When we think about drug dealers,
we usually either think about shady guys in dark alleys
or billionaire narco kingpins.
But beyond those media clichés,
we almost never stop to think about who these people actually are
and why they choose to sell drugs in the first place.
In this episode, we're getting inside the mind of a drug dealer.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs:
why people use them
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
Julia Buxton is a professor at the University of Manchester
who’s spent years investigating international drug supply
and how it intersects with issues of equality, race, and gender.
Julia, welcome to
Thank you for having me.
So when we talk about drug dealers,
most people would think they are either purely evil
or just in it for the money.
But your research indicates that
actually we really need to rethink these assumptions, right?
Well, it is partly for the money,
but it really depends on who’s doing the selling,
what drug it is,
and the factors that lead people into dealing
and selling drugs in the first place, which are very complex,
and we have no single kind of model of a person who sells drugs.
I think the other aspect here as well
is it’s not always necessarily for money.
A lot of the time, people are dealing drugs
also as a kind of form of security.
We’ve got a real record at the moment of people joining friendship groups
and kind of social clubs and dealer groups,
and it’s in order to reduce the risk.
So dealing can be a factor of money and motivated for monetary gain,
but also it's a kind of security.
So let's start at the street level.
How do organized crime groups go about recruiting drug dealers?
Well, again, it depends on the country.
It depends on the drug.
Huge amounts of attention at the moment
around this issue of county lines.
So county lines is seen to be this process.
It’s this use of young people to come out of major city centers,
traveling across borders, as it were, kind of regional borders in the UK,
in order to transport drugs into rural areas,
seaside communities, you know, outside of city centers.
This has been a big focus for the Conservative government,
dealing with what’s seen as being child exploitation.
And they’re classifying this
and kind of pursuing this through the concept of human slavery.
And so the whole emphasis here is that it’s based on coercion,
so coercion of young people into these kinds of activities.
Why young people?
Because usually, they’re in communities
where they’re vulnerable to that type of recruitment.
Young people are disposable.
WhatsApp and digital technologies makes it very, very easy
for younger people to come into this kind of trafficking activity
and to communicate.
They operate largely below the radar,
and they’re very, very easily replaceable.
But also, we are seeing cases now
where young people are coming into this
because they’re seeing it as a way of supplementing household incomes.
We’re coming out of a period of austerity.
People are really, really hard-pressed financially.
And this is a way, unfortunately,
of people adding to the money that's coming into the home.
As I understand it,
this emerged off the back of quite successful police operations,
and the gangs and organized crime groups
would start using kids as a buffer between them and the police.
Mm-hmm. But you see, that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?
This has emerged from police operations.
This is the whole challenge that we have here.
And this has been the record of the last 30, 40, 50 years,
since criminalization in the 1961 UN Single Convention.
And what we see is this enforcement activity.
Again, this has been the work that I’ve been doing
looking at the situation in Afghanistan,
is that when you have these enforcement activities,
they don’t shrink the drug market.
They have two effects.
Firstly, they create violence.
Why do they create violence?
Because when you take down a crime group
or when you have a major seizure of drugs,
you leave a vacuum.
And you have then competing groups that are challenging each other
to control that vacuum.
The second problem when you have this kind of enforcement activity
is that it has the effect of dissipating the drug trade.
County lines, in my view,
is very much a product of successful law enforcement,
as you’ve said, in some of these major urban areas,
but with a net effect of simply dissipating the drug traffic
out into new markets.
And how have you seen similar dynamics of child exploitation
in your work in, say, South America?
The most significant case,
which is frequently referred to here, is probably Brazil,
where you’ve had these gangs, the First Capital Command,
the Red Command,
which basically control the favelas.
They control communities.
They control societies,
many of these kind of major urban centers of São Paulo and Rio.
And they have the ability, the influence, and the capacity
to pressure young people to come into drug trafficking.
And that can start at a very young age,
ten, 11, 12 years old.
And the drug trade is another manifestation of
focusing on the most disposable elements of society
in order to carry out highly lucrative activities.
And ultimately, what happens is that
young people become institutionalized into these gang organizations,
into these structures,
because these organizations give them, as we said before,
resilience, networks, stability, an income.
And it’s very, very difficult to get out of those networks.
And in particular where law enforcement and policing
are not seen as being somebody that you can turn to for support
or turn to for help.
So is that like if you’re a 14-year-old kid
on the streets of Juárez or Chicago or Birmingham,
you would be attracted to joining one of these gangs
or working for them as a drug carrier
almost for self-protection, for security?
Yep, that’s a really good way of seeing it.
There’s been a lot of focus on knives and on guns
and on these kinds of contemporary manifestations of youth violence.
But the reality is, yes, they are there as a form of protection,
but ultimately it's not protection
because it also increases massively your vulnerability, doesn't it,
to that kind of gang-related violence.
But I think the key thing here
is to really focus on the types of challenges that young people face.
Particularly, the UK is a really, really good example here.
The kind of cuts that we’ve seen over the last ten years,
you know, £1 billion cut from child and family services,
does have an impact.
These kinds of impacts are massive.
So we’ve lost that social cohesion
that gives young people identity,
gives them this kind of self-belief, this ambition,
and it completely skews it.
There's that total vulnerability,
which I think austerity bears a huge responsibility for.
So if young people are looking to gangs
for that kind of protection and security,
then I think that’s a tremendous failing of the state.
So that same 14-year-old kid,
if he didn’t think that he had an opportunity to get a job,
or there was no economic advancement available to him
in a legitimate economy,
he’d go, “Well, I’ll become a drug runner then.”
Drug running does become an avenue.
It becomes an opportunity
in a world that seems to be full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs
and very limited other opportunities.
So I think we have to look at the coercion
and the concerns around coercion.
But at the same time, what we don’t want to do
is create a narrative that all young people
are essentially drug running.
These are the kind of stereotypes that are being built, aren't they?
Because ultimately, the way that we are responding to this
is criminalizing young people.
It’s not addressing the social context
of their involvement in this kind of criminal activity.
I guess it kind of creates a gray area
between perpetrator and victim, right?
Because some kid can be coerced into becoming a drug carrier,
then he rises through the ranks and ends up recruiting other kids.
So he’s been exploited but then exploits others.
If somebody is recruited into these kind of activities at age 13 or 14,
and by 2021,
they’re recruiting the new generation of young children into it,
that, to me, is a policy failure.
Nothing has broken that up, so these cycles continue.
So yes, we do have these crossovers,
but that’s also because we have this parallel informal economy
which is allowed to subsist and embed
and becomes a viable option for people.
So what you have is the illicit drug market
creating these very rich, powerful gangs
who then step into the role
that the state doesn’t fulfill in these communities.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And in many respects,
these organizations play a kind of Robin Hood role,
which is not to kind of romanticize or to glamorize.
It's just the reality of life.
I mean, when we talk about getting inside the mind of a drug dealer,
in that case, from what you just said,
we’re talking about getting in the mind of very young people.
It can be. Of course, it can be.
But not all of the drug dealing problems
are just linked to these issues of youth alienation, austerity,
under-investment in youth services.
This is a national problem.
It's an international problem.
I think that drug trafficking, drug supply activities
are seen to be low risk.
It’s a complete myth.
It comes with high levels of risk,
high levels of violence, high levels of coercion.
And again, it depends on what the drug is.
So if we’re talking about something which is low volume but high value--
-Like cocaine. -Like cocaine.
Then obviously that’s going to be quite a lucrative activity
to be involved in,
on the assumption that,
as the person who is involved in that supply activity,
you’re actually receiving
quite a substantial amount of money as payment.
And that’s not always the case.
How does it work?
Well, because young people--
For example, if you’re carrying cocaine across county lines
into different parts of the country,
you’re not obviously going to be receiving a substantial payment
relative to the value of that drug that’s being trafficked.
The money, as we know, is made at the top end.
So if you’re that kid doing county lines
or selling on the streets of Chicago or Juárez,
you’re passing thousands and thousands of dollars or pounds
up the chain to your boss,
and you’re actually receiving, what, like a few hundred bucks?
Yep. But then the challenge is that ultimately those few hundred bucks
do come with the provision of security.
They come with that kind of prestige
that might be attached to that kind of informal activity.
And a hundred, a couple of hundred dollars,
couple of hundred pounds,
is actually more than you’d probably be getting
if you’re working in a fast food joint.
OK, so aside from making money,
I guess the main thing that most dealers think about
is how to avoid the cops.
What’s the role of law enforcement in all this?
The role of law enforcement, I would argue,
is actually as a driver,
a continued dynamic within these illicit drug markets.
I would argue very strongly that the challenge of incarceration,
the challenge of putting people into prison,
is that prisons essentially are graduate schools
for becoming involved in illicit activities
and criminal activities generally,
but drug-related activities and drug dealing
and drug trafficking specifically.
So what we’ve seen with the emergence of
some of the most sophisticated crime gangs globally—
the First Capital Command in Brazil is the perfect example of this—
is organizations that have grown out of prison settings
to become really serious players, political players,
in terms of power and illicit economies
in their home country environments.
Law enforcement in other country contexts,
we can look at somewhere like Mexico.
Mexico’s drug trade problem
really emerged from the complexity of policing.
And that’s not just a Mexico problem.
This is also seen as being a wider global problem,
that the resources that drug trade activities bring in,
they make it very, very easy to pay off police officers,
to pay off port officials.
I was at the Scottish Drugs Forum recently,
which was really quite fascinating because I think Scotland,
because of its very, very high drug deaths,
is trying to take a very different approach here.
[Such as] law enforcement, really trying to bring them in
as a role in terms of addressing things like overdoses.
So the Scottish police are now carrying naloxone
in order that when they attend to overdoses,
they can reverse these overdose situations.
And so that's more of a partnership.
When you said that prison is a graduate school for criminals,
that 14-year-old kid is now 17.
He ends up in prison,
and he ends up in prison with really hardened veteran criminals,
and he learns the ropes there.
It actually begins far earlier, and that’s the problem.
It’s also increasingly youth detention centers,
youth custody,
so we’re criminalizing people at a young age.
If you have this early exposure to the criminal justice processes,
you kind of develop this disdain towards policing.
You know, you see policing as the enemy.
You don't see them as somebody, you know,
as a partnership within your communities.
And Pablo Escobar was initially involved in
low-level cannabis trafficking activities, and that was where--
His first encounter with law enforcement
in Colombia, in Medellín, was because of cannabis.
So what you’re doing is you’re basically putting people
on a fast track, I would argue, to wider drug trafficking networks.
So the idea of cannabis as a gateway drug,
chemically, we know, is nonsense,
but it could be a gateway drug when you’re arrested for--
Absolutely. I think that's a really clever point.
I mean, the idea of cannabis as a gateway drug,
we now know tobacco is more like the gateway drug than cannabis.
What we did in the 1990s is that we stopped--
Customs and borders stopped drugs,
cannabis coming in from Morocco and Afghanistan.
That had very low THC content— 2, 3 percent.
And we stopped that coming in.
And that was seen as being a real victory in the war on drugs
in the UK in the 1990s.
What was the impact of that?
Well, people began domestic manufacture within the UK,
and they were using hydroponic growing technologies,
genetically modified cannabis seeds.
And the result of this was to create a drug market here
which is dominated by this very, very high-potency,
high-THC, skunk-type cannabis.
And when we look at our clichés and stereotypes about drug dealers,
about what the drug dealer is,
those stereotypes are not applied equally to different populations.
What we know historically...
is that overwhelmingly the focus of policing
has traditionally been on,
unfortunately, minority and ethnic communities.
And so what that has enabled is this over-policing of communities
that are predominantly Black or predominantly Asian.
You know, we saw that in Birmingham. We saw that in London.
We've seen that in Manchester in the 1990s, the 1980s.
You know, the whole idea of the yardie.
It’s back to this idea that the dealer is somebody who’s evil,
somebody who’s scary,
and is an external threat that comes into your community
or comes into your country.
And this goes right back 100 years.
It was the Chinese opium dealers.
It was the Mexican marijuana smugglers.
So we also tend to think of drug dealers as men.
But there are many women involved in this trade as well.
How do the gender roles play out?
Historically, we have completely neglected the role of women
in drug use and in drug supply.
It’s overwhelmingly been focused on men.
It’s been overwhelmingly focused on Black and ethnic minority men.
What we’ve seen over the last ten years
is that, even though women are a very, very, very small number
of the overall global prison population,
is that overwhelmingly women are now being incarcerated
on the basis of drug-related offenses.
80 percent of the women in the prisons of Thailand
are there on drug-related charges.
I think in the Philippines it’s around 60 percent.
Mexico, it’s around 70 percent.
Disproportionality.
So it’s really driving an increase in the global prison population,
but particularly amongst women.
We’ve got 19,000 children under the age of three
who are currently in prisons
with women who are serving for drug-related offenses.
Austerity meant that more women
were being brought into the informal economy,
the rise in the number of single female heads of household.
Literally, mums and grandmothers
selling drugs in order to send their kids to school.
It is essentially, yeah.
The argument that women’s involvement in the drug trade
is driven by financial necessity is far stronger than it is for men.
I think men become involved in the drug trade
for a whole variety of reasons,
you know, masculinities, identities, gangs.
But where we are seeing the increase in the number of women
who are involved in supply activities,
this does seem to be economic hardship which is a key driver.
And now to go to the very top of the market.
One thing I’ve never understood is why people like El Chapo Guzman—
he’s worth a billion dollars—
why doesn’t he just walk away and sit on his billion dollars?
Why does he stay in the game
and end up in maximum security prison in the States?
If you try and retire as a high-level drug dealer,
then ultimately you do risk the fact that
the political situation could change, you might be extradited.
There’s a threat of reprisals. There’s a threat of arrest.
So ultimately, maintaining your profile in that trade
enables you to maintain those networks of security
and protection around you that you’ve built up
and which enabled you to become that high-level dealer in the first place.
We see, you know, in Dubai at the moment,
what’s going on in some of these Gulf countries
in terms of these emerging now
as the new “Costa del Crime,” as it’s being called,
high-level actors seem to be moving there
because there is a reduced risk of extradition.
And this is the key thing, I think,
that keeps so many people in the trade
who arguably could retire, as it were,
is that risk that they will face
the criminal justice system at some point.
As long as you’re still in the trade,
you’re still able to kind of operate those networks of threatened reprisal
if you do face law enforcement.
So how is drug dealing changing?
One of the things which is really important
in changing the nature of dealing is dark nets.
So we’re seeing the real strengthening
of cyber-based drug transactions.
And this is something which is very much limited to
the Global North countries, to Europe and North America.
But what was fascinating during COVID
is the number of people who turned to dark nets in order to purchase drugs.
Sellers such as Cannazone just saw this boom in the number of people.
People who’d never been on dark nets before
were now buying their drugs online.
And what’s fascinating about these online drug purchases
is that it’s changing the skills and qualifications
of being a drug dealer.
Being a drug dealer on dark net markets
doesn’t require the use of violence,
you know, to enforce contracts, to ensure debts are paid.
A lot of the time, it requires things like really good marketing skills.
The dark net is an eBay for drugs, as we know.
Kind of the skills you see in the formal economy
is being applied on dark net drug markets.
And dark net drug markets,
even though they’re only a small proportion of overall global markets,
I think these are a very, very important
form of drug supply going forward.
And I think COVID and lockdown
has completely transformed the importance of cyber markets.