Drug Sales, Gender, and Risk: Notions of Risk From the Perspective of Gang-Involved Young Adults

Abstract

We examine gender and meanings of risk in interviews (2007–2010) with gang-involved young men and women (n = 253) engaged in illicit drug sales in San Francisco, California. The in-depth interviews from this NIDA-funded study were coded using the software NVivo to identify patterns and themes. We examine their interpretations of the risks of drug-selling and their narratives about gender differences in these risks. We find distinct discourses regarding the role of femininities and masculinities and male and female bodies in shaping risk as well as the nexus between gender, family, and risk for female drug sellers.

Keywords :

• risk
• gender
• drug sales
• gangs
• youth
• risk-reduction strategies

THE AUTHORS

Molly Moloney, PhD, is a sociologist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis in California. Her research has focused on a number of subject areas, including masculinities, femininities, and parenthood among youth gang members; gender, sexuality, and ecstasy use in the rave scene; the regulatory environment and the changing nighttime economy; and Asian-American youth and young adult illicit drug use. What connects these different projects together is an emphasis on interpretive socio-cultural inquiry that is attentive to meaning, culture, and consumption and a focus on the intersections between identities (gender, sexual, and ethnic) and substance use.

Geoffrey Hunt, PhD, is a professor at the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University, Denmark and senior scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis in San Francisco. Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist, who has had 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the fields of drugs, alcohol, and youth studies. He is currently the principal investigator on an NIH project on Asian-American Gay and Bisexual Men, Club Drugs, and Nightlife. In addition, Dr. Hunt has been involved in a number of large-scale comparative international projects on such issues as drugs and the nighttime economy and drug and alcohol treatment. He has published widely in the field of substance use studies in many of the leading sociology, anthropology, and criminology journals in the United States and the United Kingdom. He and colleagues have just published Youth Drugs and Nightlife (Routledge, 2010) and Drugs and Culture (Ashgate, 2011).

Karen Joe-Laidler, PhD, is a professor of sociology and the director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong. She has been involved in criminological research—applied and theoretical—in the United States and Hong Kong. In the United States, her interest in the articulation of gender and ethnicity in gangs dates back to the late 1980s. She continues to publish in this area, focusing especially on violence and drugs. In Hong Kong, her research has focused on the sex work industry and drug-related issues, especially the rise and problems associated with psychotropic drugs, drug-use-related violence, Buddhist interventions with heroin users, and generational differences among heroin users. She is also working on a number of evaluation studies of youth intervention programs.

GLOSSARY

• Child protective services: California social services directed to intervene in cases of child abuse and neglect.

• Governmentality: A concept initially developed by Foucault, which examines the process by which governments through a mixture of institutional policies, regimes, knowledges, practices, and procedures exercise power in late modern societies.

• Late modern society: Or “Late modernity” refers to contemporary sociological analysis found especially in the work of Giddens (1990) and Beck (1992), in which contemporary individuals must engage in a constant process of self-reflection, or as Beck refers to it as “the emergence of reflexive agency.” As individuals become increasingly free of structural constraints and structural social ties, such as social class, they are free to reflect increasingly on their own selves. Within this process, notions of life-style become increasingly important.

• Risk society: It is a concept introduced to English-speaking sociologists in the early 1990s and initially developed by Beck in his book, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992) to identify a central paradox within contemporary society, whereby advances in science and technology inevitably lead to an increasing threat of ecological catastrophes coupled with a heightened risk of mass disasters.