NOT A VERY GOOD LOOK Dealing: Women in the Drug Economy. By Barbara Denton. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. Reviewed by Grazyna Zajdow. The literature on women and illegal drugs in Australia is almost non-existent and it is good to see a substantial beginning, at least in sociology. Ethnographies are notoriously difficult and time-consuming, and the drug world is even more so for the unwitting researcher. Denton is not an unwitting researcher though. She has many years of experience in working with women in prison and her knowledge of the prison world, its web of relationships and the flows between the inside and outside worlds, is profound. Having said this, I do have some reservations about the way Denton chooses to portray the women in this study. It seems to me that in her effort to present women as active agents of their own destinies (as writers often present men in the drug culture), Denton misses something about the nature of drug taking. Denton also understates the structural positions in which many women, as women, find themselves. Still, there is much interesting material in this book and it makes an important contribution to academic knowledge. Before I move into discussing the content of the book, I would like to comment on the cover. The cover is a photograph of a woman (I presume it was taken in the 50s or early 60s), holding a pen or pencil and gazing down onto the street below. The pose is so elegant. The woman's outline is essentially indistinct because of the interior shot, but her face in profile is in sharp relief because of the light coming in from outside. I do not propose to analyse the symbolic meaning of the cover, only congratulate the person who chose the photograph. So many academic publishers these days spend no time or money on their covers it is gratifying to see one that pleases the aesthetic senses. On to more important issues. Denton writes: One of the striking features of academic work has been that while men are portrayed in a variety of roles - as leader and led, master and servant, successful dealer and downtrodden user - women rarely are accorded anything other than subordinate and inferior status. (3) This is undoubtedly true. Denton makes the point that, unlike most writers, she wants to portray women as agents of their destinies. While the point is well made, she seems to want to deny for the most part, the less than active roles women play in drug taking. I realise that there is some argument about whether there is such a thing as addiction, but I will be reactionary and say that there is. The process of addiction is one in which the individual submerges most of her other identities into the single one of addict. Most of the day is spent thinking about how to get the drug, what the enjoyment (or relief) will be when the drug is taken and trying to conserve enough for the future. Conversations between users are often dominated by the cost and quality and the best places to score. Not all of Denton's informants are addicts but, since she does not make clear who is or isn't, they all blend into one. Denton explains in the first chapter the way she found her path into this particular study. She met some women in prison and then followed them on the outside. Then she widened her net. It is unclear how many of the contacts she found outside the prison made it into the pages of this book. Denton met sixteen women in prison who had been involved in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. These were the key informants. The only description of them comes on page six. Seven were regular intravenous drug users (IDUs), nine sold heroin, five sold cannabis and two sold amphetamines. Of the heroin sellers, two had never used narcotics. One speed (amphetamine) dealer used intravenously. The reader never gets a clear idea of who is who. I am mindful of the need to maintain anonymity, but it should have been possible to give short biographies for a smoother narrative. Who was a mother, who was a user, who never went to jail, how old were they? Etcetera. At this point, as you can infer, I became a little confused. Denton often confuses the drug users and the dealers; they seem one and the same, but then she goes to great pains to point out their individuality. Sometimes I forgot whether I was reading about women in the business of the drug economy, or women in the drug economy in general. There is difference. In this first chapter Denton describes some strange and chaotic episodes, but then spends the rest of the book distancing herself and the women from these same episodes. What is wrong with portraying women as victims when sometimes they are? I do not believe that there are two distinct types of feminism - one where all women are victims of an overarching patriarchy with no individual agency, or the one where the sisters assert themselves in discourse and everything else takes care of itself. These distinctions are meaningless in the lived world. These strange and chaotic episodes Denton describes are also when the writing is the strongest, when something interesting happens. On page 19 she describes a debauched scene with a group of people attempting to have a dinner party but then someone would 'drop' (fall into a stupor) and slump into their soup. One of them says: 'Jesus, it's just shit around here with this lot. I'm half out of my mind, They knew you were coming today. Wouldn't you think they could have some respect?' There was another house guest, a man in his twenties who was 'ripped to his eyeballs'. 'Terry's drugged that bloke and taken his money. She's like that. That's what she does', Chris stated. Drugs like heroin do strange things to people; they can turn dinner parties into David Lynch movies. But in our attempt to bring the drug users in from the cold, we have turned them into the equivalent of the twenty-first century 'Leave it to Beaver' or 'Father Knows Best.' If heroin didn't do strange things to people they wouldn't use it. If heroin didn't blot out the world, if amphetamines didn't produce the human road-runner, if cocaine didn't make us believe that we were the queens of the world, or if marijuana didn't make us into gibbering idiots who believed they were Marie Curie, then there wouldn't be a market for them. As Stephen Mugford points out, illicit drugs are used in the postmodern world to define ourselves outside the employment market. There is a world of work where we need to be focussed and serious and then, with the little time we have left, the commodities we use for leisure give us serious leisure. This of course means different things to men and women; we may want to be gender equal, but we cannot, as feminists, be gender-neutral. I once knew a woman who literally crawled over broken glass to get to the drugs for a hit. On a good day she would be competent and a loving mother, but on other days she became a cartoon of a person. She was never less than human and should always have been accorded respect and compassion (which many of us withheld from her), but that was the truth of her life. She sold dope too, and if we were going to include her story in a book about women dealers we would not be telling all the truth about her life without at least mentioning these things. The next chapter called 'Learning the trade' is a very traditional symbolic interactionist account of the career of the drug dealer. First she must move into a social world where drug use is normalised. In this study the women fell into it, either because of friends or lovers. No-one, it seemed to me, decided they wanted to be a drug dealer without some knowledge of the drug scene. There is a constant interaction between the licit and illicit business world, one women launders her money through her father's legitimate business, another works as a nurse by day and pays for the luxuries of life with some dealing at night. I found it hard to work out, but I think that only one or two women were anything other than street-level dealers and these seemed to have reached high levels because of the sudden absences of their male partners. I have no doubt that there are some women in high level positions in drug networks, but the likelihood of an academic, any academic, being able to write about them is remote. But in more than one place Denton states that she wants to present the 'successful' drug dealer. Success means something different to Denton than to me, it seems. She does note that she is not trying to present the successful woman drug dealer who is all 'lights, camera and action' as a new universal. She describes one woman who was a victim of physical violence and regular abuse from her lover while she was in business. This woman is presented as exceptional, though. Most women drifted into full-time dealing, as most of the literature suggests people generally do when they get into crime. The next three chapters outline the various relationships in the drug dealer's world. Chapter three is a description of the networks women had around them. Many had families they could rely on to work with them, or to support them when they were in trouble. Those without family connections often produced quasi-familial networks, friends and acquaintances who acted as supports. Kin ties were particularly important because of the need for loyalty and trust. Not all the women had these, however. Denton describes the businesses that women ran as of two types: the 'dope pad' and the 'mobile sales'. The dope pad refers to women who dealt to people who they knew and who would come to their houses to score. Their customers would try the dope on the premises and it was a very personal transaction. These women operated on their reputations for selling good quality drugs to a regular clientele. Anybody who used illegal drugs of any sort, but particularly marijuana and heroin in the seventies and eighties, would recognise this business. A variation on this was the mobile operation. The new technologies of mobile phones and pagers meant that drop-off points could be arranged and the women themselves or their employees would exchange dope for money. This sort of transaction lent itself to more fraudulent practices. None of the women were dealers in the new open market that was developing in Melbourne at the time. The 90s saw a street market developing in parts of the city and certain streets in suburbs like Collingwood, Springvale or Footscray. This new market is a completely different beast and resembles what we often see portrayed in American television crime shows. This new form seems to rely on children as the runners between the buyers and sellers and appears to be dominated by certain ethnic groups. The fast, anonymous deal in the open air is the new shape of dope dealing and buying. Some research seems to suggest that many people now prefer to buy their drugs this way, and it is an example of open-market commodification of illegal drugs, an underworld parallel to the fee enterprise culture so beloved of our leaders. It probably also leads to many more fatal overdoses. How gender fits into this scheme is something for future ethnographers (although Lisa Maher has written about a similar scene in the US crack market and how women have taken advantage in business). Women in Denton's study did use sex and a subordinate stance when dealing with their suppliers. There seemed to be no meeting of equals here, they did what they needed to for maintenance of supply. Denton does rightly point out that this was just one strategy used by the women, but one that generally men did not have to use. On occasion a small number of women used threats and violence, but that was really not part of their business techniques. What Denton is describing in this chapter is the system of family or family-like relationships that these women are surrounded by. I have not read a description of male dealers in quite this way and this suggests a fundamentally different way of operating between men and women. The workers the women used are presented in the next chapter as part of the family-like relationships the women develop, but then something darker comes in. The workers are all users of the dope, even if some of the women dealers do not use their own product. Workers are controlled by their need for the drugs but this control is presented as a by-product, rather than a central position within the structures set up. The women employers are presented as caring for their workers by giving them places to live, clothes and presents. However if the workers were not addicts, then they probably would not be there, and when things got tough for the dealers, they became tougher for the workers. Like all bosses, these employers exploit their workers, and like all small business people, they present themselves as benign and only doing what is best for their 'families' of workers. It is in this chapter too, that the 'trust' presented in the previous chapter begins to unravel in the face of police intimidation and infiltration of the networks. Of course, this police work is undermined by the corrupt relationships the dealers have with some police. In this chapter we see the argument for legalisation of at least some of the drugs. If the drugs were legal, then this exploitation and corruption might not exist. The next chapter, however, presents evidence against the some of the purported benefits of legalisation. In this chapter, Denton details the many other illegal activities women become involved in. Shoplifting, burglary, and bank fraud are some of other ways women supplemented their incomes. The women are presented as skilled and competent criminals, enjoying their activities and becoming involved for the excitement and satisfaction gained from them. In presenting crime, not as an outcome of drug addiction, but as just another activity that was indulged in for fun and profit, the link between drugs and crime is questioned. If the link is not so straightforward, then some of the arguments presented for legalisation are not strong. I don't believe it is so clear-cut, but as I have written before, the proponents of legalisation oversell their case. I think it is a bit of both. Denton points out that for many women, the reason they are caught is precisely because they have become so successful and have so much money to splurge which they do on drugs. Sometimes, they are just not very smart, or at least they have not learnt the middle-class lesson of deferred gratification. But then that is the nature of addiction. Unfortunately we can't present people who use drugs of dependence as rational actors, because if they were just rational actors they wouldn't do what many of them do to get their drugs. The same can be said of legal drugs of addiction like alcohol, of course. Chapter six deals with the women's experiences in prison. These are both brutal and supportive. Prison is seen as a form of taxation for some women, an expected by-product of dealing. Women drug users are held in contempt by the staff and they are undermined at every stage by the system. But prison is also a place to do business and make business contacts. Alliances are formed and debts are repaid. The next interesting piece of research would be to look at the new prison that was built after Fairlea (the prison that Denton describes). The new prison (Deer Park) was a private prison that had such an enormously high rate of overdoses, suicides and active resistance that eventually the government was forced to intervene and take it over. Unlike Fairlea, it was not centrally positioned, and not near any public transport. The new prison also did not physically resemble Fairlea. The Fairlea cottages, which spawned the relationships that sustained many a network, are no more, and something else has taken their place. This is also the chapter that Denton acknowledges takes her back to her starting point. She began the study in the prison and ended it there. It is very hard to make the argument that women are in no way victims of the drug scene when they all end up in jail. Jail victimises its inmates, even as they resist. Indeed, without the victimisation, there would be no need for resistance. In the final chapter, Denton outlines the different trends in the literature related to women in the drug scene. I think that she reads the literature accurately but I am caught in a quandary. I am back to a question I posed at the start and the answer is not any clearer. Am I to read this book as about women who make a business by dealing drugs, or about women in the drug economy, as users and dealers? I accept that most users deal at some time or other, but that is not the argument of the book. Denton presents them as dealers who use (or not use), not the other way around. Denton is right in that the literature is overwhelmingly about women drug users, not dealers. There is Avril Taylor's wonderful work in Glasgow in the 90s, Marcia Rosenbaum's groundbreaking work in the US of the 1980s and others. Only Lisa Maher's work on women in the crack economy in the US deals with women in the business of drugs. Maher's work is interesting, but it is difficult to make direct comparisons to Denton's research. We do not have a crack market in Australia; the extreme deprivation of parts of the USA are, thankfully not yet, at least, part of the Australian economy. Race is also central to Maher's work in a way it is not to Denton's. All these studies present women as active agents with varied rationales for their positions. It is in context of the existing literature that Denton discusses women's lives as mothers, something she steadfastly refuses to do in the rest of the book. It is as if, were she to have presented women as mothers with the problems inherent in being 'good' mothers at the same time as dealing and using heroin, then that would have undermined her thesis. I don't see why. All humans have a hard time living up to being good and when they fail in their endeavours, it should not mean that they are then victims for ever, without volition and agency. Taylor and Rosenbaum showed how women considered themselves good mothers even though they did admit it was difficult, not just because of the pressures from authorities, but also relating to the problems of being dependent on heroin. Heroin dependence does narrow options; women need to ensure a constant supply and they have to consider rationally when and how to have a fix so as not to disrupt the children. This is usually more than many women can handle. Many women (who no longer use heroin) have told me about their doubts relating to their treatment of their children when they were using. For the most part, the children were fed, clothed and attended to, but there was the niggling doubt about the children's emotional well-being; and of course, the occasions when children found their mothers 'out of it' and incapable of taking care of them. Why can't we speak about these things without labeling ourselves as perpetuating the stereotyping of women as victims or monsters? The new discourses about drug addiction and dependence revolve around harm minimisation/reduction. These assume the 'rational' actor as the centre of the drug transaction. Given the right education, the argument runs, users will be able to make appropriate decisions and minimise the risks to themselves. Others, such as families and friends, are rarely part of the consideration in this discourse. As I have already noted, if we were looking for 'rational' experiences, we wouldn't bother using drugs. I do not mind people using mind altering substances for the sheer fun of it, but the world as it is presented to us is not all about fun, particularly when children come along. So women are caught in a vice that is made worse by poverty and ever-hovering welfare agencies. Denton is quite right, not all women use drugs because they had childhood sexual trauma, and sometimes it is for fun and profit. Eventually, unless they are particularly wealthy, drug use catches up with them and they moderate (or stop) or they must make some very unpleasant concessions. Non-drug using partners will often disappear, families can be alienated, friends may tire and the law may catch up, with prison the most extreme sanction. This is not the only story, however. Denton wants to make sure that we understand this is the case. The limitations she has set herself, both stylistically in the way she presents her work, and in her ideological concerns, means that I finished the book feeling rather unsatisfied. Except for the descriptions of prison life I felt that I did not get a clear view of the women's lives. There was not enough 'thick' description, as Norman Denzin would put it. No narratives of women's lives were apparent. They seemed disembodied at times. The best ethnographies do not have to sacrifice good narrative for academic rigour. Feminists have been saying just this for 20 years. This problem with the book is unfortunate because this is an important work that needs to be widely read and discussed. Grazyna Zajdow is from the School of Social Inquiry, Deakin University