The new book by Phillippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend, has just been published by University of California Press. Righteous Dopefiend covers Bourgois’ long-term ethnographic work with heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco. Jeff Schonberg provided haunting photographs for the book.

“Calling this book ethnography would be like calling The Wire a cop show: what comes roaring out of its pages is almost as visceral and devastating as spending a night in ‘the hole’ itself.”
-Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

“Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg provide a riveting narrative of the daily struggles for survival of homeless people with a physical and emotional addiction to heroin. The authors’ poignant account of these experiences features sophisticated analytic themes that enable them insightfully to integrate discussions of agency and moral responsibility on the part of homeless addicts with an analysis of the powerful structural forces that shape the addicts’ lives. Righteous Dopefiend is a must-read.”
– William Julius Wilson, author of More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

Here’s the UC Press description:

This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts’ determination to hang on for one more day and one more “fix” through a “moral economy of sharing” that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.

And here’s Publisher’s Weekly starred review:

In this gritty ethnography exploring the world of San Francisco’s homeless heroin addicts, Bourgois, anthropology and community medicine professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Schonberg, a photographer and graduate student in medical anthropology, draw on a decade immersed in this subculture to eloquently elaborate on the survival techniques and intimate lives of black and white addicts who live in self-made communities and work the economic fringes for survival. The authors explore racial boundaries and crossings, love stories, family relations, parenting, histories of childhood abuse, as well as the constant work of navigating hostile police enforcement, exploitative and helpful business owners, overburdened medical services and social service bureaucracies.

The book details the gruesome material toll of addiction, infection and homelessness and the risks of ongoing personal and institutional violence. Bourgois and Schonberg create a deeply nuanced picture of a population that cannot escape social reprobation, but deserves social inclusion. Schonberg’s photographs capture the scars of addiction, the social bonds between romantic pairs and drug-running partners and the concerted efforts at domesticity without a domicile. The collage of case studies, field notes, personal narratives and photography is nothing short of enthralling.

Continue reading “Righteous Dopefiend by Phillippe Bourgois”

By Jackie Dolan, Maria Brooks, Diana Harintho, and Jackie Doherty

Do you feel a thrill when you swipe your card at the register? Come home from the store with things you didn’t plan on buying? Buy things you never use? Run your credits cards up to the limit? If your answers to these questions are yes, you may be a shopaholic.

Shopping and Other Addictions

Newsflash: Shopping addictions are not as glamorous and humorous as the media often portrays them to be. In fact, shopping compulsions are similar to other serious drug addictions that our culture faces today. Donald Black, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, College of Medicine states:

“Like other addictions, it basically has to do with impulsiveness and lack of control over one’s impulses. In America, shopping is embedded in our culture; so often, the impulsiveness comes out as excessive shopping.”

As is seen with all other addictions, compulsive shopping can destroy a person’s life, family, and finances. Take a look at this clip from the show Intervention, which starts with Heidi on a shopping spree.

Continue reading “Confessions of a Shopaholic”

By Kerry, Lauren, Matt and Nicole

Let’s look at the statistics: “Research found alcohol use depicted in 92 percent of the films in a sample of 601 contemporary movies… Alcohol was used in 52 percent of G-rated films, 89 percent for PG, 93 percent for PG-13 and 95 percent for R”

The stone-cold-sober fact? Alcohol is everywhere in films and it shapes the consumption of alcohol by viewers. A 2008 study concluded that each year the average US adolescent (ages 10-14) was exposed to “5.6 hours of movie alcohol use and 243.8 alcohol brand appearances in the top 100 US box office films from 1998-2002.”

Beyond exposure, the magnetism of a drinking character can influence viewers. “Health educators and policymakers are alerted to the fact that the entertainment media too often portray glamorous characters as enjoying alcoholic beverages without facing negative consequences, which may particularly affect the viewers who feel attracted to the role characters.”

Hollywood cinema can be magical, with scenes that seduce the viewer and tattoo memory to mind. These mystical moments generally glamorize alcohol. Drinkers are frequently depicted in films as more attractive, more aggressive, more romantically/sexually active, and as having a higher socioeconomic status than nondrinkers.

In contrast, Hollywood alcoholics are regularly depicted as hopeless, broken deadbeats, chugging down whiskey while their lives crumble around them. Thus, the movie industry portrays the two polar extremes of alcohol use – glamorized celebration and desolate disease. There is no middle ground.

Continue reading “Lights, Camera… Alcohol?”