Save up to 40% on adidas Originals in the adidas.com Sale section

Righteous Dopefiend

Homeless Drug Addicts on the Streets of San Francisco

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.

Photo of medicinal bottle with a label that says “Heroin”

Consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics

“I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do.”

More …

Becoming a Marihuana User

We have featured Howard Becker’s writing previously in American Ethnography (see Photography and sociology). Now we want to bring to your attention one of his earlier articles: Becoming a Marihuana User from 1953. 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.

The Perfect Whatever Drug

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.” We have an excerpt from his book Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs.

American Ethnography Quasimonthly is published by the Intercontinental Institute for Awesome Anthropology and Ethnographic Excellence