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Economic-Compulsive Pathway

Definition

Crime committed to raise money for a dependent drug habit, such as theft or shoplifting, rather than crime caused by the drug's pharmacological effect.

Related terms

Direction-of-Causation Problem
The methodological difficulty of establishing whether drug use causes offending, offending causes drug use, or a shared upstream factor produces both.
Drug Court
A specialist court that diverts substance-dependent offenders from prosecution into supervised treatment, with the judge playing an active monitoring role. Participants who...
Psychopharmacological Pathway
Crime or violence produced by a drug's direct chemical effect on cognition, mood or impulse control while a person is intoxicated or...
Systemic Pathway
Violence generated by the structure of an illegal drug market itself, including turf disputes, debt enforcement and robbery of dealers, in the...
Drugs-Crime Nexus
The umbrella term for the several distinct ways drug use and crime connect, rather than a single causal claim that drugs cause...
Tripartite Framework
Paul Goldstein's 1985 model dividing drug-related violence and crime into three separate causal pathways: psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive and systemic.

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