Illegal Drugs (Special)

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Doing “Business” in Suburban Neighbourhoods. Data on Sociohistorical Changes in the Drug Economy in Working-Class Areas. The Case of the Hauts-de-Seine Department.

Michel KOKOREFF, Université de Lille 1. Clersé-Cnrs-Ifresi

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This article concerns the role of drug trafficking in areas subject to social disaffiliation. It examines the sociohistorical processes that account for the current configuration of the drug economy in this context. Based on an ethnographic survey in Paris’s suburban housing developments and a series of biographical interviews conducted in prisons with subjects involved in various aspects of drug trafficking, the analysis covers three separate phases: the emergence of a local heroin and cocaine trade, its professionalization, and its restructuring in recent years. This study explains the social relationships built around these illicit activities. It also highlights the paradoxes inherent in local trafficking, which not only leads to a cycle of violence but also functions as an agent of social peace.   Keywords:  Drug trafficking, social disaffiliation, social relationships of drug trafficking, violence, suburbs.       In this article, we propose to examine the social mechanisms that led to the emergence and transformation of a drug economy in poor neighbourhoods.[1] Specifically, we are interested in those areas which, being seriously affected by unemployment and economic insecurity among residents, are subject to social disaffiliation.[2] The object is not to account for drug distribution networks and channels, the modus operandi and organization of street or apartment trafficking, or the division of roles and the status they imply. The object is to examine the sociohistorical processes that account for the current configuration of illicit urban markets[3] and the disruption of social relationships it involves.    This dynamic, context-based approach rests on two arguments. First, those markets have not always existed in the forms we recognize today. It was in a context of deindustrialization and labour market restructuring that drugs appeared in working-class areas.[4] However, this process, far from homogeneous, did not have the same effects everywhere.[5] It took hold in some neighbourhoods before spreading to others by osmosis. The emergence of a local drug trade, though gradual since the 1970s, has had contradictory effects: on one hand, an entire culture of the illicit has developed across several generations and been transmitted through families and peer groups, providing an alternative to segregation and disgrace;[6] and on the other, increased competition due to the rising power of drug trafficking in the 1980s has spawned a cycle of tension and violence among its key participants and, more widely, in the entire social life of those suburban developments and their environment. The succession of generations – or more properly, “demi-generations”, since it has happened every ten years – and the heterogeneity of criminal careers highlight the conflicts underlying the social relationships of drug trafficking.[7]    Second, if the illegal economy is a violence-producing machine,[8] this approach captures its social substrate and its specific forms. The paradox is that drug trafficking appears as both a pacifying factor in supposedly “sensitive” neighbourhoods and the cause of a whole range of violent behaviours. Thus, when we look at a map of the neighbourhoods where these behaviours, which are referred to as urban violence and have been making headlines for over twenty years in France, appear on a recurring basis, and compare it with a map of areas considered to be notorious drug-trafficking locations, the lack of overlap is striking. This leads to the hypothesis that the organization of trafficking with a greater drawing capacity, in the cases that concern us, depends on specific modes of social regulation. At the same time, we have to wonder whether the urban disorder caused by trafficking does not reflect a more profound social degradation in suburban neighbourhoods where it has manifested itself during that period.    The Hauts-de-Seine Department is an excellent example. What makes it so is its rich social history, the migration processes and urban policies that have shaped it over the long term, and the persistence of the drug trafficking observed there for over twenty years. It is also a good example because it is part of Paris’s inner suburbs and it provides a variety of settings, which mitigates any social determinism while highlighting processes that are not confined to local conditions.    Before analyzing these processes and their various phases, we will focus on two questions in an effort to clarify our approach: To what extent can we actually talk about a market when we refer to drug transactions? And what kind of territoriality is involved in that type of exchange?    I. Market or Territory?    Contrary to the received wisdom that drugs are everywhere and affect everyone, trafficking belongs to a type of urban spaces that Robert Ezra Park called moral areas.[9] The corollary of this spatialization of the illicit is that there exists in contemporary large cities a topology of fear. The Portuguese sociologist Luis Fernandez proposed that the journalistic expression “drug supermarket” be replaced with the concept of psychotropic territories (Fernandez, 1999). In his view, this concept permits a threefold split: to consider the participants in drug markets from a relational perspective, to describe the observed situation dynamically, and to focus on the spatial matrix that constitutes the experience of drug users. Yet we can question this concept, understood in its geographic, social and symbolic dimensions, since it tends to be confused with well-established, highly visible locations (peripheral districts or core spaces). For drug trafficking is, basically, a special social convention in which deterritorialization – of flows of commodities, wealth, men and women – is matched by reterritorialization – of market participants, selling places and their social bases. The concept of the bazaar economy, proposed by Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South, questions the very possibility of identifying crime zones precisely. The evocative value of the bazaar concept is that it alludes to a variety of individuals interacting in a marketplace where goods and services are bought and sold without regard for whether they are legal or illegal. The concept of a bazaar, as applied to contemporary large cities, entails the coexistence of legality and illegality and a permanent change in the boundaries between the two.[10] Thus we return to that dynamic which is reflected not only in the coexistence of the legal and the illegal, of employment and unemployment, but also in the disappearance of boundaries and the reappearance of barriers in our cities – barriers that are not just geographic or symbolic but also occupational through a clearly racial division of labour.[11] The drug trade: A market like any other?    Calling drug dealing a market assumes that it is subject to the general rules of business (market conditions, competition, adjustment of supply and demand, etc.). As most recent studies show, there is no homogeneous distribution system for the various products: cannabis, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, crack and so on are subject to their own specific rules and modes of operation. In the urban context that concerns us here, we find a bipolar market, with cannabis on one side and heroin and cocaine on the other. This phenomenon reflects the societal distinction between a drug that is gaining widespread acceptance – cannabis – and the drug that epitomizes dependency and degradation – heroin.[12] However, even the distribution system for each product lacks homogeneity. For example, the term cannabis trafficking can be misleading since it lumps together many forms of trafficking that have different conventions and rules. Without actually developing a typology of drug markets, which has never been done systematically,[13] some studies discern two different rationales: profit, where the dealer tries to make as much as possible from the operation, and proximity, where social relationships and connections play a part in the negotiation.[14] Moreover, this market specialization is not an established fact, as we will see later. It is belied by the existence of traffickers offering a range of products, and by the porosity of the many ways of doing business in suburban areas (dealing in brand-name clothing, consumer goods, vehicles and parts, and so on).    This is where the illicit nature of these markets comes into play. The work of law-enforcement institutions (police, gendarmerie, customs, justice) has a central role in the characterization – both legal and sociological – of this social phenomenon. This work is not without its effects on the various echelons of the drug trade (wholesalers, semi-wholesalers, street dealers, and so on). Law-enforcement strategies interact with the strategies of the traffickers through, for example, the mobility and entrenchment of trafficking. Institutional analysis of the illegal markets has clearly shown that the environment is not very transparent and the illegality of the transactions and the absence of stable networks produce great complexity and a degree of uncertainty, which results in irrational behaviour by the agents.[15] As a result, many obstacles stand in the way of measuring trafficking phenomena, enumerating the groups involved, determining their sociological profile, and carrying out field work, which – one assumes – creates a great deal of mistrust and resistance.    The specifically social dimension of the drug economy must also be taken into account. We know that the circulation of drugs does not, in itself, contribute to the destruction of social networks. On the contrary, such networks are the social condition that makes the drug trade possible, the foundation that provides a modicum of security, access to information, and the business’s ability to perpetuate itself.[16] In France in particular, surveys have shown that among young people in suburban developments there is an entire system of barter and mutual assistance, a mix of parallel economy and neighbourhood solidarity that creates a web of interdependencies, affects and practices characteristic of social interaction in the suburban.[17] In sharp contrast to the desocialized dealer, the sale of prohibited substances can be analyzed as an occupation.[18] It involves multiple roles (lookouts, steerers, sellers, suppliers, couriers, enforcers) with various duties (watching, arranging contacts, transporting, deterring, protecting). This occupation entails various apprenticeships designed to impart a range of skills that are often family-based or even community-based.[19]    This raises the question of whether there is a model drug market or just some specific patterns.[20] The porosity of the illicit markets and their vulnerability, which is the downside of their natural growth, also make one wonder what research instrument would be capable of gathering data about those processes. Territorial dimensions of drug trafficking    Methodologically, the question of the appropriate scale for observing local trafficking is critical. Should the sociology of drug trafficking be confined to producing an ethnography of urban enclaves, or should it reproduce the various scales around which the networks are built? A review of the work done in France over the past ten years reveals the shift that has occurred. Two types of locations have been studied particularly closely: drug “scenes” and other places where drugs are bought, sold and consumed (Fontaine St-Michel, Ilot-Chalon, Forum des Halles), which have emerged in Paris since the late 1970s;[21] and the suburbs, where cannabis and heroin trafficking relocated and reorganized in the late 1980s.[22] During the 1990s, a number of studies highlighted the relationships between the processes of social disaffiliation and the long-term establishment of a drug microeconomy in poor neighbourhoods. Local microstudies[23] were followed by broader approaches, first at the municipal level in cities such as Lille, Marseille and Paris,[24] and later at the departmental or interdepartmental level,[25] and there were even some studies of cross-border underground economies.[26] By highlighting the plasticity of illicit trafficking, those studies lend sociological substance to the old Chicago School idea that deviant practices occur in the interstices of urban spaces. The spread of near-boundary trafficking, as analyzed by Alain Tarrius and Lamia Missaoui, goes farther afield. It shifts the focus from urban areas and suburban neighbourhoods of ill repute to rural areas and communes where smugglers who are above suspicion because they live and work in the community are recruited.[27]    Without going that far, our approach is to observe trafficking activity in a department that very early, in the 1970s, specialized in heroin, before cannabis became prominent: the Hauts-de-Seine Department. Survey data   In the tradition of urban anthropology and symbolic interactionism, our approach was to combine different types of observations and data in order to lift the veil that surrounds illicit activities, especially drug-related activities, and remove the obstacles encountered by researchers. Thus, we brought in three types of data: ethnographic data, collected through observation in suburban areas; institutional data, taken from a corpus of court case files; and biographical data, gathered in a series of interviews conducted with both local and international traffickers and/or user-dealers.[28] For the sake of consistency and for methodological reasons, we will rely mostly on the ethnographic and biographical data.    Since the mid-1990s,[29] we have been conducting field work in a number of Hauts-de-Seine neighbourhoods. We have observed the role played by drugs in the social interactions and reputations of these neighbourhoods, the various forms that urban trafficking takes, the times and places of drug deals, the various participants and their interactions, and certain aspects of the transactions. Length of time is a critical aspect of this kind of undertaking.[30] The field work also made it possible to put these illicit practices into the proper social and cultural context. For nearly two years, we met and frequented some 200 people. Consisting largely of males aged 18 to 30 whose parents immigrated from North Africa, the group had a common socialization all its own. With regard to their involvement in deviant practices and crime, the majority of our contacts were cannabis users, while a few were heroin users. Some of them may have been involved in trafficking at some point in their lives.    The youths living in the neighbourhoods studied are far from being a homogeneous group and can be divided into three subgroups of unequal size: those who are still at school (lycée, co-op program, university in a few cases); young adults alternating between periods of activity (internships, training courses, contract employment, usually as messengers, stock handlers, customer service representatives, group leaders or mediators) and non-activity, during which they receive social assistance; and the truly disaffiliated group who have no job and receive no social assistance and are, in their words, “en galère” [down and out]. It is difficult to measure the relative size of these subgroups. The chronic instability of circumstances and the porosity of the subgroups or circles are remarkable.    The data were rounded out with about twenty interviews with various participants in the drug trade who had different positions in the trafficking operation (semi-wholesaler/retailer/users, middlemen in international networks). Most of the interviews were conducted in prison with people who in many cases were older (between 24 and 47) than the youths we met in the neighbourhoods. Some of them were repeat offenders convicted either of drug trafficking charges or of other crimes (burglary, pickpocketing, violence, etc.). We were able to meet with some of them a number of times, which made the interviews more productive. These interviews and meetings with various local trafficking participants led to the development of interpretive hypotheses not only about the arrival of drugs in poor neighbourhoods and what makes the drug economy a work in progress but also about the relationships among some of the participants, at least within the department. Our analysis will cover three communes in different parts of the department. Their identities will be kept confidential to avoid worsening the social stigma they already bear.[31]    II. Time Frames    How did drugs come to these neighbourhoods? Under what conditions did an illegal economy gain a long-term hold in this urban context?  On the basis of the data we collected, three turning points can be identified. They show both the consistency of this process over time and the variations in the way it fits into the local context.    Arrival of drugs: Phase 1    The arrival of drugs in the Hauts-de-Seine Department probably dates back to the early 1970s; for the sake of comparison, that is about ten years before they were introduced into the Lille agglomeration or the working-class neighbourhoods of Marseille. That is, in any case, the conclusion produced by a comparative analysis of interviews with both drug users and/or dealers and local participants and/or residents. Contrary to received wisdom, hashish was not very widely used until that time. Only certain groups of Moroccan origin, adults rather than young people, used it, and they did so discreetly. Of course, it may have been sold in certain cafés, but the volume was marginal, insignificant compared to the scope of subsequent trafficking. As for heroin, the white variety first arrived in temporary housing projects between 1972 and 1976, depending on the location. The colour is not simply anecdotal; it describes the local heroin market in relation to the Parisian market, which more commonly has another type of heroin (“brown”), from Pakistan or neighbouring countries.    How can we account for this process? There are a number of factors. The arrival of hard drugs took place in the context of sectoral deindustrialization and labour market restructuring. When major auto manufacturers (Simca, Citroën, Renault, etc.) closed plants or moved them from the inner suburbs of Paris to the outer suburbs, which in turn forced many small subcontractors out of business, the result was an increase in unemployment among the workers. The establishment of an early retirement plan by the social stakeholders also made it increasingly difficult for young people leaving school with only a basic education to find work. The poverty that characterized the shantytowns turned temporary housing projects and the old residential developments was compounded by the precarious economic situation evident in various indicators (mass unemployment, social transfers as a percentage of total household income, unpaid rent arrears, and so on). This represents less of a change than a continuous process, as shown by, among other things, the existence of a survival economy that predated the large-scale spread of drugs and found in it new and more lucrative opportunities.    Another important factor has to do with the effects of urban sorting[32] mechanisms. We know that telescoping between the political majority and social housing management has resulted in some neighbourhoods being made into areas where “undesirable” groups are banished and concentrated, bringing together evicted families and known offenders.[33] The Hauts-de-Seine Department is a good example of this phenomenon as well. It is a good place to observe the implicit alliance between Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) communes, which are trying to rid themselves of the “hard cases”, and Communist communes, which hope to strengthen their electoral base in working-class areas.    On the other hand, there are some external factors at play: the decline of the “French connection”, the explosion of the domestic market during the 1970s into what was initially semi-wholesaling, carried out by new participants in the market, and later became a retail operation, symbolized by fixed-location trafficking.[34]    Nevertheless, the process was not homogeneous and did not have the same effects everywhere. It also fails to provide a straightforward explanation of why a drug market arose here and not there. We must therefore take the situational effects into account. The chronology of events and the players involved were different for each neighbourhood studied. In the northern part of the department, heroin was introduced by freelancers. Instead of buying the drug at a high price in Paris, they went to Thailand or India and brought back what in those days were significant quantities (up to a kilo); later, they obtained their supplies in Holland. Later, other criminals got involved, seizing the opportunity to make money with a product that was largely unknown in working-class areas.[35] Initiated by a few French and Moroccan families that have remained well known locally, trafficking began with transactions in people’s apartments.    In other neighbourhoods, drug dealing spread through a process of internalization/ externalization. It involved taking drugs in Paris nightclubs or buying them in well-known parts of the capital. In the 1970s, heroin was extremely rare in the suburbs. The opportunity to profit from knowing a scene was viewed as an alternative to a less lucrative, more risky kind of crime. Instead of flying somewhere to buy a supply, the trick was to purchase small quantities from a semi-wholesaler in Paris and sell it in one’s own neighbourhood. For example, five grams bought for 500 francs a gram would be divided into small packets, each selling for 100 francs, which produced an estimated daily profit of 2,000 to 3,000 francs. This operation very quickly brought in a great deal of money, especially for working-class youths who grew up in poverty.    During the 1980s, small distribution networks, fed by growing international supplies, sprang up in the working-class suburbs in one form or another.[36] This led to the emergence of new categories of users. As noted in the Trautmann report, The 1970s saw the appearance of the user-dealer who gave the first hit for free, acquired a local clientele, took their orders, and largely financed his habit by selling diluted heroin locally.[37] Yet it wasn’t until much later that the law began recognizing this category; before that, user-dealers were lumped in with traffickers and sentenced to long prison terms.    It is worth noting that as this form of illicit trade flourished, it produced changes in the nature of crime and the careers of criminals. Until the 1980s, drugs were taboo in traditional criminal circles. Associated with the bourgeois world and with weaklings, drugs encountered strong opposition from gangs of youths defending their territory. As shown by eyewitness accounts recorded at the time[38] and by our own survey, delinquency (theft from parked cars, breaking into RATP [Paris transportation authority] machines, pickpocketing, petty burglary) was there before drug addiction. It also preceded the use of cannabis, which began spreading quietly among teenagers in the slums. Among the generation born in the 1960s, confinement in institutions for minors, followed by incarceration, was not uncommon. Subsequently, these individuals typically fell into a cycle consisting of alternating periods of imprisonment and release, a cycle made unbreakable by the use of hard drugs. Others, such as the thieves and robbers of the famous bande de la Banlieue Sud [southern suburbs gang], put their money into heroin. As money became harder to come by, selling heroin was seen as a way to make some easy cash. You might even call it a retraining strategy.    Ascent and professionalization of local trafficking    Phase 2 began with the rise of heroin trafficking in the 1980s. We know that heroin use spread like wildfire in a number of European countries between 1977 and 1982. The process took hold a little later in suburban neighbourhoods, as local traffickers enjoyed a boom period that probably lasted from 1986-87 to 1991-92.    How did we arrive at those dates? First, after Paris’s main drug scenes (squats, districts undergoing rehabilitation, etc.) were torn down and a strategy for reclaiming areas taken over by drug dealers (metro stations, shopping centres, etc.) was introduced in the second half of the 1980s, trafficking shifted to the working-class suburbs. Just as the strategy used by police since the 1960s to combat paedophilia may have done more harm than good, so it became public policy in the 1980s to eliminate drug trafficking in city centres and confine it to certain marginalized peripheral neighbourhoods.[39] Second, there occurred a threshold effect: the market’s growth became difficult to control. Various reprisals against the merchants of death (or at least some of them), a new emphasis for police services on suppressing local trafficking, and the initial cries of alarm to governments about the drug economy signalled the beginning of a new phase.    The rising power of local trafficking was reflected in a profound transformation of the illicit markets. There was a twofold shift at the local level: from apartment dealing to street dealing, and from trafficking by large numbers of user-dealers to trafficking organized and carried out by non-users. Though not strictly contemporaneous, these two phenomena are linked. The larger client base made for a lot of comings and goings around dealers’ homes, which made them easier to identify, first for local residents and then for police forces. Paradoxically, while the suburban area, with its codes and rules, provided anonymity to local trafficking participants, at the same time it increased the social visibility of trafficking since it was carried on in plain sight and with the full knowledge of everyone (local residents, local dealers, police officers, journalists). Yet it was only an apparent paradox, since the players and their methods of operation were changing. Trafficking was undergoing a process of professionalization, in which addicts driven by the need to finance their habit were losing control of the market.    In phase 1, according to witnesses from the period, there was no real organization. That was when it really started. I mean, it wasn’t as organized as people imagine … as it is now, for example. What’s happening now is that people who used to be on the front lines have now become really the organizers of the operation. They got bigger and moved up in the ladder. The first dealers identified by police, imprisoned and getting older, gave up the most exposed positions to the younger generations, who took all the risks in retailing, transporting and storing the merchandise and the money, and even crossing borders. In some cases, the bosses no longer even lived in the neighbourhood, but controlled it from a distance; they owned a business and a house, deposited their money in the bank or invested in other businesses, and maintained many family or ethnic connections.    In neighbourhoods where heroin was already present and the networks were well established, the markets operated on a departmental or interdepartmental scale. For example, people would come from Paris, Seine Saint-Denis, Val d’Oise and Yvelines to buy their supply in Hauts-de-Seine neighbourhoods. Their reputation was already made, and they had the capacity to keep up with the demand, as recounted by this heroin and cocaine dealer, now 36, who himself became a user:[40] I learned about the neighbourhood. There was a wait. There were 150 guys waiting around. Can you imagine? A gang of 150 addicts just there, and you see the cops going by again and again. They don’t do anything. You say to yourself there’s something wrong somewhere. (…) The guys were waiting because they knew they’d be served. The dealer sees 150 addicts. It’s a windfall for him. He sells 40,000 or 50,000 francs worth in no time. Drugs could be purchased at any hour of the day (Now they’ve gone upscale and set business hours). In addition to lookouts, steerers and sellers, there were now people whose job was to manage the flow of customers,[41] though this was less common in France than in the United States.[42]    Nevertheless, it is difficult to get a clear idea of the money involved. This excerpt from an interview at Clairvaux prison with a 47-year-old inmate serving five years for trafficking and money-laundering is a typical example. It was so big it was hard to grasp. For young people like that to have so much money in such a short time… It was so huge … no, there are some things I can’t tell you. And when we offered to turn off the tape recorder: No, no, no! Look, I’ll tell you. It was so big. I told you there were three partners. I remember in less than two weeks they made nearly 2 million francs. They talked about it. That’s how I found out. But at the time it was like a supermarket. That’s why it was hard for them … to stop. And in my opinion, what stopped them, because they were all arrested and got whopping sentences. Later, they started sniping at each other because there was so much money at stake. There were enormous amounts of money. It should be noted that this subject was involved with two others in a case that saw substantial sums of money flowing through businesses and front men, along with the seizure of a kilo of heroin and a trunk containing a hold-up man’s arsenal (weapons and explosives).    Here is another example. This person lived in the same neighbourhood. He started in the business – retailing cocaine – at the age of 16. He was living the fast life (cars, entertainment, clothes, women, etc.), being unaccustomed to having such vast amounts of money (4,000 or 5,000 francs in his pocket, grossing 20,000 to 30,000 francs a day). His mistake was that he started using drugs and failed to manage the business as well as others did. For, to use some familiar expressions, the downward spiral, that vicious circle of drug use which causes one to hit bottom, is by no means unavoidable. As this former user, now an expert case worker, says: The stakes are so high. The guy in many cases is supporting his whole family. If he uses, he loses face with the others. He’s no longer reliable.    A heroin dealer can expect to earn between 3,000 and 5,000 francs a day; a lookout or steerer, about 1,000 francs. The story told by this user-dealer, who started his career in the late 1970s, is a perfect illustration of the Paris-to-suburbs distribution system described above. I worked, I mean, I sold for someone. I was bringing in on average … It lasted a while, not long, but it lasted four or five months anyway. I was bringing in 20,000 francs a day for him. But you’d have to see how much he made all together. The speaker himself earned between 2,000 and 3,000 francs a day. For those in more senior positions in the trafficking operation, earnings can be as high as several tens of thousands of francs, depending on sales volumes. For example, in the southern part of the department, certain sites attract a steady flow of customers. If we take a conservative estimate of between 50 and 80 users for a given site, with a price of 400 francs a hit, we get gross earnings of between 20,000 and 32,000 francs. A gang can easily take in three or four times that much if it controls a number of sites.[43]    Hence it would be wrong to downplay the cash flow generated by suburban trafficking. Both the huge influx of money and the potential value of the market in poor neighbourhoods hastened the disintegration of neighbourhood solidarity that had been under way in working-class areas since the 1970s.[44] The rules of an honourable crime – consistently somewhat mythologized in retrospect – like the implicit rules in this type of urban community, are gone. Contrary to the received wisdom that the “code of silence” prevails in any criminal economy, rumours, rivalries and disputes abound. In one of the areas studied, the imprisonment of the top dealers led to a restructuring of the market; one of them fared very well, gaining a near monopoly over a neighbourhood with a large turnover.[45] In those circumstances, there was a lot of talk about arrangements between certain police officers and local traffickers. The latter would eliminate the competition by informing on them, and the former would make arrests as part of their duties while at the same time being suspected of taking payoffs. Restructuring trafficking    There is yet a third phase: since the mid-1990s, drug trafficking has been undergoing restructuring. From a territorial perspective, what we have seen is a diversification of points of sale. That diversification can be interpreted as the result of interactions between traffickers’ strategies and police strategies. The drug economy requires mobility.[46] This may be reflected in a system of rotating selling spots (foyers, stairwells, basements, footbridges, etc.), one week here, one week there, with customers following within a given geographical area. The mobility of trafficking is not inconsistent with its entrenchment in neighbourhoods where it has existed, in some cases, for over twenty years. Trafficking is changing in scale. In some cases, the steerers hunt for potential customers in other communes, even though a local market exists. This is bound to create tension. However, the specialization of certain locations in heroin seems to have declined. The variety of choices has reduced the number of monopolies.    One significant trend is the transition from specialized markets to multiple-product markets. This multi-drug trafficking pattern has been reported by Michel Joubert’s team (1994, 58), which noted the evolution of a “small business” that must be capable of supplying several different categories of users on an apparently cottage-industry scale. For example, in one of the locations studied, regular trafficking in cannabis, heroin and cocaine had developed, and ecstasy was available as well. Some of the user-dealers we interviewed also talked about people who sold all types of drugs: They’re guys who have connections all over. So if they get a request for hash or heroin, they take the order, and the guy delivers it. Those guys made money. Indeed, economic considerations were dominant, whereas in the past, it was the drugs that counted most.    What about their supply pipelines and connections? There were four supply pipelines in Hauts-de-Seine: Holland or Lille in one direction, Italy in the other for heroin, Spain or Portugal for cocaine from the Colombian cartels, and Morocco via Spain for cannabis. Do semi-wholesale traffickers know each other? We have hypothesized elsewhere[47] that the various forced relocations which took place in the 1970s with the gradual removal of the shantytowns and the progressive demolition of the temporary housing projects led to community break-up and the restructuring of networks across the Hauts-de-Seine Department and even the Parisian region. In other words, the connections between families and within generations remained and formed the social underpinnings of the illegal economy’s networks.    More recent interviews lend substance to that hypothesis. For example, a 24-year-old individual being prosecuted in two trafficking cases told us the following: In areas where it brings in money, all the kingpins know each other in Paris. They know each other from the scene. They’re members of the same generation. They go to the same nightclubs. It’s never just one guy alone. It’s groups of 3 or 4 or 10. When you look at the whole city, you don’t realize because you say to yourself that they only control their own neighbourhoods. But when I went out and drove to A, I saw a boss from C who was talking to another boss I didn’t know. But what was he doing there? He wasn’t there by accident. Thus, we need a framework capable of incorporating such interconnections; the latter are evident in court records, which show, for example, that dealers in the northern part of the department have the cell numbers of dealers in the southern part.    Another indicator of the restructuring of drug trafficking is the arrival of cocaine in recent years. For a long time, cocaine remained extremely rare in poor neighbourhoods, and therefore expensive. For addicts from working-class areas, it was a curiosity, an extra, an opportunity to live it up, but it did not change their daily habit of injecting or inhaling heroin. While the scarcity of cocaine may be attributable to supply factors, the social perception of the drug, commonly associated with well-to-do and artistic areas, offers a complementary explanation. Nevertheless, cocaine became more accessible in the suburbs in the mid-1980s, and in Hauts-de-Seine in particular in more recent years. Dealers have adopted the strategy of selling both heroin and cocaine to keep up with the competition.    This new approach was well described by some of our respondents. Everybody has it, explained one 40-year-old individual who was familiar with suburban trafficking, and it’s not expensive. Before, it was 200 francs a hit. Now the dealer sells it to you for 400 francs a gram, and heroin costs about 700 or 800. So it appears that the two drugs have not just been put on an equal footing but that their roles have been reversed. Cocaine’s entry in the local market has had social consequences. It is not just the drug’s psychopharmacological effects but also the relationships that they create between buyers and sellers. There are differences in the way users of the two drugs regulate their habit. Because you give the guy some coke and he can snort it all in an hour or two. But you give him 5 grams of smack and he’ll shoot up once, twice, three times and keep some for tomorrow. He’ll still have some left tomorrow. This compulsive consumption has an impact on the user’s lifestyle. Cocaine really messes you up. You’re wasted. You stop eating. You can’t think of anything else. You’re not interested in food. It makes you sick. You use tons of it.  After that, it becomes difficult to control the relationship. Even though it was the same dealers, they realized that the coke was doing too much harm, that it was becoming too risky, and they simply stopped selling it. III. Social Relationships and Drug-Related Violence      As I see it, these findings shed light on the social relationships of drug trafficking and the various forms of drug-related violence evident in suburban neighbourhoods. For example, the turning point that occurred when addicts lost control of the deal and trafficking became increasingly professionalized helps us to understand what can be described as the “structural” conflict between two groups of participants belonging to different generations. On one hand we have the former drug addicts. Involved in petty crime since their teenage years, they started smoking cannabis and then tried heroin. At that point in their lives, they moved on and took advantage of the opportunities that opened up to sell the drug, which became a commodity. Highly dependent on the drug, many of them died of overdoses, AIDS or unexplained accidents. Those who were left viewed themselves and were regarded in the neighbourhoods as survivors of a decimated generation. Their decline in status relegated them to subordinate roles (middlemen, steerers, small-time dealers), when they did not return to their former activities to earn money or when they were not asked to leave because they bore the traces of their habit and attracted too much attention. On the other hand we have the new generation, the “young guys”. Driven at first by a desire to make money, they do not take heroin, at least not initially, but they may be heavy users of cannabis. They feel utter contempt for their customers. Arrogance, insults and refusal to negotiate prices or quantities also make them more vulnerable, since users have fewer qualms about informing on them. However, after they have survived being questioned, interrogated or put in jail, they rise to more senior positions within their deviant society.    Between one generation and the next, enforcement intensified. Police forces’ heightened awareness of drugs at the turn of the 1990s was reflected in increasingly specialized enforcement and the creation of special squads in police stations. The result was competition between police services that reduced the effectiveness of official actions. The penal system also attempted to deal with the illegal economy both procedurally and organizationally. The traffickers adjusted accordingly. Much could be said about the strategies they employed. For example, buyers were steered to the transaction site, where the dealers were hooded and protected by armed men; or the dealers used basements where money and drugs changed hands through a door to prevent identification. In other situations, buyers did not go to a particular location but rather contacted the dealer on his cell phone so that a safe meeting place could be arranged or the drugs could even be delivered to the buyer’s home, like a pizza. The recruitment of sellers and lookouts from outside the neighbourhood also looks like a strategy to minimize the risk of identification.    This transformation of trafficking is quite evident in our interviews with displaced user-dealers. Some of them refer to two different methods of operation: Nowadays, they’re more interested in making money than doing business. (...) Before, everybody was happy, I mean, both the dealer and the customer. Now look how they treat the addicts and everything. It’s bad. The addict gets beaten up and called names. It’s depressing. The guy’s treated like trash. This contrast between past and present is an inverted reflection of the entwinement of buyer-seller relationships and personal connections. For example, differences in dealer sociability seem to be linked to their attitude toward the addicts’ situation: for some, the only thing that counts is the money (they don’t give a damn if you’re sick), while others may be willing to make special arrangements (they know what drugs are like because they have a brother who’s using).    Disputes, of course, are not exclusively between street dealers and users. They also arise between dealers and suppliers, whose client-vendor relations are not always based on pure economic rationality – far from it. Here’s how a user-dealer describes it:  With some suppliers, it’s ‘Here, I’m giving this amount of drugs. You bring me back that amount of money.’ You have this much for yourself. You can make this much. But because the dealer, being a user as well, uses up too much of his supply and then has to borrow in order to make his payment, because he is subject to buyers’ attempts to negotiate (prices, credit, quantities, quality) and a variety of pressures (he has to keep people happy; big brothers don’t want their little brothers to be served in the neighbourhood), things are not so simple. This social dimension in which the transactions take place sets limits on the players’ economic rationality, but it is also a synonym for uncertainty. It makes assessment of the prices, wages and profits of trafficking at the local level an invariably uncertain proposition since they move in a very narrow range around a relative point.    Moreover, trafficking relationships always have the threat of police action hanging over them.  As we observed in one neighbourhood, the threat is ever-present, in the form of uniformed or plain-clothes officers, urban police services (patrols, community policing, anti-crime squads) or the police judiciaire (criminal investigation unit). The police presence can be used as a tool to hurry the customers, instil a general atmosphere of suspicion, encourage the neighbourhood to close itself off, and persuade users to go elsewhere to take their drugs by following them as they leave. It appears that this police strategy, while intended to keep the pressure on dealers and identify any newcomers, may actually foster the entrenchment of drug trafficking and hence the strong trend toward professionalization of its main participants.     

Is trafficking a pacifying factor in the suburbs?

   Violence is usually considered an inseparable part of the world of drugs. The dramatic situation in Colombia is a perfect example of this. The country is torn between the power of the drug traffickers and the guerrillas’ operations against the central government, which in turn derives substantial funding from illicit crops. Similarly, studies of North American ghettos by urban anthropologists clearly show the structural causes that led first to the resurgence of gangs in the 1970s following the neutralization of the Black Panthers and later to a veritable guerrilla war between rival street gangs over the sale of crack in the 1980s. As Mike Davis has demonstrated in his book on Los Angeles,[48] the crack and cocaine industry is generally viewed as a last economic resort for thousands of young people in the ghettos.[49] But it also drives local authorities to adopt a strategy that criminalizes an entire segment of the population.    In France, drug-related violence has seldom been studied specifically. Of course, the situations observed in suburban working-class areas are in no way similar to those seen elsewhere, as a comparison of crime and homicide rates in particular might indicate, on both sides of the Atlantic.[50] Yet this argument is not unambiguous. It downplays the deterioration of the social climate in French suburbs, though this may provide cheap reassurance to some. In general, scholarly opinions focus on the psychopharmacological effects of the substances involved: addicts can be dangerous, especially when they need a fix; cocaine makes people aggressive and paranoid; smoking cannabis makes people lose their self-control; and so on. This trend is strengthened by the development of multiple addictions, noted by everyone involved. This violence, reflected in such forms as debt, pressure, retaliation, etc., is described by some authors as systemic,[51] which represents a misunderstanding of the sociological dimensions at play. It is also a misunderstanding of the significance of the ideology of survival which has existed for several generations, prizes strength, boldness, courage and male chivalry and is fuelled by grudges, humiliation or despair.[52] What’s more, it ignores the fact that violence is not simply the product of a particular social milieu but also an institutional effect, generated by state action, primarily through the police and the schools.[53]    The paradox of the drug economy is that it is, at least apparently, a factor in keeping social peace. As noted in a collective study published in the early 1990s, some families play a moderating role through their ability to contain the drug phenomenon and especially to protect the neighbourhood against explosive, self-destructive situations, which could arise if the trafficking were done by people from outside the area.[54] One cannot simply set up shop as a dealer wherever one pleases, especially if one is selling hard drugs. The introduction of illegal markets involves having control of the territory, that is, a hold over the groups that make up the territory, control of the flow of addicts who live in the area or come from outside and whose appearance may very well reflect their status and interfere with the illicit operations. This is particularly true for heroin and cocaine trafficking. Users may commit crimes close to the site in order to make sure they have enough money, take their drugs immediately in public places or common areas, and leave their syringes behind. Furthermore, an addict is always more interesting to the police than any other type of user, because he is assumed to have committed other offences, to be capable of informing on his supplier, and to be easier to manipulate during questioning. On the other hand, it explains why some neighbourhoods have tried to protect themselves from the influx of hard drugs, which are likely to harm existing businesses. It is also easier to understand the collective efforts against heroin dealers, in many cases mounted by local dealers attempting to eliminate competitors who may have come in from other neighbourhoods or be operating clandestinely.[55] These phenomena may be interpreted as attempts to regulate and reproduce illicit trafficking.    There are, however, other methods of internally regulating trafficking. The participants in the drug trade and the neighbourhood residents are linked by a whole set of interdependencies. Economic interests are not the only things at stake. There are also relationships built on neighbourhood solidarity, either intergenerational or community-based: identifying people who are in trouble, paying for restaurant meals or weekends, sending money orders to people who get caught, helping their families, acquiring or sharing a territory, and protecting those who are in the business even if one is not in it oneself. It appears that a sizable proportion of those who are on the street are children of immigrants or were born in other countries. The key factor here is less a Mafia-like loyalty than a greater sense of family solidarity than is generally found in French families.    Yet this pacification has a negative side. Activities connected with the supply, transportation, distribution and retail sale of drugs are themselves generators of violence. What comes to mind, of course, is the cyclical settling of scores that accompanies the growth of trafficking proceeds at the various levels of the business. And this violence may take many different forms. Between the practices associated with organized crime (professional contract killings of semi-wholesalers or middlemen who fail to pay for a shipment or are slow at paying their debts), fights over territory, murders or violence carried out with rifles or edged weapons following a dispute between dealers, punitive expeditions mounted by youths from one area against another district following a rip-off or an overdose, and killings disguised as suicides (overdose, fall from a building), there is a difference in kind and degree. Moreover, there is a whole range of violent behaviour in suburban developments that plays a role in creating a climate of violence and fear: physical assault, property damage, intimidation, threats of reprisals against relatives and friends, pressure, name-calling.[56] As the traditional settling of scores is replaced by these more discreet forms of violence, violent behaviour becomes especially difficult to measure since in many cases, it remains within the confines of the neighbourhood and is not reported to police. What’s more, it appears to be savage and pointless. The local press regularly runs stories about investigations in the core of sensitive neighbourhoods, focusing on the succession of beatings and other punitive expeditions. These senseless confrontations, as one police officer put it, are characterized by youths as follows: It’s all mixed up. There’s no reason for it.    The social substrate of these heterogeneous behaviours should probably be analyzed in greater detail to distinguish the strata in which they are rooted. There is a kind of violence that is rooted in the memory of neighbourhoods and a family history, a kind of social violence caused by the harshness of living conditions, not to mention the stigmatizing effects produced by the migration process and perpetuated by the routine racism and ethnic discrimination encountered during the process of searching for a job. There are also, in day-to-day life in the poor districts, many situations that fuel disputes – sometimes long-standing ones – between families, neighbours, French people and Arabs, young and old, tall and short, as well as disputes with security guards, watchmen, police officers, teachers, public transit drivers, and elected politicians. And it is not always possible to separate what is real from what is imagined. In this sense, the violence can be referred to as retributive.[57] It is a way of getting respect, of maintaining one’s reputation. Finally, the violence is highly ritualized. It is part of a system of values, of which street cultures are one dimension.[58]    From micro-networks to organized gangs    Returning to trafficking, to what extent do the changes in the social relationships of trafficking account for these forms of violence and the atmosphere in the neighbourhoods? Both today and in the past, the dominant perception of drug trafficking is that trafficker networks, highly structured vertically, are the rule. However, our survey adds some nuances to that perception by revealing the existence of a large number of micro-networks. To be sure, there is still a group of people who ensure that drugs are available for sale in the neighbourhood. But that does not mean they are part of a structured network. This point can be illustrated by the retail sale of cannabis in suburban areas. A few youths sell drugs to their peers in lobbies or common areas, with the consent and/or complicity of their relatives and friends to keep watch, screen buyers and arrange contacts; the supply is obtained from a semi-wholesaler who lives nearby, in quantities ranging from a 250-gram bar to a few kilos. The same finding applies to heroin: peddling drugs on the street, seeking out addicts and even dealing from a specific location are methods used by small groups (couples, friends) who are reacting to circumstances rather than acting as members of a structured organization. Any trafficking operation that becomes too big is in jeopardy from people who are left out or from direct competitors. For example, a 20-year-old individual who has stable employment and is neither a user nor a dealer told us the following: When they see someone selling, they wreck his business. They start making anonymous phone calls.    Now, it appears that the changes described above may be causing a restructuring of trafficking that remains poorly understood. Today, all available indicators point to an increase in the quantities of cannabis in circulation on the local market. According to traffickers we interviewed in prison, when there is greater competition among small-time dealers and prices decline, suppliers make larger quantities available and retailers buy more in order to maintain their respective profit margins. While the methods of operation do not seem to have changed much, the level of control and the degree of risk are growing significantly. A 24-year-old individual who made a name for himself in trafficking but never took any drugs explains. You take 100 kilos. You’re taking the risk of going to prison and losing the merchandise. The people don’t give a damn if you lose the merchandise as long as you don’t rat on them. You don’t talk and you pay them back when you get out. (...) It’s a vicious circle because when you’ve been given the stuff, I think it’s really impossible to pay the money back right away. You still owe him the money. He gives you some, you give him part of it, and he gives it back. That’s how he keeps his hold on you. And you can’t discuss things with such people. You’re no match for them. This indebtedness means that at some point, debtors must sell, find clients, hold product and provide many different services.    At this level of trafficking, there are organized gangs, without question. We know that this term was included in the new penal code so that drug importing and exporting by organized gangs could be made an indictable offence. We are not using the term in this legal sense, but in the sense that drug trafficking and money laundering activities are part of an organization of varying complexity. Such trafficking depends on broad family solidarity and networks of people with long-standing (childhood) friendships and neighbourhood connections. These support networks may be paralleled (or extended) by networks of acquaintances made in various ways (in prison, introduction by a mutual friend) for the purpose of money laundering. In other words, some areas are said to be controlled by bosses, who in turn report to drug lords, who bring in huge quantities and have operations across the entire Parisian region. This is way things work in the world of the drug kingpins. At a lower level, people work in rings, whether they are trafficking in drugs or committing other crimes (robbery, car theft, weapons smuggling). These rings may share a territory on the basis of a franchise system.    I wanted to work alone. After a while, you get into a gang without realizing it, and then they have you. There is no shortage of means to gain this hold over people: intimidation, violence, home burning, confinement, kidnapping, etc. Then selling becomes a forced activity. Furthermore, it involves a relationship based on debt. That is the social dimension of trafficking.   Conclusion      During the 1990s, drugs and drug trafficking became increasingly widespread in poor neighbourhoods. This finding has paradoxical aspects to it. While the residents of these neighbourhoods faced growing economic insecurity and marginalization, the illegal economy – of which the sale of illicit substances is only one of the most socially visible aspects – was booming. Of course, trafficking is not confined to the universe of districts that are in serious difficulty; that universe encompasses a wide range of different situations. In those areas, however, it assumes a special social significance, one of whose consequences is the de facto criminalization of the people who live there, especially the youths.    Another paradox is manifested in the emblematic figure of the drug dealer, who may emerge as a model of social success in suburban developments when the established models of success – those which involve school and a job or associations and local politics – become less attainable. Choosing between the experience of social and ethnic discrimination, endured by a large proportion of suburban youths, and the ever-present opportunities and solicitations in the areas studied to do business and thereby erase the stigma of poverty and be someone poses a great dilemma. It is reflected in periods of indigence alternating with periods of internship or employment, periods when selling drugs seems to be the only solution alternating with periods of keeping one’s distance from the drug world.    A further paradox lies in the fact that trafficking, a means of survival for most and a source of wealth for a few, helps keep the peace in suburban developments. This is evident in the efforts made by drug lords to control their territories and contain the forms of violence and crime that work against their economic interests. However, by instigating forms of violence and crime that are less sensational than those which make the headlines, they are helping to degrade the quality of life in poor neighbourhoods.    Clearly, all these factors engender some degree of pessimism. They suggest that drug trafficking in suburban areas is in for prosperous times, as the social and economic conditions that led to its emergence and growth have never been so fertile. The fact that this illicit trade remains largely ignored in public policy, which instead focuses on enforcement and medicalization of drug use, does not help the situation.                                     Michel Kokoreff                                     Institut de sociologie                                     Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille 1                                     F.59655 Villeneuve d’Acsq                                              E-mail: kokoreff@ifresi.univ-lille1.fr               Appendix: Locations Studied        The neighbourhoods studied are located in three communes in Paris’s inner suburbs. They are part of a wide band of social housing that cuts right through the Hauts-de-Seine Department, from south to north. Though considered one of the wealthiest departments in France, it provides instances of sharp social contrast through the juxtaposition of different types of neighbourhoods and populations.    For more details concerning the status of these communes, we consulted Nicole Tabard’s (1993) typology of the evolution of cities with a population greater than 60,000. Of the four trends she describes (decline of the well-to-do class, growth of the well-to-do class, technicization, no change for the working classes), the last is clearly evident in the first two communes (A and B). The “working classes” (labourers and employed people combined) make up between 54% and 65% of the labour force in these communes. These proportions are not quite as high as in other communes located in the neighbouring department of Seine-Saint-Denis (between 65% and 75%). The third commune (C) consisted of 23% labourers and 36% employees in a population of nearly 40,000.    However, this commune-level approach has obvious limitations due to the heterogeneous socio-urban configuration of the three areas. As recent studies show (Grafmeyer, 1991; Oberti, 1995; Collective, 1997), the use of smaller geographic units is feasible provided one has a good geographical and sociological knowledge of the areas. There are many disparities: for example, in Commune A, between the central district (historical core and residential area of the city), residential developments built during the early industrial period in the 1930s, and an area composed of apartment blocks and towers typical of mass urbanism in the 1960s.[59] Similarly, Commune B consists of eight neighbourhoods separated by highway, railway and heavy industrial infrastructure, four of which are made up of large housing developments. The unemployment rate varies widely (from 11% to 24%). The same is true of the proportion of foreigners in the population. A breakdown by neighbourhood indicates that dwelling occupancy is inversely proportional to the percentage of large families and the unemployment rate. More generally, when commune-level data[60] are compared with available data on the neighbourhoods studied,[61] the latter appear to be home to many social problems. They have more low-income housing units, more large families, more people under 20, more foreigners, more unemployment (especially in the under-20 and foreigner categories), and more economically insecure families. There is also a shortage of outreach and prevention programs, despite the mechanisms put in place by the municipal government. Though close to Paris, many of these neighbourhoods are isolated, with poor public transportation service (essentially the RATP [Paris transportation authority] bus system, since RER [regional express system] and SNCF [national railroad corporation] stations are usually in outlying areas).    While the low-income housing neighbourhoods certainly have some common features, they are by no means homogeneous. In Commune C, if we take five smaller districts that consist exclusively of social housing and have populations of similar size (2,000 to 2,500), there are wide variations in the unemployment rate (from 7.4% to 14%), particularly in the under-25 group (from 10% to 24%), and in the proportion of lone-parent families (from 4% to 16%), which is considered an indicator of economic insecurity in this context. The spread is even wider in the proportion of foreigners in the population (from 7.3% to 18.9%), and those who are unemployed (from 10% to 30%). Hence, we need to take situational effects into consideration, without ignoring the problems caused by data reliability and the different ways of dividing the communes.    According to the available data, the situations in the neighbourhoods studied are less dramatic than those observed in, for example, the neighbourhoods of Lille-Sud or Lens-Liévin (Duprez, Leclerc-Olive, 1997). This difference can be attributed to the effects of urban polarization, the vitality of the labour market, and the resources of local communities in the Parisian region. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate, especially among people under 25 and foreigners, the proportion of long-term unemployment, lone-parent families and below-average incomes, and the large number of family allowance and minimum income recipients are indicators of social vulnerability affecting a significant portion of the population. 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