedelics that are aimed at addressing the human capacity to work and think.  As with recreational drug use, problem drug and other boundaries, there is a fuzzy line between categories. I would frame this as purposeful use to change the trajectory of the self. Effects include: time compression, time shifting, focus locking, and a sense of being left behind otherwise.  They deal with deficits not top performers. 

Psychedelics have represented a useful study as they function as technical fixes, windows to the psyche, and probes into the mind. There has been for many years renewed research interest in psychedelics and renewed socially legitimated narratives for them.  There is a push and pull between dominant Silicon Valley CEO style enhancement narratives which present themselves as rewiring the self to be more competitive, and many others which focus on treatment, transcendence, and the self in the world. 

For example, Ibogaine is a natural hallucinogen used in ritual practices by followers of Bwiti, an animistic religion. Iboga used much as the sacrament in Catholic mass. Has powerful effects- sickness, frightening hallucinations, leaves you exhausted. It is hard to fit LSD or Ibogaine use into the schema of pleasure/hedonism, for instance, or that of Ketamine, a dissociative that produces in the user a sense of becoming dissociated from their body. They work on the same biochemical systems as the more hedonistic substances but do not appear to generate reward sensations and can be in fact quite disturbing – if satisfying, revelatory or otherwise worthwhile – experiences.  Research hampered by legal, financial and epistemological considerations – it’s not really like a medicinal drug, can’t easily be brought to market and resists commodification.

One approach is epistemological and ontological. Since the 1990s ‘Decade of the Brain’ there has been a concerted attempt to understand the neural substrate of all mental states, states of mind, especially consciousness.   LSD and hallucinogens then are treated not lenses on the psyche (as in the 1960s) but probes into the brain. The neuroscience now follows the principle of materialism – that mental states can be reduced to physical states. Every single thought pattern has its neural substrate.  The use of enhancement drugs and the materiality of mind mean medicalisation is no longer about sorting the normal from the pathological and sociology of medicine cannot hang our hat on that.

Canguilhem, Georges. On the Normal and the Pathological. Vol. 3. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.

Durkheim, Emile. “Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological.” The rules of sociological method. Palgrave, London, 1982. 85-107.

Something I’ve been grappling with is the right to opacity and how that can be supported. The reason I think is less to do with opacity as a privacy supporting right and more to do with it as a public good. Currently opacity is largely ‘owned’ by centralised platform services.

A darknet is any online system which disguises its content in some way. In contrast to the open web which is publicly searchable and connectable a darknet is designed to limit some of the information accessible to external observers. Much of the digital world is now composed of semi-darknets. Facebook has some attributes of a darknet as it operates as a self contained private network. Users are visible to Facebook and its advertisers, to each other with some limits, but invisible to google or other web search engines. Opacity pervades the digital world. What is usually meant by the term ‘darknet’ is a system where users rather than platform owners can control the terms on which they are opaque, where the opacity of the system is a decentralised public resource. A system like the Tor darknet exemplifies that principle and provides a degree of anonymity to users.

Tor is a routing system which encrypts connection data. Doing so makes it difficult for a third party to tell who is connecting from where. The internet is a disclosing machine. It tells a lot about anyone using it. Tor limits that automatic disclosure. Effectively it means an internet user can browse websites and send messages without being easily traced. Tor enables a second function, onion or location-hidden services. Onion services allow a server to be connected without its location being revealed. Users can set up web services without the host’s IP address being known.

Glissant wrote of the right to opacity in a colonial context, to resist being known to systems of colonial governance. Colonial subjects created a thicket of unknowability. Discussions of encryption often view it as criminogenic. Viewing it as one means for opacity might help move the discussion on to one which balances risk and benefits and which considers opacity as part of growing the digital public space.

Fiction:

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, borrowed electronically through Libby/Edinburgh City Libraries.

Academic themes:

Pre crime:

Arrigo, Bruce, and Brian Sellers. 2021. The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age. Bristol, UNITED KINGDOM: Bristol University Press.

Emotions and the machine:

Detailed ethnographic work (Bourgois 1998, Wakeman, 2015) has shown the rich, complex set of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities by which heroin users in marginal social and economic circumstances maintain a moral economy. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, locking users into norms of reciprocity and sharing, distributing resources and helping users limit withdrawal and also avoid some harms such as overdose. Punishment is also distributed, through excluding a norm violating individual from the community of care. These studies are in embedded communities, where people interact regularly. Micro payments and limited options mean people need to interact frequently, to maintain an income and to obtain heroin. A range of roles come into being such as the user-dealer and a range of practices such as instrumental social supply.

The moral economies described have qualities in common. Participants are known to each other and subject to some degree of mutual surveillance and influence. Interactions are recurrent and frequent, sometimes to the point of being ritualised. They take place in geographically well bounded and resource limited environments. There is a sense that this is why they exist: they are needed to combine different kinds of scarce resources into a working set of social and material relationships that rewards prosocial participants by protecting them against frequent periods of scarcity and withdrawal. Acute withdrawal can be used as an implied threat so as to push members into compliance. These characteristics are typical of a population of heroin users who are also likely to be frequently in contact with criminal justice, social and other services.

Shewan and Dalgarno (2005) highlight the existence of another group of non-treatment users who are more like the general population in terms of employment and education. Participants indicated that their drug use was typically controlled and did not dominate their day to day lives. Users did not centre their lives around heroin buying and consumption. They were peripheral to many aspects of the moral economy described above. It appears that this more individuated group of users do not need the moral economy to get by. Population data note a decline of face to face drug purchase during the pandemic and a further rise in the popularity of social media apps for obtaining drugs. It is likely that these changes further marginalise the moral economy and push users towards the cash nexus. I hypothesis that people who buy using cash, consume individually or with their own friendship group and not with the people they have bought from. Face to face buying might be a useful proxy for engagement in the moral economy. On the other hand, Masson and I noted that varying degrees of reciprocity were possible in darknet drug markets.