Governing at a distance: how digital–physical hybridity reshapes drug markets and risk in Scotland

Purpose This study aims to examine how digital–physical hybridity reshapes Scottish drug markets by reconfiguring interaction, trust and exposure to risk. Moving beyond the assumption that digitalisation represents a shift from “offline” to “online” markets, the authors analyse how hybrid arrangements produce interactional distance and redistribute harm within drug supply operations. Design/methodology/approach This study is a secondary analysis of the authors’ existing qualitative data sets from Scotland, spanning 2012 to 2025. The authors analyse semi-structured interviews with people involved in or connected to drug markets. Using abductive analysis, the authors moved between participant accounts and existing theory to identify mechanisms through which digital and physical practices combined, comparing across time periods to document what changed, what persisted and why. Findings Findings identify three interrelated mechanisms. Firstly, hybrid infrastructures expand access and coordination while increasing interactional distance between organisers and physical exchange. Secondly, trust shifts from relational, kinship-based forms to infrastructural trust embedded in platforms, protocols and compartmentalised roles, with physical enforcement re-emerging when this trust breaks down. Thirdly, a hybrid organisation enables modular labour structures that insulate higher-level actors while displacing risk and harm downward to runners, sellers and digitally recruited young people. Digital mediation reconfigures, but does not replace, physical delivery, enforcement and place-based control. Originality/value This study advances debates on digital–physical hybridity by identifying interactional distance and the intensified displacement of risk as empirically grounded mechanisms through which contemporary drug markets are reorganised. It contributes to harm-reduction scholarship by showing that hybrid markets do not eliminate violence and vulnerability but redistribute them, concentrating physical risk among those most exposed and least protected.