Jennifer Ward - Flashback: Drugs and Dealing in the Golden Age of the London Rave Scene

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First published 2010 by Willan Publishing

Published 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Jennifer R. Ward 2010

The rights of Jennifer R. Ward to be identified as the author of this book have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Project managed by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon
Typeset by Kestrel Data, Exeter, Devon

ISBN 13: 978-1-84392-791-4 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-86154-1 (pbk)

Contents

Many people who in different ways assisted and supported me in producing this book require my thanks. First and foremost, these are friends I socialised alongside in the different friendship networks who enabled me to tell this story, and who made my years in this leisure culture the enormously fun ones they were. For reasons of confidentiality they will remain nameless. Special thanks go to Colin who introduced me to the rave club scene in the first place and who has continued to be a source of inspiration and encouragement of my academic study into it.

My PhD supervisor Professor Geoffrey Pearson requires special thanks for remaining keenly interested and helpful over the many years in which it took me to leave the field and to get writing. Thanks are also extended to Professor Dick Hobbs and Professor Robert Power for their input into the books content and especially to Dick for inviting me to publish with the Crime Ethnography Series.

A couple of people helped when my confidence was waning by reading and commenting on my manuscript which assisted me to keep going and reach completion. Dr Louise Ryan and Anthony Thickett require thanks here.

As well as thanks, some apologies are needed. These are to my friends and family who have experienced my absence in different ways, and maybe when it was needed, while I prioritised my ambition of completing a book. Special thanks go to Nick Kemp whose patience and support throughout the years of my completing the PhD, and again in turning the document into a manuscript have been tireless. Thank you.

For British youth ecstasy has become a milestone on the road to adulthood like cutting your teeth, riding a bike and losing your virginity. (Wright 1998: 231)

An exaggeration? Maybe, but it was without doubt that the emergence of the rave club culture in the UK in the late 1980s, and its ongoing transformations throughout the 1990s had a major impact on the drug taking behaviour of British youth (Gilman 1991, 1994; Newcombe 1991; McDermott 1993; Collin 1997). Going out clubbing and taking drugs became a regular feature of many young peoples lives. It could safely be stated that by the mid 1990s drug use in the UK was widespread (Collin 1997). An array of drugs made up peoples drug using repertoires, though ecstasy and later cocaine were by far the most popular (Riley and Hayward 2004). A knock-on effect of this widespread drugs consumption was the large numbers of people who became involved in selling them. Whether they perceived themselves to be drug dealing or not, many peoples selling activities were at a frequency and level which constituted dealing.

This book is informed by an ethnographic study of drugs use and drugs dealing as it occurred within different leisure venues and among different friendship networks participating in the London rave club culture. The research was carried out over a five-year period from the mid to late 1990s (19931998). Participant observation techniques were employed to conduct the study; a style that took the author out socialising in numerous London nightclubs, dance parties, house parties, chill-out sessions, after-club parties, bars and pubs, peoples houses, and among interconnected friendship networks where drugs were being bought and sold, consumed and discussed. From this lengthy and detailed investigation, unique insights were gained into drug selling in Londons clubland and the careful organisation and interactions that surrounded the supply and trade in ecstasy and other dance drugs.

Various studies have examined aspects of this leisure culture, such as the significance and meaning it played in the lives of those involved, yet little work has paid attention to the income generation and economic activity connected to it. This book fills this gap. It focuses on the organisational features of drug selling and purchasing in different settings and social arenas and emphasises the enterprise and entrepreneurship that underpinned this activity. Rave club participants are illustrated as capitalising on the money-making opportunities generated through the widespread demand for drugs from within this leisure culture.

Drug selling is differentiated by trade in the more risky public domain such as in nightclubs and dance parties, and in the safer confines of the private domain, among extended networks of social and friendship group contacts. Different people are focused upon to highlight the various positions and roles they occupied in the drug selling and distribution process.

The camaraderie that supported rave club participation greatly assisted drug selling activities to expand; sometimes into thriving commercial operations. Friends put friends in touch with people they knew who were dealers, and people nurtured useful social contacts that aligned them to a drug supply. This was added to by the busy nature of the London urban setting which provided multiple contacts and assisted drugs trading activity to be disguised within its general lively milieu and vibrant form.

The book concludes with the argument that the construct of friends was a useful one to adopt, in that it neutralised drug selling operations so they could be conceived of instead as set-ups that provided for friends drugs needs. When scrutinised more closely, friends were often great in number and were sometimes people met in a club the night before, and whom the seller barely knew.

This ethnographic study makes an important contribution to the existing body of information on drugs market organisation, and makes a significant addition to the so far limited evidence base of recreational drugs markets.

The term ethnography is assigned to many types of qualitative research, and ethnographic studies exist in numerous forms (Pearson 1992; Armstrong 1993; Hobbs 2001). My style follows in the tradition of ethnographies emanating from the Chicago School of the 1930s and 1940s. This approach has its roots in anthropology and applies the technique of participant observation to better understand the social and cultural milieu that peoples lives are lived out within. The method elicits detailed information by being immersed in a social setting for an extended time period, locating oneself as close to the activity as possible in order to develop a deep understanding of the culture, the group, or the community under study (Hobbs and May 1993; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Bryman 2001).

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