This book provides a detailed account of the way girls and boys of white British origin access and participate in legal and illegal drugs within the context of supply at the local level. It explores the relationship of children and young people to the local drug market from a gendered perspective and illustrate how their drug behaviours should be understood in both localised and gendered terms. It draws on a two-year ethnographic study of children and young people growing up on 'Northside', a small housing estate located on the edge of a large Northern City in England. Northside has an established drug market dominated by the trade in cannabis resin, known locally as 'tac'. The environment in which these young people inhabit is described in the first half of this book, and the author provides a critical examination of the popular image of the contemporary British housing estate by exploring the political economy of drug dealing and crime at the local level. It reveals how the local culture of crime and irregular market activity, of which drug dealing has become a part, is in governed by the rules of masculinity and is in fact rooted in established criminal activity organised around informal trading. In the second half of this book, attention focuses on the nature of boys' and girls' engagement with the local drug market and describes and analyses the gendered nature of their drug taking practices and rituals. By re-engaging with ethnography this book provides a rich, descriptive account of young people's drug taking practices and behaviours within the context of supply. It also enables gender to be examined as a process and to explore the gendered meaning and context of drug taking and drug selling. Contents Introduction 1 Young people and drug taking: the British context Part 1 Northside: young people, families and place 2 Young people, families and kinship networks on Northside 3 The 'problem estate' 4 The drug market Part 2 The local and gendered context of drug taking on Northside 5 Boys, girls and deviant practices 6 'Bucket stations': drug taking places, practices and rituals 7 Conclusions: 'doing local', 'doing gender': the youth-drug connection on Northside estate Bibliography Index.