Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heat as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drug. One of the most popular episodes
Speaker 1: the Psychoactive to date has been the one where I
Speaker 1: invited my friend Julie Holland to service my co host
Speaker 1: and answer questions with me from you the audience. So
Speaker 1: we're going to record another one of those episodes, and
Speaker 1: we need your questions. Leave us a voicemail with a
Speaker 1: question as d he tells us possible at one eight three, three, seven,
Speaker 1: seven nine sixty, or you can record a voice memo
Speaker 1: and send it to Psychoactive at protozoa dot com. I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's going to be a great second go with this. Hello,
Speaker 1: Psychoactive listeners. Today's episode is the first time I'm actually
Speaker 1: inviting a previous guest right back on to do a
Speaker 1: second conversation, and it's Philippe Bouguas. And the reason I'm
Speaker 1: doing this is because when we talked last time, we
Speaker 1: really focused extensively on his research, first in East Haarlem
Speaker 1: in the nineties and then more recently in Philadelphia, which
Speaker 1: focused especially on people involved in selling crack and sometimes
Speaker 1: other drugs, and we got so caught up in that
Speaker 1: discussion that all his other work, um a whole another
Speaker 1: part of his work, which focuses on injecting drug users
Speaker 1: and others in San Francisco and Los Angeles, even in Tijuana,
Speaker 1: we barely touched on that. And there are some similarities
Speaker 1: between the conversation we had there, but a whole range
Speaker 1: of new themes to address, And so you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to have a Philip back for a second time
Speaker 1: so we could delve more deeply into this other line
Speaker 1: of work. So Philip, thank you ever so much for
Speaker 1: coming back on Psychoactive with me, and thank you for
Speaker 1: for bringing me back. I think a shorter way of
Speaker 1: introducing me is just probably to say I'm an obsessive,
Speaker 1: compulsive researcher on drugs since the mid nineteen eighties. But
Speaker 1: thank you. I should then thank you for being an
Speaker 1: obsessive compulsive and applying your subsessive cold energies to this
Speaker 1: area because I tell you what I what I had
Speaker 1: done before we talked last time, and I refreshed myself
Speaker 1: this time was taking out this book, Righteous Dope Fiend,
Speaker 1: which you co authored with a graduate student of yours,
Speaker 1: Jeff Schoenberg. And it's not just a written book, it's
Speaker 1: actually a photo ethnography that it's full of these stunning
Speaker 1: and incredible, you know, black and white photos, and it
Speaker 1: was based upon the research that you it for I
Speaker 1: think twelve years from to two thousand and six, basically
Speaker 1: living with essentially homeless drug injectors, mostly heroin injectors in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. My first question for you is when you
Speaker 1: look at that community that you got to know back then,
Speaker 1: and obviously there were certain things that were distinctive about
Speaker 1: them when they were born, the time they grew up, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But do you think that many of the observations you
Speaker 1: made and the generalizations you came away with and the
Speaker 1: insights would be generally true of a range of drug
Speaker 1: using communities today around the United States. You know, frankly
Speaker 1: the age old French saying pluenge produced m M shows
Speaker 1: is the tragedy of of drug use. At the current moment,
Speaker 1: it's actually gotten worse because of how the prohibitionist policies
Speaker 1: have pushed drugs into greater toxicity, namely fentanel and now
Speaker 1: even worse than fentanel. The combining of animal tranquilizers zylazine
Speaker 1: to the fentanil to remediate some of the disadvantages of
Speaker 1: fentanil but keep their psycho you know what injectors see
Speaker 1: as the psychoactive um advantages of fent nil over over heroin,
Speaker 1: so that over you know, poppy plant based heroin. So
Speaker 1: that is the the current situation that's hitting the streets
Speaker 1: now across different parts of the United States at different rates,
Speaker 1: with of all places, Philadelphia being the epicenter of all
Speaker 1: of this is the addition of zylazine to fentanil. So
Speaker 1: it's the two most toxic products that when mixed together,
Speaker 1: create a whole slew of bodily problems. Basically, zylazine, to
Speaker 1: put it in popular terms, asphyxiates, you know, sells randomly um,
Speaker 1: so it isn't the abscesses that pop up that are
Speaker 1: so horrendous are are not even popping up necessarily at
Speaker 1: the site where someone injects. Zylazine is also a different
Speaker 1: kind of sedative. It's not meant for human consumptions. Zylazine
Speaker 1: has meant, you know, to put elephants to sleep, you know,
Speaker 1: when you transport them. And the reason why it came
Speaker 1: first to Philadelphia is because the horse breeders, who you
Speaker 1: know often win the sort of biggest you know, US
Speaker 1: horse races, raise their thoroughbreds in the highlands of Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico because it's cheaper where it's just a great environment
Speaker 1: for horses. And the stable. The people working in the stables,
Speaker 1: they were underpaid, partially employed for only part of the season,
Speaker 1: and because these horses are so valuable, they obviously knocked
Speaker 1: them out with zylazine. So the zylazine made its way
Speaker 1: into the drug supply that the that that the stable
Speaker 1: users had gotten involved in. And one of the big
Speaker 1: poorest migration routes between rural Puerto Rico and the United
Speaker 1: States is through the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia, which just
Speaker 1: so happens to be the four state mid Atlantic headquarters
Speaker 1: for distributing retail level drugs to the United States. Philip,
Speaker 1: let me let me interrupt your second So I just
Speaker 1: want to get a handled on this. So you know,
Speaker 1: we know, going back a number of years ago, when
Speaker 1: we begin to see the emergence of fentinel, there's all
Speaker 1: sorts of obvious reasons why fentinel starts to become more
Speaker 1: on the president, first in certain neighborhoods and then increasingly
Speaker 1: around the country. And that's because it's, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's cheaper and easier to smuggles a fifteen hundred times
Speaker 1: more potent than heroin. You can, you know, just put
Speaker 1: it in the mail and effectively sentence or hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of doses. It was a way of cutting heroines. Basically,
Speaker 1: dealers could say, you know, make more money on their sales.
Speaker 1: And my collection from talking to people in the harmonduction
Speaker 1: world and elsewhere was that initially people preferred the heroin,
Speaker 1: but over a period of time, you know, you now
Speaker 1: have a whole new generation that actually prefers the fent anyl,
Speaker 1: And in fact, fentimyl has become kind of on the
Speaker 1: present and it's a powerful opioid, So it kind of
Speaker 1: makes sense that it would have gotten out there and
Speaker 1: the way it did with all the deadly, deadly consequences.
Speaker 1: But when you're talking about zylazine, what was the incentive
Speaker 1: A on the part of the suppliers and the dealers
Speaker 1: to put it in there was a similar defentanyl? And
Speaker 1: B is there in fact a real demands? I mean,
Speaker 1: are there people on the street who are saying I
Speaker 1: want that combination? And why? Yeah? No? And it's a
Speaker 1: simple it's a simple answer. Longer legs to the high.
Speaker 1: The problem with fentanyl is that precisely what makes it
Speaker 1: more psychoactively fun to people is that it doesn't last
Speaker 1: as long. It's half life is shorter, so you get
Speaker 1: that more manic up and down own, which is where
Speaker 1: people who like who, who adore that pleasure get their pleasure.
Speaker 1: With the addition of xylazine, does it gives it what
Speaker 1: they call on the street longer legs, So fentnille has
Speaker 1: short legs compared to poppy plant based heroin. The other
Speaker 1: caveat um Ethan is that drug users are like wine aficionados.
Speaker 1: They develop these tastes and there's groups of them, Like
Speaker 1: one thing, groups of them that like another, but they
Speaker 1: really sort of know too much about what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: And so it's, you know, like any high art, it's
Speaker 1: this sort of to use populist psychobabble language, you know, obsessive, compulsive,
Speaker 1: you know, love for the effects. What someone figured out was,
Speaker 1: you know, you add it's called trank on the streets
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia. Just the name itself tells you what the
Speaker 1: drug feels like to some extent, trank. And when you
Speaker 1: you know, when you're doing ethno rafe there, you you know,
Speaker 1: you're walking around, you can't quite believe what you're seeing.
Speaker 1: People are sort of moving around it almost in slow motion,
Speaker 1: just completely just sedated, beyond what you've ever seen with
Speaker 1: normal you know, with normal fetanel or normal heroin. So, Philip,
Speaker 1: you're saying that, I mean, we're talking here that about
Speaker 1: a drug combination that the drug consumers are actually seeking
Speaker 1: out because they like the sensory psychoactive effect, but that
Speaker 1: unfortunately as health consequences that are even more devastating for
Speaker 1: their lives. Yeah, but it's it's it's more tragic than that.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a huge section of them that seek
Speaker 1: it out and then the rest of them have it
Speaker 1: totally imposed on them, so it's sort of a self
Speaker 1: fulfilling thing. It's easier for the sellers to make more
Speaker 1: money and bring in new people. It's started basically measurably
Speaker 1: in two thousand sixteen in Philadelphia, where the first you know,
Speaker 1: place where public health sees it is in the corners reports.
Speaker 1: So it's in the in the poor people, you know,
Speaker 1: in the first overdoses who occur on a large scale.
Speaker 1: And this is what's so sad when you look at
Speaker 1: the per capita overdoses, you compare Philadelphia even just to
Speaker 1: New York City, you know, it's just like way, way, way,
Speaker 1: way more. There's no way to look at it and
Speaker 1: tell the difference with your you know, with the naked eye.
Speaker 1: That's the problem with the prohibitionist way we do drug
Speaker 1: testing and drug monitoring. If we monitored drugs to protect citizens,
Speaker 1: you know, protect residents, protect human beings in the United
Speaker 1: States from killing themselves, damaging themselves, and damaging others. We
Speaker 1: would be able to have clear data that's rapidly alerted
Speaker 1: to people so people understand the risks of what they're doing.
Speaker 1: People don't realize it. They just think it's fun, you know,
Speaker 1: think of it. You're you're seventeen years old. You know,
Speaker 1: you want to have fun, and you're you. You think
Speaker 1: that you're immortal. And that's the tragedy. You know, when
Speaker 1: you're walking down the street, and and it is interesting
Speaker 1: because because it's so sedating, you know, you'll see people
Speaker 1: bickering and so forth, but it's not like they're moving
Speaker 1: fast and you know, and able to punch each other
Speaker 1: or you know, get angry at each other the way
Speaker 1: you can when you're taking a stimulant. I can hear
Speaker 1: outside you are about the current work. But I do
Speaker 1: really want to pull you back just a little bits
Speaker 1: who to some of the earlier work you did and
Speaker 1: the book Righteous Dope theme, because I've just immersed myself
Speaker 1: in its absolutely fascinating. I mean, you spend thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of hours with people living under the freeway, in
Speaker 1: in in back areas. I mean essentially you know either
Speaker 1: a percent homeless or mostly homeless, people who were totally
Speaker 1: committed to heroin. At one point, there's a phrase you used.
Speaker 1: You said that you began to understand this community as
Speaker 1: forming a community of addicted bodies that is held together
Speaker 1: by a moral economy of sharing. Just explain what you
Speaker 1: mean by that and whether that still applies today, which
Speaker 1: I assume it does. It does. And actually I want
Speaker 1: to also, you know, shout out to Jeff Schoenberg. For
Speaker 1: every five hours I spent out there, he spent fifty literally,
Speaker 1: That's how and why he got such good pictures. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's a talented photographer, just in and of he just
Speaker 1: has that knack. But then when you become you know,
Speaker 1: such a skilled ethnographer and so dedicated at it. He
Speaker 1: was working at it full time and didn't have any
Speaker 1: other responsibilities. He was able to really and and and
Speaker 1: and he's also a gentle nice person. People appreciated him,
Speaker 1: and they invited him in, and he was giving people,
Speaker 1: you know, copies of the photographs he was taking of them,
Speaker 1: and they really appreciate it. They started decorating their encampments
Speaker 1: with Jeff's photographs. And so that made this what we
Speaker 1: call photo ethnography possible um and it tempers you know,
Speaker 1: the intense you know, academic analysis that's also in the book,
Speaker 1: because I wanted to set it in the context of
Speaker 1: d industrialization. What comes through in the book is it
Speaker 1: goes a lot deeper there. I mean you and especially
Speaker 1: Jeff I guess. I mean, you are sometimes spending the
Speaker 1: night in these homeless encountenments. You know, you're sharing foods,
Speaker 1: you're sharing money, You're getting to know their families, um,
Speaker 1: and you know, unlike say some of the crack sellers
Speaker 1: in Philly or Harlem, you know, you're also living with
Speaker 1: people who are sometimes having bathed in weeks, who are
Speaker 1: in horrific you know, health, who can smell terribly, who
Speaker 1: are shooting themselves and puking. I mean, you describe a
Speaker 1: lot of this kind of being around. Did it take
Speaker 1: some getting used to to just be part of that community? Yeah?
Speaker 1: First you feel like a kuk and you're embarrassed. I was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was chair of medical school department at the time
Speaker 1: at UCSF. I would park my car on the corner
Speaker 1: where they hang out, and I'd still be dressed in
Speaker 1: you know what you have to dress as a chair,
Speaker 1: and I would you know whatever, you know, go outside
Speaker 1: dressed like that and then see, you know, every everyone
Speaker 1: walking by would think that I was the upper class
Speaker 1: addict going to get their fixed. That was what actually
Speaker 1: I was most embarrassed about. Initially, I was just embarrassed
Speaker 1: that everyone thought that I was, you know, you know whatever,
Speaker 1: a drug addict. After a while, I just didn't care,
Speaker 1: and I didn't even notice the passers by, just the
Speaker 1: way they don't in some sense, and the passers by
Speaker 1: didn't seem to notice me anymore. I don't I don't
Speaker 1: quite know how that magic takes place. It was interesting.
Speaker 1: I remember vividly the first time I brought Jeff down
Speaker 1: to the scene. I just couldn't believe that he was
Speaker 1: able to hang out in the scene that we were
Speaker 1: in without being freaked out by it. He could see
Speaker 1: both their desire to be documented, their need to tell
Speaker 1: their story, and and they they want their story to
Speaker 1: be heard. They're proud of who they are, you know,
Speaker 1: outlaws in that sense. These were people, you know, at
Speaker 1: the at the end of a long life of being
Speaker 1: in drug use. But I think you pointed out that
Speaker 1: very few of the white um you know, the white homeless,
Speaker 1: the white drug addics, had actually been in juvenile delinquent
Speaker 1: institutions as opposed to the blacks. Pretty but it was
Speaker 1: just to go back though fully today that free as
Speaker 1: you use, a community of addicted bodies that is held
Speaker 1: together by a moral economy of sharing. Just elaborate on
Speaker 1: sure well, I was funded by the National Institutes of
Speaker 1: Health to reduce HIV and hepatitis C, you know, and
Speaker 1: I'm a conscientious researcher. I wanted to get practical data
Speaker 1: on how one could you know, reduce the transmission of
Speaker 1: blood borne diseases through shared needle use. As a result,
Speaker 1: I looked, you know, much more more, much more closely
Speaker 1: than is normal on site to sharing practices as they occur,
Speaker 1: and I would discuss those practices and what people understood
Speaker 1: about the risks and what they understood when I would
Speaker 1: tell them the public health perspective on what they were
Speaker 1: doing and the risks they were taking. So I got
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of detail on that, and I realized that
Speaker 1: what public health was defining as you know, sort of
Speaker 1: a self destructive, pathological thing. Sharing was seen as an
Speaker 1: ethical responsibility by them because what what they all organized
Speaker 1: their lives around is not becoming what they called dop sick,
Speaker 1: not going into the horrible, horrible withdrawal symptoms that are
Speaker 1: so you know, that are so devastating to anyone who's
Speaker 1: physically dependent on heroin, and you know, it's super visible.
Speaker 1: It's like it's you know, the person is sweating, the
Speaker 1: person is getting irritated, the person is fidgeting. None of
Speaker 1: their cells are behaving normally anymore. So you know, the
Speaker 1: skin cells are itching and getting irritated with ashes, and
Speaker 1: they can no longer hold any food in and so forth.
Speaker 1: So when someone is like that, you you want to
Speaker 1: help them. I mean you, even if you're a schmuck,
Speaker 1: you want to help them, you know, I mean, you
Speaker 1: you feel sorry. You can't not feel sorry for them.
Speaker 1: So as a result, you know, they would you know,
Speaker 1: give them part of their needle, and you know, in
Speaker 1: that process, you know, most likely infect them if the
Speaker 1: person wasn't already infected with hepatitis C. But the thing
Speaker 1: that they were getting most of all was abscesses, blood
Speaker 1: borne abscesses from the sharing of needles, and also just
Speaker 1: from the fact they didn't have they didn't have obviously
Speaker 1: running wood. So you just you can't you can't clean
Speaker 1: your hands, you can't clean your body, you know, effectively
Speaker 1: or consistently, and so forth. It was that very visible
Speaker 1: dynamic of suffering that was based in an ethics of sharing,
Speaker 1: and there was no communication of of understanding between their
Speaker 1: perspective and priorities versus you know what the outsider perspective,
Speaker 1: the rational perspective of public health and clinicians is. Since
Speaker 1: I was working in a medical school, I told all
Speaker 1: the doctors that I explained that I said, I was
Speaker 1: trying to teach them how to engage, you know, talk
Speaker 1: to someone about the priorities of their life, how they
Speaker 1: can manage less destructively their their veins, you know, and
Speaker 1: what they need to do about, you know, their nutrition
Speaker 1: with respect to how much they can enjoy drugs. They
Speaker 1: only want to hear things in terms of how can
Speaker 1: they maximize either minimize the pain of their withdrawal, depending
Speaker 1: on what stage they are in their relationship to the drugs.
Speaker 1: You know. All many of them just thought themselves as
Speaker 1: staying well. They weren't trying to get high anymore. They
Speaker 1: were just trying to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay, whereas
Speaker 1: others were still in the ecstasy of pursuing I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm having fun every day. Um. They're also drinking huge
Speaker 1: amounts of cisco berry. Right, that's a completely legal toxic
Speaker 1: you know alcohol, right, cisco berry, you know, fortified wine
Speaker 1: and getting h cirrhosis of the liver and smoking huge
Speaker 1: amounts of of cigarettes. And in addition to the crack
Speaker 1: they were smoking or the crack that they would melt
Speaker 1: into their heroine. So you know, they were being bombarded
Speaker 1: also by you know, sort of predatory industry that makes
Speaker 1: so much money off of killing people simultaneously, and it
Speaker 1: just happens to be called legal. We'll be talking more
Speaker 1: after we hear this ad, Philip. You know, I'm just wondering,
Speaker 1: I mean NIA and it's I mean no longer as
Speaker 1: much today. But you know, they were anti harm reduction.
Speaker 1: They would tell people seeking grant funding, uh not to
Speaker 1: use the phrase harm reduction. They were reluctant to get
Speaker 1: on board on needle exchange, the whole thing. And they've
Speaker 1: never been all that big on funding, if not bography
Speaker 1: in a big way. You know, it's old brain science
Speaker 1: and addiction and all this kind of stuff. But somehow
Speaker 1: you were successful in getting funding that resulted in these fascinating,
Speaker 1: fascinating books and articles you've read in How did you
Speaker 1: manage that? Well, you know, this was the pre extreme
Speaker 1: right wing turn in the United States. Ethan. They reached
Speaker 1: out to me, they reached out to me actually way
Speaker 1: back under crack, because I was like the only you know,
Speaker 1: the only person at least that the press was interviewing
Speaker 1: that knew what crack looked like, how it was used.
Speaker 1: They didn't even know if it was smoked or swallowed
Speaker 1: or or injected, right, They were that ignorant. There was
Speaker 1: an awareness that they didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 1: They didn't even know what the problems were and were
Speaker 1: being blindsided by everything. So there was a project officer
Speaker 1: who did believe in needle exchange. Actually, his his name,
Speaker 1: actually he's retired now, was Richard Needle. Ironically that's his
Speaker 1: real name, not not his This was in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: early nineties. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so he actually realized
Speaker 1: that I, you know, it was clueless about the N
Speaker 1: I H and could never write the right kind of things.
Speaker 1: So he just through a little tid, tiny tidbit of
Speaker 1: money at me, you know, anthropologists never have any money
Speaker 1: for the research, and said, you know, tell us, you know,
Speaker 1: tell us what drugs are the drugs of preference and
Speaker 1: what's going on. We don't know anything. And so he
Speaker 1: started inviting me into their things. And then I actually
Speaker 1: realized my gosh, this is just you know, it's boring
Speaker 1: to write these grants, but you can do it. You
Speaker 1: just got to use their language. But what I wanted
Speaker 1: to do actually is prove that my qualitative participant observation.
Speaker 1: Anthropological methods are really important quote unquote scientific methods. They
Speaker 1: are scientific methods. They tell you about reality. They're actually
Speaker 1: also very subtle because you have to pay attention to
Speaker 1: your own biases in order to be able to trust
Speaker 1: your own observations, because it's you that's doing it with
Speaker 1: your biases. So when you're self critically self aware and
Speaker 1: do it with a vision to trying to document reality,
Speaker 1: knowing that you're distorting reality because of your biases, you
Speaker 1: can actually do important work documenting reality, or at least
Speaker 1: try to. They're they're a health thing. They care about
Speaker 1: blood borne diseases. This was the height of the HIV epidemic,
Speaker 1: the height of you know, hepatitis C epidemic, and you know,
Speaker 1: they still didn't know whether, you know, whether sex was
Speaker 1: more risky than you know, injection drug use or which
Speaker 1: one you know, how it was being transmitted in terms
Speaker 1: of his relative risks, and people hadn't you know, thought
Speaker 1: of for some reason. It's so, you know, why didn't
Speaker 1: they think of it. They hadn't thought of looking at
Speaker 1: how people actually inject. When do they share, how do
Speaker 1: they share? What do they mean about sharing? Who do
Speaker 1: they share with when they say they share? And you know,
Speaker 1: all they had was quantitative data and interviews that are
Speaker 1: embarrassing to the person being interviewed. You know, do you
Speaker 1: use a condom? Well, you want to say no, I
Speaker 1: don't use a condom and sound like a creep. No,
Speaker 1: you say, yeah, I use a condom. You know, oh,
Speaker 1: every now and then you know it might you know,
Speaker 1: I might forget or it might whatever. You know, you
Speaker 1: can actually have those conversations in a real way, in
Speaker 1: a non stigmatizing way when you make friends with someone.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to find out useful things on how
Speaker 1: diseases were being transmitted in a practical way. And also,
Speaker 1: you know, anthropology doesn't tend often to force itself to
Speaker 1: try to be humbly useful. I wanted to be humbly useful,
Speaker 1: useful to the people I was studying, so that there
Speaker 1: would be more information on what could be done to reduce,
Speaker 1: you know, how obviously devastating their use of heroin was
Speaker 1: on them and the way they were being policed, and
Speaker 1: the way that services were mismanaging them and mistreating them
Speaker 1: even when it wanted to help them. It's crucial. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think listeners are psychoactive will know that. One of
Speaker 1: my pet beeves is the inadequate funding that's come from
Speaker 1: the National Student on Drug Abuse for ethnographic research on
Speaker 1: drug use and drug markets forever and ever. And when
Speaker 1: we look today at the problems around cententyl and not
Speaker 1: knowing much about how and why Centinel is being used,
Speaker 1: much less how it's being distributed and how it's getting
Speaker 1: into the drug supply. I mean, that's just a failure
Speaker 1: of of directing funding in the right way in the
Speaker 1: right area. And if they were doing it, it might
Speaker 1: actually be saving tens of thousands of lives. Yeah, with
Speaker 1: with a with a cheap ethnographic project, you can actually
Speaker 1: find out what's really going on as opposed to the
Speaker 1: self self desirable responses people are giving. Exactly, Philip, I mean,
Speaker 1: just you know, reading it though, I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: an immersion into this world of people living at really
Speaker 1: maybe in one in some respects the lowest wrongs of
Speaker 1: American society just seen as basically refused by by so
Speaker 1: much of America. Right, and you describe you know, complicated lives.
Speaker 1: All of the people living on the street have kids,
Speaker 1: sometimes many kids. Although they're typically not much in touch
Speaker 1: with them, they still some of them, you are in
Speaker 1: touch with their families. So they're going in and out
Speaker 1: of legal jobs, illegal jobs, hustling, begging, selling, you name it,
Speaker 1: but allies that also revolved it seems around this kind
Speaker 1: of daily more more than daily practice of sharing heroin
Speaker 1: where you know, it's everything where you know, where people's
Speaker 1: characters and needs come out about about their about greed,
Speaker 1: about generosity. I mean, people are getting you know, dope
Speaker 1: sick because they don't have their fix. I mean it
Speaker 1: just you describe this incredibly intimate um scene of folks
Speaker 1: kind of you know fighting, You're getting violent another and
Speaker 1: then and yet then backing one another up in these
Speaker 1: in these situations, and you guys are basically living it.
Speaker 1: You're part of it, right, just watching this stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: just I mean part of me thinks that you know,
Speaker 1: here you see people periodically trying to get their lie
Speaker 1: together and then engaging in the most extraordinary acts of
Speaker 1: self destruction. Um that one can possibly imagine, almost heartbreakingly. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right. And it was hard to understand as initially
Speaker 1: as an outsider, because you see, you know, total solidarity,
Speaker 1: and then the next minute a total betrayal by the
Speaker 1: same person to the same person, you know, to the
Speaker 1: to the same other person, and and and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you realize that they are operating with
Speaker 1: a with actually a very you know, sort of shared
Speaker 1: sense of moral ethics amongst among one another that isn't
Speaker 1: recognized as ethics by outsiders. Right, it's Tina what the
Speaker 1: one of the main characters was profoundly, profoundly religious, and
Speaker 1: before eating she would insist on saying grace. And then
Speaker 1: when when when we would sleep in the encampment with her,
Speaker 1: she would read a page before she would let people
Speaker 1: fall asleep. She would read a page from the Bible.
Speaker 1: And and this a person was, you know, as she
Speaker 1: would say, stomping on people when they owed her money
Speaker 1: or when she thought she could steal some money from them.
Speaker 1: So she was a very, very tough woman, but was
Speaker 1: operating in a set of set of ethics that she
Speaker 1: was constructing about her life. It sounds like some of
Speaker 1: them came from families where most of the you know,
Speaker 1: kids in the family had landed up getting messed up
Speaker 1: or addicted or dying or into drugs and others. They
Speaker 1: were the only one in the family who had quote
Speaker 1: unquote gone bad in some respect, right, you say, most
Speaker 1: of them growing up in poverty. Um, but you know,
Speaker 1: some of them, uh, you know, can maintaining fairly normal,
Speaker 1: typical lives until they're into their twenties and early thirties
Speaker 1: and then spiraling down and out for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: some of them having kind of places they can go sleep,
Speaker 1: or periodically having ordinary housing where they can live with family,
Speaker 1: and then coming back to live in these community and
Speaker 1: some of them, it seems that even when they have
Speaker 1: the opportunities, you know, not just a shelter, but even
Speaker 1: when you know, there are some progressive housing programs where
Speaker 1: people have an option, continually being drawn back, you know,
Speaker 1: back to the encampments that that is, to some extent,
Speaker 1: their community and their world where you know, they find
Speaker 1: a sort of sustenance. Yeah. And it took us a
Speaker 1: while to realize this. We realized that on some level,
Speaker 1: even if they couldn't say it clearly, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: in in in sort of therapeutic language. They realized they
Speaker 1: had to get the hell out of their families, that
Speaker 1: they were a destructive force to their children, they were
Speaker 1: destructive force to their mother. And so they would dress up,
Speaker 1: you know, they would arrange to take a shower and
Speaker 1: dress up and and go to a family reunion once
Speaker 1: a year, but then remove themselves and go a wall,
Speaker 1: you know, you know for another year or until Easter,
Speaker 1: you know, until an East family reunion Easter celebration or
Speaker 1: or Christmas celebration or whatever this whatever the religious holiday
Speaker 1: would be. That was you know, very very you know,
Speaker 1: very clear to see. And you had different you have
Speaker 1: different family structures also in distinct um ethnic groups. So
Speaker 1: the white families would um hate on their on their
Speaker 1: wayward children more than the African American families, which tended
Speaker 1: to forgive them and allow them back in much more
Speaker 1: rapidly and seek them out. So when when a family
Speaker 1: reunion was being planned, a mother or a cousin, or
Speaker 1: an uncle or a son would come seeking to find
Speaker 1: their father and would ask us to relay the message. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, they were still loved members of their family.
Speaker 1: In that sense, it was possible for us to to
Speaker 1: analyze these things and set them in the larger context
Speaker 1: of you know, you know, you know us um, you know,
Speaker 1: forms of of both political economy and cultural sets of relationships,
Speaker 1: family and gender arrangements. I think might be the most
Speaker 1: fascinating part for me of the book was the ways
Speaker 1: in which you and Jeff describe the differences between the
Speaker 1: white folks and the black folks living in this community.
Speaker 1: And there's always an exception to everyone. You know, there's
Speaker 1: some you know, some blacks who are more like the
Speaker 1: white or whatever. But I mean, you know, it seems
Speaker 1: to cover all areas. I mean, you just mentioned when
Speaker 1: I think about families, where you know, the blacks living
Speaker 1: in the in these in these encampments had you know,
Speaker 1: maintained a closeness to their families. I mean not maybe
Speaker 1: not children, but especially you know, the broader families than
Speaker 1: the whites did. But there seems to be other trends
Speaker 1: as well. I mean, just talk about that. It's how
Speaker 1: they had different tastes and drugs, right, I think with
Speaker 1: crack more common, different ways of injecting. Just say something
Speaker 1: about that. The chapter where we address that the most
Speaker 1: we call intimate apartheid because we wanted to try to explain, uh,
Speaker 1: to two outsiders, how what looks at first sight like
Speaker 1: a multicultural set of a sort of loose array of
Speaker 1: home us, you know, community was actually super super um separated, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, even if only by three yards um by
Speaker 1: by you know, racial antagonism and the exceptions were also dramatic,
Speaker 1: and the people involved in them would always explain them.
Speaker 1: They would explain why they were the exception, and their
Speaker 1: analysis of it then started to make sense. You know.
Speaker 1: The other thing is how they interfaced with services. So
Speaker 1: the most obvious thing is how much more hostile the
Speaker 1: police were to the African Americans. There was just no comparison, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: And also most importantly was what passers by. Who a
Speaker 1: passer by is willing to give a quarter, two or
Speaker 1: a dollar or five dollars or twenty dollar bill. The
Speaker 1: whites could collect a lot more money panhandling, so they
Speaker 1: didn't have to engage in as much illegal activity, They
Speaker 1: didn't have to take risks in some sense. And they
Speaker 1: what they did was they also learned to view themselves
Speaker 1: as broken down, why nose, So that's what they would
Speaker 1: project to the public, and that's a recognizable person they
Speaker 1: would also present themselves as Vietnam veterans. Wait, wait, this
Speaker 1: is true both black and white in terms of presenting
Speaker 1: as Vietnam vets. Yeah yeah, right, yeah, yeah, that's universal.
Speaker 1: That's a universal American experience. But I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: you do also, I mean you sort of describe this
Speaker 1: thing not just public facing, but like you know, there's
Speaker 1: a kind of enterprising black outlaw versus the broken down
Speaker 1: white bomb. And it's not just how they present outwardly
Speaker 1: and one's well dressed and one is in in ragged clothes, right,
Speaker 1: that that's extraordinary to scene. It's not ambiguous either, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's almost I mean, I mean, it's also
Speaker 1: how they're interacting with one another. You say, the whites
Speaker 1: are going to be more successful at begging than panhandling
Speaker 1: because basically some of the racism and that there was
Speaker 1: also more of a hustling culture in a way, a
Speaker 1: more entrepreneurial culture maybe going on in terms of black culture, right,
Speaker 1: And and they and the whites would get criticized for
Speaker 1: being lazy. Yeah, those guys are just good for nothing.
Speaker 1: All they do is beg. You know, I I have
Speaker 1: self respect. I'm out there hustling you know, I I
Speaker 1: have a sense I dress well. I I spend time
Speaker 1: figuring out where to get clothes, and and I make
Speaker 1: efforts to wash, you know, in the bathroom of the McDonald's,
Speaker 1: you know, when the manager isn't looking and so forth.
Speaker 1: That was very, very clearly articulated by everyone and visible
Speaker 1: in that sense. Well, you also point out that sort
Speaker 1: of black street culture is kind of dominant. I mean,
Speaker 1: not just in this community, but really in much of
Speaker 1: urban America where is there really is not much of
Speaker 1: a sort of white urban street culture anymore, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole biker gang Hell's Angels thing didn't
Speaker 1: really quite work here. And the kind of white street
Speaker 1: culture that one might have associated with gangs back in
Speaker 1: the earlier part of the twentieth century of Irish and
Speaker 1: Jewish and Italian and other gangs doesn't really operate either.
Speaker 1: And so there's a way in which the black culture
Speaker 1: street culture kind of shapes and frames everything, and the
Speaker 1: whites don't really fit into that very well. Yes, certainly
Speaker 1: in this scene and in this generation. But on the
Speaker 1: other side of San Francisco, in the Hayde Ashbury, there
Speaker 1: was a thriving white young injector scene that was dominated
Speaker 1: by whites, and it's really interesting. It was really interesting
Speaker 1: to see how people performed and did real violence. So
Speaker 1: you have whites, Latinos, and blacks, right, the Latinos were
Speaker 1: literally caught in between, and they could choose which camp
Speaker 1: they wanted to go to. They were in the minority
Speaker 1: in this scene, and then all of a sudden, their
Speaker 1: whole personality would change in terms of how they did violence,
Speaker 1: which drugs they were preferring, and how they were talking
Speaker 1: in each of the two scenes. So, yeah, people we
Speaker 1: were able to sort of morph their cultural preferences, so
Speaker 1: to speak. Well, you know, it was interesting even when
Speaker 1: you get into something as intimate injecting. Yeah, that's incredible,
Speaker 1: you said. Even the ways that the whites and black's
Speaker 1: injected were different, different experience of the injecting, different ways
Speaker 1: of doing it, and different health consequences. Yeah, booting and jacking.
Speaker 1: So it's you know, you put in the you put
Speaker 1: it in, then pull out so that some of the
Speaker 1: blood comes back into your syringe and so forth. A
Speaker 1: completely different way of also experiencing the rush of what
Speaker 1: you're injecting, whether it's a combination of cocaine, and heroin
Speaker 1: or just or or or just heroin, um, you know,
Speaker 1: with multiple rushes going in and out of your veins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you describe like whites almost injecting it was almost
Speaker 1: like a perfunctory way. It's like I just got to
Speaker 1: get this into my system to keep from not even
Speaker 1: into the vein, just into the muscles, so so it
Speaker 1: even takes a few minutes for it to hit right,
Speaker 1: and as if I just got to do this to
Speaker 1: keep from getting sick, and dada da da, where as
Speaker 1: you describe the blacks were injecting like you know, doing
Speaker 1: this you know, way deep and intravenous and spending the
Speaker 1: time to find it. And then this kind of more
Speaker 1: kind of sensual you know, public you know, manifest enjoyment
Speaker 1: to the experience. I mean that seems to be a
Speaker 1: whole another kind of cultural difference between the two groups
Speaker 1: living just a few feet away from one another. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And even the way you would do your your your
Speaker 1: public nod you know, this sort of the ecstatic experience
Speaker 1: of the heroin is to be, you know, nodding and
Speaker 1: looking like you're drooling on yourself. And and that's what
Speaker 1: you know, sort of someone is seeking to do at
Speaker 1: the height of their pleasurable moment after injecting, and that
Speaker 1: can last for several hours, so people would would be
Speaker 1: seeking that. What was interesting was the whites weren't admitting
Speaker 1: to it, so they wouldn't have the initial rush that
Speaker 1: you get when injecting directly a direct deposit of the
Speaker 1: drug into the vein, but they would you know, going
Speaker 1: into the fatty tissue with the capillaries, or or into
Speaker 1: the muscle with the you know, the muscle, then sending
Speaker 1: it on, you know, to the rest of the body.
Speaker 1: You know, it might take twenty minutes for the full
Speaker 1: effect to come on or ten minutes or whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how long. But they would then be
Speaker 1: nodding out, you know, intensely after that, and they wouldn't
Speaker 1: admit to it. Right, So what did you make of
Speaker 1: so many of them claiming they had been Vietnam vets,
Speaker 1: whereas none of them had been Vietnam vets and only
Speaker 1: a few of them had actually been in the military, right,
Speaker 1: You know, that was an interesting dynamic one Sometimes often
Speaker 1: you know, suspects that, but then one never knows because
Speaker 1: there are Vietnam vets. The one person I do want
Speaker 1: to say, though, who was a legit VET and he
Speaker 1: did qualify for v A you know, whatever v A care.
Speaker 1: You know, he was a little bit younger, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was Grenada or what US invasion,
Speaker 1: you know, invasion of Central America he was involved in,
Speaker 1: or Panama or whatever. But he was saved by the
Speaker 1: v A and successfully saved by the VA when he
Speaker 1: was finally able to prove his identity. And they had
Speaker 1: a great program that integrated him into a job at
Speaker 1: the v A a you know, and gave him a
Speaker 1: whole transition period with you know, with supportive housing. So
Speaker 1: he was the one, the one, you know, super positive outcome.
Speaker 1: So Philipe you, you and Jeff you called the book
Speaker 1: righteous dope fiend. I imagine you wouldn't to use the
Speaker 1: title if they hadn't been calling themselves righteous dope fiends.
Speaker 1: They were hoped to die with my boots on dope fiends.
Speaker 1: Is how how they would you know, they would giggle
Speaker 1: saying that in some sense, you know, righteous is also
Speaker 1: you know, just a popular word for doing something well.
Speaker 1: You can be a righteous cook, you know, you can
Speaker 1: be righteously good at at anything. And so that's what
Speaker 1: righteous dope fne means. You are totally dedicated to focusing
Speaker 1: on your love of heroin in some sense. And it's
Speaker 1: said without shame. It's said with you know, with with
Speaker 1: outlaw pride in that sense um. And they would consider
Speaker 1: the term junkie a slur in this setting. You know,
Speaker 1: different words take on different meanings for different generations at
Speaker 1: different moments in history. But you can read about, you know,
Speaker 1: the righteous dope fing in the nineteen fifties when it
Speaker 1: was a new you know, when it when it seemed
Speaker 1: like a new thing to the younger generation at that time.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you about this. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: as they said at the beginning, you know, this is
Speaker 1: a photo ethnography. So there's these very compelling black and
Speaker 1: white photos that your co author, Jeff Chamberg did. I
Speaker 1: want to ask you about this because you know, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, you know, you say, you know, there's
Speaker 1: the pictures says a thousand words, but you guys turn
Speaker 1: it on it on its head. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: line where you say, letting a picture speak its thousand
Speaker 1: words can result in a thousand deceptions. But you know,
Speaker 1: I just remember encountering this repeatedly. Where there was a
Speaker 1: documentary maker in Vancouver twenty years ago, Nittie Wilde, and
Speaker 1: she did this fascinating documentary about the injecting scene in Vancouver,
Speaker 1: and it was when the whole debate was going on
Speaker 1: around the safe injection sites, and she was very much
Speaker 1: an advocate of trying to get these sites set up.
Speaker 1: But I think the footage she collected of people injecting
Speaker 1: was so captivating that she had a lot of it,
Speaker 1: and I just imagined that not just myself, but many
Speaker 1: others were kind of almost being put off by that.
Speaker 1: And then I remember there was a book that came
Speaker 1: out twenty years ago, a big, almost like one of
Speaker 1: these you know, table top books anyone was called Cocaine
Speaker 1: Blue or something, which also had all these photos of
Speaker 1: people at the height of the crack era. And I
Speaker 1: had this sense that there was a way in which
Speaker 1: the success at securing this really provocative photographage or photographic
Speaker 1: or documentary footage may have undermined their effort to really
Speaker 1: create a greater level of empathy and sympathy that we
Speaker 1: could help promote policy change. And I always felt very
Speaker 1: ambivalent about these projects, even as I admired their motivations.
Speaker 1: And I wonder when you were doing this book, how
Speaker 1: did you deal with that? Well, we were very inefficient.
Speaker 1: We took a long, long, long, long time to do it,
Speaker 1: and then selected our pictures carefully to both tell reality
Speaker 1: but also to minimize how they could be, you know,
Speaker 1: hallucinated upon by a hostile reader in some sense. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, we also wanted to show the
Speaker 1: real suffering. And you can't sanitize something and do justice
Speaker 1: to making recognizable the suffering and making recognizable the bad
Speaker 1: policy in a sense that the need for reform. It's
Speaker 1: really interesting also to see the differences in different countries
Speaker 1: when you show these pictures, and and how easy and
Speaker 1: clear it is two people in less conservative, less puritanical,
Speaker 1: less righteous, so to speak, cultural countries. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: my father's French, and he would go, God, the US
Speaker 1: is such a stupid country. Why does it you know,
Speaker 1: why does it torture it's citizens? This is crazy. Why
Speaker 1: not let them have their heroine. They would be completely
Speaker 1: harmless with their heroine. And it's like so simple in
Speaker 1: that sense. And and that's what's so interesting about the
Speaker 1: um you know, the Swiss, I mean the Swiss of
Speaker 1: all people, right, the Swiss are the ones that you know,
Speaker 1: we're piloting the prescription of heroin to unrepentant drug users,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden they started having better full
Speaker 1: I mean, this is hard to believe if full abstention outcomes,
Speaker 1: you know, leaving drugs completely, because once the person was
Speaker 1: like getting all the heroine they wanted, they weren't excited
Speaker 1: by their outlaw life anymore. There wasn't the manic up
Speaker 1: and down pleasures that what for whatever you know, psychodynamic
Speaker 1: reason they were pursuing. And you know, they were just
Speaker 1: like hanging out with a nurse who is making sure
Speaker 1: they didn't give themselves an abcess, and they would say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should just like learn how to go skiing,
Speaker 1: and then they would get you know, free skiing lessons.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break here and go to an ad believe,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you. I mean, it was interesting because I
Speaker 1: followed the developments around the heroin maintenance clinics in Europe
Speaker 1: very closely, and it's all true what you're saying. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously didn't like people take the heroine home with them,
Speaker 1: but this really helped people stabilize their lives. It was
Speaker 1: specifically for people who had tried method on and not
Speaker 1: succeeded on that. And interestingly, one of the biggest strows
Speaker 1: they dealt with was that, you know, most of these
Speaker 1: folks were generally older, in their thirties or forties, if not.
Speaker 1: You know, they were getting a point where they were
Speaker 1: tired of living life on the streets, but they were
Speaker 1: no longer not ready to abandon their lady love heroin.
Speaker 1: And so here they're getting basically as much heroin as
Speaker 1: they want each day. They can go to a clinic
Speaker 1: up to three times a day. It's either cost either
Speaker 1: nothing or just a few franc a day. But the
Speaker 1: thing they struggled with, I think the most when they
Speaker 1: were in these programs was depression and the sense of
Speaker 1: loss of purpose in their lives. And I want to
Speaker 1: bring that back to what you know you were talking
Speaker 1: about in the book, where you know, at one point
Speaker 1: you talk about you know that you know at one
Speaker 1: point you were Jeff is walking along and you describe
Speaker 1: the brisk, eager walk. Makes it clear that they're dope
Speaker 1: feends on their way to fix and that remain reminded
Speaker 1: me of sort of the Godfather of of drug study,
Speaker 1: ethnography and Preble who wrote a book called Taking Care
Speaker 1: of Business, and in the book Taking Care of Business,
Speaker 1: and he said, because you know, I mean, basically the
Speaker 1: way I know is if I see somebody lying on
Speaker 1: a doorstep, they're more likely drunk. Whereas if I see
Speaker 1: somebody walk in head bopping back and forth left and right,
Speaker 1: I can tell they're on the hustle. They're looking for
Speaker 1: a place to score, they're looking for a place to
Speaker 1: do that, they're taking care of business. In fact, when
Speaker 1: you talk about the zyla scene phenomenon that's coming up
Speaker 1: now and how that turns people into kind of slow
Speaker 1: motion versions of who they were before, you can see
Speaker 1: that maybe that phenomen no I'm taking care of business,
Speaker 1: begins to get diminished. What is all making me think
Speaker 1: about is that one of the things you find is
Speaker 1: I agree with obviously a d percent that that you know,
Speaker 1: that making whether it's method on or brupern orphane, or
Speaker 1: especially pharmaceutical heroin or now this drug hydromorphone, which is
Speaker 1: equivalent to heroin you know available in the US, um
Speaker 1: would make a huge difference for people who are addicted.
Speaker 1: Defense and all this sort of stuff, But at the
Speaker 1: same time there's this element and you describe this at
Speaker 1: this period in nearly two thousands when San Francisco begins
Speaker 1: to adopt some more progressive policies and when the people
Speaker 1: are homemost have the option not just of a shelter,
Speaker 1: but even if having you know, a little room to themselves,
Speaker 1: and you describe some of the people who get out
Speaker 1: of the drug scene and then just fall into this
Speaker 1: terrible depression and using a loan. Right. Absolutely, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that was sad to see and it made too
Speaker 1: much sense after it happened, and you know, is predictable
Speaker 1: in a sense, but the whole program was new. There
Speaker 1: were a bunch of cities doing it, but San Francisco
Speaker 1: is you know, managing to do it and claim that
Speaker 1: it was doing better than everyone else even when it isn't.
Speaker 1: So that was, you know, an interesting program, a housing
Speaker 1: first program, that's a classic harm reduction program. Don't don't
Speaker 1: judge the person, get them housed before you you know,
Speaker 1: do any kind of you know whatever attempt to reduce
Speaker 1: the risk taking. And and that was really interesting to
Speaker 1: see when it worked and what some of the contradictions
Speaker 1: to it were. And it did it did work? Um,
Speaker 1: you know, for more people than it didn't work. You know,
Speaker 1: injecting heroin alone is extraordinarily dangerous. It's such an easy
Speaker 1: drug to overdose on, and it's such an easy drug
Speaker 1: to revive someone on when you're next to them, you know,
Speaker 1: you you mean, most of the time, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: you can just shake the person and and wake them up.
Speaker 1: But you know, obviously no one can shake you when
Speaker 1: you knock over, so that that is a tragic you know,
Speaker 1: I felt connected to what you were, I mean the
Speaker 1: senior describing because you know back you described, you know,
Speaker 1: the harm reduction programs and needle exchange programs that even
Speaker 1: though they're problematic in some ways and sort of trying
Speaker 1: to put in a kind of public health model that
Speaker 1: doesn't always make sense to the real lives to be
Speaker 1: on the streets, they're nonetheless the most valuable thing going on.
Speaker 1: And that was the period where I had persuaded George
Speaker 1: Sorrows to become the number one private funder of needle
Speaker 1: exchange in the world, and we were funding those programs
Speaker 1: and in the areas you were looking at. And then
Speaker 1: you describe the ballot initiative PROP thirty six and two thousand,
Speaker 1: which I am, my colleagues drafted, put together, raised the
Speaker 1: money for and one with you know, overwhelmingly in two
Speaker 1: thousand and that was the first major alternatives to incarceration
Speaker 1: ballot initiative to pass in the US all basically since
Speaker 1: the repeal of alcohol prohibition, and it doubled state funding
Speaker 1: for drug treatment at that time. Right, and even though
Speaker 1: it's still had elements of coercion in it, the initiative
Speaker 1: was actively opposed by the drug court judges because we
Speaker 1: took away a lot of their more coercive tools. And
Speaker 1: so you described this moment there where in fact you
Speaker 1: know that that there is this sort of beginning of
Speaker 1: more services coming in, but it can help only so much.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the sense I got. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's good that those services are out there, but for
Speaker 1: a lot of the people you were getting to know
Speaker 1: living home in in those encampments, you know, they weren't
Speaker 1: really gonna take advantage of it for any extended period
Speaker 1: of time. Their whole life they had been abused, Right,
Speaker 1: every previous interaction ever in their life with any figure
Speaker 1: of authority had always been an abusive relationship, A relationship
Speaker 1: of being you know, balled out, beaten up, you know,
Speaker 1: in put in jail, rebuked, you know, for being a
Speaker 1: good for nothing and so forth. So you know, when
Speaker 1: all of a sudden these sort of new piloted you know,
Speaker 1: wonderful harm reduction services were being offered, they couldn't really
Speaker 1: believe it, right, They didn't even know how to absorb
Speaker 1: it or trust it. And the whites were the first
Speaker 1: people that the system recognized as quote deserving it, you know,
Speaker 1: and reached out to them, and they literally were the
Speaker 1: first ones to get housed and and you know, it
Speaker 1: was like totally racialized in that sense. Although you described
Speaker 1: the whites being piste off because they felt that the
Speaker 1: blacks were getting favoritism, it's which wasn't really true. That's
Speaker 1: what everyone I mean, that's the American story, right, that's
Speaker 1: the American dream. Everyone piste off and everyone else. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the most heartbreaking moment in the book, Philip was,
Speaker 1: you know, you're pointing out how almost none of the
Speaker 1: white folks have any relationship with their children anymore, whereas
Speaker 1: that with the black folks, they're more likely to have
Speaker 1: some relationship there and the more likely and extended family
Speaker 1: that's caring about them and will invite them back in.
Speaker 1: But there's this moment where you were, Jeff um go
Speaker 1: and one of one of the black characters in the book,
Speaker 1: you know, his son shows up and he's so happy
Speaker 1: to see his dad, wants to meet the family. They
Speaker 1: arranged to meet in a few hours, and the hours
Speaker 1: go by, and you know, I can't remember which character was,
Speaker 1: but he's so happy, he's so happy, so happy, and
Speaker 1: you know they're going to take the bus and then
Speaker 1: just you know, lands up taking the bus fare to
Speaker 1: buy some crack. And somehow the time goes by and
Speaker 1: they show up very late and the kids not there,
Speaker 1: and I just, I mean, I guess it was something,
Speaker 1: because part of what you're writing about in this thing
Speaker 1: is that there's something, you know, whether it's the drug itself,
Speaker 1: or the or the or the community they're living in
Speaker 1: that somehow breaks something off in times. It just, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I guess I just found it heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: That piece of it. Yeah, that was heartbreaking. Jeff actually
Speaker 1: went to find his funeral and the family asked him
Speaker 1: to be the official photographer at the funeral, and and
Speaker 1: they also asked for copies of of his photograph and
Speaker 1: and his son and daughters. Um Carter was was the
Speaker 1: name we gave him. They had grown up without their father,
Speaker 1: and so the photographs were are now their memory, and
Speaker 1: they compare what they look like compared to their father,
Speaker 1: how their beard compares to how their father's beard looks,
Speaker 1: you know, in the casket. So it was a very
Speaker 1: moving dynamic um And and it was sad. It's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: I mean, their lives were harping. Every single one, you know,
Speaker 1: except for one person had died or two people had
Speaker 1: died by the time the book was published, not even
Speaker 1: ten years after. By the time the book was published,
Speaker 1: their mortality rate is so high. So you know, so
Speaker 1: outlaws suffer. You know, they get punished, they get killed
Speaker 1: by their bodies. You know. It's curious by the way.
Speaker 1: I mean, here you and Jeff are spending so much time.
Speaker 1: You're sharing meals. Jeff is sometimes even I think sleeping
Speaker 1: over there. You know, you get other families. Did you
Speaker 1: ever share drugs with them? Did they ever press you two?
Speaker 1: Did you ever offer I mean whether it was just
Speaker 1: weed or whether it was cocaine or heroine. I mean,
Speaker 1: how did you handle it? You know? No, the I
Speaker 1: mean I slept out there, you know a few times.
Speaker 1: But like I say, for every you know whatever, half
Speaker 1: a dozen times I slept out there. Jeff probably slept
Speaker 1: out there, you know, five or six or seven or
Speaker 1: ten more times. I remember, there was really cute. Tina
Speaker 1: went back out hustling so she could hustle up for
Speaker 1: Jeff's fix, which she had identified as coffee and so
Speaker 1: and it was called the wake up you know, you know,
Speaker 1: his his wake up, his wake up fix. He's gonna
Speaker 1: need seventy five cents for his wake up fix. And
Speaker 1: they realized they were penniless, so she went back out
Speaker 1: and hanhandled it for Jeff because he had spent all
Speaker 1: his money, you know, buying buying food for them that day,
Speaker 1: so they would accept us for the nerds that we were.
Speaker 1: I did drink beer. Um. I tried once or twice
Speaker 1: to drink um fortified wine. I literally threw up the
Speaker 1: first time I did, and and have never touched it
Speaker 1: since then. That stuff is, I mean, it tastes like
Speaker 1: cough syrup. Cisco berry is the nastiest thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's mostly sugar and syrup, I guess um and
Speaker 1: a bunch of alcohol. But each bottle is the equivalent
Speaker 1: of five shots of vodka? Is that what I read? Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable, isn't it. Marijuana never shows up in the
Speaker 1: book more or less, I barely. I think that it's
Speaker 1: barely ever mentioned. No. Yeah, and the marijuana is completely
Speaker 1: irrelevant to them. Yeah, And how do you explain that,
Speaker 1: especially when you read now that the ways in which
Speaker 1: cannabis can enhance the feeling of an opioid um and
Speaker 1: so often cannabis goes well with many drugs. Why in
Speaker 1: your that world right there is basically marijuana essentially absent. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't available in the same way that
Speaker 1: it's available now in a tight traded amount that you
Speaker 1: can buy in the store in California where you know,
Speaker 1: you know, even what mixture of whatever those things aren't
Speaker 1: canne Philip, So what I mean, marijuana was still omnipresent
Speaker 1: throughout this period, and they were already accessing heroin, cooka
Speaker 1: and everything else. Why do you think marijuana wasn't part
Speaker 1: of that scene at all? I mean, it just it
Speaker 1: just seems odd to me, now that you say it
Speaker 1: like that, it seems odd to me. I didn't. It
Speaker 1: didn't even occur to me why they would possibly. It
Speaker 1: seemed obvious to me that they wouldn't want it in
Speaker 1: that sense, Whenever they had an extra penny, they would
Speaker 1: invest it, you know, despite what the white said. They
Speaker 1: often would too. They would invest it in crack. So
Speaker 1: that was where their discretionary income is. And when you
Speaker 1: compare the psychoactive effects to crack and marijuana, it's not
Speaker 1: like the marijuana becomes even vaguely noticeable in the face
Speaker 1: of crack. So last question about this book here. You
Speaker 1: wrote this a number of years ago, and you know,
Speaker 1: you say in the book that you know, the language
Speaker 1: that people use, I mean, the folks you were studying,
Speaker 1: you know, it was it was racist, it was crass,
Speaker 1: it was misogynistic. I mean, you know, filthy, terrible language.
Speaker 1: But in the book, right, so you say you temperate somewhat.
Speaker 1: But like when people are consistently using white people using
Speaker 1: the N word, you spell it out in the book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do that anymore. No, you don't do that anymore.
Speaker 1: And I'm just curious, do you think that the fact
Speaker 1: that that the book does spell it out all the time,
Speaker 1: is that make it less likely that the book might
Speaker 1: ever be assigned in university courses. Now, you know, I
Speaker 1: think you could even suggest it to the UH, to
Speaker 1: the publisher that in the next printing they do it
Speaker 1: with a dash, and so forth. The way, the way
Speaker 1: that the convention has changed. Now. The thing is, I
Speaker 1: wanted to use real language. I didn't want to tell
Speaker 1: a lie. I wanted in your face racism to be visible.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to soft pedal the racism of whites
Speaker 1: against blacks and the few Latin X character is against
Speaker 1: blacks as well. That's what we felt at the time,
Speaker 1: is we wanted to rub it in the face of America,
Speaker 1: to face the fact that they might have politically correct
Speaker 1: language in their you know, upper class homes or or workplaces,
Speaker 1: but that's not the way that you know that that
Speaker 1: that people on the street speak, and and they aren't
Speaker 1: ashamed of how they speak. Do you think anything's lost?
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously everybody knows what the end dash. You
Speaker 1: know what it means. If you don't spell it out
Speaker 1: now it isn't It's an awfully ugly word. I think
Speaker 1: it's too painful when I see it in my I
Speaker 1: can see it in my students it just distracts them.
Speaker 1: I don't want to waste time distracting them. I want
Speaker 1: them to see the important thing. And I don't want
Speaker 1: to have side debates that don't have steaks, because we
Speaker 1: we have so many problems that we can deal with
Speaker 1: and that you know, there are ways to reform in
Speaker 1: the United States, and so you know, if we get
Speaker 1: two side tracked, it just isn't worth it. So listen,
Speaker 1: you're in l A now for a number of years,
Speaker 1: So are you on the streets again? Are you doing
Speaker 1: something in jail? Actually? Mostly, I mean that's all right,
Speaker 1: that's where all the public resources go. I shouldn't be there.
Speaker 1: And what exactly are you doing in jail these days?
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty intense. It's the mental health wards of
Speaker 1: the l A County jail. It's the great tragedy of
Speaker 1: the United States where we closed down our hospitals and
Speaker 1: then the people that do need help are now instead
Speaker 1: of getting help, they're being punished in jail. So we
Speaker 1: we did stumble on a super interesting peer support program
Speaker 1: that even seems to be operating in the heart of
Speaker 1: the Beast in a very positive way. And we found,
Speaker 1: you know, a progressive sheriff who's open to expanding that program.
Speaker 1: So we're just working very much with bare knuckles to
Speaker 1: expand a tiny space, you know, of humanity and help
Speaker 1: in in a setting that is, you know, obviously where
Speaker 1: no one with psychosis should ever set foot. On any
Speaker 1: given day, there's between three and five thousand people. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, many of them you know, thinking that you're
Speaker 1: you know, a devil or the or a snake who's
Speaker 1: trying to eat them or a vampire trying to bite them,
Speaker 1: don't have any understanding of why they're being punished, and
Speaker 1: are most of them people of histories of of drug
Speaker 1: problems as well. So it's both the drug of choice
Speaker 1: on the streets of l A is meth amphetamine, and
Speaker 1: methamphetamine is the thing that you know most fast throws
Speaker 1: you into psychosis when you have that tendency and when
Speaker 1: you use a lot of it over and over especially,
Speaker 1: and you know it can also trigger in someone long
Speaker 1: term psychosis. So it smoked, um, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: that extraordinarily pure crystal meth that comes up from Tijuana
Speaker 1: and it keeps you up for two three days, so
Speaker 1: it's really really strong and it doesn't take a lot
Speaker 1: of organization to get it. You know, injecting heroin every
Speaker 1: single day or or or going into heroin withdrawal takes
Speaker 1: a lot of organization. It takes a lot of hard work.
Speaker 1: That isn't something something someone with psychosis can do, usually
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, enough to even develop a habit
Speaker 1: in that sense. And you're saying it's overwhelmingly smoking now,
Speaker 1: so very little injecting so far. Yeah, there there are
Speaker 1: some scenes of injection, and especially in Tijuana where you
Speaker 1: know that is the epicenter, you know, among the deported
Speaker 1: gang members who are both selling it and and using
Speaker 1: it and trapped at the border wall. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's just more rational to smoke it. It. It has
Speaker 1: the same strong effect and is much easier, and you
Speaker 1: don't have to poke yourself twenty times, and and you
Speaker 1: don't have to miss, and it burns like hell when
Speaker 1: you miss, and so forth. So it's just rational to
Speaker 1: smoke it. And that's it's sort of the same way
Speaker 1: crack is rational with respect to cocaine in that same way. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, smoking it is so much easier than injecting it,
Speaker 1: and and and with okay, now, it doesn't even reach
Speaker 1: your brain it won't even reach your The pleasure of
Speaker 1: effects don't even reach your brain if you don't get
Speaker 1: in a direct deposit so it can you You can
Speaker 1: waste your money completely. And is there's something different about
Speaker 1: the meth today as opposed to the meth ten years ago.
Speaker 1: You know, I just get this from the secondary you know,
Speaker 1: the reports cartels are you know, are you know specifically
Speaker 1: sought out experts to make the best quality they could
Speaker 1: get that smokes the easier. You know, they want to
Speaker 1: open up their market with a product that outcompetes everything else.
Speaker 1: You know, it's more consistently good than it ever was. Probably,
Speaker 1: is what I would say in that sense. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: not qualitatively different. There's the meth of ten years ago
Speaker 1: compared to the method today. You would not compare it
Speaker 1: to heroin um to FENITYL. It's not that big a
Speaker 1: difference between what was there before what is there now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree with you. Yeah, yeah, no, Well listen, Philipe,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is fantastic continuing this conversation with you,
Speaker 1: and I so much admire the work you're doing. So
Speaker 1: let me just say thanks for doing this with me,
Speaker 1: Thanks for having this conversation. Best of luck with the
Speaker 1: work in Los Angeles as well as in Tiahuata, and
Speaker 1: I really look forward to, uh, you know, your next
Speaker 1: writings in your next book about all of this. So
Speaker 1: thanks so much, great, thank you, and I look forward
Speaker 1: to listening to your podcast. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please
Speaker 1: tell your friends about it, or you can write us
Speaker 1: a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your own stories, comes and ideas, then leave
Speaker 1: us a message at one eight three three seven seven
Speaker 1: nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
Speaker 1: can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can
Speaker 1: also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and
Speaker 1: Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Geeseis and Darren Aronotsky from Protozoma Pictures, Alex Williams
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman.
Speaker 1: Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks
Speaker 1: to a Brio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP.
Speaker 1: Next week we'll be doing something totally different, heading out
Speaker 1: of my apartment up to East Tarlem to do an
Speaker 1: episode from the country's first overdose prevention center, also known
Speaker 1: as a safe injection site. It's a shame that it's
Speaker 1: still controversial to open these sites in America, I mean
Speaker 1: in some ways in terms of harm reduction and what
Speaker 1: we could be doing over those prevention sites or safe
Speaker 1: consumption rooms or old news right, because they've been up
Speaker 1: and thing, if you know, all over the world, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier. But as an organization, with our Washington
Speaker 1: heightsite and our East Harlem site, we've been tiptoeing up
Speaker 1: to this and preparing for this in a variety of
Speaker 1: ways for years. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't
Speaker 1: miss it.