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This article employs a range of sources to critically explore the role of children and young people in county lines drug dealing, the potential harms they are exposed to and the difficulties of protecting them. As county lines centre upon the movement and exploitation of vulnerable peoples, we utilise the human trafficking literature for further insights into the dynamics of county lines and current policy responses. The article concludes by discussing the challenges of safeguarding young people, particularly that over-worked and under-resourced frontline practitioners can experience difficulties identifying the vulnerability of young people caught up in county lines, particularly beneath their tough exteriors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug use, like much criminality, is often explored in relation to the journey into adulthood. Though young people are understood to commonly 'grow out' of crime, protracted transitions from adolescence into adulthood have brought about a new developmental phase where many young people are freer to engage in drug-related leisure and other forms of subterranean play in a period of extended adolescence. In this article, we look to this phase with focus upon those engaged in full time higher education and explore the extent to which entry into university and 'studenthood' enables particular changes in levels of involvement in recreational drug use and supply. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews undertaken with mainly 'traditional' undergraduate university students in South West England, this article seeks to explore the ways in which the structural circumstances of the university environment can produce favourable conditions for 'turning points', where university students transition into regular drug use and 'social supply'. It is argued that the university can be understood as a specific 'risk environment' where certain cultural and environmental attributes including distance from guardians, the interconnected nature of the student populace, and financial insecurity can ultimately provide facilitative conditions for transitions into drug supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policing of local drug markets in England often takes the form of specific, high-profile, crackdown operations which themselves are mostly a generic, periodic response to particular criminality. Drawing on Innes' (2004) concept of 'control signals' and Edelman's (1985) notion of 'symbolic policy', we argue that 'symbolic policing' relates to activity that is principally about achieving symbolic aims - 'being seen to be doing something' rather than preventing or solving crime. This article, focusing on police crackdown operations on heroin and crack cocaine 'dealers' in three English urban areas, considers the meanings of such operations, how they work, and in relation to local suppliers suggests they may in fact have counterproductive enforcement outcomes whilst still achieving symbolic objectives. It is concluded that generic crackdown operations at the level of local drug markets are unhelpfully insensitive to local conditions and that, in certain circumstances, they can be antithetical to more considered enforcement and public health aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of user-dealing has largely been explored within criminology in conjunction with the ‘drug–crime’ link or with a focus on ethnography and subculture. Whereas it is known that many users of drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine engage in small-scale supply as a way of generating revenue, less is known about the particular interplay of social context and choice that leads them to pick this income-generating activity over other potential options. Contributing to a burgeoning literature, this article explores the constrained choices of user-dealers with reference to Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ (1977). Through locating stories of failure in user-dealer narratives, we utilize this novel approach in criminology, illuminating the importance of working with all of the interrelated concepts of habitus, field and capital in appreciating user-dealing as ‘practice’. It is argued that application of this framework affords the previously unharnessed opportunity to use Bourdieusian theory to understand notions of culpability when sentencing this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Describes how the relative normalisation of recreational drugusein the UK has been productive of, and fused with, the relatively normalised and non-commercial socialsupplyof recreational drugs.Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 60 social suppliers of recreational drugs in two studies (involving a student populationn = 30 and general population samplen = 30). Respondents were recruited via purposive snowball sampling and local advertising.Findings: Both samples provided strong evidence of the normalised supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of friendship and close social networks. Many social suppliers described “drift” into social supply and normalised use was suggested to be productive of supply relationships that both suppliers and consumers regard as something less than “real” dealing in order to reinforce their preconceptions of themselves as relatively non-deviant. Some evidence for a broader acceptance of social supply is also presented.Conclusions: The fairly recent context of relative normalisation of recreational drug use has coalesced with the social supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of use and exchange whereby a range of “social” supply acts (sometimes even involving large amounts of drugs/money) have become accepted as something closer to gift-giving or friendship exchange dynamics within social networks rather than dealing proper. To some degree, there is increasing sensitivity to this within the criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A concept of 'social supply' has emerged in the UK that describes drug transactions that are almost exclusively to friends and acquaintances and that are non-commercially motivated. Social suppliers are increasingly understood not to be drug dealers 'proper' and many argue that the criminal justice system should consider and process them differently to commercially motivated suppliers. Recent (2012) changes to sentencing guidelines in England and Wales that have attempted to accommodate this will continue to struggle to deal with social supply however due to a continued reliance on how culpability is defined. This article explores the rationale for understanding social supply activities as a specific form of supply and a new (lesser) separate offence and also outlines a rationale for extending the concept to one of 'minimally commercial supply' something that explicitly accommodates the real-life circumstance of most supply transactions and is also inclusive of addicted user-dealers of heroin/other substances whom might reasonably be seen as closer to social suppliers than to drug dealers proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]