Bouchard, M., Soudijn, M., & Reuter, P. (2020). Conflict Management in High-Stakes Illegal Drug Transactions. The British Journal of Criminology, 1-20.
We draw from aspects of Black’s theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents...
Bouchard, M., Morselli, C., Macdonald, M., Gallupe, O., Zhang, S., & Farabee, D. (2019). Estimating Risks of Arrest and Criminal Populations: Regression Adjustments to Capture–Recapture Models. Crime & Delinquency, 65(13), 1767-1797.
The size of criminal populations is unknown, and policy decisions are typically based only on the number of offenses and offenders that come to the attention of the criminal justice system. However, the size of criminal populations may follow different trends than what is observed in official data. We use a regression-adjusted capture–recapture model to...
Aldridge, J., & Bouchard, M. (2019). Leveraging the value of online data and methods: drug policy research at the cutting edge. International Journal of Drug Policy.
Is the online domain really so terribly important for drug policy researchers to engage with in order to study drugs and drug policy? Is illicit drug use not, after all, an ‘offline’ activity enacted by people with their offline identities as they buy, sell and consume – not digital – but physical psychoactive substances? With...
Bouchard, M., Gallupe, O., Dawson, K., & Anamali, M. (2018). No place like home? Availability, opportunity, and substance use in adolescence. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(6), 747-764.
Surveys on drugs and alcohol availability show that (1) alcohol is much more easily accessible than both cannabis and tobacco, and that (2) many adolescents still do not find it ‘easy’ to access those substances. In the current study, we examine the importance of both opportunity and availability in assessing substance use in adolescence. Our...
Jozaghi, E., Buxton, J. A., Thomson, E., Marsh, S., Gregg, D., & Bouchard, M. (2018). Building new approaches to risk reduction with social networks and people who smoke illegal drugs from participatory community-based research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17(1), 1-10.
Background: Global cases of overdose-related deaths attributed to synthetic opioids are reaching epidemic proportion in many jurisdictions. While the main focus of health agencies and the different levels of government has been to combat the cases linked to injection drug use, the deaths attributed to smoking illegal drugs have not gained the same attention. Moreover, little...
Bouchard, M., Dawson, K. L., & Anamali, M. (2018). Waiting for the Right One: The Role of Social Proximity and Location in the Decision to Use Cannabis for the First Time. Journal of Drug Issues, 48(4), 625-644.
The study examines the social context of a cannabis offer, an outcome rarely examined in research on substance use. Drawing from a survey conducted among 15-year-old students in a mid-sized Canadian city, we examine (a) the differences between three types of users (immediate, late, and nonusers) and (b) the factors associated with accepting a cannabis...
Ouellet, M., Macdonald, M., Bouchard, M., Morselli, C., & Frank, R. (2017). The Price of Cannabis in Canada (005). Public Safety Canada
The report provides estimates of: 1) cannabis prices from 2011 to 2015; and 2) the price elasticity of cannabis demand in Canada. Estimates rely on approximately 9,000 self-reported cannabis transactions from 2011 to 2015, as reported to the Price of Weed website, an online platform for cannabis users to anonymously submit the price, size, perceived...
Malm, A., Bouchard, M., Decorte, T., Vlaemynck, M., & Wouters, M. (2017). More structural holes, more risk? Network structure and risk perception among marijuana growers. Social Networks, 51, 127-134.
This study examines the relationship between network structure and risk perceptions. We use self-report data on 359 illicit marijuana growers and their personal co-worker networks. Our results show that growers with more structural holes in their co-worker network perceive higher risk of apprehension from law enforcement. We argue that this result is facilitated by two...
Morselli, C., Bouchard, M., Zhang, S., Farabee, D., Ouellet, M., & Easton, S. (2016). It came from the north: assessing the claim of Canada’s rising role as a global supplier of synthetic drugs. Crime, Law and Social Change, 66(3), 247-270.
The past decade saw increasing attention turned toward Canada as an active supplier of synthetic drugs to the U.S. and wider international market. Other than occasional drug seizures at border crossings and news stories, no systematic research has been conducted to verify or ascertain such claims. This study assesses the Canadian synthetic drugs market by...
Ouellet, M., Bouchard, M., & Malm, A. (2016). Social opportunity structures and the escalation of drug market offending. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53(6), 743-764.
Objectives: This study looks at whether social opportunity structures are associated with transitions into more serious drug market offending. Our focus is on the speed at which transitions occurred, and whether variations in criminal embeddedness play a role in explaining this. Methods: A survey of 520 North American cannabis cultivators allowed us to assess one dimension of...
Barratt, M. J., Potter, G. R., Wouters, M., Wilkins, C., Werse, B., Perälä, J., Pederson, M. M., Nyugen, H., Malm, A., Lenton, S., Korf, D., Klein, A., Heyde, J., Hakkarai, P., Asmussen, V., Tom, F., Decorte, T., Bouchard, M., & Blok, T. (2015). Lessons from conducting trans-national Internet-mediated participatory research with hidden populations of cannabis cultivators. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26(3), 238-249.
Background: Internet-mediated research methods are increasingly used to access hidden populations. The International Cannabis Cultivation Questionnaire (ICCQ) is an online survey designed to facilitate international comparisons into the relatively under-researched but increasingly significant phenomenon of domestic cannabis cultivation. The Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium has used the ICCQ to survey over 6000 cannabis cultivators across 11...
Gallupe, O., Bouchard, M. (2015). The influence of positional and experienced social benefits on the relationship between peers and alcohol use. Rationality and Society, 27, 40-69.
An assumption of peer influence research is that being connected to an alcohol-using peer group is associated with personal alcohol use. However, most research assesses peer influence through simply counting the number of peers involved in a particular behavior or the amount of that behavior within a person’s peer group. Rarely considered is the fact...
Potter, G., Barrat, M., Malm, A., Bouchard, M. et al. (2015). Global patterns of domestic cannabis cultivation: a comparison of sample characteristics and patterns of growing across eleven countries. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 226-237.
This article aims to provide an overview of: demographic characteristics; experiences with growing cannabis; methods and scale of growing operations; reasons for growing; personal use of cannabis and other drugs; participation in cannabis and other drug markets; contacts with the criminal justice system for respondents to an online survey about cannabis cultivation drawn from eleven...
Barratt, M. J., Potter, G., Bouchard, M., Blok, T., Christensen, A., Decorte, T., Frank, V., Hakkarainen, P., Klein, A., Lenton, S., Malm, A.E., Perala, J., Werse, B. and Wouters, M. (2015). Trans-national internet-mediated participatory research with hidden populations: Lessons from the ICCQ. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 238-249.
Internet-mediated research methods are increasingly used to access hidden populations. The International Cannabis Cultivation Questionnaire (ICCQ) is an online survey designed to facilitate international comparisons into the relatively under-researched but increasingly significant phenomenon of domestic cannabis cultivation. The Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium has used the ICCQ to survey over 6000 cannabis cultivators across 11...
Nguyen, H., Malm, A., Bouchard, M. (2015). Production, perception, and punishment: Restrictive deterrence in the context of cannabis cultivation. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 267-276.
American authorities have invested extraordinary resources to keep up with the growth in cannabis cultivation, and state-level cannabis laws have been changing rapidly. Despite these changes, little research on the relationship between criminal justice sanctions and grower behaviours exist, in particular research that examines restrictive deterrence - the altering of an illegal behaviour as opposed...
Athey, N., Bouchard, M., Decorte, T., Frank, V., Hakkarainen, P. (2013). Cannabis Cultivation and Detection: A Comparative Study of Belgium, Finland, and Denmark. Drugs: Education, Prevention, Policy, 20, 203-215.
Research on cannabis cultivation has identified several factors associated with a grower's likelihood of detection by law enforcement. However, these studies are difficult to compare, as they drew from different data sources and methods, and have focused on only one geographical location. This article revisits the issue of detection using a large sample of cannabis...
Athey, N., Bouchard, M. (2013). The BALCO scandal: The social structure of a steroid distribution network. Global Crime, 14, 217-237.
The current study revisits the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal involving the production and distribution of an undetectable anabolic-androgenic steroid to professional athletes from late 1990s until 2003. Multiple sources are reviewed to re-create the social structure of BALCO and examine whether it formed a close-knit community or instead multiple communities defined around...
Nguyen, H., Bouchard, M. (2013). Need, connections, or competence? Criminal achievement among adolescent offenders. Justice Quarterly, 30, 44-83.
Variations in criminal performance have been much less explored than other parameters of criminal careers. We explore the factors associated with differential criminal achievement in a sample of 154 adolescent offenders involved in cannabis cultivation. Drawing from theories of earnings attainment, we examine the role of drug use, criminal social capital and criminal human capital...
Bouchard, M., Beauregard, E., Kalacska, M. (2013). Journey to grow: Linking process to outcome in target site selection for cannabis cultivation. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 50, 33-52.
The objective of this study was to test whether there is a relationship between characteristics of the journey to an outdoor cannabis cultivation site and the total number of plants grown. Spatial data on the location of a sample of 132 cultivation sites derived from aerial detection policing efforts is used. TwoStep cluster analysis is...
Gallupe, O., Bouchard, M. (2013). Adolescent parties and substance use: A situational approach to peer influence. Journal of Criminal Justice, 41, 162-171.
This study takes a situational approach to testing criminogenic peer influence effects on substance use by examining audience characteristics at the last two parties that adolescents attended. We examine the applicability of situational approaches to social learning theory and symbolic interactionist perspectives on criminogenic peer group effects.We found that higher levels of substance use are...