Women Drag Dealers in the Illicit Economy

The vast majority of research on drug dealers focuses on men, while most studies on women in the drug economy focus on subordinated drug users. We know very little about how successful women run their drug dealerships. Consequently, some of the assumptions about attributes or skills required for successful drug dealing may apply primarily to male dealers, while allegedly female attributes regarded by men as handicapping women may be irrelevant or even valuable resources. This in-depth, observational study of successful women drug dealers in Melbourne indicates that skills and orientations associated with familial relations play a key part in the most sensitive aspects of such business. Conversely, ruthlessness and violence are comparatively peripheral, even though the women demonstrated that these were well within their repertories of action. Embedded in common knowledge and in much contemporary research literature is a view that drug dealing is essentially a male occupation, indeed, 'drug selling is "a man's world'" (Adler 1993: 199). Women are conspicuously absent from most accounts of drug distribution, and where featured, they have been depicted as 'unsuitable' as drug sellers (Blum 1972; Adler 1993), and as having peripheral or exploited and subordinate roles in male selling networks (Rosenbaum 1981 ; Auld et al. 1986; Ruggiero and South 1995). Often, this gendered pattern is explained by reference to 'institutional sexism' in the illicit economy (Steffensmeier 1983). Such findings suggest that men prefer not to work with women, who are depicted as not possessing the necessary attributes to make it in the drug business. They have been seen by male dealers as lacking in courage and the necessary physical strength, as being less trustworthy, too emotional, and more inclined to give way when subjected to police pressure. Typically, Adler in her study of cocaine smugglers found that the women were regarded by men in the drug world as 'dope chicks' and took on passive roles as 'prestigious escorts'. (Adler 1993: 91). Perhaps this attitude among male dealers has flavoured the understandings used to shape and target research in the field. Thus, while images of women in the drug economy have become more varied as expansion of the cocaine economy has created business opportunities for them (Bourgois 1989; Fagan 1994,1995), women drug sellers still are seen as an anomaly, or as 'normally' working in a subordinate role with their male partners. Fagan's (1995) study, for example, found that most women are initiated into drug selling through heterosexual friendships, with women selling drugs in mixed-sex organizations—settings understood to offer women an ongoing and necessary (male) protection from predators. Recent work, such as that of Lisa Maher (1997), still challenges even such a limited view of an emancipation of women in the drug