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The use of drugs by human beings is a quintessentially anthropological topic of study because it directly connects diverse aspects of the human condition, from internal emotional states to the global political economy, and from intense religious experience to adventurist pleasure-seeking. Given its complexity , and its concurrent expression on multiple levels (individual, familial, communal, national, global), drug use requires a perspective that is committed to holistic understanding—one that tries to see the forest (macro-level) and the trees (micro-level) simultaneously and in interaction. Certainly, aspects of drug use among humans are most productively explored by focused approaches, such as disciplines that seek to address questions such as how the human brain performs under the influence of a particular drug or what impact the use of a certain drug has on personal nutrition. Nevertheless, these approaches can capture only part of the complexity presented by humans using drugs and can only produce partial accounts of the role of drugs in human life. They cannot, for example, explain, at the level of individual experience or in terms of human social processes, why particular groups use particular drugs in particular ways and in particular places with particular effects. Anthropology, however, seeks to learn from diverse approaches that address a diverse array of directly and indirectly related questions and carefully weave these seemingly disparate pieces into a flowing whole—ultimately rooted in an ethnographic account of actual behaviors and social contexts of human action—which is informed by the insider perspective of drug users. As drug using populations adapt their behavior to changing conditions, it will be increasingly important to have ethnographers study those adaptations and translate them for other scientists who concern themselves with the health and behavior of the relevant populations. Regardless of the future legal status of drugs, ethnographers who study drug use will have much to do. If, for example, 162 9 The Future of Drug Ethnography as Reflected in Recent Developments decriminalization eventually carries the political day, the process of adapting to conditions in which possession no longer makes users vulnerable to arrest will require renewed scientific examination by ethnographers. This final chapter seeks to summarize the position currently occupied by drug ethnography in the study of the human condition and comment on its future. The Scientific Context of Ethnography Ethnography as a method for understanding human behavior in natural habitats has become integral to the social science landscape. Without it, survey research is often at a loss to interpret its findings, or even to formulate the most important and accurately framed questions. The fields of social and medical research on drug use began to recognize the value of ethnography, initiating the first public health ethnographies in the 1970s (e.g., Rubin and Comitas 1975; Weidman 1978) and consistently supporting the research of ethnographers over the last 40 years. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health took the lead in this kind of scientific activity, developing promising researchers and recognizing the importance of the understanding of human behavior that ethnographers could contribute to the advancement of science. In two of the early public health ethnographies, Rubin and Comitas (1975) and Carter (1980) encountered some resistance in the NIH to making an anthropologist the principal investigator of large, ethnographically driven projects . In both cases, the institute administrators indicated that they would be more comfortable with having a physician as principal investigator of projects of that size. The physicians in those projects declared that the anthropologists were necessary for navigating the problems presented to the projects by their foreign locations. The projects needed the anthropologists to represent the research team to the local officials and regime operatives in order to obtain the permissions and collaborations necessary to conduct the proposed studies. Both of these projects had multiple disciplinary components, ranging from drug ethnography to electroencephalography, and therefore, contact management between in-country physicians and technicians and North American scientists demanded much diplomacy and attention to local politics and interpersonal dynamics. Not all projects that combine ethnography with other methods were as complex as the early public health projects funded by NIDA. In the study of street-recruited populations of illegal drug users, it became clear by the 1980s that ethnography combined with availability surveys—an approach that came to be known as ethnoepidemiology—represented a means of formulating questions that would succeed in eliciting the desired information from the population under study, and it would also provide a contextual perspective for THE...

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