CRACK DEALERS AND RESTRICTIVE DETERRENCE - IDENTIFYING NARCS

Data drawn from semistructured interviews with 40 active street-level crack dealers are used to illustrate, apply, and expand the concept of restrictive deterrence. The article focuses on the perceptual shortha nd dealers use to determine whether buyers in question are ''narcs.'' In presenting this shorthand, the article seeks to demonstrate how int eractions among marketplace democratization (i.e., the idea of selling to as many different customers as possible to maximize profits), mark etplace volatility, transactional brevity, and threats from law enforc ement affect its complexity and refinement Respondents operated out of a medium-sized, midwestern metropolitan area (population: 2.2 million ) within a central city of 390,000.