UOW Facts and Figures - Risk in Heroin Markets

Contemporary scholarship recognises drug markets as a multidimensional phenomenon that intersect at a global and local level. In Australia, heroin use has been the focus of varied media and academic attention, not least because the ‘overt’ nature of most heroin markets has long been associated with a diverse range of negative individual, social, and community-level consequences. However, very little academic attention has been focused on understanding the perceived risks of transacting in heroin markets, and no research has explored these issues in Australia. In this short paper, we explore the self-reported perceptions of risk among a large sample of drug market participants across seven main sites in Australia.