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Inconvenient friendship: How successful cocaine dealers manage social obligations

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  • David Crawford

Abstract

Based on life history interviews with successfully retired drug dealers, this article examines opportunities and challenges in the suburban underground economy. “Friendship” is key. Suburban drug dealing occurs exclusively through networks of friends, kin, and the acquaintances thereof. Friends are functionally necessary for the suburban illegal drug business but also economically inconvenient in that they require sharing drugs, spending time, “hanging out,” and “partying.” Friends represent “transaction costs” in conventional economic terms. The ambivalence produced by this, in profiting from friends and mixing sociality and commerce, is best understood via insights from economic anthropology, preeminently Marcel Mauss. For Mauss, gifts and self‐interest, generosity and profit, are, and ought to be, conceptually inseparable. Dealers vividly demonstrate this entanglement.

Suggested Citation

  • David Crawford, 2021. "Inconvenient friendship: How successful cocaine dealers manage social obligations," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(2), pages 259-272, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:8:y:2021:i:2:p:259-272
    DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12212
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. David Crawford, 2016. "Suburban Drug Dealing: A Case Study in Ambivalent Economics," Research in Economic Anthropology, in: The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations, volume 36, pages 197-219, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    2. Clay Darcy, 2020. "Men and the Drug Buzz: Masculinity and Men’s Motivations for Illicit Recreational Drug Use," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 25(3), pages 421-437, September.
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    Cited by:

    1. Rahul Oka, 2021. "Introducing an anthropology of convenience," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(2), pages 188-207, June.

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