Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood; and to the proud man, a brief oblivion for
Wrongs unredress’d, and insult unavenged …
With the beautiful and impassioned praise to opium above – lifted from Thomas De Quincey's 1821 autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater – we dedicate this issue of American Ethnography Quasimonthly to what De Quincey calls the brief oblivion, and we’ve gathered together for you three quite different ethnographic takes on the theme of taking dope.
At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from De Quincey’s romantic opium descriptions, is Philippe Bourgois’ and Jeff Schonberg’s new book Righteous Dopefiend. Bourgois and Schonberg spent over a decade doing field work with two dozen homeless heroin and crack addicts on the streets of San Francisco, and produced an extraordinary well-crafted documentation of this dystopian side of American society. While reading the book, we found ourselves thinking “it’s like the hobo stories from Jack London’s The Road gone horribly, horribly wrong.“ Still, that 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, and we’re stoked to have 
an excerpt from Bourgois’ and Schonberg’s book.
While he has also reported the dead end lives that Bourgois and Schonberg document, 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 our Sucking a Sad Poem out of America onto Film issue). 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.
