Angus Bancroft

• University of Edinburgh

Complex cybercrime markets face collective action problems. As they involve disparate networks of individuals, they cannot use in person persuasion or coercion to ensure cooperation. They face a tension between being open to new members and opportunities, and regulating participation. We propose that collective emotional regulation plays a crucial...

Purpose of Review Darknet-hosted drug markets (‘cryptomarkets’) are an established model of illicit drug distribution which makes use of specialised online hosting and payment systems to link buyers and sellers remotely. Cryptomarkets appear to professionalise, gentrify and integrate drug markets. Therefore, they can be hypothesised to have effects...

The impact of COVID-19 itself and societal responses to it have affected people who use drugs and the illicit drug economy. This paper is part of a project investigating the health impacts of COVID-19 related control measures on people who use drugs in Scotland. It examines their roles and decisions as economically situated actors. It does this wit...

Sociology of drugs and digital sociology—albeit for different reasons—need the analysis of interactions, an approach underdeveloped in current scholarship. We address this gap by providing a specific analytical framework for the analysis of digital interactions which enables an ethnomethodological account of micro-interactional dynamics within a cr...

Purpose Trading illicit drugs on cryptomarkets differs in many ways from material retail markets. This paper aims to contribute to existing studies on pricing by studying the relationship between price changes in relation to changes in nominal value of the cryptocurrency. To this, the authors qualitatively study product descriptions and images to e...

As modern societies have encountered intoxication, they have sought to regulate and criminalise it as a threat to public order, personal and economic development and the public good. Drug control has become a hybrid of state and private regulation and sanctioning, some of which entirely disregards due process and citizenship rights. Drugs can be un...

This chapter develops the theme of faith being put in technology over community to consider the differences between automatic trust systems and users’ and vendors’ own judgements when it comes to drug quality. The chapter explores the different kinds of knowledge that are employed to assess and ensure drug quality. Some of this knowledge can be ref...

This chapter presents cryptomarkets and drug supply chains as political economies. This means understanding how harm and benefits are distributed by processes external to the criminal group or act. The changing global power structure, the emergence of regionally dominant digital payment platforms, the international division of labour and the deform...

This chapter introduces the main case used in the book: darknet cryptomarkets. Cryptomarkets are one way in which the illicit drug market and drug use cultures are mediated through digital platforms. The cryptomarket case is unusual because it is one area where the groups supporting the market control the backend, the frontend and the content. This...

This chapter discusses the context of digital drug research. The internet is a fractured place with varying, incompatible structures. The abundance of ‘free’ data is tempting for social research and it must be tempered by an understanding that the digital is not society, and that there are challenges to social science norms of what makes quality re...

This chapter examines how trust is built between users of illicit spaces and the trust that users put into technology. There has been a significant focus on what is called trustless technology, systems that in theory allow users to make agreements enforceable by software. The blockchain used by the bitcoin cryptocurrency is, or claims itself as, a...

This chapter examines how drug markets are embedded culturally and institutionally. Digital life has provided new capacities for criminal action and new ways of monitoring and surveilling criminals. In terms of the control infrastructure it has produced new capacities for law enforcement, security services and private agencies to intervene, coerce...

This chapter examines the possible benefits that cryptomarkets have for harm reduction. The cryptomarket ecosystem is claimed as being transparent about drug quality and therefore benefiting both harm-reduction in illicit drug use and the establishment of a model for a legalised drug market. To that end, many market players seek to promote a ration...

This chapter concludes by arguing that digital crime is something society is increasingly exposed to and, as such, it is treated as a normal threat. The changing configuration of the digital society is changing the capacity and autonomy of the citizen. Our digital lives are increasingly ‘modded’. Platforms tell us what we may say, who we may connec...

This chapter sets out why we should think about criminological risks as stemming from the configuration of technology, economic and social organisation, and cultural identity. ‘Cyber’ implies a set of rules and spaces separate from the real. A digital perspective shows how embedded the internet infrastructure is with day-to-day life and other syste...

This chapter sets out the different business models present in the cryptomarkets and the basis on which participants are driven towards selecting one over another. The market confers advantages on big players, thus there is a tendency towards market concentration. Some vendors, however, deliberately limit the size of their business. Vendors take on...

This chapter considers another claimed benefit of cryptomarkets and the darknet generally, the feature that is seen as most threatening: anonymity. This chapter argues that anonymity is not the dangerous quality it appears to be. Most malicious activities do not take place using a darknet-provided cloak of anonymity. Communities can benefit from an...

This book draws on research into darknet cryptomarkets to examine themes of cybercrime, cybersecurity, illicit markets and drug use. Cybersecurity is increasingly seen as essential, yet it is also a point of contention between citizens, states, non-governmental organisations and private corporations as each grapples with existing and developing tec...

Illicit market exchanges in cybercriminal markets are plagued by problems of verifiability and enforceability: trust is one way to ensure reliable exchange. It is fragile and hard to establish. One way to do that is to use the administrative structure of the digital market to control transactions. This is common among a specific type of market – da...

The internet is a medium for research, a place for the exchange of drugs and knowledge, and a method for governing and surveilling drug users. Opportunities for drug research with and in digital spaces are expanding, using internet mediated methods such as online surveys, web scraping, and research with web communities and users of cryptomarkets an...

Background: An ethnographic analysis of drug-centred cryptomarket community and exchange, this article explores the embedded values around drug distribution and consumption within this setting. Drawing on our interviews with cryptomarket users, we analyze the ways in which users claim the cryptomarket as a space of morality, empathy, trust, recipr...

The chapters in this edited volume include a vibrant mix of scholars from political science, sociology, criminology, law, and practical experiences. This volume is the first of its kind in German-speaking countries addressing the complex issue of ‘drugs, darknet and organized crime’. The multidisciplinary approaches to the new phenomenon demonstrat...

Sale of illicit drugs through online ‘cryptomarkets’ is a notable innovation in the illicit drug market. Cryptomarkets present new ways of configuring risk and harm in relation to drug use. I examine the kinds of knowledge and discourses users employed to do this. I argue that the lay/expert divide that creates a hierarchy of knowledge around drug...

The ‘student experience’ is commodified in UK higher education. It meshes with the commodified intoxication culture around alcohol that has been promoted in the UK by central and local government. Central to this culture is a concept of pleasure as purposeful, unrestrained sociability. It invokes gendered norms of interaction that drinkers both eng...

This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant pr...

Intoxication represents a threat to individual autonomy, the self-willing, self-activating, self-making personhood at the heart of liberal philosophy. In the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of countries like the UK, USA, Canada and Australia it is walled off from day-to-day life, surrounded by strict moral regulations and conceived of as a space of ab...

This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant pr...

Background Users of darknet markets refer to product quality as one of the motivations for buying drugs there, and vendors present quality as a selling point. However what users understand by quality and how they evaluate it is not clear. This paper investigates how users established and compared drug quality. Methods We used a two-stage method for...

Anonymity is treated as a problem of governance that can be subject to technical resolution. We use the example of the darknet to critically examine this approach. We explore the background assumptions that have been made about anonymity as a quality of social life. We conceive of anonymity as a way of engaging and maintaining social relationships...

Anonymity is treated as a problem of governance that can be subject to technical resolution. We use the example of the darknet to critically examine this approach. We explore the background assumptions that have been made about anonymity as a quality of social life. We conceive of anonymity as a way of engaging and maintaining social relationships...

Background: Users of darknet markets refer to product quality as one of the motivations for buying drugs there, and vendors present quality as a selling point. However, what users understand by quality and how they evaluate it is not clear. This article investigates how users established and compared drug quality. Methods: We used a two-stage me...

This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant-pr...

This paper reports on a participatory ethnography conducted with undergraduate students. It examined the rituals and habits through which they constructed their intoxication culture. Students used video recording devices such as smartphones to collect data about aspects of their intoxication experiences. They were then interviewed about emerging an...

Pre-drinking, also known as pre-partying, pre-gaming, and front- or pre-loading, is the intensive pair or group consumption of alcohol in a private home prior to going out for the night, with the intention of ensuring maximum levels of intoxication. It has emerged as a distinct component of heavy drinking practice among young adults approximately b...

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of sociological work exploring the importance and meaning of kinship. Much of this work has criticized the ‘individualization’ thesis according to which changes in family structures over time have been interpreted as reflecting a fundamental decline in family values. Highlighting continuities as well as...

Concern is increasing about children growing up in families where there are substance use problems but relatively little is known about the perspectives of the children themselves. We report on a qualitative study with young people who grew up in such families, exploring their accounts of their daily lives at home, school and leisure. We focus on t...

The extended dependence of many young adults on their parents, in a socioeconomic climate which disadvantages unsupported young people who leave education early, has been the focus of much research (Jones et al. 2006; Furlong et al. 2003). Some of this work has posited a polarisation in young adulthood between those whose extended transitions to ad...

Parental drug and alcohol problems can have a profound impact on children. There is a growing policy and practice focus on this topic in the UK. Most is concerned with children of primary school age and younger. Older children tend to be neglected in the debate, and young people of age 16 and over are mostly absent from it. It is argued here that t...

Research into potentially sensitive issues with young people presents numerous methodological and ethical challenges. While recent studies have highlighted the advantages of task-based activities in research with young people, the literature on life history research provides few suggestions as to effective and appropriate research tools for encoura...

Parental drug and alcohol misuse challenges the parent-child boundary that is generally created, sustained and enforced through norms, roles, individual practices and social institutions. However, empirical studies of family life show that these boundaries, although vested with so much emotional energy and material resources, are malleable and brea...

Introduction The parent–child boundary is created, sustained and enforced through norms, roles, individual practices and social institutions. It has symbolic resonance partly because the relationship between parent and child is often portrayed, not without reason, as one of the few remaining social bonds whose boundaries have a weight of obligation...

This paper draws upon qualitative research with 100 smokers (50 male and 50 female) in two Scottish areas of disadvantage to investigate their perceptions and experiences of quitting. The fieldwork took place between 1999 and 2000, with data collected through in-depth individual interviews and the completion of a smoking day grid. While many interv...

The paper draws on qualitative interviews with a sample of male and female smokers who live in areas of disadvantage in Edinburgh, Scotland, to examine their perceptions of habit and addiction and the implications for smoking behaviour. The paper shows how smokers have a sophisticated understanding of these concepts and the way in which they affect...

Fast Lives: Women who use Crack Cocaine. By Claire E. Sterk. Pp. 242. (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1999.) US$ 19·95, ISBN 1-56639-672-7, paperback; US$ 59·50, ISBN 1-56639-671-9, hardback. - Volume 34 Issue 1 - Angus Bancroft

Although there is there is a shared assumption among the research community that response rates are lower in areas of deprivation, few studies have reported on the difficulties of recruiting disadvantaged respondents for the purposes of research. Where these issues are raised the focus is usually on why particular respondent groups may be more or l...

To examine the behaviour and attitudes related to smoking and contraband tobacco products among smokers in two socially deprived areas. Cross sectional study with qualitative semistructured interviews, augmented by smokers' day grid. Two areas of socioeconomic deprivation in Edinburgh. Participants: 50 male and 50 female smokers aged 25-40 years ra...

Roma and Gypsy-travellers are amongst the most marginalised groups in modern European society. This paper uses the experience of Czech Roma in order to examine issues of spatial regulation and exclusion. It seeks to determine the processes by which they are pushed to the edges of society and how these processes are changing as their circumstances,...

This paper examines the place of Gypsy-Travellers within the British legal system. It considers the function of the law in establishing moral and social norms and pathologising aspects of Traveller life. It examines how a variety of legal principles, discourses and bureaucratic agencies combine to construct travellers as deviant with regard to the...

Under Communism the Roma minority in the Czech Republic were subject to severe state directed assimilation policies. Since the end of the Cold War they have endured a combination of labour market exclusion and racially motivated violence. The apparent historical discontinuity between the Communists' strategies of assimilation and the current forms...