Silje Anderdal Bakken

Social relationships are a fundamental part of illegal drug markets. However, drug market categorizations, such as online/offline, open/closed, and public/private, overshadow the everyday purchase and sale of illegal drugs. Highlighting the significance of social relationships reveals the complexity and fluidity of real-life drug market activities. By using the economic sociological theory, we bridge the gap between online and offline drug market research by merging two datasets of qualitative interviews, focusing on Norway's physical and online drug markets. Combined the data consist of in-depth interviews with 100 market participants. We find that market relationships vary on a continuum between being fully digital to fully physical. Moreover, participants’ positions on this continuum are not fixed on one market category. Individuals’ participation is determined by several interconnected factors, including social networks, risk and trust, and drug and street culture. Hence, despite technological advancements and new possibilities, the purchase and sale of illegal drugs take place on a digital–physical continuum determined by social and relational factors.

Digital societies demand technological competence, including for actors in illegal activity. Inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and related criminological concepts such as street capital, this study analyses digital capital as a wider concept relating to digital drug markets that capture both technological and cultural competences. We pursue this empirically via interview data ( N = 107) on social media and darknet drug markets. The overall need for digital competence erodes the earlier divide in drug markets based on either subculture or networks. The need to be familiar with mainstream technological tools and behaviours connects digital drug markets to more general cultural competencies. Consequently, illegal activities become connected with mainstream cultural capital because both fields value the same competencies.

Textual and visual app-based communication is standard everyday interaction. I argue that, as researchers, we have to be better equipped to include various ways of interacting digitally with participants in qualitative research interviews. In this paper, I do a methodological focused analysis of app-based textual interviews (n = 98) with young people selling illegal drugs online. I challenge the earlier skepticism towards interviewing through text, while also placing the interview in a new context of encrypted mobile phone applications. App-based textual interviews prove to be highly flexible and create a socially informal character of semi-structured interviews that interviewees perceive as safe. At the same time, the interviewer’s position is decentered as the interviewee takes full control of the interview context behind the screen. App-based textual interviews proved highly useful when interacting with a younger generation, also on a sensitive topic like illegal drugs. It also introduces several ethical dilemmas for discussion.

In this paper we argue that legal and technological shifts in cannabis marketing has a gendered impact, which research so far has ignored. Despite high variations in national criminal laws, US-based social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter play a huge role in enforcing certain social and political standpoints on a global scale. One example being the recent legalization and commercialization of cannabis in various states in the US. Young men with dark, anonymous profiles illegally dealing cannabis on social media are no longer the only visible traders, as today’s marketing of trademarked legal cannabis products also features women influencers, who post images exhibiting light colors, desirable environments, and beautiful landscapes. To understand this diversity, we compared 60 Instagram profiles of illegal Swedish cannabis sellers to 70 US-based cannabis influencers’ Instagram profiles. By applying theories and research from media scholars on influencing, we highlight various changes in the way cannabis is being presented and professionalized by a new group of actors. Our findings show that cannabis influencers on Instagram are changing the stereotypical characteristics of illegal cannabis culture as being almost entirely dominated by men, to one where cannabis is represented as a desirable accessory in certain feminine lifestyles. Influencers’ role in transforming cannabis culture to become more mainstream and acceptable for women could potentially effect cannabis cultures globally, as well as ongoing legalization debates.

Online and digital platforms play a central role in today’s illegal activities and related networks. Communicating through these channels makes creating an online criminal identity crucial to establish oneself as trustworthy and meet the needs of potential buyers, especially when reaching out to strangers in a market. A highly needed skill is balancing the signals of attracting wanted attention and of avoiding possible risks. This article explores how social media drug dealers present themselves in 173 Facebook profiles. The analysis of these online criminal personas is applied in two stages: a) a broader content analysis of the profile content and b) by using signalling theory to understand the overall visual presentation of these online criminal personas. I find that sellers fall into three main persona types: the professional dealer, private dealer, and cultural dealer. These personas signal trust in different ways through their choice of pictures, text, and personal information.