7 Concluding comments

Drug markets lend themselves to mythologizing, because they are difficult to study and because the effects of the drugs
themselves create a good deal of glamour to what is in fact a banal and grubby business. The common view that drug markets
are lucrative, violent and monopolistic is, for most drugs, places and time exactly wrong. Mostly participants earn low incomes
from engaging in routine activities in the context of small organizations with no capacity to control their customers. There
are important exceptions at the higher levels of the markets, particularly for cocaine and heroin, in which a few individuals
earn large incomes and control great violence. These constitute a specific social problem which needs to be dealt with but
nothing is gained by generalizing the exceptional few to the mass market in which millions of participants are engaged on
a daily basis.