The moving first-person accounts of drug addicts on the streets of New York.

Offers new and cutting-edge research on the role of drugs in Iranian society and government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless—culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields.

This brief, compelling life story of a drug addict poses and answers questions of broad public concern about social responsibility, illicit drug use, hidden economies, and social inequality. Merrill Singer, a medical anthropologist involved in the public health impact of alcohol and illicit drug use, conducted interviews over a seven-year period with Tony, a street drug addict who grew up in the inner city. Tony learned the ways of using and selling drugs from his father, became an enforcer in a street gang, spent considerable time in prison, committed seemingly heartless, violent acts, and has had to struggle with the knowledge that he suffers from HIV infection. Tonys life story is an insider, personal view of a tumultuous, marginalized world that intertwines closely with the wider social milieu constructed and sustained by the U.S. political economy. Unique to this book is its attempt to understand the forces that contribute to the risky behavior of drug use, even at a time when drug users know about its deadly and damaging connection to diseases like HIV and hepatitis. Tonys story demonstrates that none of us make choices in a vacuum. Further, the book addresses important issues about how structures of social inequality in our society impact the lives and options of those at the bottom of the social ladder.

This basic analysis of the drug problem in America describes the historical and present use of mood-altering drugs; the economics of drug trafficking; theories of addiction; and the resulting crime, violence, and community deterioration. In addition, the author focuses on the effects of legalizing drugs and the role of law enforcement. This is an ideal text for any course discussing drug use and abuse.

This volume is the definitive resource for anyone doing research in social work. It details both quantitative and qualitative methods and data collection, as well as suggesting the methods appropriate to particular types of studies. It also covers issues such as ethics, gender and ethnicity, and offers advice on how to write up and present your research.

Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience. Based on ethnographic research conducted in sites from alcohol treatment clinics in Russia to Pentecostal addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are linked by the contributors' attention to the dynamics—including the cultural, scientific, legal, religious, personal, and social—that shape the meaning of "addiction" in particular settings. They examine how it is understood and experienced among professionals working in the criminal justice system of a rural West Virginia community; Hispano residents of New Mexico's Espanola Valley, where the rate of heroin overdose is among the highest in the United States; homeless women participating in an outpatient addiction therapy program in the Midwest; machine-gaming addicts in Las Vegas, and many others. The collection's editors suggest "addiction trajectories" as a useful rubric for analyzing the changing meanings of addiction across time, place, institutions, and individual lives. Pursuing three primary trajectories, the contributors show how addiction comes into being as an object of knowledge, a site of therapeutic intervention, and a source of subjective experience. Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll