Revisiting the entrepreneurial ‘dealer’: The case of Shiny Flakes [PREPRINT]

In Chapter 10, Aysel Sultan considers the famous case of Maximilian Schmidt, who was accused of setting up Germany’s largest digital drug shop under the alias Shiny Flakes, becoming the subject of media stories and Netflix productions. The case provided an opportunity to explore how the move to digitally-mediated drug supply has altered the ways in which phenomena such as the ‘dealer’ and ‘dealing’ are constituted in socio-technical and legal contexts. The chapter contributes to drug scholarship that identifies the need for novel theoretical frameworks to aid in the study of digitalized drug dealing. Sultan also raises questions about the suitability of the criminal law as the prime means of addressing the use and supply of psychoactive drugs, and particularly the ways in which we attribute ‘harm’ to contexts with no apparently visible victim.