Bob Hughes runs a small-time crew that robs pharmacies — not to get rich, but so he never runs out of drugs. There is no empire to build nor respect to win: only the next high and a string of superstitions (never a hat on the bed) to ward off bad luck. Bob is what Cloward and Ohlin called the double failure: the one who fits neither the legal ladder nor the criminal one, and whose only way out is to withdraw from the world by chemical means.
// The theoryThe third way out: giving up
Cloward and Ohlin described three subcultures. The criminal one (Fisk) for those with a ladder of organized crime; the conflict one (O-Dog) for those with none, who seize status at gunpoint; and the retreatist one for a third group: the double failures, those who fail at once in the legitimate path and in the illegitimate one. Taking up the "retreatism" that Merton had already named, they argued that these people have one last adaptation left: to quit the game and take refuge in drugs, alcohol, escape. They fight neither for the goals nor for respect — they retreat.
Bob is that exact portrait. His robberies are not ambition but logistics: means to a single end, staying high. He does not want money (he spends it the moment he has it), he does not want power (he shuns violence), he does not want status (he lives in hiding). His horizon has shrunk until it fits inside the next dose. The retreatist subculture is neither rebellion nor evil: it is surrender — that of someone who, with every door shut, decides that the only way to bear the world is not to be fully in it.
Neither win nor fight: escape
The retreatist subculture is the saddest of the three because it aspires to nothing: it neither pursues success nor replaces it with respect, it simply absents itself. Cloward and Ohlin reserved it for those who fail twice over, and that is why their crime is different — instrumental, without glory, in the service of consumption—. Bob does not steal to become someone; he steals to stop being, to numb a life that offered him no ladder worth climbing. His ritual of superstitions is the only thing resembling order he has left: small charms of someone who no longer controls anything else.
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// The subjectThe cowboy who wanted to get off the horse
What saves Bob from being a textbook junkie is that he tries to quit. Unlike O-Dog's dead-end nihilism, Bob glimpses another life: when a death in the group hits him, he tries to get clean, looks for a job, signs up for a program. There the film —and the theory— become more honest than any sermon: getting out of retreatism is brutally hard precisely because the ladders that pushed him into it still are not there. Bob wants to rejoin a world that never made room for him, and relapse (an old crewmate, a slip, the lack of a net) lurks around every corner. His final struggle is not against the drug, but against the absence of alternatives that made him use — and that battle is not won by willpower alone.
Later science reinforced that social reading more than the "failure" one. Bruce Alexander's Rat Park experiments showed that rats in isolated cages became hooked on morphine, while those living in a rich, social environment barely touched it: addiction depended less on the substance than on isolation. Bob is not a weak-willed halfwit; he is someone whose world left him with no Rat Park to return to.
Bob Hughes
// The crackAre they really "double failures"?
The "double failure" category is the weakest part of the theory, and critics pointed it out early. Many drug users are not failures at anything: they are integrated, they work, they succeed — consumption cuts across every class and does not always spring from exclusion. Presenting retreatism as the fate of those who are good for neither the legal nor the illegal path is both inaccurate and somewhat contemptuous. Bob himself belies the cliché: he is intelligent, capable, personable. Addiction, as we now know, has neurochemical, traumatic and social roots far more complex than a "he wasn't good for anything else." The retreatist subculture captures a real phenomenon —escape as a way out— but explains it with a label that is far too poor.
Treat the way out, don't punish the escape
If retreatism is a surrender to the absence of alternatives, punishing it with prison is the most absurd response possible: it locks up someone who had already locked themselves inside, and adds a record that shuts the few doors that remained. The useful reading of Bob is that of treatment over punishment: understanding addiction as health and as a social symptom, and offering the ladders —detox, employment, connection, a net to catch the relapse— that make return possible. Bob wants to get off the horse; society decides whether to hold out a hand or hand down a sentence. The retreatist subculture is not dissolved by fear: it is dissolved by giving back, to the one who gave up, something worth playing for again.
Three key takeaways
- The retreatist subculture (Cloward and Ohlin) is that of the double failures —those who fail on the legal path and the criminal one— who withdraw into drugs. Bob robs only to use: not to win nor to fight, but to escape.
- It is neither rebellion nor evil, but surrender to the absence of ladders. Bob tries to get out, and discovers that rejoining a world that never made room for him is brutally hard without a net.
- The crack: "double failure" is inaccurate and contemptuous (consumption cuts across every class; addiction is more complex). The cure is not prison, but treating the way out: addiction as health and social symptom.
Sources · further reading
- Cloward, R. A. & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and Opportunity. Free Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). «Social Structure and Anomie». American Sociological Review, 3(5).
- Fogle, J. (1990). Drugstore Cowboy. Delacorte Press.
- Alexander, B. K. (2008). The Globalisation of Addiction. Oxford University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Bob Hughes?
Bob Hughes («Bob») es un villano de Drugstore Cowboy, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Bob Hughes runs a small crew that robs pharmacies, not to get rich, but so he never runs out of drugs.
¿Por qué Bob Hughes se convierte en villano?
Drugstore Cowboy and differential opportunity: Bob Hughes succeeds neither in legitimate life nor in crime — all he knows how to do is rob pharmacies to stay high. This is Cloward and Ohlin's retreatist subculture: the "double failure" who, with both ladders shut, withdraws into the only refuge left to him, drugs.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Bob Hughes?
El caso de Bob Hughes se analiza desde la Oportunidades diferenciales. Cloward and Ohlin's third subculture is the retreatist one: that of those who fail at once in legitimate means and in illegitimate ones —the "double failures"— and take refuge in drugs and escape. Bob Hughes, in Drugstore Cowboy, is its portrait: a small-time thief whose only goal is to stay high, with no ambition for money or status, trapped in a ritual of robberies and superstitions. He embodies retreatism not as evil nor as rebellion, but as surrender: the way out of someone who, with every door shut, decides to stop playing.
