ABSTRACT
This chapter will begin with an analysis of this exaggeration of the scale of drug-related crime. It is usually said that there are three types of link from drugs to crime: psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive and systemic. This chapter will go on to examine this ‘tripartite framework’ (Goldstein 1985; Goldstein et al. 1989). It will argue that – in similar ways to the examinations of health inequalities discussed in the previous chapter – it underemphasizes the importance of the social in determining the scale and distribution of drug-related harms. Looked at closely, the tripartite framework and many of the studies that have inherited its blinkered approach to the drug-crime link fail to match up to the complex social reality that is increasingly visible through the work of sociologists and anthropologists. This chapter then develops an alternative concept of the link between drugs and crime: the idea that both are instances of a process of subterranean structuration. This concept suggests that drug use and offending are linked together by powerful forces of mutual attraction for people who have been relegated to the underside of late modern employment and consumption. People from all walks of life may journey into damaging patterns of drug use. The combination of inequality and consumerism means that the link between drugs and crime is much more likely among people who suffer from relative
poverty. If we are to break the drug-crime link, we will need to reduce social inequality.
