Constructing the problem of drugs and crime.pdf

Hammersley, Richard
Chapter 1, Constructing the problem of drugs
and crime
Hammersley, Richard, (2008) "Chapter 1, Constructing the problem of drugs and crime", Hammersley,
Richard, Drugs and crime: theories and practices, 1-15, Cambridge: Polity Press (c)
http://www.politybooks.com/
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1
Constructing the Problem of
Drugs and Crime
This is the problem: drugs and crime are consistently related to one
another in different studies. Even when different places and different
forms of drugs and crime are studied, the conclusion is consistent.
Some general surveys, for example, show that the same people who
admit to doing drugs also commit crime, particularly in youth (e.g.,
Elliott, Huizinga and Ageton, 1985; Jessor and Jessor, 1977; Willis,
1971; Kandel, Simchafagan and Davies, 1986). Similarly, drug users
admit more crime than non-users (Bean, 1971; Gordon, 1973), while
criminals admit more drug use than non-criminals (Noble, 1970;
Bass, Brown and Dupont, 1972; Lightfoot and Hodgins, 1988; Spunt
et al., 1995; Lamb and Weinberger, 1998). There are studies that
reveal that some people who are drug dependent commit high levels
of crime (Inciardi, 1979; Jarvis and Parker, 1989) and use much of
the proceeds to buy drugs (Rajkumar and French, 1997). This applies
to those on heroin most commonly, but also to some cocaine users,
particularly crack cocaine users, and to people dependent on other
drugs or alcohol. Here I'm giving only a handful of illustrative exam-
ples, mostly from the USA and the UK, but studies around the world
in places as different as Chile, Hong Kong, Australia, Russia and
Thailand all find that drug use and crime are correlated.
However, despite what people may believe, the connections are
in fact far too complicated to summarize as a straightforward
`drugs-crime' relationship (Bennett and Holloway, 2005a). This book
looks in depth at the complex issues surrounding these phenomena.
For example, drug-dependent people who are also known to commit
crimes tend to be clustered in areas that are socio-economically
deprived (Burr, 1987; Curtis, 1998; Ihlanfeldt, 2007) in the same way
as people known to commit crimes without drug use. When people

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2
Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
who are known to be drug dependent and commit crimes are treated
for their drug problems, then both offending and drug use tend to
improve (Inciardi, Martin and Butzin, 2004; Dijkgraaf et al., 2005;
Ribeaud, 2004; Gossop et al., 2000), although this more often
involves reductions in both than complete non-offending and com-
plete abstinence. Indeed, there are problems of defining `non-
offending' and `abstinence' which cloud the findings. Moreover, when
heroin is in short supply then offending can reduce, rather than
increasing in order for the users to be able to pay the resulting higher
price (Donnelly, Weatherburn and Chilvers, 2004), and when habits
shifted away from crack cocaine in New York, then violent crime fell
(Bowling, 1999). However, reduced availability does not have
uniform beneficial effects everywhere. For instance, it can lead to
people switching to more problematic substances, as when expen-
sive Scottish heroin in the 1980s led to the injecting of insoluble
temazepam (Hammersley, Lavelle and Forsyth, 1990). Or, it can lead
to further criminal professionalization of the black market. Moreover,
some people argue that drugs-crime connections are largely a product
of the illegality of drugs, which criminalizes supply, inflates prices and
abdicates the sorts of controls over drugs that are exercised over
alcohol, tobacco and medicines.
It is clear that crime would exist without drugs because other social
forces create and stimulate demand for stolen goods and because the
same psychological and social pressures form criminals and people
with serious drug problems: drugs and crime exist in a `common
causal nexus' (Elliott, Huizinga and Ageton, 1985) where it is impos-
sible to blame one for the other in any simple way.
Many people looking at drugs-crime connections conclude that it is
obvious that the same risk factors predispose people to both drug use
and offending, and that drug dependence causes crime because users
need money to buy drugs. Indeed, the consistency of links challenges
strongly socially constructed explanations of drugs-crime relation-
ships, as one would surely anticipate more variation across different
cultures and social conditions. However, perhaps consistency is in the
eye of the beholder. While the behaviour of drug-dependent offenders
is reasonably similar everywhere it has been studied, links between
drug use and offending at the population level are unpredictable
(Martin et al., 2004). The sheer scale of drugs and crime problems is
often held to be justification for action, yet their magnitude is partly a
matter of assumption and definition. Furthermore, whatever the scale
of the problems, even if drugs cause a lot of crime, it does not neces-
sarily mean that eliminating drugs will reduce crime, or have only

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Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
3
beneficial effects on society. Finally, it is not clear that drugs and crime
problems can be tackled in isolation from wider social problems. Wars
on drugs and crime are wars against ourselves, not against alien agents
in our societies. Some of the difficulties with this received view can be
illustrated by discussing an example.
The received view of the problem
In 2002, the then home secretary wrote:
If there is one single change which has affected the wellbeing of individ-
uals, families and the wider community over the last 30 years, it is the
substantial growth in the use of drugs, and the hard drugs that kill in par-
ticular. The misery this causes cannot be underestimated. It damages the
health and life chances of individuals; it undermines family life, and
turns law-abiding citizens into thieves, including from their own parents
and wider family. The use of drugs contributes dramatically to the
volume of crime as users take cash and possessions from others in a des-
perate attempt to raise the money to pay the dealers. In addition, other-
wise decent people become dealers in pyramid selling, as they persuade
friends, acquaintances and strangers to take on the habit, so that they
themselves can fund their own addiction. (Blunkett, 2002, 3)
Like many statements about drugs and crime, the quote offers a series
of cliches, misrepresentations and stereotypes as truth (Stevens, 2007;
Orcutt and Turner, 1993). Let us look at six serious difficulties in
turn.
First, it is questionable whether drug use has actually risen over the
past thirty years, particularly if one counts tobacco and alcohol as
drugs, which the British government does not. It is even questionable
if hard drug use has risen that much, after its initial rise in the early
1980s. Over the 1990s, in the British Crime Survey annual prevalence
for heroin use remained under 1 per cent, while cocaine use crept up
to about 5 per cent. It is important to remember that `annual preva-
lence' includes an unknown number of infrequent or one-off users
and that this is supposed to be more likely for cocaine than for heroin.
Whether cocaine use has increased or not, it certainly has not
increased as much in the UK as had been predicted in the mid-1980s.
Instead, cocaine use has spread more slowly and insidiously until
some 5 per cent of Britons admit use.
In the 1940s over 70 per cent of the population smoked cigarettes.
Nowadays smoking (of cannabis or tobacco) is under half as prevalent

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4
Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
and other drugs are rarer still. With a different political mindset, this
could be a great public health success, with the unfortunate sting
that substance use has diversified in many countries among the
young. Although alcohol intake may be increasing, particularly
among women and younger people, it has not yet reached levels
recorded some hundred years or more ago (Cabinet Office, 2003).
Furthermore, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2006)
estimated that world opium production has fallen by 80 per cent in
the last 100 years. Just because it is widely accepted that drug use is
increasing, it is not unquestionably so.
Second, mortality rates for heroin injection are indeed high (in the
UK opiate overdoses are now the leading cause of mortality among
people under thirty, surpassing alcohol overdoses and other forms of
suicide (e.g., Roberts, Barker and Li, 1997; Johnson et al., 2005), but
cocaine does not kill that often and cannabis does not kill at all, except
as a contributor to accidents. Drugs policies are usually written
against heroin and cocaine but enforced against cannabis (Runciman,
1999).
Third, the misery of drugs is only half the story. People usually take
drugs for enjoyment and often continue to take them, or return to use,
because, for them, the benefits outweigh the misery caused (Mullen
and Hammersley, 2006). Looking only at misery inclines people to
assume that drug users are crazy - otherwise why use? This leads to
two serious fallacies: that drug users are not responsible for their
actions and that they are fundamentally different from `normal'
people, who use only selected substances such as alcohol, in respon-
sible(ish) ways. Drugs can indeed damage health. However, neither
heroin nor cocaine themselves harm health as much as alcohol or
tobacco, although the related lifestyle can be appalling, particularly if
it involves drug injecting and poverty (see, for example, Neale, 2000).
Fourth, drugs rarely turn law-abiding citizens into thieves. Most
drug users who steal to buy drugs had acquired the skills to steal
before they used drugs (see Bennett and Holloway, 2005a, 111-26).
Not surprisingly their families may be unaware of this, unless, as
sometimes happens, they abetted it. If drug users have no criminal
skills then they usually make incompetent thieves and are caught
quickly. Imagine, could you raise 70 (throughout I assume 1 =
$1=0.70) or more a day by stealing, starting tomorrow because you
just happen to have become dependent for the first time?
A related difficulty, rarely considered, is that, while drug use has
risen in the UK, so crime, other than certain types of violent crime,
has fallen in the British Crime Survey. If drug use and crime had more

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Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
5
stereotypically risen together, then politicians would not have hesi-
tated to force the `obvious' causal link. So, as drug use has risen while
crime fell, drugs clearly prevent crime! There are reasonable explana-
tions of this (temporarily) obvious fact.
* Intoxicated people make poor criminals.
* Some drugs such as cannabis and the psychedelics have neuropsy-
chopharmacological effects that discourage crime.
* Cannabis makes people `mellow' and relaxed.
* People really wasted on drugs cannot offend at that time.
* Drug use tends to reduce alcohol use, which is definitely related to
some types of crime and disorder.
* Some drug-using subcultures are less criminogenic than the norm.
Fifth, some dependent heroin or cocaine users do indeed steal a lot to
buy drugs, and they can be responsible for a great number of crimes.
Others do not. Trying to work out why is a central problem for this
book. Another central problem is to decide how much crime is caused
by drug use. This is too complicated to go into yet, but jumping to the
simplest and most appealing answer, that drugs cause a lot of crime,
is like taking the easy guess in an arithmetic test to save doing the hard
calculations - it does not make the guess correct. This book will intro-
duce you to both the statistical assumptions about the drugs-crime
relationship and the conceptual assumptions underlying it. Both are
equally important. This book is about drugs and crime, with the
emphasis on drugs and a focus on crime only insofar as it is suppos-
edly (or really) related to drugs.
Finally, Blunkett compares drug dealing to pyramid selling.
Pyramid selling often involves selling a product, but more importantly
selling franchises to sell the product. There are fewer people who will
participate than you might think, and unless you are near the top of
the pyramid this does not work; a town can support only so many
sellers of domestic cleaning products or jewellery, or even of drugs.
However, there is a huge market for illegal drugs, which is one of
the world's largest industries (Castells, 1998, 166-205; RSA, 2007),
rivalling the weapons trade. The drugs market is demand led, and
dealers do not actively have to recruit new customers. Indeed some
dealers retire because they are sick of being hassled by keen customers
day and night. It is usually new users that turn each other on, often
despite the dire warnings of more seasoned and more dependent users
(Hunt and Chambers, 1976), which may include some local drug
sellers.

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6
Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
Everyday thinking about drugs and crime
This deconstruction of Blunkett's rhetoric illustrates how society
tends to care about drugs and crime with inaccurate and exaggerated
fear and concern, which is widely taken for fact. Another central ques-
tion for this book is to understand why those fears and concerns exist
and are so powerful that they are quite resistant to rebuttal by evi-
dence, facts or reasoned arguments. When I tell laypeople what I
study, they generally have strong beliefs about drugs and crime that
they are happy to put to me as the correct answers. The following are
some of the common prejudices I hear.
Society is too soft on drug users.
Drugs should all be made legal to get rid of the problem.
Heroin is extremely addictive.
Cocaine is extremely dangerous.
Drug dealers should be killed and then punished for a long time (to
compound a number of prejudices).
Cannabis is completely harmless.
Cannabis is extremely dangerous because it leads to other drugs.
I know a person who had the terrible experience of being the victim of
a crime done by a drug user; he or she was terrified, consequently
drugs are evidently very bad.
Drug problems are all caused by . . . (insert the ethnic minority or other
disliked social group of your choice).
Over twenty years, the candidates for blame I have heard include blacks,
Chinese, Glaswegians (heard in Edinburgh; for non-Scots insert two
local rival cities of your choice), Arabs, the IRA, the UDA (both in news
items from Belfast at different times), the government, doctors, the
United States government and the CIA. Perhaps inevitably al-Qaida
were linked to drug trafficking as early as 2003 (MarineIog.com, 2003),
although such links are largely circumstantial (Transform, 2001).
Indeed, anyone wishing to make large profits quickly and tax free with
no questions asked, for any purpose, is likely to be tempted by drug
dealing. For, if it is not the world's largest industry, it is certainly the
world's largest industry that is completely untaxed and unregulated.
Risk
WARNING - CONTENTS MAY BE HOT
(Kenco disposable coffee cup, Great Western Rail, 2004)

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Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
7
Previous generations seemed to believe that people could drink hot
coffee without advice. Nowadays, people allegedly want their coffee
hot enough for enjoyment, but not so hot as to scald - a tricky if not
impossible balance for caterers afraid of litigation. The management
of potential risks has sometimes led to bags of peanuts labelled
`Warning - may [sic] contain nuts', swing parks without swings, all
rectal examinations taking place in front of two health-care profes-
sionals (one of each gender so all patients are equally embarrassed) to
avoid sexual harassment or allegations thereof, teachers doing drugs
education required to refer any pupil mentioning their own drug use
to the head teacher, all metal sharpish objects being banned from air
travel, and parents being worried about taking pictures of their chil-
dren nude. Risk management is usually well intentioned, but can have
strange consequences.
There are a number of serious points (see Adams, 1995, and
chapter 6). First, definitions of risks that are worth managing vary
from place to place, so people do not agree. Second, the information
needed to calculate what the risks of harm really are is always incom-
plete and is always difficult and often impossible to obtain, so people
have to guess. Third, making things seem less risky can cause people
to behave more dangerously. If coffee is routinely labelled `hot' then
the server doesn't have to bother warning the customer if the cup
seems unusually hot, and liability is passed to the customer; if the
swing park has a padded floor, then children jump from higher up
because landing might hurt less. Fourth, developed societies are
increasingly centralizing risk, security and safety, moving away from a
`modernist' view that innovation, novelty and technology are gener-
ally good. Since Beck (1992) identified these trends, they have
intensified. For example, around 80 per cent of UK citizens now
favour spying on terrorist suspects and detaining them without trial
(National Centre for Social Research, 2007).
In this cultural context, drugs and crime are useful for policy
makers because disliking drugs and crime might unify us and divert
attention from more problematic and complex changes that have
occurred over the past thirty years. These include a widening of the
poverty gap between richest and poorest, with resultant health and
other inequalities both globally (globalissues.org, 2007) and within
affluent countries (Luxembourg Income Study, 2000). However, it is
relevant and perhaps not coincidental that New Labour policies have
reduced child poverty in the UK across the same period as crime has
broadly fallen (Hills and Stewart, 2005). Another problematic change
has been the debasement of the educational system, partly through

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8
Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
under-funding. For example, in England and Wales A-levels are easier
than they were (The Economist, 11 August 2005). In 1993, 49 per cent
of degrees in England were upper seconds or firsts. By 2004 this figure
had risen to 58 per cent (Department for Education and Skills, 2005),
suggesting lowered standards, as the numbers attending university
also rose over that time - so presumably the mean ability fell. Yet
another change is the erosion of secure career-type employment for
most people, which has been replaced by jobs that are temporary and
often part-time, requiring both adults in a family to work to make
ends meet securely and thus making it difficult for people to be full-
time parents (Ermisch and Francesconi, 2001).
An additional headache for national policy makers is that the power
of nation states is diminishing in the world against the rise of global
capitalist organizations, among which it is sensible to include orga-
nized crime and drug trafficking (Castells, 1998). Actually, it may
be old fashioned to talk of `drug trafficking', because increasingly
trafficking in illegal cargo has become a global industry that will trans-
port anything from a stolen kidney to shiploads of hazardous waste,
to fake designer goods for street markets (Naim, 2005). The many
skills required for trafficking may have been honed supplying drugs,
but they can be used to conceal and ship anything. Crime is a more
perennial problem, but it too is influenced by major social inequali-
ties (Chamlin and Cochrane, 2005; Baron, 2006). It is unclear
whether politicians can do anything about the changes over the past
thirty years and whether the public want them to. Drugs and crime
concerns are diversionary activities that unify us against these `incon-
trovertible' dangers, rather than leaving us to worry too much about
where our society is taking us in terms of inequality, exploitation, fear-
fulness and ignorant consumerism. This perhaps applies even more
so to policy makers, who may be loath to concede impotency and
difficulty foreseeing the global future.
Pragmatic realism
The idea that drug abuse and crime are socially constructed phe-
nomena is threatening or incomprehensible to many people. Both
clearly exist and are clearly related. I do not accept that the universe
is constructed entirely from discourse, but I do accept the much
weaker but more reasonable suggestion that all our thinking about and
understanding of the universe is constructed from discourse of one
sort or another. That is, the real world surely exists independently of

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Constructing the Problem of Drugs and Crime
9
our attempts to understand it, and there is a convincing philosophical
argument to this effect (Husserl, 1977), but there are no guaranteed
methods for finding out `the facts' or `the truth' of the real world. This
approach to research can be called `weak social constructionism' or
`realism' (Harre, 1970; Bhaskar, 1997), but to confuse things other
philosophical positions are also called `realism'. The Bhaskar and
Harre form I will call `pragmatic realism': I do not want to abandon
the idea of a real world independent of our discourse, because then
there would be no point researching it, but I do want to abandon the
idea that scientific or other research methods of any kind guarantee
truthful knowledge of the real world.
The topics of drugs and crime are weakly socially constructed
throughout and aspects of our understanding are strongly socially
constructed; some drugs and crime `problems' may not exist at all -
the anticipated crack cocaine epidemic in the UK in the 1990s being
one example.
There is considerable resistance by policy makers and the media to
acknowledging any form of social constructionism, because `spin' -
managing discourse about events - is a main tool of their trades.
Therefore it is often very difficult to show which concerns and prob-
lems are entirely illusory without being attacked for it. More widely, the
management of information is a potent form of social power (Douglas
and Wildavsky, 1983) - perhaps the only fundamental form of power
in addition to raw violence (Galbraith, 1985). Scientists, health-care
professionals and criminal justice professionals also wield information
as power, so are also resistant to social constructionism. Of course,
appreciating that social constructionism is accurate is itself power, but
of a rather lame variety, as it leads to uncertainty about what to do,
which in turn often causes social constructionists to be passed over in
favour of those willing to present themselves as more certain. People
readily confuse a person's confidence with their knowledge, hence their
power. Some people who understand social constructionism very well
choose a positivistic presentation of knowledge. The most extreme
form of social constructionism, which is often called postmodernism,
poses a threat to science because it proposes that all accounts/
discourses/texts compete equally. This may be an account of how con-
temporary societies tend to work, but it should not diminish the power
of expertise, including science. For example, the discourse of some
newspaper leader writers is unlikely to rehabilitate anyone from
offending or substance dependence, whereas psychological and psy-
choanalytic discourse can. Architects are not generally encouraged to
abandon engineering principles for postmodern playfulness.

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