The Unusual Suspects: An Educated, Legitimately Employed Drug Dealing Network

This article challenges the mainstream discourse that is often used to conceptualize illegal drug supply. In particular, it questions the assumption that drug dealers and the markets they inhabit are a social aberration, restricted primarily to social outsiders operating in socially and economically marginalized communities. Drawing on 6 years of ethnographic fieldwork with 25 “conventional” working-class “lads,” the article makes two overarching arguments. First, that the illegal drug trade is by no means confined to a subset of violent or marginalized drug distributors. Second, that the organization and structure of drug distribution networks can often be entwined into the fabric of conventional routines. The article concludes that criminological research must move toward better conceptualizing the so-called silent majority of drug dealers if we are to accurately reframe the current reductionist drugs discourse

Breaking bad, making good: notes on a televisual tourist industry

This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show’s sites, scenes, and tastes in the city of Albuquerque . This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression

The enchanted snake and the forbidden fruit: the ayahuasca ‘fairy tale’ tourist

This ethnographic study increases our understanding of Westerners seeking genuine fairy tale experiences of magic, transformation and enchantment within South American psychedelic ayahuasca tourism. Examining 63 tourists, this study shows how vision-based spirit sensegivers facilitate individuals in exorcising demons, to make sense of themselves as spiritual beings within an enchanted universe. However, and with this potion quickly wearing off upon returning to the West, tourists feel abandoned by their spirits, and disconnected from the fairy lands. Coupled with not wanting to re-experience intense inner tensions from stepping in and out of a fairy tale, further tourism is rejected. As such, ayahuasca tourism becomes a ‘forgotten’ fairy tale, rarely told