Back in 2013, while in the latter stages of my PhD research, I landed a job as a researcher on a project that would go on to change my intellectual path. Never having been a student of criminology, I found myself tasked with ‘finding out all I could’ about the illicit market in pharmaceutical drugs. No mean feat. But it remains my most productive and encouraging period in academia to date. This is in large part due to the freedom and time I was given to immerse myself in the world of users, suppliers and officials attempting to police the trade – in other words, to do the job of a proper criminological ethnographer. I was lucky that my boss at the time was a seasoned ethnographer of illicit markets, and that he trusted me to do a good job.

Criminological ethnography is hard, even for those scholars with a great deal of experience. Some have convincingly argued that a PhD is the last period of sustained time left in today’s fast academy conducive to ethnography. Yet nowadays even doctoral researchers are not immune to the growing demands of academia’s specific style of managerialism and target culture. It is increasingly difficult to play the long game, something that is an essential prerequisite for any researcher attempting to gain access and build trust with hard-to-reach populations. In a bid to offer someone the space and time to experience what I had five years earlier, I advertised for a PhD student in 2018 with an idea for a project I titled ‘Refitting the Self’. The aim was to delve deeper and find out more about one specific aspect of the illicit market in pharmaceuticals dedicated to performance and image enhancement. That PhD student would go on to be Nick Gibbs, the author of the book you are just about to read and whose PhD research its analysis is based upon.

As we begin to get back to life following a global pandemic, one might assume that the market in so-called lifestyle drugs is beginning to wake from a period of deep slumber. In fact, the market has only continued to build steam despite several national lockdowns.