‘Hood Economics’: Drug Dealing, State Failures, and Social Suffering

Abstract Chapter 3 turns to the stories and experiences of young people, and to a lesser extent those of their family members, who find themselves implicated in the street-level economy of Class A drugs. It starts from a fact that has not featured in the dominant narrative of ‘saving’ the vulnerable: the same government that discovered street-level drug dealers as slaves in need of state protection has also driven inequality to peak levels through its politics of public sector cuts on top of decades of neo-liberal welfare withdrawal and even longer colonial histories of racial extractivism. I share the stories of several young people who became involved at the lowest rung of this drugs economy. While motivated by their hopes for access to money and social rewards, they have also had to reckon with dangerous, unpredictable, and harsh working conditions. And yet, state interventions designed to lift drug dealers out of the illicit economy were also experienced by their families as attempts to ‘set them up to fail’. These experiences bring into sharp relief the ‘social suffering’ confronted by those at the margins at the hands of multiple structural forces. They also reveal the workings of a deeply disjunctive democracy that has formally extended a narrative of care while allowing substantive inequalities to flourish.