This article presents the findings of an ethnographic exploration of heroin use in a disadvantaged area of the United Kingdom. Drawing on developments in continental philosophy as well as debates around the nature of social exclusion in the late-modern west, the core claim made here is that the cultural systems of exchange and mutual support which have come to underpin heroin use in this locale-that, taken together, form a 'moral economy of heroin'-need to be understood as an exercise in reconstituting a meaningful social realm by, and specifically for, this highly marginalised group. The implications of this claim are discussed as they pertain to the fields of drug policy, addiction treatment, and critical criminological understandings of disenfranchised groups.
This article presents a cultural analysis of HBO's drama series, The Wire. It is argued here that, as a cultural text, The Wire forms a site of both containment and resistance, of hegemony and change with recourse to the regulation of illicit drug markets. In this sense The Wire constitutes an important cultural paradigm of drug policy debates, one that has significant heuristic implications regarding both the present consequences and future directions of illicit drug policy. Ultimately, it is demonstrated below that through its representations of the tensions and antagonisms characteristic of drug control systems, The Wire reveals larger predicaments of governance faced by neoliberal democracies today.
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This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself, the article demonstrates how the domains of fieldwork, biography and the emotions intersect to render clear a progressive account of heroin addiction. However, this is offset against some negative occurrences directly reducible to doing ethnography where biographical congruence exists between the researcher and the researched. Ultimately it is argued here that an increased consideration of the self -biographically and emotionally -both permits and facilitates the presentation of analytic yet stylised data in the form of what is termed below, 'lyrical criminology'.
The prescription of heroin to dependent users has been a distinctive feature of British drug policy for almost a century now, and in recent years the policy's evidence-base has grown significantly. However, whilst the evidence for heroin assisted treatment's effectiveness is strong it is somewhat limited by the clinical setting of the randomised control trial and thus leaves a number of important areas unexplored. This article investigates some of these through a sociological lens informed by both developments in regulatory theory and ethnographic research with a heroin-using population in NorthWest England. It is argued below that heroin prescription has currently 'untapped potential' as a means of regulating heroin markets, but also that it presents a number of 'unanswered questions' regarding heroin's socio-economic roles in marginalised communities and the importance of heroin-using identities.
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