Drug trafficking is a very important subject to study, since it is the basis for helping us limit or prevent it. Studying it gives us a better understanding of the personal and psychological motives behind drug dealers and smugglers to initiate in the process, of the violent crimes behind these activities, of the drug movement itself, and of the society we live in. Aware of the importance of having knowledge about drug traffic and smugglers, and conscious of the “enormous research potential in studying them,” Patricia A. Adler, the author of “Researching Dealers and Smugglers” and her husband Peter decided to study this subject more in depth. A legitimate motivation the author might have had for researching the subject is the significant boom that this research could have to her professional career, because she would offer a completely new perspective of drug trafficking.
While studying and analyzing the drug dealers, Mrs. Adler and her husband took a different approach. She felt that past researchers all did the same mistake: they usually wanted to understand the world of criminals from their own perspective. This means that they usually tried to obtain information in a very systematic and distant way, without taking risks or dealing directly with the people involved. The problem with this is that that way the information obtained is not necessarily correct, and it may be vague and not concrete. Dealers may not feel comfortable enough to reveal such safe and risky information to anyone. They may think that the information revealed may be used against them, or that the purpose behind the research is to capture them, fool them, or even blackmail them. So to cover themselves they may give out false information and lies about their actions, movements, and crimes. In contrast, if information is obtained form an insider’s perspective, and the researcher becomes someone the smuggler or dealer can trust, the information will certainly be more accurate, honest, and precise. For this reason, Mrs. Adler and her husband decided to become close friends with all the dealers they would investigate. They became trustworthy people with whom dealers could “discuss the nature of their dealing and smuggling activities.” It is very difficult to penetrate into dealers’ real environment, which is completely different from the normal world. Therefore, from an insider’s perspective, a researcher will obtain more detailed, concrete info and data on their movements and actions.
As Mrs. Adler states in her writing, “this scene was different from any analysis of drug trafficking because of the amounts they were dealing and the fact that they were importing it themselves.” But the excessive trust that was generated between the drug dealers and the researchers made way to the uprising of certain unethical behaviors and actions from the researchers’ part. It was unethical, even though necessary, to use their friendship with Dave to study him closely and develop an independent research study about him, because they could become biased towards him and understand his situation from a friend’s perspective rather than from a researcher’s one. Also, it was unethical to take advantage of the fact that their friend Dave was a drug dealer to buy drugs from him for their own personal interest. Finally, it was unethical to know about crimes that were being committed by the drug dealers and smugglers and keeping that information to themselves instead of telling the police. They can be accused of “guilty knowledge”. However, it was a necessary and justified action that they had to take because, as she stated, “field researchers studying deviance must inevitably break the law in order to acquire valid participant observation data.” Had they used that type of information to report crimes to the police, they would never have appeared as trustful people to the drug dealers, and they wouldn’t have obtained secret information from the dealers as openly as they did.