Final Paper: The Deviant Identity & Caree
· Your paper must have a thesis in bold print, as well as an introduction and a conclusion.
· Use quotes, page numbers, in-text references, and a bibliography in ASA, APA, or MLA style.
· DEEPLY AND THOROUGHLY use course readings to support your argument.
· Draw from the list below.
. Out of these readings, you should use at least 7 (more is fine too).
. DEEPLY means that the inclusion of several quotes will not be sufficient to demonstrate your mastery of the material. Quotes must be properly contextualized, and used in such a way as to illustrate a strong and complex understanding of the course materials.
. Course videos can be used as supporting material as well.
. A video is not a reading.
How and why does one enter and live a deviant life?
Focus on:
· a cocaine selle
Grading Ru
ic (20 total points)
· 1 point: clear, distinct, compelling thesis in bold print
· 1/2 point: define deviance
· 1 point: What is the deviant act? Why is it deviant?
· 1 point: Who is the deviant? From what are they deviating? (Be specific; obviously it’s a normative identity they’re deviating from, but what exactly is that normative identity?)
· 3 points: What made them deviant? Explain using three of these theories: structural functionalism, strain theory, differential opportunity theory, conflict theory, feminist theory, culture conflict theory, reaction theory, lower class culture theory, differential association theory, drift theory, labeling theory, control theory of delinquency.
· 1/2 point: Which of these theories best explains their deviance, and why?
· 1 point: What stigma is involved in their deviance? How do they manage it?
· 1/2 point: Do they identify as deviant?
· 3 points: Explain and apply the steps of a deviant career, as explained in Adler & Adler (and others, if useful for your argument).
· 1 point: Describe their career as a deviant.
· 1/2 point: What, if anything, would make it difficult to leave their career as a deviant?
· 2 points: clear & compelling argument
· 3 points: use of required course readings (with quotes)
· 1 points: overall quality, including quality of writing
· 1 point: APA style bibliography
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321_1.tif
Qualitative Sociology, VoL 13, No. 4, 1990
Drifting into Dealing:
Becoming a Cocaine Seller
Sheigla Murphy, Dan Waldorf,
and Craig Reinarman
This paper describes a study of eight ex-cocaine sellers located via chain refe
al
from eight different levels of sales. To be eligible for the study respondents must
have sold cocaine steadily for at least a year and have stopped selling for at least
six months. The authors describe modes and levels of entree into cocaine sales,
and the subtle transformation of identity that occurs when a person moves from
a user to a dealer. The interviews suggest that entry into social worlds of cocaine
sales is a fluid process akin to Matza's notion of drift XXXXXXXXXXFive basic ways in
which people begin to sell cocaine ale identified. The first is to become a
go-between, a seller who starts out buying only for friends and only later envisions
the profit possibilities. 7"he second mode is to become a stash dealer, a person
who sells small amounts' in order to better afford their own cocaine use. The third
style, the connoisseur, is characterized by the user's desire to buy high quality drugs
through wholesale purchases. The fourth mode o f entree may be called
apprenticeship, trainee-style relationships where the novitiate lives with an
established seller, learns the ropes, shares the dope, and eventually takes over all
or part o f the experienced dealer's business. Finally, there is product line expansion,
wherein dealers start outselling other drugs, usually mar~iuana, and move into
cocaine sales when it becomes available.
The research reported herein was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice
(# XXXXXXXXXXCA-IJ)), Bernard A. Gropper, Ph.D., Program Manager, Drugs, Alcohol and
Crime Programs, Center for Crime Control Research. The views expressed herein are those
of the authors alone. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Qualitative
Sodology for helpful comments.
Address co
espondence to Sheigla Murphy, Institute for Scientific Analysis, 2235 Lombard
Street, San Francisco, CA, 94123.
321
© 1990 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
322 Murphy et al.
INTRODUCTION
No American who watched television news in the 1980s could have
avoided images of violent drug dealers who
andished bullets while
driving BMW's before being hauled off in handcuffs . This new
stereotype of a drug dealer has become a staple of popular culture, the
very embodiment of evil. He works for the still more vile villains of the
"Columbian cartel," who make billions on the suffering of millions. Such
men are portrayed as driven by greed and utterly indifferent to the pain
from which they profit.
We have no doubt that some such characters exist. Nor do we doubt
that there may be a new viciousness among some of the crack cocaine
dealers who have emerged in ghettos and ba
ios already savaged by rising
social problems and falling social programs. We have grave doubts, how-
ever, that such characterizations tell us anything about cocaine sellers more
generally. If our interviews are any guide, beneath every big-time dealer
who may approximate the stereotype there are hundreds of smaller sellers
who do not.
This paper describes such sellers, not so much as a way of debunking
a new devil but rather as a way of illuminating how deviant careers develop
and how the identities of the individuals who move into this work are trans-
formed. Along with the many routine normative strictures against drug use
in our culture, there has been a mobilization in recent year for a "war on
drugs" which targets cocaine dealers in particular. Many armaments in the
arsenal of social control from propaganda to prisons have been employed
in efforts to dissuade people from using/selling such substances. In such a
context it is curious that ostensibly ordinary people not only continue to
use illicit drugs but als0 take the significant additional step of becoming
drug sellers. To explore how this happens, we offer an analysis of eight 3 ,
depth interviews with former cocaine sellers. We sought to learn something
about how it is that otherwise conventional people--some legally employed,
many welt educated-end up engaging in a sustained pattern of behavior
that their neighbors might think of as very deviant indeed.
DEVIANT CAREERS AND DRIFT
Our reading of this data was informed by two classic theoretical
works in the deviance literature. First, in Outsiders, Howard Becker ob-
served that, "The career lines characteristic of an occupation take their
shape from the problems peculiar to that occupation. These, in turn, are
a function of the occupation's position vis-a-vis other groups in society"
Drifting into Dealing 323
(1963:102). He illustrated the point with the dance musician, caught be-
tween the jazz artist's desire to maintain creative control and a structure
of opportunities for earning a living that demanded the subordination of
this desire to mainstream musical tastes. Musicians' careers were largely
a function of how they managed this problem. When the need to make
a living predominated, the basis of their self conceptions shifted from art
to craft.
Of course, Becker applied the same proposition to more deviant oc-
cupations. In the next section, we describe five discrete modes of becoming
a cocaine seller which center on "the problems peculiar to" the world of
illicit drug use and which entail a similar shift in self conception. For ex-
ample, when a drug such as cocaine is criminalized, its cost is often greatly
increased while its availability and quality are somewhat limited. Users
are thus faced with the problems of avoiding detection, reducing costs,
and improving availability and quality. By becoming involved in sales, users
solve many of these problems and may also find that they can make some
money in the bargain. As we will show, the type of entree and the level
at which it occurs are functions of the individual's relationship to networks
of other users and suppliers. At the point where one has moved from
eing a person who has a good connection for cocaine to a person who
is a good connection for cocaine, a subtle shift in self conception and
identity occurs.
Becker's model of deviant careers entails four basic steps, three of
which our cocaine sellers took. First, the deviant must somehow avoid the
impact of conventional commitments that keep most people away from in-
tentional non-conformity. Our cocaine sellers passed this stage by ingesting
illegal substances with enough regularity that the practice became normal-
ized in their social world. Second, deviant motives and interests must
develop. These are usually learned in the process of the deviant activity
and from interaction with other deviants. Here too our cocaine sellers had
learned the pleasures of cocaine by using it, and typically were moved
toward involvement in distribution to solve one or more problems entailed
in such use. Once involved, they discovered additional motivations which
we will describe in detail below.
Becker's third step in the development of deviant careers entails
public labeling. The person is caught, the rule is enforced, and his or her
public identity is transformed. The new master status of "deviant," Becker
argues, can be self fulfilling when it shapes others' perceptions of the per-
son and limits his or her possibilities for resuming conventional roles and
activities. Few of our respondents had been publicly labeled deviant, but
they did describe a gradual change in identity which may be likened to
self-labelling. This typically occu
ed when they deepened their deviance
324 Murphy et al.
y dealing on top of using cocaine. This shift in self conception for our
subjects was more closely linked to Becker's fourth step--movement into
an organized deviant group in which people with a common fate and
similar problems form subcultures. There they learn more about solving
problems and ideologies which provide rationales for continuing the be-
havior, thus further weakening the hold of conventional norms and in-
stitutions and solidifying deviant identities. In the case of our subjects