PurposeThis study aims to examine how digital-physical hybridity reshapes Scottish drug markets by reconfiguring interaction, trust and exposure to risk. Moving beyond the assumption that digitalisation represents a shift from "offline" to "online" markets, the authors analyse how hybrid arrangements produce interactional distance and redistribute harm within drug supply operations.Design/methodology/approachThis study is a secondary analysis of the authors' existing qualitative data sets from Scotland, spanning 2012 to 2025. The authors analyse semi-structured interviews with people involved in or connected to drug markets. Using abductive analysis, the authors moved between participant accounts and existing theory to identify mechanisms through which digital and physical practices combined, comparing across time periods to document what changed, what persisted and why.FindingsFindings identify three interrelated mechanisms. Firstly, hybrid infrastructures expand access and coordination while increasing interactional distance between organisers and physical exchange. Secondly, trust shifts from relational, kinship-based forms to infrastructural trust embedded in platforms, protocols and compartmentalised roles, with physical enforcement re-emerging when this trust breaks down. Thirdly, a hybrid organisation enables modular labour structures that insulate higher-level actors while displacing risk and harm downward to runners, sellers and digitally recruited young people. Digital mediation reconfigures, but does not replace, physical delivery, enforcement and place-based control.Originality/valueThis study advances debates on digital-physical hybridity by identifying interactional distance and the intensified displacement of risk as empirically grounded mechanisms through which contemporary drug markets are reorganised. It contributes to harm-reduction scholarship by showing that hybrid markets do not eliminate violence and vulnerability but redistribute them, concentrating physical risk among those most exposed and least protected.

Using English prison inspectorate reports, the article presents an Ervine Goffman-inspired sociological discourse analysis of official political accounts about the living conditions of incarcerated children held in London’s Feltham prison. Through a close reading of inspection reports, we develop a critical window into their lived experiences in an exceptionally harmful UK prison regime. The construction of this prison estate conjures its dilapidation, unhygienic conditions, and endless social danger. The stigmatizing construction of the child prisoner intimates a pervasive culture of violence and bullying, resulting in their aversion to purposive activities. While, at first blush, prison inspectorate reporting is based on the policy of efficiency to ensure a safe and rehabilitative prison experience for youth, it is argued that the nature of the reporting of incarceration obviates a critique of the wider political fabric that custodial interventions will invariably reproduce. The Inspectorate operates within the state’s dominant class-stratified political ideology. The adoption of a generic labeling discourse in the reports minimizes the communication of harms inflicted on children by criminal ‘justice’ that can only worsen their wellbeing and reproduce the harmful intensity of their pre-existing marginality.

This chapter walks readers through the first few days of drug sales in A-Town, emphasizing the tools, techniques and tactics our interviewees used to ship, store and sell drugs in the area. We discover that some drug dealers enthusiastically embrace the always-on culture of modern drug dealing and the use of smartphones and social media to reach customers, while others find delivery dealing a chore, and they only do it to keep up with consumer demands and customer preferences. The chapter also explores the dynamics of debt collection and conflict management in B-Town, and precisely why violence can be bad for business. These findings help flesh out the standard story of county lines by illuminating some of the dark corners of the practice and the strategic decision making that is usually shrouded in secrecy.

This chapter documents in vivid detail, the problem of violence in county lines and the events leading up to the end of the line in A-Town. The findings show that big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers; instead, they may have to learn to live with them. County lines drugs networks may be regulated by violence, but again, too much violence is bad for business, and if events away in the county sites threaten the gang at home in the hub, the gang will cut ties in the interests of self-preservation.

Playing on the immortal words of Ernest Hemingway, this chapter demonstrates how county lines can go bankrupt suddenly but more often gradually. This chapter highlights how personal pride and greed undermine group cohesiveness, and how lies and mistrust ultimately lead to the downfall of the criminal enterprise.

This chapter documents in vivid detail, the problem of violence in county lines and the events leading up to the end of the line in A-Town. The findings show that big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers; instead, they may have to learn to live with them. County lines drugs networks may be regulated by violence, but again, too much violence is bad for business, and if events away in the county sites threaten the gang at home in the hub, the gang will cut ties in the interests of self-preservation.

Combining a compulsive read with rigorous academic analysis, this book tells the real-life stories of drug dealers involved in county lines networks. This myth-busting, accessible book offers a new way of thinking about drug crime prevention, intervention and enforcement.