ABSTRACT
Drug use is now ‘normalised’ across a wide range of social groups in modern societies (Williams and Parker 2001; Parker et al 2002; Duff 2005). This means that most people below the age of 50 have now tried drugs and that large numbers of people regularly use drugs (Pearson 2001; Williams and Parker 2001; Parker et al 2002). Further, the majority of the population appear to think that there is little wrong with the use of drugs, even cocaine and LSD, so long as they are taken within ‘sensible’ limits which they tend to be, for example at weekends (Parker et al 2002). Indeed, most users of illicit drugs have otherwise conforming social profiles (Williams and Parker 2001; Pearson 2001). However, some illicit drug users do not have such conforming social profiles. These users tends to live in deprived urban areas (Parker et al 1998) and have involvements in crime which, the state has long claimed, is connected with their need to support their drug ‘addictions’ (Bean 2002). This chapter is concerned with this ‘official view’ of the drugscrime problematic and, in particular, the extent to which social research has been implicated in the problematisation of drug use by certain sections of the population. The chapter begins by charting the nature and extent of drug use in modern societies. This highlights how drug use by people living in deprived urban areas, or working class people more generally, has been problematised for its relation with acquisitive crime (Helmer 1977). This problematisation of the link between drugs and crime is, of course, a product of the political discourse from which it originates rather than a real or necessary empirical relationship. This will become more and more apparent as the book progresses.
