How Young Britons Obtain their Drugs: Drugs Transactions at the Point of Consumption. Policy

Abstract: The enormous expansion in recreational drug use (cannabis, amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy) amongst young Britons during the 1990s has had a normative effect whereby gender and social class differences are now negligible and consequently most young drug users are other-wise law abiding and conventional. Based on five contemporary studies of adolescents ' drug use, nightclubbers and new young heroin users, this paper explains how while young "hard " drug users utilise "real" dealers, the vast majority of young drug users do not. Instead they rely on friendship and acquaintance chains and networks to "sort " each other out and thereby put physical and social distance between them-selves and "real " dealers from criminal worlds. While de jure this means a significant minority of young Britons are drug suppliers, in practice few are apprehended because these transactions take place in their own semiprivate social space where they are largely condoned. Thus far these informal transactions at the point of consumption have kept the recreational- and heavy-end drugs arenas apart. However there are worrying signs that purposeful heroin distribution and mar-keting is penetrating recreational-drugs settings and recruiting a new generation of "susceptible " heroin users. THE BRITISH DRUG SCENE ACROSS THE 1990S While far from the highest international per capita alcohol con-sumption rates (Harkin et al., 1995), the U.K. has the most drug in-volved population of all the European Union States. This status is not Crime Prevention Studies, volume 11, pp. 59-81 60 — Howard Parker primarily generated by problematic use, although heroin, crack and poly drug dependency are at significant rates, but by the "recrea-tional " drugs consumption of young Britons (ages 12 to 30). It is the use of cannabis, followed by amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy and in-creasingly cocaine (powder), that generates the U.K.'s top slot acros