The Racialization of Chicago’s Drug Market

This paper discusses the material relationships that were configured to serve the distributive network needs of Chicago's early illegal drug market. One of its main aims is to explore how the American occupation of "drug dealer," an originally nondescript term used to describe one's place in the drug market, began to be mired in the racialized semiotics of criminality and danger. The driving hypothesis is that the transition of "drug dealer" as a type of job to a type of person reflected the racial dimensions of Chicago's service sector in the early twentieth century. Combining sources from the pharmacy trades and carceral institutions of the period provides insight into the ways that the social world of Chicago's illegal drug market was interconnected with the networks that sustained the boundaries of legitimacy within the pharmaceutical industry. This approach complements the historiography of drug history by shifting focus away from the well-established understanding of how conceptions of race attach to drug commodities and reveal the way that the needs of these commodity chains influence the experience of race. Conceived as a contribution to the harm reductionist debate, this investigation of the social history of pharmacy from the last century gives a long sense of the economic, political and cultural forces that have persistently contributed to racially disparate carceral policy dependent on criminalized drug markets.