An unrecognised revolution in street drug design

I’ve got an article in The Observer about the ongoing but little recognised revolution in street drug design being pushed forward by the ‘legal high’ market.

Since 2008 we’ve seen the first genuine wave of ‘designer drugs’ that are being produced by science-savvy professional labs that are deliberately producing substances to avoid drug laws.

New substances are appearing at a rate of more than one-a-week and some are completely new to science.

The article looks at how the clandestine labs are creating these new highs and what this almost impossible to regulate situation means for the ‘war on drugs’ approach to recreational drug use.

Link to article in The Observer.

View the original article here

The evolution of London street gangs

A fascinating article in the journal Crime and Delinquency tracks the evolution of London gangs from their ‘boys on the street’ beginnings to organised crime syndicates.

Sociologist James Densley has clearly spent a lot of time talking to gang members of the streets of London and has gained an intimate insight into how the organisations function and develop.

The article is full of quotes and is equally frightening and tragic. Not tragic, however, in the death and destruction sense, but sometimes just sad, as the bottom of the pile gang members struggle to live the high rolling life style they aspire to.

Gang members were eager to pull thick rolls of banknotes out of their trouser pockets to illustrate a typical “night’s work,” but amounts quoted often refer to revenue rather than income. They also struggled to transform cash into wealth. Only inner circle gang members had the human and social capital to launder profits through casinos, pawnbro- kers, money couriers, small bank deposits, and remittances transferred using money service businesses such as Western Union.

One interviewee resorted to depositing cash into the bank account of a wealthy private school girl he had known since primary school. In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in- transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.” In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties.

It’s a brilliant study into the social organisation of London gangs that merits reading in full. Sadly, the full piece is locked behind a paywall but it seems a version has found its way online on this page.

Link to journal article online (via @crimepsychblog)
Link to page with pdf.

View the original article here

7th Street

Get ready to dive into one of the most violent, drug-infested neighborhoods only to see it transform into the trendy, residential enclave it has become. Many of the old timers figured out how to survive the area when it was a ghetto - now the challenge for them is to see if they can survive gentrification.

7TH STREET draws the viewer into a neighborhood that most people were once too afraid to enter. An area that most people only heard rumors about: Alphabet City in NYC's East Village, once known as the drug capital of the East Coast.

The movie explores change in one of the most vital areas of NYC and the complexity of gentrification. Not only is this movie about one block in Manhattan - it's about neighborhoods and communities all over the world where progress sometimes comes at the expense of richness of character and diversity.

Viewers join in Pais' struggle as he sees his block transform and become a safe place for his newborn son and a trendy neighborhood for the new inhabitants at the expense of his street family. The people who were his role models as a child he now sees homeless in Tompkins Square Park or discovers them dead.

7TH STREET will undoubtedly pull your heartstrings and make you look with fresh eyes at the place you call home.

Price: $19.95

Click here to buy from Amazon

A mental map of city street drugs

Urbanite has a fascinating article on researchers who are attempting to map drug users’ minds onto the city streets.

They are giving addicts GPS-enabled PDAs that ask the participants to rate their psychological state as they move around Baltimore.

By using pre-existing maps of the city that chart things like neighbourhood poverty and local drug availability it’s possible to see how the mental state of users changes as they move through the different physical and social environments of the city.

To make the patterns of movement meaningful, the researchers have to understand the various city “environments” that the drug users move through. This job fell to Craig, the biostatistician and a Baltimore native. To create maps of the urban landscape, Craig started with Census indices, which include race, income, and other socioeconomic metrics. To those he added a system developed by Dr. Debra Furr-Holden at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who sent teams out to score city blocks based on physical characteristics (broken windows, shell casings, street memorials for recent killings) and on people’s behavior (clearly intoxicated adults, unsupervised children, and so on). “Her data are like nothing else I’ve ever seen,” says Epstein.

On these maps, Craig plots the paths of drug users as they move through the city, weaving in the information they’ve plugged into their PDAs. The result is a detailed rendering of how addiction is lived in space and time, opening a new window on the experience of tens of thousands of city residents. “Their work is novel,” says Yale University’s Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry and child study and director of the Yale Stress Center. This research “allows us to understand the social context in which drug use takes place and to evaluate that context,” says Sinha, who is internationally known for her pioneering research on the mechanisms linking stress to addiction.

The technique is called ‘ecological momentary assessment’ – although it is similar to a closely related method called ‘experience sampling’ that also involves giving participants an electronic device that requires they record their mental state at various points in their daily life.

These techniques have been around since the early 90s but the new aspect is the incorporation of GPS to map these responses into physical space.

One of the pioneers of this technique has been, not a scientist, but the artist Christian Nold, who has been making emotion maps of cities for many years to beautiful effect.

The Urbanite article covers how a team from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse are attempting perhaps the most ambitious and data-rich version of this approach to date which truly attempts to blend both inner and outer worlds.

Link to article ‘On the Trail of Addiction’.

View the original article here