The Social Life Of Smokers: Analysis

‘The social life of smokers: Processes of exchange in a heroin marketplace,’ (Dwyer, R. 2011) is a controversial study about the development of heroin users and dealers, exposing their everyday lives, practices, and struggles. Dwyer argues that illegal drug marketplaces are formulated through 'complex and dynamic social processes and relations.' However, he accentuates the prevailing notions of drugs and markets that we perceive as 'driven by the mechanism of supply and demand, ignoring the fundamental social relations and tend to reify the 'market' as an object to be measured rather than a process to be understood.' (Dwyer, R. 2011, p.19). This text will essentially examine the issues related with the process of exchange in a heroin marketplace, the significance of trade in heroin, the perspective of illicit drugs as having multidimensional social implications, with their practice fundamentally implanted in broader social contexts, and the complex social processes and relations that encompass the production and consumption of heroin. An analysis of various sources will presume that the process of exchange of cigarettes with research participants reflects the
Hence, status as a commodity is “just one moment in the intricate flow of items through specifiable social settings” (Dilley, 1992). Applying this to the heroin marketplace, by equating the economy of heroin only with the market, attention is confined to just one point through the circulation of social relations. Every other area of trade that may entail exchange or redistribution are neglected. It is the entire set of exchange processes that constitute an overall heroin