ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 has shown that copious amounts of research effort have been invested in examining the links between drug use and crime. It also showed that some effort has also been invested in tracking the changing nature and extent of drug use in modern societies, for example, the last chapter also discussed the work of Howard Parker and colleagues which has provided detailed descriptions of the changing nature of recreational drug use in Britain. However, notwithstanding Parker’s work which has sought to explain the ‘normalisation’ of ‘recreational’ drug use in modern societies, we have so far come across precious little work that has sought to theoretically understand (verstehen) why ‘problematic’ drug use occurs in deprived urban areas and how it is linked to crime. Hunt and Barker (2001) argue that this is because most criminological research is conceptually limited and therefore tends to decontextualise drug use from the social situations within which it emerges and proliferates. Bean (2002), on the other hand, argues that this is because ‘[t]here is little by way of trying to establish links with established sociological theory or other theoretical propositions. Only a very small number of theories have been offered ... What is interesting about these models is how little they are connected to the main theories of the sociology of deviance. They seem to have developed outside mainstream deviance sociology ... For example, control theory is not mentioned, nor is labelling or differential association theory’.
