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Short abstract:

This paper seeks to reappraise the roles of people and production of knowledge at the fringes of the international drug control system by stripping existing labels and frameworks to understand drug markets, namely through their prohibition and criminality.

Long abstract:

This paper analyses the growing body of research that seeks to undo pre-existing legal and methodological categories that obscure health-related knowledge and technological production in illicit drug markets. By stripping the criminal labels, and re-examining instead on examples and anecdotes of knowledge-making and techno-innovations by consumers, producers, harm reduction activists, the aim is to reframe methods for understanding what counts as legitimate or illegitimate knowledges produced at the fringes of restrictive drug control laws. Indeed, countries are researching or reforming access to plant-based controlled substances, New Psychoactive Substances pose different challenges.

In other words, not all practices are safe, and not all vendors seek to advance human health, broadly conceived (Lancaster, 2017). Rather than undoing completely with ideas of what is legitimate or illegitimate knowledge about health practices within illegal spaces, it may still be important to fine-tune the impact or negligible or indeed, negative impact of some practices by conceptualising actors in the supply chain differently. For example, what if we conceived some producers, suppliers and dealers as ‘quacks’ (Porter, 1989), insofar their relationship to consumers is not about the ‘fakery’ of the medicines sold, but about the ‘transactional’ model which seeks to generate profit through the sale of discredited chemical substances, like nitazenes and other new synthetic opioids. In short, whilst undoing legalistic labels may support understanding and fleshing out health-related knowledge-making at the fringes, old categories may help to describe actors whose knowledge of chemical and pharmaceutical substances with a negligible or dangerous impact on human health.