VEUS RAVAL

Since 2012, Guillaume Dumont and Rafael Clua García (UManresa) have launched VEUS RAVAL, a five-year ethnographic project on Barcelona’s narcotics market. Its main objective is to study the narcotics market in its relationship with health, law enforcement, urban, and social policies. Specifically, the project analyzes the phenomenon of the “narcopisos”, namely the illegitimate occupation of public or private properties by criminal organizations to sell drugs to clients using them on-site. This project problematizes narcopisos as a dynamic and open-ended illegal organizational response to the intensification of drug law enforcement, pressure from local communities, limitation of harm reduction policies, and structural vulnerability.

VEUS-RAVAL is innovative in many aspects and provides theoretical and methodological developments from an interdisciplinary perspective (Anthropology, Organization Studies, Epidemiology, Criminology). It sheds new light on the organization of drug use and trafficking as the product of collective action and, therefore, moves beyond the dominant focus of existing research on People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) alone. It analyzes the networks of collaboration among the actors involved and the conventions shaping and structuring their interactions, including PWUD, cocaine, crack-cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine dealers, police forces, harm reduction professionals, residents, drug activists, community leaders, and politicians.

VEUS RAVAL contributes to developing new knowledge on the following urgent social problems: (1) Gentrification and urban transformation; (2) Drug law enforcement; (3) Harm reduction policies; (4) Social movements and activism; (5) Intersectional structural vulnerability.

Recent publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14661381221113416

Social media: https://twitter.com/veusraval?lang=en

Media: https://vimeo.com/640053337