The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

Crit Crim (2016) 24:363–377 DOI 10.1007/s10612-015-9312-5 The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’ Stephen Wakeman1 Published online: 18 December 2015  The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract This article presents the findings of an ethnographic exploration of heroin use in a disadvantaged area of the United Kingdom. Drawing on developments in continental philosophy as well as debates around the nature of social exclusion in the late-modern west, the core claim made here is that the cultural systems of exchange and mutual support which have come to underpin heroin use in this locale—that, taken together, form a ‘moral economy of heroin’—need to be understood as an exercise in reconstituting a meaningful social realm by, and specifically for, this highly marginalised group. The implications of this claim are discussed as they pertain to the fields of drug policy, addiction treatment, and critical criminological understandings of disenfranchised groups. Introduction Late in 2012 I met ‘Ryan’ for the first time on the outskirts of a small town in England’s North-West. This town, like many others located in former manufacturing heartlands of the UK, is now severely blighted by the numerous social problems that accompany continuously high levels of unemployment. The main street contains more ‘chain’ pubs, betting shops and pay-day loan outlets than it does anything else, a sign outside one of which informs us that if we have a ‘bank card and a job’ we could walk away with up to £1000 cash in minutes. Noticing it caught my eye, Ryan educated me—‘‘there’s not many people round here with both of them things’’ he quipped. We settle in an empty café and he gives me an overview of his life: he has used heroin habitually for almost 15 years, frequently engages in acquisitive crime, and has served three prison sentences. Yet, he was thoroughly pleasant company and insisted on pouring my tea before his own as it was ‘‘good & Stephen Wakeman 1 School of Humanities and Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University, John Foster Building, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L3 5UZ, UK 123 364 S. Wakeman manners’’. This was the start of my fieldwork with heroin users like Ryan, but not long into it I hit upon a recurrent theme. He explained: We all do stuff we shouldn’t you know, crime and that. But only when we have to. For the most part there’s no need though, we get by together you know, we all help each other out. If I’m paid [has money], I’ll sort them out [his peers], but if I’m broke they’ll sort me. It means there’s a lot of goings-on [arguments] about money and that, but it also means we all get by you know? Field notes These processes of ‘getting by’ are the core concern of this article. It is argued here that heroin users ‘getting by’ through collective support and mutual exchange constitutes much more than it initially appears above. These exchanges are presented below as constitutive components of a ‘moral economy of heroin’, which is itself part of a concerted set of efforts towards the reconstitution of a meaningful social sphere by, and specifically for, this marginalised group. A similar moral economy was observed in homeless heroin users in the U.S. (Bourgois 1998; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009), and British studies from the 1980s revealed systems of reciprocal exchange to be prominent features of the upsurge in heroin use at this time (Parker et al. 1988; Pearson 1987). However, while there have been some exemplary ethnographies of problematic drug use in recent years (Briggs 2012; Parkin 2013), moral economies have not featured to the extent they could. Analysis of heroin’s moral economic order is shown below to have a number of significant advantages. Firstly, it helps account for changes in the prevalence of this type of drug use. Whilst recent years have witnessed an ‘age of austerity’ in the UK, characterised by double and triple-dip recessions, they have also seen recorded levels of heroin use decline. As Seddon (2006) notes, while the relationship between social exclusion and levels of problematic drug use is complex, recognition of the link between the two has been a key feature of British drug policy making since the 1980s. The official position has normally been that increasing levels of social exclusion/marginalisation results in increasing levels of problematic drug use. However, the current estimate of 256,163 opiate users in England is over 5000 less than it was this time last year (Hay et al. 2014: 3), and this downward trend has been constant since well before the 2008 financial crash which kick-started the rise of austerity economics. This presents a number of interesting questions for the heroin-social exclusion nexus, yet the situation is more complex still. Whilst available data shows an overall decline in use, this does not hold across all age-groups. The number of users in the 35–64 bracket has increased, and this trend is also constant from previous years (Hay et al. 2014: 5). The specific problems presented by ageing populations of drug users are now widely recognised (see Crome et al. 2014) and are certainly not confined to the UK. In fact, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (2008) have estimated that continentwide this subsection of problem drug users will have doubled in size between 2001 and 2020. Importantly, it is demonstrated below that changes in prevalence rates such as these are inextricably linked to heroin’s moral economy. In short, this article presents the moral economy of heroin as a distinctive socio-cultural reaction to the imposed and ever-encroaching politico-economic restructuring of social life in marginalised Western communities. It opens with a short conceptual overview of ‘moral economy’, followed by an equally brief exposition of some of the ways in which criminologists have understood social exclusion and the actions/reactions that stem from it. Following this, the works of continental philosophers such as Stiegler (2011, 2013, 2014) 123 The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’ 365 and Badiou (2009a, b)—as they have been adopted by contemporary criminological theorists (e.g. Hall 2012a; Hall and Winlow 2015; Winlow and Hall 2013)—are introduced to this field as presenting a promising alternative means by which criminology might understand issues related to exclusion and marginalisation. It is argued here that theorising heroin use through the lens of moral economy/continental philosophy provides a useful means by which wider criminological debates about social exclusion and resistance can be engaged with (cf. Hall and Winlow 2015; Hayward et al. 2015). The remainder of the article is then concerned with illuminating these debates through the use of ethnographic data; here the operation of heroin’s moral economy is demonstrated in terms of its instrumental and emotive functions. Finally, the claim that heroin (...truncated)