ABSTRACT
Illegal drug markets are shadowy, subterranean enterprises that are not readily accessible to law abiding citizens, researchers or the police. The chapter presents the results of interviews with 17 male flexers in a Toronto locale with an active street drug market. Compared to poor, homeless crack users, middle class users have many other activities and demands competing with drug use and often choose them over drugs. Crack addiction appears more likely to have reinforced or intensified, rather than launched, flexer's deviant trajectory. Central to an understanding of their embeddedness in a deviant lifestyle is flexer's sense of addiction to crack cocaine. With nothing to compete with crack, it is hardly surprising that middle-class routes out of addiction - treatment, rehabilitation, education, jobs, family support - have little relevance to the men. Flexers are ignored or arrested, neither of which events addresses their drug use or their lifestyle, but rather serves to amplify their deviance through further stigmatization and criminalization.
