The Space between Community and Self-Interest: Conflict and the Experience of Exchange in Heroin Markets

To expand understandings of conflict, this chapter offers a detailed assessment of how exchange is enacted within local heroin markets. Addressing drug dealing and heroin users’ buying drugs for their peers (i.e., brokering), this research expands how illegal drug markets are commonly understood. A generalized framework is presented that highlights patterns of exchange.

Findings come from a 36-month study of a demographically diverse sample of 38 heroin users in Cleveland, OH. Methods involved open-ended, semi-structured interviewing and participant observation, conducted by the author and a team of graduate students.

Instead of framing exchange as either an economic or social act, this chapter shows how trade in heroin markets is often both. Here Gudeman’s (2001) dialectic between market and community is embodied in inter-subjectivities of traders, promoting both trust and conflict. In this context, conflict is the result of perpetual ambiguity all market participants can experience.

Applying a blended notion of exchange as both social and economic offers new insight on conflict and expands its orientation beyond narratives of political economy. Here, in addition to the economics that often promote conflict, the social elements of exchange (e.g., reciprocity) are emphasized.

Research has understood conflicts in drug market operations through trader characteristics (e.g., poverty, race, class, privilege). This chapter emphasizes opportunities for conflict irrespective of individualized characteristics by outlining structural elements of exchange.