Guest editorial: Taking hybridity seriously in drug market research

Much like other areas of our lives, practices of drug supply, buying and using drugs are increasingly simultaneously mediated and shaped by the digital and physical. Yet, research on the digitalization of drug markets has tended to operate within an “online paradigm” focusing primarily on the digitally mediated dimensions (Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b). Inspired by trends in media studies (Lindgren et al., 2014; Floridi, 2015; Batat, 2024) and in criminology (Lane, 2016; Lusthaus and Varese, 2017; Roks et al., 2021), recent drug market research, however, has argued for an epistemological shift, including a move beyond digital dualism (the belief that digital and physical worlds are separate), and a foregrounding of the interconnected and intertwined dimensions of digital-physical drug ecosystems (van der Sanden et al., 2023; Korshøj and Søgaard, 2024).

In fact, Bakken and Harder (2024) argue that illegal drug trading represents an exemplar of the overlaps between “online” and “offline” crime. While the emergence of digital technologies has hugely influenced how drugs are marketed (Barratt and Aldridge, 2016; BenBaruch et al., 2025; Demant and Aagesen, 2022; Fuller et al., 2024), drugs are physically embodied: chemical material substances that work on the physical body resulting in altered cognition and motor functions (Bakken and Harder, 2024). Digitally mediated marketplaces for drugs still rely on farms and/or laboratories, production sites and transport networks. For drugs to be sold, a physical product needs to change “hands”, and drug market actors using digital platforms still inhibit local physical spaces and cultural worlds.

In this special issue, we draw attention away from drug markets conceptualized in terms of rigid, outdated distinctions between “offline” and “online”, and from a zero-sum view, in which the “online” replaces the “offline”. Rather, we argue that a productive research avenue is to apply an analytical “digital-physical hybridity” lens, which foregrounds the ways digitally mediated activities, spaces and relations flow together with their in-person and physical equivalents in co-produced practices of drug supply, drug purchasing and drug consumption. We hope to illustrate how a focus on digital-physical hybridity as a new research lens holds the potential to provide deeper understandings, modify research agendas and set new methodological protocols in drug market research.

The concept of hybridity has been on a long journey from 19th-century biology and race genetics to post-colonial and post-modern cultural theory (Kraidy, 2005). Most recently it has been taken up by scholars in media studies (Lindgren et al., 2014), criminology (Roks et al., 2021) and drug market studies (Demant and Aagesen, 2022; Tzanetakis and South, 2023; Demant and Nexø, 2024; Korshøj and Søgaard, 2024, 2025; Berger and Bakken, 2025; Joyce and Jofre, 2025; Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b). As a concept, hybridity stands in opposition to myths of categorical purity, to the fetishism of boundaries and binaries, and to ideas of fixed and essentialist typologies. Instead, it embraces blending, syncretism, creolization, fusion, plasticity, the transgressive, impure, heterogeneous and the eclectic and messy nature of reality and practices (Kraidy, 2005; Fuchsberger, 2019). Beyond the drug studies literature, the increasingly blurred boundaries between the digital and physical or virtual/cyber and in-real-life realms have been brought together using a variety of terms, including “onlife” (Floridi, 2015) and “phygital” (Batat, 2024), the “Internet of Things” (Milivojevic, 2025), and “augmented reality” (Jurgenson, 2012). All these terms share an emphasis on the interconnections and coproductions between the digital and physical, and how these make and remake practices, relations, cultural forms and identities. We favour the concept of hybridity because it evokes a quick and expressive picture of something blending, and the concept can hence be a powerful tool for pushing a new drug market digital-physical hybridity research paradigm.

A first step in taking digital-physical hybridity seriously in drug market research is to acknowledge that although hybridity can productively be used descriptively or even categorically, for instance as a label assigned to certain drug market types, the real value of the concept lies in its use as an analytical lens or prism in the production of new research agendas, understandings and methodological protocols. In digitally heavy contexts, for instance, a hybridity perspective is useful for reorienting the analysis to include embodied experiences (the human and more-than-human; Seear, 2026), beyond the rational actor of economics (homo economicus), to highlight how drug trading and use are shaped through conjunctures between digital affordances, individual agency, emotions and juridical, national, local, cultural, social and spatial embeddedness. A hybridity perspective also holds the potential to question and nuance linear accounts of digitalisations and changes, to critique essentialist and deterministic views of technology and to inform our understanding of the notion of drug markets.

In the drug market context, a focus on digital-physical hybridity is still emerging, and the concept rarely theorized. In the following, we try to deduce ways that digital-physical hybridity has been approached in existing drug market research. We highlight the advantages and potential limitations of different approaches.

Somewhat akin to criminological studies, arguing that one way of moving beyond an “online research paradigm” is to retire the “cyber” prefix in cybercrime (Gordon et al., 2022), recent drug market studies have started to relabel formerly known “social media-” and “digital-” markets as “hybrid drug markets” (Demant and Aagesen, 2022; Korshøj and Søgaard, 2024, 2025; Berger and Bakken, 2025; Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b). Such relabelling is useful in highlighting the position of drug sales facilitated through social media as an intermediate market between cryptomarkets and traditional street markets (Berger and Bakken, 2025), and to guide attentions toward the continued relevance of physical, in-person and local embeddedness (Korshøj and Søgaard, 2024). A categorical or typological use of the concept of hybridity, as a nominator of particular markets, however, also comes with challenges. A categorical use, for instance, risks fixating hybridity as an essential characteristic of specific drug markets, thus ignoring that most, if not all, drug markets are in fact characterised by digital-physical overlaps. Drug markets today exist on a hybridity continuum ranging from fully physical to varying degrees and forms of digital-physical overlaps. A digital-physical perspective is hence also relevant in contexts such as cryptomarkets and social supply.

A digital-physical hybridity perspective has also been operationalised through layered analysis, where the drug trading crime script is described as composed by a “platform layer” (digital communication and coordination) and a “physical logistical layer” (mechanisms of distribution, including postal services and delivery setups). A layered approach is useful for highlighting the “hidden” physical/in-person face of digitally mediated crime (Lusthaus and Varese, 2017), and for exploring the functional interdependence between digital and physical activities, including the importance of postal systems in darknet drug vending (Joyce and Jofre, 2025). A digital-physical layered approach can potentially also be used to reveal layered functional contradictions. For instance, between drug seller’s Goffmanian “front stage” civil performances on customer-direct digital platforms (Bakken et al., 2022), and sellers’ “backstage”, and sometimes in-person, recruitment and exploitation of vulnerable youth as drug runners or stashes (Søgaard et al., 2021). A layered approach, however, also entails downsides, including risks of reproducing a conception of digital and physical spaces/activities as existing in parallel. Furthermore, if emphasis remains primarily on one side, for instance, the digital dimensions of drug trading, there is a risk that the analysis, even while using the hybridity concept, maintains an “online paradigm” perspective (Lindgren et al., 2014).

Rather than focusing on interdependence between layers, hybridity can be understood as being attentive to digital-physical connectivity within layers or functional domains. From this perspective, digital-physical connectivity is seen as co-productive process that give shape to an “in-between” or “third space of action” (Kraidy, 2005; Heitmayer, 2026). That is, practices, relations and experiences that are more-than-digital and more-than-physical, a form of a social “environment” augmented by digital-physical enmeshment (Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b). This includes studies exploring how digitally mediated drug trading is embedded in and influenced by individuals’ bodily emotions (Demant and Nexø, 2024), by physical social relationships (van der Sanden et al., 2022; Berger and Bakken, 2025; Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b), by physical borders controls and national cultures (Demant et al., 2018; Demant et al., 2019). It also includes studies of how digital platform affordances condition the agency of people who consume and/or sell drugs (Childs and Bernot, 2024; Korshøj and Søgaard, 2025), alter and augment social supply networks and dynamics, resulting in “social supply supernets” (van der Sanden et al., 2023), and enable locally situated consumers to easily find and meet with physically proximate sellers (Demant and Aagesen, 2022). Key to this type of approach is a processual understanding of hybridization, an attentiveness to digital-physical contact zones, wherever these occur, and a view on (novel) hybrid practices and forms as contingent outcomes of complex interplays between existing physical practices and continually evolving digital technologies.

While drug-related digital-physical hybridity is part of larger global processes, the way it unfolds will often be uneven and contextually dependent. Following Kraidy’s (2005) assertion that any analysis of hybridity should be situated in a wider socio-cultural context; we argue that a contextually situated focus and analysis can shed light on the “glocal” (Robertson, 1995) – the simultaneity of universalizing (global) and particularizing (local) – tendencies in drug market changes and community cultures. A contextually situated analysis also enables an exploration of the structural conditions giving shape to specific digital-physical hybridity formations and variations.

Relatedly, digital-physical hybridity should also be historicized. At its core hybridity-thinking includes a conception of the “new” and “recent” as a “recombination of existing combinations” (Pieterse, 2001, p. 220). A hybridity perspective can, for instance, be used to call into question linear accounts of digitalisations and changes rooted in an overemphasis of ruptures and distinctions between “new” and “old” technologies. Many people who consume drugs, for instance, navigate in polymedia landscapes (Wanke et al., 2026a, 2026b), which include but are not always restricted to digital technologies. Analogue phone-based texting (as a private means of communication) is, for instance, sometimes integral to social media drug marketing and transactions (Demant et al., 2019), and smartphones – constituting polymedia landscapes in and off themselves (Madianou, 2014) – are sometimes used to send drug commercials to customers via both analogue texts and digital apps (Korshøj and Søgaard, 2024), hence illustrating how digital technologies can be used to improve a crime script of existing criminal activities. On the other hand, digital-physical hybridity is also a constantly moving and changing phenomenon. With the growing influence of algorithmic developments (Aagesen and Demant, 2025), and of generative AI, and new devices such as Meta’s “smartglasses”, combining visual, recording, voice AI assistance and inter-device connectivity (Hunt, 2026), the augmented reality of drug trading is likely to continually change (Weisheit, 2025), and with it digital-physical hybridity.

Recent ontological changes also have potential epistemological implications, and raise questions such as to what extent do key drug market concepts, developed in an analogue reality, hinder or assist our analysis of augmented realities? As aforementioned, in the context of the broader field of criminology, Gordon et al. (2022) have argued that a crucial aspect in moving beyond dualist thinking has been to abandon the term “cyberspace”. The latter not only frames digitally mediated activities through a spatial lens, it also rests on a separation of digital/mediated space and terrestrial/in-person space. Notions of spatiality and boundaries are hence two sides of the same coin. Relatedly, we hold that one step in moving beyond dualist thinking in the drugs field is to critically reflect upon the usage of the “market” concept. Especially in sociological and criminological analysis, this term is often a synonym for what is in fact a focus on specific and relatively delineated “marketplaces,” “arenas,” “platforms” or “websites” (Munksgaard, 2024).

A digital-physical hybridity perspective, concerned with fusion and blending across boundaries, brings into question conventional spatial and bounded conceptions of drug markets. Instead, it suggests that drug markets might best be conceptualized as phygital drug market assemblages, in which the flow and exchange of drugs are outcomes of heterogeneous socio-technical connectivity spanning across the digital-physical divide. An assemblage approach shifts the unit of analysis from stable entities to dynamic configurations, from bounded “space” to relational connections and networks (DeLanda, 2006; Duff, 2016), and by implication what we define as the “market” might best be approached as an accomplishment, an end-product, rather than a pre-given structure and starting point.

In a phygital, onlife or hybrid reality, traditional ethnography (physical spaces) is often insufficient alone, and pure digital data collection on digital platforms risks missing the physical/in-person and multimedia aspects of realities. Hence, Batat (2024) and Liu (2022) have argued that ambitions to study hybrid realities might require a new methodological protocol, including multimethod approaches. Relatedly, Crooke (2026) and Heitmayer (2026) both argue that the evident hybridity of everyday life requires all ethnographers to attend to the digital, even if their research question decentres digital aspects. When considering drug market research, combining platform observations with in-person fieldwork and interviews, either simultaneously or in different research phases (Lane, 2016), may help to generate relevant data on the blended digital-physical dimensions of drug use and drug trading.

The contributions to this special issue represent considerations of drug market hybridity as an emergent conceptual approach to understand drug market developments. As such, these articles provide a strong starting point for future development and evolution of a hybridity research paradigm.

Berry (2026) uses a comparative case study approach to trace the historical evolution of illegal drug markets alongside communications technologies using Actor-Network Theory. Berry charts the development of pagers, mobile phones, the Internet and extended reality and their adoption for drug trading purposes, highlighting the ongoing reconfiguration of drug market coordination and risk as policing practices and technological affordances evolve. Berry’s piece provides a valuable foundation for understanding the historical evolution of the techno-physical hybrid nature of drug trading, and of how shifting digital-physical configurations are likely to continue co-constituting drug market coordination and risk into the future.

Zooming in on the hybridization of local drug markets, Densley et al. (2026) explore how the growing role of digital platforms in retail drug market operations in Scotland has reconfigured the core mechanisms used to establish trust, coordinate supply logistics and manage risk. Presenting a combined abductive analysis of two interview data sets collected over more than a decade (2012–2025), the authors chart shifts toward more open, anonymous and compartmentalized drug market arrangements as hybrid organizational structures are becoming commonplace in the Scottish context. They propose the concept of “governance at a distance” to describe how hybrid drug supply exacerbates risk and harm inequities between those organizing, managing and profiting from drug supply via digital platforms, and those carrying out the physical, on-the-ground legwork of drug selling and transporting.

Our third contribution focuses on an increasingly crucial and dynamic facet of hybrid drug markets – the networked relationships between drug selling groups. Cunliffe et al. (2026) use a link-tracing approach to explore the size, structure and interconnectedness of Telegram drug selling channel networks in London and Warsaw at two points in time (March and May, 2024). Focusing on temporal changes across the data sets, their analysis underscores differential forms of inconsistency – or “churn” – across Telegram channel networks in both locations, with each network displaying distinct network formations and activity levels over time. Their focus on the digital “routing layer” of Telegram drug markets in London and Warsaw highlights the importance of physical context in shaping hybrid drug market formations. The paper raises questions around the implications of digital market “churn” for embodied physical market engagement, as well as the study and quantification of hybrid digital markets.

Our final contribution explores hybridity in the context of foraging for magic mushrooms in Poland. Using data gathered from digital forum discussions, Wanke et al. (2026a, 2026b) trace the changing meanings of foraging for, and consuming magic mushrooms among the Polish forum community over time, charting shifts between mystical or recreational framings and empirically grounded, therapeutic perspectives. Their analysis situates the digital forum both as a continually evolving digital information source, and, more crucially, a co-constitutive actor alongside physical foraging and consumption practices and experiences, and the subsequent perspectival framing of the resulting human-non-human encounters. This paper provides a valuable example of how physical and digital practices are co-produced and mutually shaped.

Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the digital from the physical world. Instead of focusing on one or the other, researchers need to embrace the interconnectedness of domains to produce in-depth understandings of current and future phygital drug market assemblages. Collectively, the articles in this Special Issue illustrate the value of this perspective.