Drugs and Crime Deviant Pathways

Candido Da Agra, Serge Brochu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351942737
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This key work exposes international studies from leading social sciences researchers who use various theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations to depict deviant drug and crime-related pathways. The chapters have been grouped into four sections. The first section, Deviance, Set and Setting, discusses a new basis for the understanding of deviant pathways. The second section, Youth, Drug and Delinquency Pathways, presents empirical studies which help to understand the drug-crime relationship. The third section discusses Adult, Drug and Crime Pathways adopted by drug users, flexers, traders or dealers, and traffickers. Finally, the fourth section, Ways Out of deviant pathways, explores approaches for controlling drug use and criminality socially or individually, with or without legal intervention or formal help. In short, this book presents an invaluable overview of the most advanced research in the field of deviant drug-and crime-related pathways.

Part I
DEVIANCE, SET AND SETTING

Chapter 1

The Complex Structures, Processes and Meanings of the Drug/Crime Relationship

Candido da Agra

This chapter presents, in four sections, the programme of studies on the relationship between drugs and crime carried out at the Centro de Ciências do Comportamento Desviante (Centre of Deviant Behaviour Sciences) of the University of Oporto, Portugal, between 1991 and 1996. Under our scientific direction, 14 researchers developed a set of articulated studies, in which different empirical research methods were applied to approximately 1000 subjects.

The first section presents the results of theoretical research on the models of scientific research and its application to the explanation of the drugs/crime connection. The second section presents the logic, the frame of reference and the method of the research programme. The third section presents the results of the empirical research. The aim, the method and the results of each of the main studies are presented in this section. Finally, the fourth section goes back to the theoretical analysis, in order to build a comprehensive system from the empirical data.

The Scientific Explanation and the Explanation of the Relationship Between Drugs and Crime

The scientific explanation

The question of what is a scientific explanation is one of the most difficult issues in epistemology. Supported mostly by the work of Kuhn (1971, 1977), we have come to conclude that there are three types of scientific explanation: causal, structural and processual (da Agra, 1996).

Causal explanations predict direct relationships between two different phenomena of the type: A causes B. According to the physics epistemologist Bunge (1971), a relationship between two phenomena can only be called causal if it obeys a number of conditions: (a) that the relationship implies two different systems, one being the determinant and the other the determined; (b) that the reaction of the determined system on the determinant system is considerably weaker than the action suffered (feedback negligible); and (c) that there are no spontaneous effects on the determined system. Bunge thus states that very few systems are causally connected. Referring to causal explanation in physics, Kuhn claims that its significance declined in the nineteenth century and has almost disappeared in the present day. Considering that this kind of elementary explanation has been abandoned in the sciences that deal with natural phenomena, how can we accept its use in the sciences that study much less deterministic phenomena, such as human behaviour?

The structural explanation is one of the most fruitful kinds of scientific explanation. It consists in reducing a phenomenon’s surface appearance to its deep structure and in explaining global and macroscopic properties through properties found at a microscopic level. In other words, in metaphorical language, the visible appearance of things is explained by invisible structures.

The processual explanation defines the succession of a phenomenon’s conditions over a period of time, and the rule according to which such conditions are articulated. It demands that two conditions are fulfilled: the change of condition in a system and the rule or law that expresses the connections between the different conditions over time.

Scientific explanations demand, on the other hand, an epistemological stance towards determinism and indeterminism. Superficial analyses place the question in dichotomic terms: phenomena are either determinate or indeterminate. However, more serious epistemological analyses reveal a tremendous complexity of intermediate points between pure determinism (which is an abstraction) and pure indeterminism (also an abstraction). These are the degrees of determinism/indeterminism: causal determinism, dynamic determinism (knowledge of the phenomenon’s ‘initial conditions’ and their predictability), legal determinism (description of the laws that rule the phenomena), statistical determinism (description of the system’s state in global and indirect terms, through statistical distribution), statistical indeterminism (which supposes ‘free’ laws besides the ‘necessary’ laws characteristic of determinism) and contingency. The concept of self-organization and autopoiesis supposes this ensemble of explanatory possibilities to be located between determinism and indeterminism.

The explanation of the drugs/crime relationship

Let us apply the basic modes of scientific explanation to the scientific literature dealing with the relationship between drugs and crime. All of the vast amount of literature produced since the 1960’s can be split into three models: causal explanation, structural explanation and processual explanation.

Explaining through causal determinism

The small scientific community in this field usually identifies three causal explanatory schemes: (a) the psychopharmacological model (anti-social behaviour is a consequence of the psychopharmacological properties of the substances); (b) the economical-compulsive model (when in need of drugs that he/she cannot afford to buy, the drug addict is forced to resort to illegal means to obtain them); and (c) the systemic model which explains drug-related criminality in terms of the violence intrinsic to illegal drugs traffic markets.

Brochu (1995) adds two more models to the causal type of explanation: Goldstein’s tripartite model and the inverse causality model. Goldstein (1985) advanced his tripartite model in a paradigmatic paper titled ‘The drugs/violence nexus: a tripartite conceptual framework’. The reason why Goldstein calls his model ‘tripartite’ is that it aims at integrating, in a theoretical system, the three models of simple causality that had been developed until then: the psychopharmacological, the economical-compulsive and the systemic. The inverse causality model, based on empirical evidence, shows that the consumption of drugs also proceeds from criminal activity (the determination of the two phenomena is now inverted; that is, crime is now seen as causing drug taking).

The debate about the causal model

The issue of causality has joined authors around two different tendencies: those who while rejecting causal relationships, suggest that there is a spurious relationship, a co-occurrence model; and those who claim that there is a causal relationship. This debate on causality sinks into deep epistemological incoherence, for it confounds causal determinism with statistical determinism or co-occurrence and spurious relationship with the absence of determinism.

Clayton and Tuchfeld (1982) are among the few authors who point their finger at this serious problem in the debate about causality. They accuse those who argue that there is a spurious relationship of ignoring what they are defending, namely of ignoring the existence of intermediate variables between drugs and crime. Supported by Hirschi and Selvin’s definition of causality, they argue that there is empirical evidence supporting a causal relationship between drugs and crime; it is claimed that statistical and probabilistic relationships are found between both phenomena. However, like the authors they criticize, these authors also reveal a frail conceptualization of causality. In fact, if we speak about statistical and probabilistic relationships we are prevented from speaking about causality in a strict sense (as defined above). The alternative to the spurious relationship is not necessarily causality.

The notion of ‘inverse causality’ is also frail and deceptive. The empirical evidence supporting it, (that criminality precedes drug taking), works only to deny the causal relationship between drugs and crime; it does not contribute to the emergence of an opposite value causality. The fact is this: if drugs cause crime but crime also causes drug taking with an identical weight of determinism, we no longer have a phenomenon that determines and a phenomenon that is determined, and that is, as we pointed out above, a crucial condition for a relationship to be called causal. If drugs cause crime and crime causes drug taking, all we can say is that there is a reciprocal or complex causality or, to put it more simply, there is no causality in a strict sense.

The emergence of a will to complexity

A will to explain the drugs/crime relationship in complex terms has been surfacing since 1985. The complex explanation model refuses both the simple direct causal relationship and the spurious relationship.

We find signs of that will to complexity in Goldstein (1985), Watters et al. (1985), Inciardi (1985) and Faupel (1989). Goldstein’s tripartite model is a transition model between simple causal models and complex models. In fact, while it still has a deterministic basis, it is no longer – contrary to Brochu’s suggestion – a causal model. Because it is an explanatory model that integrates three major factors with different explanatory weights (the nature of the substances, the economical – compulsive factor and the situational factor), then by definition it rejects simple and direct explanations and admits, even if not explicitly, complex relations. It is our belief that in his integrative model, Goldstein transfers the ‘law of the effect’ to the drugs/crime relationship (according to this law, the effect of drugs cannot be explained without taking into consideration three major factors: the substances, the individuals and the contexts).

Similarly, in a paper also published in 1985, titled ‘Causality, context and contingency: relationships between drug abuse and delinquency’, Watters et al. argue that the relationship is not direct but complex, more contingent than causal.

As we understand it, the complex explanation of the drugs/crime relationship has been developed in two models: structural explanation and processual explanation.

Structural deviance: from macroscopy to microscopy of the drugs/crime relationship

As we move from the surface towards the structures underlying the drugs/crime behavioural complex, we find elements of structural explanation in five major domains, among which are the ‘correlational models’ (Brochu, 1995). In short, they are as follows.

Structural statistics Here we find the statistical studies by Anglin and Speckart 1986. Using ‘structural equation modelling’, they manipulate a latent variable and a manifest variable. The authors show that variables such as lifestyle, social background and personality structure interfere in the drugs/crime relationship, thereby preventing a given behaviour from being predicted on the basis of an analysis of the other element. They also show that early deviance is related to a future association between drug taking and criminality.

‘Deviance syndrome’ This kind of explanation is usually fitted into the ‘correlational models’ category because, when understood as a syndrome, deviance encompasses a series of different behaviours brought together by a common characteristic: antisociality or transgression (taking drugs, committing offences, running away from and being undisciplined at school, acts of vandalism, early sexual experiences, and so on). The deviance syndrome is regarded as being associated with psychosocial ‘structural marginality’ (Brochu, 1995).

Psychopathological explanation This is also part of the ‘correlational models’ which, according to Brochu, explain the drugs/crime relationship by ‘common causes’. Some personality traits, identified by instruments of psychological diagnoses, are taken to explain simultaneously addictive and criminal behaviour.

Psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric explanations Personalities with structural functioning difficulties associated with problems in the resolution of the Oedipal conflict are responsible, with latent structures, for deviant behaviour such as drug taking, criminality, suicide and so on (Mendel, 1969; Bergeret, 1980). In his turn, Devereux, following his studies in ethnopsychiatry, prefers the concept of ‘social negativism’ to that of antisocial personality for the explanation of the psychopathology of deviant behaviour. According to Devereux, deviant behaviour, criminal or not, is always symptomatic: it expresses an anguish resolution strategy. However, where does this anguish come from? From the incoherent and contradictory nature of complex societies, according to Devereux (1977).

The social-cognitive explanation By ‘social-cognitive’ we mean the theoretical strategy that explains the drugs/crime relationship either as a neutralization technique or as a labelling process. In this perspective, the drugs/crime relationship is not natural but artificial, constructed by social interaction and cognitive and affection factors. Apart from Becker’s (1963), there are few studies on the social-cognitive processes. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, authors such as Fagan, Elliot and Huizinga have opened up some research trends in this perspective.

The deviant process

The processual explanation locates the drugs/crime relationship in time, in the time of the actors of drugs and crime. As we see it, there are four major approaches in this general perspective.

From structural explanation to processual explanation – biopsychological processes and the general deviance hypothesis An example of this approach is the important study carried out by Newcomb and McGee (1991). The authors research the relationship between what they call ‘sensation seeking’ and general deviance, and its behavioural expressions (drug taking, delinquency, criminality, sexual experiences, and so on). These variables are studied in a developmental perspective. Newcomb and McGee confirm the deviance syndrome theory; they show, however, that the constellation of problematic behaviours changes in the transition from adolescence to youth. On the other hand, they verify the existence of a relationship between sensation seeking in adolescence and specific dev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Drugs and Crime Deviant Pathways
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Kai Pernanen
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I DEVIANCE, SET AND SETTING
• Part II YOUTH, DRUG AND DELINQUENCY PATHWAYS
• Part III ADULT, DRUG AND CRIME PATHWAYS
• Part IV WAYS OUT
• Index