Journeys Into Drugs And Crime

This book analyses the life histories of Jamaican men involved in the UK drugs trade, including wholesalers, street dealers, specialist cooks, cutters, and growers. Employing a life history approach, their autobiographical accounts are examined to provide an in-depth and unique insight of their journeys into drugs and crime.

This book analyses the life histories of Jamaican men involved in the UK drugs trade, including wholesalers, street dealers, specialist cooks, cutters, and growers. Employing a life history approach, their autobiographical accounts are examined to provide an in-depth and unique insight of their journeys into drugs and crime.

Although there is a strong and growing literature in the two areas of desistance and addiction recovery, they have developed along parallel pathways with little systematic assessment of the empirical evidence about the co-occurrence of the relationship or how one area can learn from the other. This book aims to fill that gap by bringing together emerging literature on the relationship between offending and substance use. Instead of focusing on the active period of its onset and persistence, this book examines the mechanisms that support desistance, addiction recovery, and the common themes of reintegration and rehabilitation. With contributions from a wide range of international experts in the fields of desistance and addiction recovery, the book focuses on a strengths-based, relational and community-focused approach to long-term change in offending and drug-using populations, as well as the shared barriers to effective reintegration for both. This book will be highly informative for a wide audience, from academics and students interested in studying desistance and recovery to those working in addiction services and the criminal justice system as well as policy makers and the people undertaking their own journeys to desistance and recovery.

This book analyses the life histories of Jamaican men involved in the UK drugs trade, including wholesalers, street dealers, specialist cooks, cutters, and growers. Employing a life history approach, their autobiographical accounts are examined to provide an in-depth and unique insight of their journeys into drugs and crime.

None of us have insight into the challenges and experiences we will face along the path of life as we attempt to manage it and all its uncertainties that come with the package. Statistically, when uncertainties are the result of an imbalanced support system, exposure to drugs and crime, and a lack of positive male role models, the outcome is death or a long prison sentence. Alonzo Burns walks you through the highs and lows of his personal journey to escape the fast life and how he re-established himself on a path of productivity and relevance. He defies the notion that you have to be a product of your environment. Instead, he reveals how to use negative experiences as fuel to propel you into your destiny. Hold tight and prepare yourself for a "behind the scenes" look into his raw and uncut journey. "When I first encountered the street life, it was through observation. I was fascinated with the drug dealers' popularity, respect from the hood, the material things that followed, and all the females that threw themselves at the feet of them. As a young kid that was seeking and searching for a male role model, it was easy to get sucked into this type of lifestyle and that is exactly what happened." - From the Chapter: Street Life Expired Alonzo Burns is an ex-drug dealer who went from the street corner to Corporate America. He has years of experience as an IT technologist in Corporate America and is an entrepreneur that operates a real-estate investment company as well. His passion and focus are sharing his life experiences to the hopeless and forgotten to provide encouragement to fulfill dreams and aspirations.

High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives. Young Carl didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist—Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor in the sciences—whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction. In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

This book examines the drug dealer in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective and considers the increasingly blurred demarcation between illegitimate and legitimate drug markets. It explores the motives and drivers of those involved in drug supply and dispels common and stereotypical myths and misconceptions surrounding illegal drug markets and those who operate within them. The drug dealer has become one of our foremost contemporary ‘folk devils’. Those who trade in substances prohibited by law are the subject of array of inaccurate myths and urban legends. Criminology has tended either to shoehorn drug dealers into neat typologies or portray them as ‘victims’ of an uncaring, predatory post-modern society. In reality, we know relatively little about the complex and diverse world of drug markets and our concentration inevitably falls on low-end ‘retail’ dealers who operate in the most visible sectors of the illegal economy. Bringing together an international group of experts, this book considers perspectives from around the world, including UK, USA, South America, Spain, India and Australia. This book will be of interest to students and researchers across criminology, law, sociology, criminal justice and public health, and will be essential reading for those taking courses on drugs, drug markets and substance misuse.

Ongoing journal of an artist/writer, spiritual revolutionary.