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Who becomes a drug use ethnographer? Why pursue this vocational path? What are the special appeals and distinctive burdens of this line of professional work? This chapter addresses these questions by reviewing findings from a study conducted by Singer, Page, and Melissa Houle of changing patterns in the development of anthropological careers in drug research. In the past, the road to such a career was rarely a straight line leading from a carefully thought out decision to an established training program, and from there to professional involvement in the field. Recalling his own pathway into a drug research career, Michael Agar observed: My first teaching job landed me at the University of Hawaii in 1971. . . . It was bad enough that a new kid arrived working on book revisions. . . . But a book on heroin addicts? Anthropology was obviously going to hell in a handbasket. Most [of my colleagues] did books and articles, if they wrote anything at all, on villages in Asia and the Pacific. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone asked me, “Yes, but is it anthropology?” (2007, 51) As reflected in this statement, when Agar began his career as a drug researcher in the early 1970s, there was far from universal acceptance among fellow anthropologists that such a career track was fully legitimate within the discipline (Bennett and Cook 1996; Page 2004). Recognizing that, relative to other scientists or even other social scientists, anthropologists were considered a marginal group, unconventional in their methods and research perspectives. As an ethnographer of drug-related behavior , Agar found that he was “marginal in a marginal field” (Agar 2007, 48). At the time, drug research was not the quest anthropological dreams were made of (Singer 1986). Indeed, it was far from clear that such a career path existed in anthropology, and it certainly was not something many people planned in 133 7 Career Paths in Drug-related Ethnography From Falling to Calling advance. In his assessment of anthropological careers in alcohol research during this period, for example, Dwight Heath observed that, traditionally, anthropologists who came to study drinking behavior rarely deliberately selected such a vocation from an array of well-considered alternatives (1976). Rather, they tended to “stumble into” such an off-the-beaten-path occupational track as a result of unanticipated circumstances. The same was true of illicit drug research, which was something anthropologists found themselves in “by chance or circumstance rather than [select] it intentionally because of its centrality to the discipline, the recognition and career benefits it would bring, or because of the productive impact findings were expected to have on policy makers and program managers” (Singer 2001, 210). Certainly, this was the case with Agar, who applied to the U.S. Public Health Service when he discovered that it was a route for avoiding the draft and being sent to fight in the widely unpopular Vietnam War. From the pool of applicants, Agar was chosen for a commission in the public health corps when Jack O’Donnell, a sociologist, decided it would be interesting to have an anthropologist in the research office at the federal drug treatment facility in Lexington, Kentucky. O’Donnell actually wasn’t quite sure what anthropologists did, but somehow he intuitively sensed that it would prove to be interesting. In retrospect , he was right. The volume that resulted from Agar’s research with patients at Lexington, Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts (1973), is considered a classic in the field. The career trajectories of many anthropologists and others who found their way into drug-related ethnographic research in the years before the appearance of the global AIDS pandemic followed a similarly unexpected, yet ultimately quite rewarding, pathway. Since AIDS, however, a new pattern has appeared that involves a conscious decision to become a drug use ethnographer. For some, such a career is also an avocation, a selected profession that allows them access to a line of personally meaningful and at times socially impactful work at the front lines of several intersecting epidemics. In this chapter, we describe the ethnographic drug research career, how it has changed over time, and the essential role that NIDA and several other institutions , such at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), have played in helping to create and shape this professional role in the health social sciences. The impact of the funding provided by these agencies has rippled throughout the research world and helped to shape the study of...

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