Sourcing illegal drugs as a hidden older user: the ideal of ‘social supply’

Abstract

Aims: At a time of growing awareness regarding the non-commercial supply of illegal drugs between friends, this article explores the significance of so-called ‘social supply’ for a group of ‘hidden’ users of illegal drugs aged 40 and over.

Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 users of illegal drugs aged 40 and over who were not in contact with the criminal justice system or treatment agencies regarding their use. Participants were recruited using snowball sampling.

Findings: Accessing drugs through the commercial market was considered as a less attractive proposition than social supply by the participants. The majority used only socially supplied drugs, with some engaging commercial dealers when socially supplied product was unavailable. A handful sourced drugs exclusively through the commercial market. Some were home growers of cannabis, and a small number had drifted into social supply themselves.

Conclusions: Social supply was seen in a far more favourable light than commercial transactions by our participants, and acted as an ideal against which all other acts of sourcing were compared. Moreover, social supply was often an integral facet of the drug using experience and served to validate and enhance that experience. The relatively benign, non-predatory nature of the social supply engaged in by the participants lends support to calls for some reform of the offence of supply in UK law.

Keywords:

• Social supply
• older adults
• hidden use

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In 2009, following the Sentencing Council’s consultation on Sentencing for Drugs Offences, the Sentencing Advisory Panel (2009) decided against changes to the law for non-commercial supply but acknowledged that the absence of commercial motivation should be treated as a mitigating factor. Following this, the Sentencing Council (2012) produced new guidelines that went some way to acknowledging social supply as a lesser offence, although the term itself was not used. The guidelines included provision for judicial discretion in sentencing through the consideration of the ‘role’ of the offender and their ‘culpability’. In practice, this is read as the ‘harm’ that a transaction causes, and is measured by reference to the amount of drugs supplied. However, it has been argued that this approach can still lead to disproportionate outcomes as it relies on a strict interpretation of profit for gain and on unrealistic weight thresholds in determining the ‘harm’ caused (Coomber & Moyle, 2014; Coomber et al., 2016).

2 See also the Police Foundation (2000) who, on the basis of an independent inquiry into the 1971 Act, found that many of those prosecuted for supply offences were not the commercial dealers who were target of the legislation. They recommended a separate offence of ‘dealing’ to be created at the top end of the scale. The Select Committee on Home Affairs (2002) disagreed and maintained that social supply should continue to be prosecuted as supply. However, they also recommended the creation of a ‘supply for gain’ offence at the top end of the scale. Incidentally, theirs was the first official use of the term ‘social supply’.

3 Note that we refer to ‘normal’ drug use to denote a mode of use that does ‘not verge upon or develop into the pathological’ (Hammersley, 2005, 201) and is straightforwardly incorporated into otherwise unremarkable lifestyles. This is but a small part of wider processes of ‘normalisation’ (see especially Aldridge, Measham, & Williams, 2011; Measham & Shiner, 2009; Parker, Aldridge, & Measham, 1998; Pennay & Measham, 2016) and we make no claim about the extent of normalisation among older adults in general. That said, it seems fairly clear that normalisation is likely to be more advanced among younger cohorts in terms of the prevalence of illegal drug use, how it is perceived and how far it is tolerated. The prospect of intensifying normalisation among older adults in the coming years is an intriguing one, deserving of further study (Erickson & Hathaway, 2010, p. 138; Moxon & Waters, 2017, p. 145–152).

4 Studies in both the UK and the US have consistently found that a greater proportion of current illegal drug users are male and that older males are more likely to use illegal drugs than older females, however ‘older’ is defined (for example Aitken, DeSantis, Harford, & Fe Caces, 2000; Anderson & Levy, 2003; Plant, Plant, & Mason, 2002). The extent to which women’s use might simply be more ‘hidden’ is uncertain. Indeed, several of our male participants had female partners who also used illegal drugs but they refused to be interviewed. Plant et al. (2002) found that female users were more likely to report adverse consequences related to their use, although Glantz and Backenheimer (1988) found that illegal drug use among ‘elderly’ women was generally not problematic, especially in comparison to alcohol and prescription drug abuse. However they did suggest that this had the potential to change as younger cohorts, including more ‘drug involved’ women, grew older.

5 The 'employment status' given in Table 1 is drawn from the participants’ own descriptions of what they did for a living. As Notley (2005, p. 281) suggested when discussing her own study of hidden users, ‘it was important to introduce as much variation as possible into the sample, and thus to “theoretically sample” a wide range of experiences that could be compared and contrasted during analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This need for variability during analysis had to be balanced against both achieving a sample of individuals who were sufficiently comparable to make it possible to develop a cohesive theory about a particular group, and the difficulties in obtaining that sample’.

6 Winston and Uri’s reminisces call to mind the ‘trading charities’ (groups involved in the drug business due to ideological commitments, with profit a secondary motive) and ‘mutual societies’ (friendship networks of user-dealers who reciprocally exchange and sell drugs) ideal types developed in Dorn and South (1990) and Dorn, Murji, and South (1992), although neither of these participants had ever been involved in the supply of illegal drugs themselves. The sense that over the years these rather ‘amateur’ supply channels had been progressively displaced by more overtly criminal and commercial ‘firms’, as described by Dorn et al. (1992, p. xiv), was echoed by Winston.