Unveiling socio-economic parallels: Exploring the blurred boundary between legality and illegality

This chapter shows the contemporary relevance of Nigel South's work to understanding digital drug markets, explicating intersections between crime, social structures, and economic forces. As I illustrate in the chapter, Nigel's work (also with colleagues) contributed to the field at least in three ways. Firstly, it challenged myths and stereotypes surrounding drug markets, arguing that they mirror legal markets, hence emphasising the blurred boundary between legality and illegality. Building on this legacy, and on work I co-authored with Nigel, the chapter examines parallels between illegal and legal economies, situating digital drug markets within the continuum of open and closed retail drug markets. Secondly, Nigel's work focused on organisational structures (rather than reducing drug distribution to an individual act of deviance) and contributed to revealing that technological advancements impact the ‘last mile’ of the supply chain. Thirdly, Nigel conceptualised illicit activities as a form of ‘work’ – a concept which in this chapter I applied to digital drug distribution, disclosing a fluid boundary between legitimate and illicit digital economies. Nigel also contributed to the exploration of ‘Uberisation’ and ‘McDonaldisation’ in digital drug market environments, highlighting transformative societal and business dynamics and thereby offering valuable insights for contemporary research and policy considerations in evolving digital drug markets.