Vulnerable people who would previously have been perceived as ‘drug dealers’ can now, under certain circumstances, be seen as ‘victims of exploitation’; coerced or groomed into supplying drugs. Drawing on police perspectives from a large national study of ‘county lines’ policing in the United Kingdom (UK), this article foregrounds how competing and contradictory logics of punishment and protection are associated with policing vulnerable people involved in drug markets (PIDM) across age ranges. We illustrate how different ways of ‘making up’ (Hacking 1986) PIDM have varied effects, pulling towards protection for some and punishment for others, and how vulnerable PIDM are often dealt with both as victims and as offenders concurrently. We argue that the language of exploitation currently used to make sense of and respond to involvement in county lines may be ill-suited to address this issue in a systemic way and may serve to reinforce punitive logics. Consequently, there is a need to more fundamentally rethink responses in order to centre attention on the structural determinants that enable exploitative dynamics.