Personal safety during fieldwork is seldom addressed directly in the literature. Drawing from many prior years of ethnographic research and from field experience while studying crack distributors in New York City, the authors provide a variety of strategies by which ethnographic research can be safely conducted in dangerous settings. By projecting an appropriate demeanor, ethnographers can seek others for protector and locator roles, routinely create a safety zone in the field, and establish compatible field roles with potential subjects. The article also provides strategies for avoiding or handling sexual approaches, common law crimes, fights, drive-by shootings, and contacts with the police. When integrated with other standard qualitative methods, ethnographic strategies help to ensure that no physical harm comes to the field-worker and other staff members. Moreover, the presence of researchers may actually reduce (and not increase) potential and actual violence among crack distributors/abusers or others present in the field setting.
Although Americans have experienced many drug epidemics, the majority of which have ended within ten years of onset, they nevertheless believed that the use of smokable cocaine, which took the popular form of crack cocaine in 1984, would grow exponentially throughout the 1990s unless it was vigorously combated. However, in 1991 it appears that crack use is in decline even in the inner-city neighborhoods where it had been most entrenched, and that the decline is due more to natural controls than to the War on Drugs. The cyclical nature of drug epidemics, as well as their progression through regular stages, was again affirmed. The cocaine-smoking epidemic of 1981-1991 (which included crack) afforded the opportunity to research it in its entirety. In this article, the advantages of recognizing the developmental cycles of drug epidemics are outlined, the most important of which concerns the future. In the terminal stage of the developmental cycle of a drug epidemic, remaining abusers play a pivotal role. If humanely treated, they may serve as deterrents to future drug use: frustrated in current drug use, however, yet insensitively treated by the wider society, they may author the next epidemic.
Impoverished crack-abusing women are usually without a regular place to live, sleep, relax, bathe, eliminate, eat, and store possessions—but most are not homeless persons on the streets because they find alternative living arrangements. This article draws from a rich descriptive repository of field notes, field diaries, and transcribed tape-recorded interviews from two ethnographic studies in New York City, focused upon crack users and sellers. The most common alternative living arrangement was for women to live in the household of an older male with a dependable income for a period of time. Women typically provided the men with sex, drugs, cash (less often), domestic service, or companionship. Several women lived in freakhouses (locales where several women entertained sexual customers and shared crack or other drugs) but tried to avoid crack houses or shooting galleries as residential locations. These alternative living arrangements reflected the women's powerlessness and the high levels of sexual exploitation and degradation of women in the inner-city crack culture.
Since 1989, heroin production worldwide has risen; in New York City, as its purity rose and prices fell, street-level markets were restructured and offered heroin in addition to cocaine and crack (which had been popular during the 1980s). While officials estimate that there are between 500,000 and one million hard-core, chronic heroin users nationwide, evidence of supplemental users heralding another heroin era includes: more overdoses and overdose deaths, greater demand for treatment, larger seizures of heroin at all levels of distribution and related arrests, and broader media coverage. In this article, the authors describe the characteristics of populations in which there may have been a percentage increase of new users, such as young middle- or upper-class European-Americans, young Puerto Ricans and recent Haitian and Russian immigrants. The abstinence of young African-Americans is also noted. The article ends with a preliminary needs assessment of the new users in the areas of health (including AIDS), housing, employment, treatment, arrest and imprisonment.
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