Drug Subcultures and Crime - Subcultural Theory

Drug subcultures and crime examines how groups organized around the acquisition, distribution, and use of illegal drugs develop distinct normative systems, status hierarchies, and patterns of criminal involvement that connect classical subcultural theory to the specific dynamics of drug markets and drug-using communities. Building on Cloward and Ohlin’s original retreatist subcultural type and extended through decades of subsequent ethnographic drug research, this article examines how drug subcultures form and organize internal status, how participation in drug subcultures relates to broader criminal offending, and what this body of research contributes to the Subcultural Theory tradition.

Introduction

Cloward and Ohlin’s original formulation of the retreatist subculture treated drug use primarily as a withdrawal response among youth who had failed to secure status within either legitimate society or the criminal and conflict subcultures available to their more successful peers, framing the retreatist as a “double failure” whose drug involvement represented resignation rather than active pursuit of an alternative status system. Subsequent ethnographic drug research substantially revised this picture, documenting that drug subcultures, far from representing passive withdrawal, typically possess elaborate normative structures, argot, status hierarchies, and career pathways of their own, closely paralleling the organizational features documented within gang and other criminal subcultures.

Sutherland’s differential association framework and the broader cultural-transmission tradition also proved directly applicable to drug subcultures, since becoming a regular drug user, as Howard Becker’s classic study demonstrated, typically requires a social learning process in which novices are taught not only where to obtain drugs but how to recognize and interpret the drug’s effects and how to derive pleasure from an experience that is often physically unpleasant on first exposure, a process requiring sustained interaction with, and instruction from, more experienced subcultural members rather than resulting from individual pharmacological response alone.

This article traces the theoretical evolution of drug subculture research from Cloward and Ohlin’s retreatist framework through Becker’s social-learning account and subsequent ethnographic drug-market research, examines the internal organization and status systems of drug subcultures, and reviews empirical evidence on the relationship between drug subculture involvement and broader criminal offending.

From Retreatism to Active Subcultural Participation

Howard Becker’s 1953 study of marijuana users directly challenged the retreatist framing by demonstrating that becoming a regular user was an active, socially learned process rather than a passive symptom of prior failure, requiring novices to learn proper technique for producing the drug’s effects, to learn to recognize those effects once produced, since the unfamiliar physical sensations of intoxication are not automatically interpreted as pleasurable, and to learn to define the resulting sensations as enjoyable through interaction with experienced users who modeled and reinforced a positive interpretation (Becker, 1953).

This sequential model of subcultural socialization, becoming willing, learning technique, learning perception, and learning positive definition, established drug use as a genuinely subcultural phenomenon requiring active teaching and social reinforcement rather than a straightforward pharmacological response available to any user regardless of social context, a finding with substantial implications for how criminologists subsequently understood both initiation into drug use and the broader process of subcultural recruitment across offense types (Becker, 1953; Akers, 1998).

Later ethnographic research on heroin and crack cocaine subcultures extended this active-participation model further, documenting elaborate informal economies, specialized argot for drugs, equipment, and market roles, and status systems rewarding skill, reliability, and business acumen among dealers, directly paralleling the status structures Cloward and Ohlin had associated with the criminal subculture rather than the passive withdrawal they had associated with retreatism (Fagan, 1989; Bourgois, 1995).

Status, Roles, and Social Organization Within Drug Subcultures

Drug subcultures typically develop differentiated internal role structures separating users from dealers, and further differentiating dealers by position within a market’s supply chain, from low-level street sellers to mid-level distributors to higher-level suppliers, with status generally increasing with position in this hierarchy and with demonstrated business competence, reliability in honoring debts and agreements, and capacity to manage the substantial risks of arrest and violence inherent in illegal drug commerce (Fagan, 1989; Bourgois, 1995).

Philippe Bourgois’s ethnographic study of crack dealers in East Harlem documented how participants in the drug subculture often explicitly framed their involvement in entrepreneurial terms, drawing direct comparisons between drug dealing and legitimate small business, and expressing frustration at blocked access to legitimate employment that paid comparably or offered comparable autonomy and respect, a framing that connected drug subcultural participation directly to Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity logic even as it substantially complicated the passive “double failure” retreatist image (Bourgois, 1995).

Gender roles within drug subcultures have also received sustained ethnographic attention, with Lisa Maher’s study of a Brooklyn drug market documenting how women’s participation was frequently structured by gendered market roles offering less income and status than roles typically available to men, alongside heightened vulnerability to sexual exploitation and violence within the drug economy, findings that connect drug subculture research directly to the broader literature on gender within criminal subcultures more generally (Maher, 1997; Miller, 2001).

Drug Subcultures, Crime, and the Broader Offending Relationship

Research on the relationship between drug subculture involvement and broader criminal offending has generally supported a bidirectional and mutually reinforcing pattern rather than a simple causal sequence running only from drug use to crime or only from crime to drug use, with heavy drug involvement increasing both the economic pressure to generate funds through illegal means and the practical opportunities for criminal involvement created by embeddedness in illegal drug markets, while pre-existing criminal involvement in turn increases exposure to drug-using and drug-dealing peer networks (Goldstein, 1985).

Paul Goldstein’s influential tripartite framework distinguished psychopharmacological violence, resulting directly from a drug’s physiological effects on behavior; economic-compulsive violence, committed to fund drug purchases; and systemic violence, arising from the disputes, territorial conflicts, and enforcement mechanisms inherent to operating in an illegal, unregulated market, a distinction that remains widely used in contemporary research seeking to disaggregate the several distinct mechanisms linking drugs to violent crime (Goldstein, 1985).

Systemic violence in particular connects drug subculture research directly to gang and honor-based violence research more broadly, since disputes over drug-market territory, debts, and reputation within the illegal market are frequently resolved through the same informal, extralegal mechanisms, and governed by comparable honor and respect norms, documented within gang subcultures generally, since drug-market participants cannot rely on formal legal institutions to enforce contracts or resolve disputes and must instead maintain reputations for reliability and willingness to use force (Goldstein, 1985; Anderson, 1999).

Drug Subcultures and the Legal and Policy Environment

The normative structure and organizational form of drug subcultures have proven highly sensitive to the surrounding legal and enforcement environment, with periods of intensified drug-law enforcement generally associated with increased market violence, as competing sellers lose access to legal dispute-resolution mechanisms and instead rely more heavily on the threat and use of force to protect territory, enforce debts, and deter informants, a pattern extensively documented during the crack cocaine era of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Blumstein, 1995).

Comparative and historical research on drug policy has also documented substantial variation in drug subcultural organization across different regulatory regimes, with markets for substances subject to less aggressive criminalization or partial legalization generally exhibiting less systemic violence and more stable, less clandestine organizational forms than markets for substances subject to the most intensive enforcement, a pattern consistent with Goldstein’s systemic-violence mechanism and suggesting that much of the violence associated with drug subcultures reflects the specific conditions of illegality rather than pharmacological properties of the substances themselves (Reuter & Haaga, 1989; Blumstein, 1995).

Conclusion

Drug subculture research substantially revised Cloward and Ohlin’s original retreatist framework, demonstrating through Becker’s foundational study and subsequent ethnographic drug-market research that drug use and drug distribution constitute active, socially organized subcultural participation, complete with elaborate role structures, status hierarchies, and informal governance mechanisms, rather than passive withdrawal by individuals who had failed within other criminal or conventional pursuits.

Contemporary research on the drug-crime relationship, formalized most influentially through Goldstein’s tripartite psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive, and systemic framework, continues to connect drug subcultural participation to broader patterns of criminal offending and violence, reinforcing subcultural theory’s foundational insight that illegal markets, like legal ones, generate their own internal norms, status competitions, and informal enforcement mechanisms with direct consequences for criminal behavior.

References and Further Reading

Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Northeastern University Press.
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton.
Becker, H. S. (1953). Becoming a marihuana user. American Journal of Sociology, 59(3), 235-242.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.
Blumstein, A. (1995). Youth violence, guns, and the illicit-drug industry. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86(1), 10-36.
Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge University Press.
Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. Free Press.
Curtis, R., & Wendel, T. (2000). Toward the development of a typology of illegal drug markets. Crime Prevention Studies, 11, 121-152.
Fagan, J. (1989). The social organization of drug use and drug dealing among urban gangs. Criminology, 27(4), 633-670.
Goldstein, P. J. (1985). The drugs/violence nexus: A tripartite conceptual framework. Journal of Drug Issues, 15(4), 493-506.
Hunt, D. (1990). Drugs and consensual crimes: Drug dealing and prostitution. Crime and Justice, 13, 159-202.
Johnson, B. D., Golub, A., & Fagan, J. (1995). Careers in crack, drug use, drug distribution, and nondrug criminality. Crime & Delinquency, 41(3), 275-295.
Levitt, S. D., & Venkatesh, S. A. (2000). An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang’s finances. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(3), 755-789.
Maher, L. (1997). Sexed work: Gender, race, and resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. Clarendon Press.
Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. Oxford University Press.
Padilla, F. (1992). The gang as an American enterprise. Rutgers University Press.
Preble, E., & Casey, J. J. (1969). Taking care of business: The heroin user’s life on the street. International Journal of the Addictions, 4(1), 1-24.
Reuter, P., & Haaga, J. (1989). The organization of high-level drug markets: An exploratory study. RAND Corporation.
Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.
Sutter, A. G. (1966). The world of the righteous dope fiend. Issues in Criminology, 2(2), 177-222.
Waldorf, D., Reinarman, C., & Murphy, S. (1991). Cocaine changes: The experience of using and quitting. Temple University Press.
Zinberg, N. E. (1984). Drug, set, and setting: The basis for controlled intoxicant use. Yale University Press.