Philippe Bourgois on the Lives and Thoughts of Drug Users

PSYCHOACTIVE

Philippe Bourgois, along with his co-author Jeffrey Schonberg, spent over a decade getting to know a group of homeless people in San Francisco whose lives revolved around their injection drug use. The result of their research was one of the greatest of all drug ethnographies, a book called Righteous Dopefiends. It's a remarkably intimate book, full of detailed descriptions of people's lives and the community that forms around injection drug use. He describes the different rituals that go into preparing and using heroin, as well as both the generosity and duplicity that surround its use. Today, we'll talk about this book as well as his newer research centered on drug use in Los Angeles and Tijuana.

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