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Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg spent over a decade doing fieldwork with two dozen homeless heroin and crack addicts on the streets of San Francisco, and produced an extraordinary wellcrafted documentation of this dystopian side of American society.
While reading their new book, Righteous Dopefiend, we found ourselves thinking “it’s like the hobo stories from Jack London’s The Road gone horribly, horribly wrong.” Still, such a description doesn’t fully do this depressing grisliness justice. Particularly dark and unromantic is Schonberg’s photography. Exactly how dark is it? Well, let’s just say that the photo of the guy smoking crack through his tracheotomy hole comes across as a relatively jolly image.
This is an ethnographic tour de force, so we‘re stoked that we are able to bring you 
an excerpt from Bourgois’ and Schonberg’s book.
While he has also reported the dead end lives that, for instance, Bourgois and Schonberg document in Righteous Dopefiend, anthropologist Michael Agar tries to describe what he calls, in an email to American Ethnography, “that first seductive dance with the drug, the song of the opiate siren, the early high times before biology takes over biography.” Agar is a veteran of anthropological research on drug addicts, and has worked with, among others, the U.S. Public Health Service and a New York State treatment program going by the Soviet science fiction name of Narcotic Addiction Control Commission. In his book Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs, Agar writes:
“I finally got around to trying heroin myself. (...) A guy I’d helped out with a couple of phone calls asked me if I’d ever used it. No, I hadn’t. Wasn’t I curious? Of course I was.”
Heroin is, he concludes after his experience, “the perfect whatever drug.” Read about it in this excerpt from Dope Double Agent.
We have featured Howard Becker’s writing previously in American Ethnography (see Photography and sociology). Again we want to bring to your attention one of his earlier articles: “Becoming a Marihuana User” from 1953. Here Becker shines brilliantly with his typical scientific eloquence, as he describes the psychological and social factors that need to be in place for a neophyte to succesfully get high, and later be “willing and able to use the drug for pleasure when the opportunity presents itself.”
Read on in this beautiful piece of social science, Becoming a Marihuana User.
In 1953, when the writer William Burroughs went looking for Yage in the Amazon jungle, he met up with Richard Evans Schultes – “the father of modern ethnobotany” – and his colleagues. Burroughs later inserted a disguised portrait of Schultes in his book In search of Yage – gave him the alter ego Doc Schindler, and fed him some rather Burrough-esque lines: “Bill, I haven’t been fifteen years in this sonofabitch country and lost all my teeth in the service withouth picking up a few angles” (In search of Yage, 1953 and The Yage letters, 2006).
Many years earlier, as a Harvard undergraduate student, Schultes had done fieldwork in Oklahoma. Also taking peyote himself, he studied how the cactus was eaten in the rituals of native Kiowa and Comanche Indians.
Read about it here, in one of Schultes’ earliest works: The appeal of peyote (Lophophora Williamsii) as a medicine.