Aspects of street addict life.
Item
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Title
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Aspects of street addict life.
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Identifier
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AAI9029988
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identifier
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9029988
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Creator
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Waterston, Alisse.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Ida Susser
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | Sociology, Social Structure and Development
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Abstract
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The central concern of this study is the humanistic and scientific understanding of street drug addicts in New York City. My thesis is that the most widely accepted conceptualization of street addicts in academic, political, and media circles in the United States does not reflect the true nature of street addict life. In this "traditional" conceptualization, street addicts and addict "subculture(s)" are peripheral, marginal, and deviant. I assert that this stereotypical image of street addicts emerges from the historically formed relationship between social scientists, policy makers, and the media. I argue that a more accurate conceptualization addresses the systematic interrelationship between street addicts and the larger socio-cultural system within which they live. To dispel the "myth of marginality," this interrelationship is examined.;The study is based on ethnographic data collected on the lower east side of Manhattan by a team of social science researchers from Narcotic and Drug Research, Inc. As a pre-doctoral fellow in the program of Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research at NDRI, I was offered the opportunity to base my dissertation on this data base. In this thesis, the unit of study is an urban population of low-income, hard-core drug users, a standard unit in drug research. Whereas the standard approach treats this unit as isolated, my treatment places street drug addicts within larger political, economic, cultural, and historical processes. To do this, I use an anthropological approach wedding micro-phenomena with macro constructs and explanations, and weaving ethnographic description together with theoretical interpretation. The thesis is organized to contain a critical review of the literature and policy on drug use in the United States, as well as chapters on the major aspects of street addict life: housing, work, the criminal justice system, medical and drug treatment, interpersonal relations, and issues of drugs, culture, and society. I have attempted to describe and explain experiences and activities of this particular behavioral group among the city's working class in terms of constraint, resistance, inequality, conflict, social control, dependency, accommodation, dominant cultural values and practices, and in terms of local cultural perspectives and individual creativity. The aim of the study is to further our understanding of drug users in urban American settings by exploring the role of economic, political and ideological forces in shaping the nature and context of the street addict experience.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
