“Doubling up”: drug dealing as a profitable side-hustle

Salinas, Mike ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9287-7130 (2023) “Doubling up”: drug dealing as a profitable side-hustle. In: Understanding drug dealing and illicit drug markets: national and international perspectives. Routledge, London, pp. 223-244. ISBN 9781138541825 (paperback); 9781138541801 (hardback); 9781351010245 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter considers the financial rationale and working practices of economically-motivated actors operating at the consumer-end of the illegal drug trade. In particular, it examines the extent to which drug dealing supplements, rather than supplants, legal work or legal endeavors through a process known as “doubling up” (Fagan and Freeman, 1999). Financially-motivated drug dealing, it is argued, may for many be seen as a profitable yet time-limited side-hustle: a form of ‘moonlighting’ that significantly elevates net earnings. Synthesizing findings from the empirical literature as well as findings from the author’s six-year ethnography, undertaken with 25 drug dealers and traffickers, the chapter demonstrates how a few hours of “work” (dealing) during the evenings and weekends is used strategically to help significantly elevate a person’s spending capacities, mitigating the precarity of unemployment or underemployment, or provide investment capital for legitimate endeavors. The chapter closes by considering the impacts of increasing economy precarity and peoples’ growing reliance on “side hustles” as a means of negating shortcomings of contemporary labour markets.