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In the late 1950s, an alternative to what had become the reigning view of drug users as social deviants began to appear. Its source was the qualitative, interactive study of drug users, and its focus came to be guided by what would come to be called the “drug use as subculture” paradigm. This transition marked the emergence of systematic drug ethnography and psychotropic ethnopharmacology . We refer to this period as modernist in the sense that it was characterized by the modern scientific understanding that if we are systematic and objective in data collection, we can understand foreign ways of life and develop accurate descriptions of the world’s cultural patterns. The Drug Use as Subculture Paradigm One of the first qualitative studies to mark this turning point was conducted by sociologist Harold Finestone among African Americans in Chicago (1957). Though not based on ethnographic research per se, Finestone’s office-based qualitative interviews with approximately fifty African American heroin addicts helped to focus social scientific attention on the existence of a worldview and subculture among drug addicts. In this work, Finestone sought to describe the ideal African American drug user role (the “cat”) on the street, the often illegal income-generating activities needed to sustain a life organized around drug use (the “hustle”), and the behaviors and experiences involved in the actual consumption of drugs (the “kick”). As Feldman and Aldrich noted, Finestone’s work began to shift the emphasis of qualitative drug studies away “from asking why people used drugs [and toward] asking how they went about getting involved in drug use and how they remained involved. . . . Ethnographers began to find their search for etiological influences in the social world rather than the internal [psychological] world of experimenters” (1990, 19). In other words, open-ended 50 3 Systematic Modernist Ethnography and Ethnopharmacology qualitative interviewing of drug users resulted in a movement away from psychoanalytic and psychiatric thinking, as seen in the work of researchers such as Dai, and began toward a more sociocultural and meaning-centered approach to drug use. Interestingly, even the title of Finestone’s most important paper, “Cats, Kicks, and Color” (1957a), reflects this shift toward a concern with drug user experience of “the life,” the details of insider speech, and the contours of the subculture(s) of drug users. The change is further evidenced in two other seminal papers that ushered in the new orientation: Alan Sutter’s “The World of the Righteous Dope Fiend” (1966), based on three years of fieldwork with addicts and non-addicts in Oakland, and, especially, Edward Preble and John Casey’s classic “Taking Care of Business” (1969), which grew out of street research in New York. The primary objective of much of this literature was the holistic description of the people for whom drug use was said to be the central organizing mechanism of their lives. For example, in an effort to counter simplistic stereotypes of drug users, Preble and Casey argued: Their behavior is anything but an escape from life. They are actively engaged in meaningful activities and relationships seven days a week. The brief moments of euphoria after each administration of a small amount of heroin constitute a small fraction of their daily lives. The rest of the time they are actively, aggressively pursuing a career that is exacting , challenging, adventurous, and rewarding. They are always on the move and must be alert, flexible, and resourceful. (1969, 2) In constructing their description, ethnographic researchers of this period tried to understand and represent the world as it was actually seen, lived, and experienced by hardcore drug users. To a large degree, this literature consists of fascinating and detailed accounts of the survival strategies used to sustain a drug-focused lifestyle, the underground economy of drug acquisition, processes of socialization into drug use social networks, the social settings that comprise drug users’ social environments, the folk systems used to classify drug users in terms of their social statuses within the subculture, and the special street argot that developed to communicate issues of concern to drug users as well as a sense of in-group membership (and, equally importantly, to hide this information from outsiders, including the police). In short, the ethnographic literature on street drug use from the 1960s onward emphasizes that the lives of drug users are not without considerable cultural order and socially constructed meaning. Obtaining drugs and drug use as social activities provide the framework for this order. As Preble and Casey commented: The heroin user...

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