Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Natalman, 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, heed 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 detailed as 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 we have as our guest Philippe Bougua,
Speaker 1: who is one of the more distinguished professors in the
Speaker 1: United States looking at issues around drug users drug markets.
Speaker 1: He's an anthropologist and ethnographer. Whereas many scholars and anthropologists
Speaker 1: will just kind of jump in and we'll go and
Speaker 1: they'll do their interviews and come back and I'll take
Speaker 1: a year or two, Philippe has actually spent almost a
Speaker 1: decade or more in three different communities of either drug
Speaker 1: sellers or drug users in a really deep sort of
Speaker 1: immersion and produced these incredible books, one called In Search
Speaker 1: of Respect, one called Righteous Dope Fiends, as well as
Speaker 1: dozens and dozens of articles. He's been a distinguished professor
Speaker 1: at San Francisco State University and University California, San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and University of Pennsylvania, and now he's currently at u
Speaker 1: C l A where he continues to do this work.
Speaker 1: So Philip, thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to this conversation. Well, thanks, thanks, Ethan. I
Speaker 1: wish I was everything that you said I was. He
Speaker 1: made me sound terrific. Actually, I'm just an obsessed ten
Speaker 1: whatever ten twelve years of field work at all my sites.
Speaker 1: But it's actually even twelve, twenty years or thirty years
Speaker 1: and now sometimes forty. In your first book in Search
Speaker 1: of Respect, which was about the seven years I guess
Speaker 1: you lived from five to ninety two in East Harlem.
Speaker 1: That was exactly the period when the War on drugs
Speaker 1: was going into hyper speed and crack cocaine was becoming
Speaker 1: a major phenomenon. And then here we're talking about the
Speaker 1: Upper East Side of New York right where you you know,
Speaker 1: have some of the billionaires of New York living in
Speaker 1: the East seventies and eighties and up into the low nineties,
Speaker 1: and then things change radically as you move into East Harlem.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a more gradual shift on the Upper
Speaker 1: west Side of New York with the Upper east Side
Speaker 1: has been sort of almost infamous for that great divide.
Speaker 1: Yet that time back when in my day Street was
Speaker 1: it was literally called the demilitarized zone, and it just
Speaker 1: if you were on the subway, that was where all
Speaker 1: the whites got out got out of the subway. It
Speaker 1: was just a caricature of apartheid. So, Philip, if somebody
Speaker 1: asked you your book of Search of Respect, what's it about,
Speaker 1: and you've got all of an elevator conversation to say it,
Speaker 1: what's the answer. It's the phenomenon of what I call
Speaker 1: us inner city apartheid, which is the fact that every
Speaker 1: single large and even small American city has a phenomenon
Speaker 1: of a of a racially and class divided set of
Speaker 1: aggregated poverty, and that that is not normal. I wanted
Speaker 1: to show what what its effect is on the people
Speaker 1: scrambling to survive and scrambling to search for a sense
Speaker 1: of humanity and dignity, because that's what they're They're just universal,
Speaker 1: They're they're they're the same as everyone else. They want
Speaker 1: a job that pays them decently, that gives them respect.
Speaker 1: And so that's what I wanted to convey, that the
Speaker 1: tragedy of the crack epidemic was about energetic, charismatic youth
Speaker 1: whose lives were getting damaged by racist and classist policies
Speaker 1: of America, of the US that has set up the
Speaker 1: phenomenon of segregated inner cities in every single large city
Speaker 1: and even small city of the United States. You are
Speaker 1: living in East Harlem with your wife and your young child,
Speaker 1: who is maybe a couple of years old at that time,
Speaker 1: and you described walking around this neighborhood, one of the
Speaker 1: one of only white people living there, and sometimes with
Speaker 1: your little kid on your on your shoulders, and in
Speaker 1: a way it was almost offering a form of protection
Speaker 1: in as you pursued your ethnographic work in your relationships
Speaker 1: in the community. So I really marveled at your I
Speaker 1: guess bravery to some extent in doing this. Well, Actually
Speaker 1: it was really fun, and that was That's the strange
Speaker 1: thing about ethnography is that if you like to hang
Speaker 1: out and chit chat with people, and if you like
Speaker 1: to make new friends and also cross boundaries that are forbidden,
Speaker 1: you actually get paid to do that. You're supposed to
Speaker 1: do that as an anthropologist. So it was fun. It
Speaker 1: was simple too. I just got an apartment. And the
Speaker 1: weird thing was that that's sort of the nature of
Speaker 1: racism and how it gets enforced in the United States,
Speaker 1: is that as a white person at that time going
Speaker 1: into Harlem, you felt like a kuk for doing it.
Speaker 1: So as long as you didn't care about being seen
Speaker 1: as a kuk, people were thrilled that you were there.
Speaker 1: They were curious, they wanted to talk to you, and
Speaker 1: they said, oh, wow, white boy, what are you doing here?
Speaker 1: I guess with the cops were seeing you and saying, yo,
Speaker 1: white boy, what were you doing here? Was a little different. Well,
Speaker 1: they were. They profiled me, and that's the that's, of course,
Speaker 1: what we know. The story of the war on drugs
Speaker 1: is based on racial profiling. It's the simplest, cheapest way
Speaker 1: for for police officers to operate. And so no matter
Speaker 1: what laws we passed saying that that's racist and they
Speaker 1: can't do it, that's what they do. So that was
Speaker 1: what was happening to me. And they could only see
Speaker 1: me as a drug addict. And it was interesting because
Speaker 1: the sellers at first site could only see me as
Speaker 1: a cop. Because the undercover cops at that time in
Speaker 1: New York City were sort of better paid, higher status
Speaker 1: and so forth, then they were almost all white. The
Speaker 1: police sports is notoriously white all the time. All the
Speaker 1: New York's is slightly less or considerably less, but the
Speaker 1: undercovers were white. When I would walk down an active
Speaker 1: street selling block, including my own block, you know, at
Speaker 1: first people would scatter, but then in the in the
Speaker 1: micro neighborhood where people learned to recognize me as a neighbor,
Speaker 1: then I was just assumed to be harmless. There were
Speaker 1: a few elderly white Italians still living in the neighborhood,
Speaker 1: so people also, you know, assumed I had come back
Speaker 1: to live with my grandmother or something like that. I
Speaker 1: know that before you did this, you had done maybe
Speaker 1: your graduate work in a first book doing well. A
Speaker 1: lot of anthropologists do. They went to a foreign country.
Speaker 1: I think you worked in banana plantations Central America. But
Speaker 1: I'm curious. You know, you come back to New York
Speaker 1: East harm You're living not far from you grew up,
Speaker 1: So just to take you backwards, at what age did
Speaker 1: you realize that this is what you wanted to do
Speaker 1: for your adult life? And in what ways were you
Speaker 1: impacted growing up on the Upper East Side living just
Speaker 1: blocks from this, And did you ever imagine you would
Speaker 1: come back to study this community that was just ten
Speaker 1: or twenty blocks north of you. You know, it's strange,
Speaker 1: but I sort of did. Because the only way wealthy
Speaker 1: people in my neighborhood could go out of the city
Speaker 1: was to drive right through the heart of East Harlem.
Speaker 1: So we would take Madison up to a street and
Speaker 1: take a right, or go over to Lexington, right in
Speaker 1: the absolute heart of Puerto Rican East Harlem and make
Speaker 1: it to the Tribe ro Bridge to get out to
Speaker 1: Long Island, which is the pretty place and play land
Speaker 1: of the rich. So my father was French and he
Speaker 1: couldn't stand American racism, and you know, he was basically
Speaker 1: a social democrat. He was a progressive guy, and he
Speaker 1: would say, this country is disgusting. Look how it treats
Speaker 1: its citizens. And he would tell me he was worried
Speaker 1: because he could see that I was becoming a gring
Speaker 1: going American and and so he was like telling me, son,
Speaker 1: this is not normal. Don't think this country is normal.
Speaker 1: This isn't how a state should be run. This is
Speaker 1: an outrage. So that moved me. And then my high
Speaker 1: school would bust us out because there aren't any there
Speaker 1: hardly any parks and playgrounds where we would go to.
Speaker 1: Soccer practice was out in Rikers Island, Randall Island. There
Speaker 1: you go, you you're in New York or legit, legit.
Speaker 1: So the you know, kids in the neighborhood would see
Speaker 1: us rich kids in the bus going out to have fun,
Speaker 1: and they would throw rocks at us, and it would
Speaker 1: be humiliating because you'd realize that it was normal for them.
Speaker 1: To be angry at us, you know. So there'd be
Speaker 1: a few, you know, Latino and African American kids and
Speaker 1: they would try to go out to the window and say,
Speaker 1: don't don't, please, don't throw rocks my people. I remember,
Speaker 1: poor guy did that, an African American kid, and boom
Speaker 1: a rock hit him, and you know, you really felt
Speaker 1: the reality of the inequality and how painful it was
Speaker 1: for people who are suffering on the side that's oppressed.
Speaker 1: And then I was getting mugged. So this these were
Speaker 1: the These were much more violent years, and so the
Speaker 1: kids who were poor would come downtown and and look
Speaker 1: for rich white kids to grab the change they had
Speaker 1: in their pocket. And we didn't know how to fight.
Speaker 1: I've never swung a punch at anyone in my life,
Speaker 1: so we were easy targets. So maybe a half dozen
Speaker 1: times I was mugged, and you would get mildly beaten up.
Speaker 1: I learned to run fast, so I would ushould be
Speaker 1: able to run away fast. I used to joke with
Speaker 1: the guys that I did field work that they had
Speaker 1: probably mugged me. And then they would tell me stories
Speaker 1: of mugging little white boys. You know. They sometimes say,
Speaker 1: you know, a conservative as a liberal who's been mind
Speaker 1: you've got mugged half a dozen times, and and yet
Speaker 1: you become somebody who becomes very left in your perspective
Speaker 1: and analysis and intrigued and better understanding the community. You
Speaker 1: know from where young guys would coming amog you. This
Speaker 1: whole project began as a procrastination from writing my dissertation.
Speaker 1: So I had done my field work for my pH
Speaker 1: d and anthropology on a United Fruit Company plantation that
Speaker 1: spanned the borders between Panama and Costa Rica, and I
Speaker 1: was looking at how the corporation, the United Fruit Corporation
Speaker 1: literally did a divide and convert manipulation, you know, of
Speaker 1: the ethnicity of the diverse workers that it would import
Speaker 1: start a union. They would just bring in a different
Speaker 1: ethnic group. They would bring in Afro Caribbeans from St.
Speaker 1: Kitts And then when this St. Kittsians would organize the union,
Speaker 1: they would bring in Negabay and er Indians from the
Speaker 1: lowlands of of Panama and and break each union. So
Speaker 1: the workers were pitted against each other into virulent racism.
Speaker 1: And so it was just a classic divide and conquer her.
Speaker 1: I wanted to try to figure out who is making
Speaker 1: money off of this, because you could see it on
Speaker 1: the banana plantation that racism was profitable. And that's what's
Speaker 1: always interested me. Why do these cruel systems and these
Speaker 1: irrationalities of such overwhelming cruel racism persist for so long?
Speaker 1: And I really do think that on some level it's
Speaker 1: because they do make money for rich people. I know
Speaker 1: that sounds a little conspiratorial, but it isn't. It's just
Speaker 1: the natural law. Even people who aren't rich try to
Speaker 1: make money. You know, it's sort of more or less
Speaker 1: any which way they can within some limits of ethics,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the time they forget their ethics,
Speaker 1: and so corporations more easily forget their ethics and can
Speaker 1: do it on an industrial scale and more cruelly than
Speaker 1: individuals can. So that's what I wanted to try to
Speaker 1: apply to the phenomenon of the inner city. I was.
Speaker 1: I was. I. I wanted to take up, in a sense,
Speaker 1: my father's challenge to try to show my fellow Americans,
Speaker 1: so to speak, um, because I am hopelessly American despite
Speaker 1: my name, culturally and personally, and you know whatever, baseball
Speaker 1: is my favorite sport, so um, you know how you know,
Speaker 1: what a weird thing for someone with a French name.
Speaker 1: So that I wanted to show that the inner city
Speaker 1: didn't make sense and shouldn't be taken for granted. So
Speaker 1: when you come back, I mean you obviously you start heating.
Speaker 1: You're already living here, and you have to start insinuating
Speaker 1: yourself into this and people are suspicious that you might
Speaker 1: be an undercover cop. And how do you break through that?
Speaker 1: I mean, what was it like to break through into Well,
Speaker 1: luckily I had a very cheap, lousy car for Galaxy whatever.
Speaker 1: It was four hundred or some you know, clunker like that,
Speaker 1: and so it was constantly broken. So I would just
Speaker 1: do mechanical work on it, which I didn't know how
Speaker 1: to do, And so people would feel sorry for me
Speaker 1: making all these mistakes and and and would come and
Speaker 1: help me. And that was literally how I got to
Speaker 1: meet a whole bunch of people. Right in the beginning.
Speaker 1: The first people to befriend me were the little kids
Speaker 1: who were playing in the street. They cross racialized boundaries
Speaker 1: super super easily, and they're thrilled to talk to anyone
Speaker 1: who's nice and friendly to them. So that was basically
Speaker 1: how it began. And and then I basically just made
Speaker 1: friends with my neighbors, and and then my wife got
Speaker 1: pregnant and so forth. So I was just a normal
Speaker 1: person doing what normal people do. And she was Latina,
Speaker 1: and so basically it was easy. When I wandered off
Speaker 1: my block, everyone thought I was a cop. You know,
Speaker 1: New York is so huge, your your neighborhood recognition doesn't
Speaker 1: extend much further than the block you're on. Practically, my
Speaker 1: my son tells me not to feel guilty about it,
Speaker 1: but I used to go to new blocks carrying my
Speaker 1: son because then people knew that I wasn't a cop.
Speaker 1: I was probably a white addict looking for heroin because
Speaker 1: there were a lot of white addicts coming up. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a big part of the market right there. The
Speaker 1: whites have a lot of money, and and so that
Speaker 1: was what in some sense drove the market, because that
Speaker 1: was outside money coming in, you know. And then I
Speaker 1: would explain, no, I'm not I'm not actually using I'm
Speaker 1: just just hanging out here. I live around the corner
Speaker 1: and I wanted to see how things were. It was
Speaker 1: the moment of crack coming in, which was first the
Speaker 1: basically it's that story of of the perversity of enforcements.
Speaker 1: So it was the US War on Drugs in Florida,
Speaker 1: you know, was targeting marijuana. So the cartels in the
Speaker 1: various importers in the Caribbean and and Colombian and other
Speaker 1: parts of Latin America shift to more profitable, lower volume product,
Speaker 1: which was cocaine, which is what they the other thing
Speaker 1: they produced, which is what I mean. You were looking
Speaker 1: for an apartment in New York, Did you want to
Speaker 1: live in that neighborhood? You know? On the on? Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So I had already experienced as an ethnographer by then,
Speaker 1: having worked in in Nicaragua and the Mosquitia, basically an
Speaker 1: indigenous territories, and so I knew that the first thing
Speaker 1: I had to do was become normal. And the only
Speaker 1: way to become normal is to live where you're gonna work. Right.
Speaker 1: But but a question I'm asking is, could you just
Speaker 1: have easily landed up in Washington Heights, which was maybe
Speaker 1: a more Dominican neighborhood, or in or in Central Harlem,
Speaker 1: or more black neighborhood, that sort of thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: There was one other person doing ethnography at the exact
Speaker 1: same a little bit even before me, at the exact
Speaker 1: same time. He was a friend of mine, Terry Williams,
Speaker 1: who's a sociologist. He's I think he's now at the
Speaker 1: New School, and he was right in Washington Heights. He
Speaker 1: was he was married at that time to a Dominican woman. So,
Speaker 1: and that the whole structure of the takeover from the
Speaker 1: traditional Italian mafia was was a Dominican takeover. So that's
Speaker 1: why it hit that part of the city, which was
Speaker 1: their neighborhood. Did you think you're gonna land up spending
Speaker 1: seven years, No, no, no, no, not at all. That's
Speaker 1: because it was too much fun and it's so hard
Speaker 1: to write, right, So you procrastinate on your writing by
Speaker 1: saying I need to do more field work. That's the
Speaker 1: anthropological sin. And you know it's not exactly laziness, because
Speaker 1: you also have to take fieldwork notes. If you don't
Speaker 1: take fieldwork notes when you do your you know, participant
Speaker 1: obposit what we call we call it participant observation ethnography,
Speaker 1: you your mind ends up playing tricks on you. So
Speaker 1: I did have the discipline to take notes because I
Speaker 1: sort of enjoyed writing a diary. So I just turned
Speaker 1: them into a more sort of social science description of
Speaker 1: my daily life, and then around specific themes. And you
Speaker 1: carried a tape recorder. Yeah, yeah, you know. I've always
Speaker 1: found popular language gorgeous and and exciting and poetic. And
Speaker 1: the guys I happened to make become best friends with
Speaker 1: were street geniuses, and they we became close friends. If
Speaker 1: they had grown up in another neighborhood, they would have
Speaker 1: been professors like me, or doctors or horrible corporate executives.
Speaker 1: But I was lucky. I mean, this was also you forget,
Speaker 1: this was the moment of hip hop, and we we
Speaker 1: didn't even know what we were seeing, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was just spectacularly beautiful and so much energy. People
Speaker 1: would put up barricades, and the barricades would be huge
Speaker 1: speakers and just start beatboxing and playing music and rapping,
Speaker 1: and then they're you know, there'd be duels that the contests,
Speaker 1: and and you'd be watching it and and it was
Speaker 1: just so exciting. We'll be talking more after we hear
Speaker 1: this ADM. Well, fully, let me ask you what I mean.
Speaker 1: You can see as I read the book In Search
Speaker 1: of Respect and other things you've written, you know, you're
Speaker 1: basically willing to delve into all sorts of challenging areas.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if there were some questions you never pursued,
Speaker 1: for example, not asking about the sources of cocaine higher
Speaker 1: up to chain, the sorts of things that an undercover
Speaker 1: agent might want to find out with, Like, were there
Speaker 1: certain things you just avoided wanting to know absolutely? You know,
Speaker 1: I was close enough even to the head guy, you know,
Speaker 1: I could I could ask Ray about that. But Ray
Speaker 1: just bought it from a Dominican, so he didn't really
Speaker 1: know that much more. I knew that much, but it
Speaker 1: was just impossible. I never talked to a kilo supplier,
Speaker 1: you know, he would buy a kilo or a half
Speaker 1: a kilo. But that was that was the high is
Speaker 1: that I got right? But fully, do you describe a
Speaker 1: moment in that book where you accidentally dishim not realizing
Speaker 1: that he is illiterate, and he you start I mean,
Speaker 1: you describe moments in the book where you're a little
Speaker 1: worried that he might in the wrong mood, wake up
Speaker 1: on the wrong side of the bed and decide he
Speaker 1: wants to hurt you or kill you. And there are
Speaker 1: some other moments in the book where you find some
Speaker 1: situations there's gunshots going around all the time, and there
Speaker 1: are sometimes straight bullets, and there are bystanders getting killed,
Speaker 1: and there's different gangs, and there's people who are not
Speaker 1: part of the world that's accepted you are one step removed,
Speaker 1: who don't trust you. I mean, weren't you living with
Speaker 1: an incredibly high level of anxiety and sometimes fear while
Speaker 1: you're doing this research? Sort of yes and no, in
Speaker 1: the sense that when it's certainly now when I look
Speaker 1: back at the statistics, you can see the graph they
Speaker 1: just go through the roof right. Homicide, Yeah, yeah, shooting,
Speaker 1: shootings and homicide sides, especially at in the middle of
Speaker 1: my field work, you know, around they just spike up.
Speaker 1: I mean, homicides is what they keep the best records
Speaker 1: on because there's a body they can count tragically. But
Speaker 1: so that was all around, and I still have all
Speaker 1: my tape recordings and they're just riddled with gunshots. So
Speaker 1: it wasn't like it was necessarily every night, but it
Speaker 1: was almost every night that there would be, if not close, gunshots,
Speaker 1: at least they would be audible from five six, you know,
Speaker 1: blocks away. So that was bad, but it was I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the nature, I guess of life. You naturalize it. Plus,
Speaker 1: the guys I hung out with scared people, so they
Speaker 1: were protecting me. And they didn't go out alone either.
Speaker 1: They didn't like to go out alone either, even though
Speaker 1: they knew how to fight super well and had fought
Speaker 1: all their lives. But they would go out in pairs
Speaker 1: and they would never, you know, walk the money home alone.
Speaker 1: They would walk with each other and and take care
Speaker 1: of each other. Well. You know, I was curious because
Speaker 1: I noticed that in your second research project, which is
Speaker 1: from six where you're doing a project with San Francisco
Speaker 1: homeless heroin addicts, and in that case you have a
Speaker 1: partner working with you, a graduate students photographer. And then
Speaker 1: when you moved to Philadelphia and you spend over a
Speaker 1: decade once again in a Puerto Rican community and a
Speaker 1: drug dealing community there, you seem to be part of
Speaker 1: a team. And I'm wondering that in terms of your
Speaker 1: own evolution, did you find as you got older that
Speaker 1: you felt more comfortable sort of managing the risk, or
Speaker 1: that that that that one of the advantages of working
Speaker 1: with a second person or a team was to reduce
Speaker 1: that sense of vulnerability. That's certainly true. Objectively, you're so
Speaker 1: called positionality. What you look like to people, that's what
Speaker 1: we call positionality and anthropology. It affects what you have
Speaker 1: access to and how people see you. So and I
Speaker 1: was starting the field work initially. I think I was
Speaker 1: twenty four or twenty five, twenty six at the time,
Speaker 1: and I have a baby face, so people don't take
Speaker 1: you serious. You know, you can only be up to
Speaker 1: no good if you're that age, basically, and so older
Speaker 1: people wouldn't talk to me that much or take me
Speaker 1: that seriously. Now you know, as a frankly a sixty
Speaker 1: five year old, people treat me with respect because I'm
Speaker 1: an elderly person who is polite and friendly and and
Speaker 1: and and a professor. So people you know, say, oh,
Speaker 1: professor and so forth, and they're they're they're nice to me.
Speaker 1: So you get access to different things. That next project,
Speaker 1: Righteous Dope Fiend was precisely because I hadn't been able
Speaker 1: to face and deal with whatever the meaning of the
Speaker 1: term addiction is. And and that was because my best
Speaker 1: friends were basically dealing with chronic consumption that they couldn't control,
Speaker 1: and and that wasn't their experience of it. Their experience
Speaker 1: was it was of being twenty something early twenty something
Speaker 1: year old, at the height of their life, you know,
Speaker 1: making all kinds of money, selling drugs, having all kinds
Speaker 1: of of people think they were important and so forth.
Speaker 1: And so I coded my notes and I was going
Speaker 1: to write a chapter of it on it on quote
Speaker 1: unquote addiction in in in Search of Respect, and just
Speaker 1: cut it out of the book because I didn't know
Speaker 1: how to deal with it. So Righteous Dope find is
Speaker 1: about the experience of the buyers rather than the sellers,
Speaker 1: even though many of the sellers can't control their habit
Speaker 1: and get destroyed by what they're selling. And so that
Speaker 1: was why I went to people that basically were completely homeless,
Speaker 1: cut off from their families, outcast pariah's who were injecting
Speaker 1: heroine and smoking crack. Quite a bit older, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were a little bit. They were about ten years
Speaker 1: older than me on average, because that was the original
Speaker 1: generation that got swept off their feet by crack. I mean,
Speaker 1: my generation was the generation selling it to them, and
Speaker 1: they were the heroin injectors that then, wow, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the price of cocaine has gone to almost nothing,
Speaker 1: started injecting powder cocaine, and then the next thing they
Speaker 1: knew there was this new product even more fun than
Speaker 1: powder cocaine, which was the same product but converted into
Speaker 1: a base form that you can smoke. That they considered
Speaker 1: as much fun as injecting cocaine, but easier to do
Speaker 1: because it's complicated and it hurts to, you know, pierce
Speaker 1: your veins. There's a limited number of times that you
Speaker 1: can inject, right. But I mean also in terms of
Speaker 1: the impact on the brain and the feeling of it,
Speaker 1: right that basically smoking a substance or injecting it, the
Speaker 1: quickness of the onset is roughly the same. Actually, according
Speaker 1: to my colleagues at all the medical schools where I've taught,
Speaker 1: it's actually even faster when you inhale, because the the
Speaker 1: vascular system that goes from your lungs to your rain
Speaker 1: is faster than the one that travels through your veins.
Speaker 1: It has to go through your heart and then out
Speaker 1: again and so forth or wherever it goes. But it's
Speaker 1: a matter of a few seconds of difference often times,
Speaker 1: right between smoking or injecting. Right. But that's what the
Speaker 1: whole fun is. That's the problem. Right, that's what you
Speaker 1: become obsessed with when you can't control it and you're
Speaker 1: just craving that. Yeah, and that's that industrialization of drugs.
Speaker 1: That is the tragedy of prohibition, is that what happens
Speaker 1: is the drug goes into its most you know, it's
Speaker 1: most sort of dangerous and toxic form, because the milder
Speaker 1: forms or whatever beer compared to alcohol, you know, are
Speaker 1: considerably less dangerous. When they get integrated culturally, people learn
Speaker 1: how to control them. There's an article that I've quoted
Speaker 1: on a few of these episodes. It was a classic
Speaker 1: piece by Joe Westermeyer in the Archives of General Psychiatry
Speaker 1: called the pro Heroin Effects of Antiopium Laws, and it
Speaker 1: just showed the transition from smokable, eatable, drinkable opium to heroin.
Speaker 1: You know, for all the reasons that it's more discreet,
Speaker 1: it's easier to traffic, it's easier to hide, it doesn't
Speaker 1: smell as much, and similing with alcohol prohibition, you see
Speaker 1: the shift from beer and wine to hard liquor, both
Speaker 1: bootleg liquor and smuggled hard liquor. So, you know, that
Speaker 1: does seem to be a general phenomenon in terms of
Speaker 1: this transition. But you know, Philip, the tension that is
Speaker 1: just palpable through everything you write, right, is that on
Speaker 1: the one hand, you're befriending these people involved in selling
Speaker 1: drugs and Philly or Ease Tarlem or in the drug
Speaker 1: using you know, hero injecting scene in San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: you're befriending them, you're getting to know them. You're also
Speaker 1: becoming aware that they're engaged in types of behavior and
Speaker 1: ways of thinking which you are almost anybody would find
Speaker 1: absolutely reprehensible. They're hurting people, they're killing people. They're racist,
Speaker 1: they're mass soogynist, they're involved in gang rape. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are the people you're hanging out with, and I
Speaker 1: can hear you sort of you know, but these are
Speaker 1: your friends. And then there's this other part of you
Speaker 1: which is saying, but let's look at this from a
Speaker 1: moral structural perspective. Let's understand the conditions that can lead
Speaker 1: people to be this way, and that tension going back
Speaker 1: and forth. If you could just expound a bit on
Speaker 1: what it was like living with that tension and encountering
Speaker 1: when you realize that the people you see as your
Speaker 1: friends kind of would joke about gang rape. That was
Speaker 1: the worst track. You know, the worst violence was was
Speaker 1: was obviously the gang rape, and that was the hardest
Speaker 1: to deal with. They would argue with me about it,
Speaker 1: that that's the way it manifested. By the time they
Speaker 1: started telling me about gang rape, we were already close friends.
Speaker 1: I knew them as human beings, and I could tell
Speaker 1: them what I thought. They didn't call it rape. They
Speaker 1: didn't conceive of it that way. That's the perversity of
Speaker 1: rape is. They were saying, that's what the girl deserved
Speaker 1: because she was hanging out with us, and girls shouldn't
Speaker 1: be out at at night, the classic language of rapists
Speaker 1: and hyper masculinity. So I would argue with them, and
Speaker 1: it was interesting because the guy I called Primo, who's
Speaker 1: who I still stay in touch with, who was really
Speaker 1: my best friend, he came around and he started feeling
Speaker 1: guilty about it. But the guy called Caesar would just
Speaker 1: argue back at me. And I didn't want to sweep
Speaker 1: it under the rug. I wanted to confront it, even
Speaker 1: though it's hard for a man to write about that,
Speaker 1: and it was very hard for me to get women
Speaker 1: to trust me enough to tell those stories. And so
Speaker 1: I write about it, mostly from the perspective of the perpetrators.
Speaker 1: This this other moment, I think we're the filu call Caesar, right,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of joking around, having beat up on
Speaker 1: a kid who who you know, probably a cerebral palsy,
Speaker 1: and he's telling you the story. It doesn't realize that
Speaker 1: this is just after you'd found out that your own
Speaker 1: son had been diagnosed with that. And you say in
Speaker 1: the book like, I could never forgive him for this,
Speaker 1: and do you actually forgive him or oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes me sad, yeah, remembering that moment. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: my my wonderful son, who's great, he was born with
Speaker 1: cerebral palsy and it got diagnosed in a free clinic
Speaker 1: in East Harlem. My wife and I were just completely
Speaker 1: freaked out and and we couldn't tell yet cerebral palsy
Speaker 1: because he was a happy baby. He just didn't crawl
Speaker 1: and it made him a lot easier baby, and it
Speaker 1: made him much more sociable. But Caesar was one of
Speaker 1: the jerk bullies who was beating up the kids with
Speaker 1: special needs at his school, and so that really really
Speaker 1: made me angry a sad basically, but yet yet on
Speaker 1: some level, you still regarded them as friends, and you
Speaker 1: invited them with to your mother's home on the Upper
Speaker 1: East Side, and Trimo was my friend. Caesar I would
Speaker 1: tolerate because I recognized his genius and there were dimensions
Speaker 1: to his humanity. He was also an abused child. He
Speaker 1: had been in special needs classes all his life, so
Speaker 1: that was part of what threw him into that perverse
Speaker 1: hierarchy of beating on the other kids with special needs
Speaker 1: who were lower on the totem pole than him or
Speaker 1: more visible than him. And he was raised by a
Speaker 1: grandmother who beat the crap out of him, and so
Speaker 1: he had a hard life. So I could understand and
Speaker 1: set him in context at the same time. And they
Speaker 1: were talking so honestly to me. They were pouring out
Speaker 1: their lives, you know, and sometimes we would cry so
Speaker 1: that I think I probably censored that out because for
Speaker 1: my own hyper masculinity. Right, But that is the nature
Speaker 1: of the contradictions, right. A victim can be a perpetrator,
Speaker 1: and a perpetrator can be a victim, and that's the
Speaker 1: complexity of it, and they often go together. When you
Speaker 1: go to San Francistico, then you moved to Philadelphia, take
Speaker 1: the job in City, Pennsylvania, and you get involved right
Speaker 1: in studying this community of drug dealers, Puerto Rican drug
Speaker 1: dealers in Philadelphia, And were there significant differences between what
Speaker 1: you saw in Philadelphia and which you saw in East Tarlem.
Speaker 1: That may have just been about the change that one
Speaker 1: that this was now twenty years later, or that it
Speaker 1: was the locality, or that's exactly what I wanted to study. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you've what what you're asking was the reason, and that
Speaker 1: was the exact reason for the project. I had been
Speaker 1: away for twenty years, and I wanted to see how
Speaker 1: it changed, and I wanted to go to a very
Speaker 1: similar neighborhood. The Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia is just
Speaker 1: a poorer, even poorer version than the poorest sections of
Speaker 1: the Puerto Rican neighborhood in in New York City. It's
Speaker 1: smaller as a proportion of the city, has less political power,
Speaker 1: and it's a more recent rural migration. But it's also
Speaker 1: the drug clear in ground for retail sales, and it's
Speaker 1: the most hyper policed neighborhood or one of the most
Speaker 1: hyper police neighborhoods, because police tend to be even more
Speaker 1: racist against more segregated African American neighborhoods and more Puerto
Speaker 1: Ricans are rainbow colors, so that the white customers have
Speaker 1: a much easier time coming into Puerto Rican neighborhoods. They're
Speaker 1: ferociously racist too, because they're just normal, tragically normal Americans,
Speaker 1: which means they're racist. Both would get beaten up when
Speaker 1: they went into black neighborhoods to buy drugs, because people
Speaker 1: don't want a white guy breaking into cars on on
Speaker 1: his way into your neighborhood to buy drugs from the
Speaker 1: local sellers in your neighborhood. They were also racist and
Speaker 1: didn't like going in those neighborhoods. So they they could
Speaker 1: deal a little bit more, and they could also pass slightly.
Speaker 1: They weren't harassed as much by the local population that
Speaker 1: was angry about the drug dealing and and that it
Speaker 1: didn't want people burglarizing on their way to get drugs.
Speaker 1: You know, you describe I mean this intense I don't
Speaker 1: know if you want to call it racism or ethnic
Speaker 1: hostility between the Puerto Ricans and the blacks, or between
Speaker 1: the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans, and as well as
Speaker 1: between the between all of them and the whites. Right,
Speaker 1: And you also describe this thing where where you're talking
Speaker 1: to them and you're saying, don't you realize this is
Speaker 1: the old pattern, just like you saw in Central America
Speaker 1: of the powerful playing marginalized groups off against one another,
Speaker 1: and they kind of look at you and barely know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Right. And the same thing you
Speaker 1: describe in looking at a homeless heroin addics in San Francisco, Right,
Speaker 1: this intense kind of interracial racism, right, blacks and white
Speaker 1: white splacks and all of that sort of stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: you put it in a structural context, But when you're
Speaker 1: looking at them and these are once again your friends
Speaker 1: expressing these hyper bigoted racist views, how do you deal
Speaker 1: with that? Is it just in the context? I mean,
Speaker 1: they're obviously expressing things that you would never find acceptable
Speaker 1: if being expressed by people who came from the middle
Speaker 1: class background, came from the group that should technically theoretically
Speaker 1: no better, right. Right. And you know it was precisely
Speaker 1: against Caesar that when I was explaining that to him,
Speaker 1: the dividing conquer thing, and how he was just naively
Speaker 1: reproducing racism to his own detriment, he completely understood it
Speaker 1: and then started making fun of it, and I put
Speaker 1: fun of me for being you know what. His critique as, oh, Philippe,
Speaker 1: you make us sound like such sensitive crack dealers. So
Speaker 1: so he was. And then and then he goes, I'm
Speaker 1: not sensitive at all, I'm tough. And so he just
Speaker 1: went off on a riff like that, which I had
Speaker 1: to to to counter my argument in some sense. But
Speaker 1: at the same time he's also just highlighting it and
Speaker 1: in some sense making it clearer for the reader and
Speaker 1: to some extent to himself. You know, it's sort of
Speaker 1: a psychotherapeutic process. You know, he was made more self
Speaker 1: aware of that idiocy in some sense. Let's take a
Speaker 1: break here and go to an ad. It's just interesting
Speaker 1: because when I think of most anthropologist ethnographers, right, they're
Speaker 1: going in, they're doing interviews, they're spending some time hanging out,
Speaker 1: but not with the intensity I think that you did.
Speaker 1: Did you ever take any criticism from colleagues for getting
Speaker 1: so deeply a mesh that you had lost object had
Speaker 1: a ton a ton. Yeah, So there was an initial
Speaker 1: reaction to the book that was criticizing it for too
Speaker 1: much dirty laundry is coming out and then there was
Speaker 1: a set of readers who said, no, that's not true.
Speaker 1: I'm from the neighborhood. This needs to be talked about.
Speaker 1: So there were people defending me, and I was worried.
Speaker 1: I didn't know if I had done it in a way.
Speaker 1: Maybe America was too racist for this book to present
Speaker 1: all this material. But in fact, what I see now
Speaker 1: over time is the and and it disappoints me to
Speaker 1: some extent is the only professors who use my book
Speaker 1: are progressive professors. It doesn't get used by the right wing.
Speaker 1: They can't stand the book. They can see that the
Speaker 1: book is against racism. So so it's it did quote
Speaker 1: unquote stand the test of time in that sense. But
Speaker 1: I was worried about it. And that is the worry.
Speaker 1: That is the difficulty of ethnography. You want to tell
Speaker 1: the truth, you want to set the truth in context,
Speaker 1: and you don't know how the reader will understand it.
Speaker 1: You can't control the reader. You know, it's a fundamental
Speaker 1: contradiction of ethnography, the danger of the seduction of a
Speaker 1: pornography of violence, and and the temptation to, you know,
Speaker 1: want to sell a best seller by doing a pornography
Speaker 1: of violence. And and there there are some classic works
Speaker 1: that suffer from that, and so for so that was
Speaker 1: definitely a worry that I had and have and and
Speaker 1: that I was trying to write. And that's why I
Speaker 1: structured the book the way I structured it. So I
Speaker 1: start with, you know, what I think of as the
Speaker 1: political economy or the Marxist analysis of the book, which
Speaker 1: is the d industrialization of the U s inner cities
Speaker 1: that occurred after World War Two, accelerating even faster after
Speaker 1: the end of the Korean War. That's what created the
Speaker 1: the extraordinary levels of unemployment and left the vacuum that
Speaker 1: got filled by the you know, narco industry. And I
Speaker 1: also start with their accounts of having dropped out of
Speaker 1: high school to work in the sweatshops and the factories
Speaker 1: that were disappearing at the time, and their job, literally
Speaker 1: one of their first jobs was to carry out the
Speaker 1: sewing machines that were being taken away to be sent
Speaker 1: to some other part of the world where a factory
Speaker 1: was going to go up, or or we're being taken
Speaker 1: for scrap metal. So that the reader could really see
Speaker 1: those structural forces and see them getting expelled from the
Speaker 1: labor force into the into the drug economy. I mean,
Speaker 1: the one thing that I couldn't see ethan was mass incarceration.
Speaker 1: And that's really interesting because this, like you say, is
Speaker 1: the moment when you look at the curve. This is
Speaker 1: when that you know, bell of the curve is zooming, zooming,
Speaker 1: zooming up. And it goes from I think fifty thousand
Speaker 1: people locked up on drug charges in to five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people locked up just twenty years later, and the
Speaker 1: overall prison population. What kind of a country could do that.
Speaker 1: It's like the stupidest thing a country could do. It's extraordinary.
Speaker 1: But you just to go back to that thing about Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: So you come to Philadelphia twenty years after he's tar
Speaker 1: alam and and in terms of of the scene, I mean,
Speaker 1: these are once again young Puerto Rican men by and large.
Speaker 1: Two things surprise you. As one was that Moose to
Speaker 1: the people you're hanging out with this East Harlem who
Speaker 1: are zealing crack land up never go into prison. And
Speaker 1: another thing that surprises you is that after you leave,
Speaker 1: at least half of them land up getting legal jobs
Speaker 1: for sustained periods of time. Right. But I wonder, so
Speaker 1: now you were in Philadelphia twenty years later with a
Speaker 1: generation of young men. What are the fundamental similarities and
Speaker 1: differences between which you see there among the cohort you're
Speaker 1: you're spending time with and the group that you've spent
Speaker 1: with time Within New York in the eighties, the police
Speaker 1: got more efficient and the system got more brutal. You
Speaker 1: see it very clearly, even just in the families of
Speaker 1: the sellers from East Harlem. Is that the first generation,
Speaker 1: the guys I made friends with Primo and Caesar and
Speaker 1: so forth, they would go in for short, very very
Speaker 1: short stints in jail. Their kids got locked up for
Speaker 1: a long time. What the US did was it started
Speaker 1: revving up the sentences when you look at how the
Speaker 1: sentencing laws operated. The judges started in forcing it, you know,
Speaker 1: using the non discretionary laws to to to sentence even
Speaker 1: more draconian sentences, you know, and throwing less things out
Speaker 1: of court for the lack of evidence, because the judges
Speaker 1: still have quite a bit of leeway even with the
Speaker 1: rules and so forth. And American judges are for the
Speaker 1: most part reactionary, progressive thinking you're leading out the prosecutors
Speaker 1: in all this, the police get more efficient, yeah, well yeah,
Speaker 1: they're even worse. But judges should know better, right, because
Speaker 1: we trust the judges, we know the prosecutors against us.
Speaker 1: Every now and then you get a judge who's a
Speaker 1: decent human being, or momentarily they're decent human being, but
Speaker 1: often they're just they just want to throw away the
Speaker 1: key and punish. Well. It seems like when you were
Speaker 1: talking about East Harlem gang you had numerous references to
Speaker 1: a liberal judge who let somebody offer whatever. But in
Speaker 1: the in the Philadelphia group, as far as I can
Speaker 1: tell you, you don't see that as well. Philadelphia is
Speaker 1: more is more conservative, uh than New York, and it's
Speaker 1: a more tough, working class city with all of the
Speaker 1: contradictions of that. So it's more ordinary America. There's no
Speaker 1: there's no tougher rust belt, arguably than well Detroit maybe,
Speaker 1: but barely than Philadelphia. Philadelphia, of all the large cities
Speaker 1: in the United States, has the highest murder rates often
Speaker 1: not not every single year, but it's always in the
Speaker 1: very top tier of the largest cities murder rates. One
Speaker 1: can really see what gets called the carcerol management of
Speaker 1: inner city poverty, and carcero means both jail and prison,
Speaker 1: all those kind and even the release with an electronic
Speaker 1: device around your ankle that then follows you for another five,
Speaker 1: ten years and so forth. So it's that huge expansion
Speaker 1: of the criminal side of the of the criminal justice
Speaker 1: process that waste its energy and money on the punishment side,
Speaker 1: completely neglects the preventative side, and completely neglects the rehabilitation
Speaker 1: and and and and reintegration side, which you know, other
Speaker 1: countries aren't that way. Other wealthy countries don't mistreat their
Speaker 1: poor the way the US does. It is not a
Speaker 1: normal thing. Americans are clueless about this. It seems like
Speaker 1: part of what's going on in Philadelphia is that people
Speaker 1: are much more likely to get arrested and to get
Speaker 1: a sent away for many years. So that sort of
Speaker 1: disrupts things in the drug marks in Philadelphia. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: better technology to monitor them, right, There's all that stuff
Speaker 1: is the use of of horrific violence and of and
Speaker 1: of guns. Are are drug dealers even more quick to
Speaker 1: do that in Philadelphia in the period you were there
Speaker 1: in the last ten fifteen years than with two and
Speaker 1: these tarlem in the late eighties early nineties. That's a
Speaker 1: good question. I can't tell you absolutely statistically, but ethnographically,
Speaker 1: it didn't feel that different except that I guess what
Speaker 1: it is now is that the guns were cheap, so
Speaker 1: there were so there's so many hot guns, guns that
Speaker 1: have been used for a crime or murder or shooting
Speaker 1: that get dumped in the inner city. They don't dare
Speaker 1: hold onto it anymore because if they get caught on
Speaker 1: another crime, they'll they'll be able to trace it back
Speaker 1: to that gun. So they just sell it to someone
Speaker 1: who sells guns. So the guns are actually at cheaper
Speaker 1: than the production cost on inner city streets. And that's
Speaker 1: a real, real, real tragedy. And it's just a recipe
Speaker 1: for disaster. You give a teenager a gun, put a
Speaker 1: lot of drugs and alcohol in them, and give them
Speaker 1: some crazy money that's easy to make fast. Well, what
Speaker 1: do you think is going to happen? But what are
Speaker 1: the surprising things? Right? I mean, you admit surprising almost
Speaker 1: every surprise if you look at a place like New
Speaker 1: York and the same things happens in many other cities.
Speaker 1: Is that homicides which peak at around over two thousand
Speaker 1: a year in New York right just at the period
Speaker 1: that you're sort of winding up your in the early nineties, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, now we see homicides jumping dramatically in New
Speaker 1: York in the last couple of years, but even so,
Speaker 1: the number of homicides is less than a quarter what
Speaker 1: it was back then. I think it went from homicides
Speaker 1: in the early ninety and New York has gentrified. New
Speaker 1: York City has gentrified. You know what is New York.
Speaker 1: It's a global, cosmopolitan city of pure finance, capital and
Speaker 1: just play land of the rich. It's not what it
Speaker 1: was when we were growing up in it. You used
Speaker 1: to phrase the moral economy of violence that crack dealers
Speaker 1: who are better and employing the moral economy of violence,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, turn out to be more successful.
Speaker 1: And then you also put into a broader context of
Speaker 1: the culture of terra and the ways in which the
Speaker 1: violence committed by a relatively small part of the community,
Speaker 1: typically by the crack dealers who you were getting to know,
Speaker 1: has this humongous effect on the communities in which they're living,
Speaker 1: the immediate communities. And I wonder if you could has
Speaker 1: the moral economy of violence changed any fundamental away When
Speaker 1: you compare East Harlem in the nineties to Philadelphia, when
Speaker 1: you think more broadly about what's going on, or is
Speaker 1: it still the same basic variable that operates whether you're
Speaker 1: talking about drug dealing their cities or whether you're talking
Speaker 1: about surviving, you know, in an incarcerated setting. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thanks for asking about the moral economy of violence, because
Speaker 1: it reminds me to shout out to my team, my colleagues,
Speaker 1: who did more of the field work even than I did.
Speaker 1: So we did it as a team of four people,
Speaker 1: and two of the people, George Karen Dinos, was basically,
Speaker 1: you know, a super super young undergraduate who lived full
Speaker 1: time in the neighborhood. And Fernando Montero was basically the
Speaker 1: same age as him, but had gone He was, you know,
Speaker 1: such a genius that he'd gone through college too fast,
Speaker 1: so he was taking some time off. And they lived
Speaker 1: full time in the neighborhood. And they never never, hardly
Speaker 1: ever even left the neighborhood. I paid for the apart
Speaker 1: it's that they lived in, you know, and I had
Speaker 1: a bed in their in their apartment, so I would
Speaker 1: stay over and hang out a lot with them. And
Speaker 1: then my wife, who's also an anthropologist, Lorie Hart, we
Speaker 1: developed that concept of the moral economy of violence to
Speaker 1: try to um understand what gets called the culture of terror,
Speaker 1: because when you say culture of something, you no longer
Speaker 1: have to explain it. For some reason, the word culture
Speaker 1: becomes a mysterious black box that just everyone takes for
Speaker 1: granted as the way things are, and has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with structural forces, has nothing to do with complex
Speaker 1: dynamics that need to be set in historical context. Yes,
Speaker 1: so that the actual theoretical term that the moral economy
Speaker 1: theory of violence that that we developed comes from. Is
Speaker 1: this wonderful British historian E. P. Thompson he coined it
Speaker 1: actually to refer to the bread riots at the beginning
Speaker 1: of way back even before, when all of a sudden
Speaker 1: people started making money off of bread, which used to
Speaker 1: be seen as a human right to have access to
Speaker 1: by the small farmers who were producing it back then.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden capitalism comes around and
Speaker 1: you can make money off of bread. The prices go up,
Speaker 1: people starve when there's a bad harvest. So he would
Speaker 1: call those moral economy riots and moral economy of violence
Speaker 1: around the price of bread and around the development of
Speaker 1: capitalism as a market profit making. So they were trying
Speaker 1: to discipline the local shopkeepers into being decent people with
Speaker 1: a sense of ethics towards their community. We wanted to
Speaker 1: apply that to the drug dealers. The neighborhood did have
Speaker 1: some power over the drug dealers. They could snitch on them,
Speaker 1: they could inform on the police on them, and they did.
Speaker 1: And so the drug dealers, no matter how up they were,
Speaker 1: were terrified of offending the local population too much so
Speaker 1: that people would get too outraged and would no longer
Speaker 1: tolerate them, or the intimidation of those big shots. They're
Speaker 1: they're actually called beauty is in the neighborhood. That's a
Speaker 1: Spanglish for big shot. And it's also a play on
Speaker 1: words because it's a it's also a term for phallus,
Speaker 1: a slang term for phallus, you know, it's classic Puerto
Speaker 1: Rican beautiful, poetic slang, and that means the head drug dealer.
Speaker 1: And so those guys had to try to at least
Speaker 1: pretend to care about the neighborhood. You know, they would
Speaker 1: flamboyantly pay for the heating bill for one of the
Speaker 1: well liked elderly women who was freezing in her house
Speaker 1: in the winter. Here's a great example. They would regularly
Speaker 1: buy little plastic swimming pools for the kids on the block,
Speaker 1: you know, in the scorching hot Philadelphia's summers, to be
Speaker 1: able to swim, fill up with a with a hose
Speaker 1: from one's from from the fire hydrant. So we were
Speaker 1: proposing that if one understands violence as being part of
Speaker 1: what gets seen by its perpetrators as a moral economy,
Speaker 1: So the person shooting you actually often thinks that they
Speaker 1: are enforcing and this is a weird thing, that they
Speaker 1: are enforcing morality by shooting you, That you deserve to
Speaker 1: be shot because you violated something they considered an ethical rule,
Speaker 1: and that when you look at it from the perspective
Speaker 1: of the guy shooting you started selling on his territory,
Speaker 1: of course you were going to get shot. Why wouldn't
Speaker 1: you be shot. You shouldn't just violate someone's territory. When
Speaker 1: you can go to a judge and get the judge
Speaker 1: to say no, you have to close down your copycat
Speaker 1: sales of that person's software whatever it is, you know
Speaker 1: you don't have to shoot the person. But when you
Speaker 1: don't have a criminal justice system, and that's the problem
Speaker 1: with drugs being illegal, is that they become more violent
Speaker 1: because there's no way to regulate disputes and and that
Speaker 1: that's the recipe for disaster. And that's why the US
Speaker 1: pathetically has the highest rates of murder of any comparable
Speaker 1: wealthy finance industry cultures. And the culture of ka I mean, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the culture of terror. So the culture of terror is
Speaker 1: something that you actually see. But when you use that term,
Speaker 1: people then start using it the way they would use
Speaker 1: sort of ethnic discrimination and or racism. It becomes oh,
Speaker 1: that's because someone is trapped in the culture of terror. No,
Speaker 1: they're trapped in the perverse American political system. The state
Speaker 1: is not doing its fair job. It regulates the disputes
Speaker 1: of rich people and doesn't regulate the disputes of poor people.
Speaker 1: That's not fair. So instead of calling that a culture
Speaker 1: of terror, call it an unfair, unjust criminal justice system,
Speaker 1: and then you can start making sense of it. So
Speaker 1: that the first thing we wanted to also do is
Speaker 1: show that perpetrators could be reached out to, perpetrators could
Speaker 1: be weaned away from violence, perpetrators can be punished in
Speaker 1: certain ways that makes sense to them. They recognize when
Speaker 1: they do something bad and when they deserve punishment. Sometimes
Speaker 1: at least and so so that is what we were
Speaker 1: trying to open up in detail. And the tragedy of
Speaker 1: it is that you see the most charismatic, charming little
Speaker 1: kids getting seduced into the moral economy of violence, because
Speaker 1: that's that's what's cool as an adolescent or as a
Speaker 1: pre adolescent, as an elementary school kid, because the guy
Speaker 1: or the girl who fights well is all of a
Speaker 1: sudden popular because you want her protecting you, you don't
Speaker 1: want her fighting you, so you want to be her friend,
Speaker 1: and so you start fighting on behalf of her so
Speaker 1: she can or he can start mobilizing other people to
Speaker 1: fight for them. And we started seeing that as a
Speaker 1: conscious thing. In Philadelphia, they actually have a word for it.
Speaker 1: Philadelphia is a wonderful city because it's got such a
Speaker 1: it's such a working class city that has a beautiful,
Speaker 1: beautiful slang, you know, a rich poetic slang. And the
Speaker 1: term they use in Philadelphia is writer and it's a verb.
Speaker 1: It can be a verb, it can be now, and
Speaker 1: it can be I'm a writer means I'm someone who
Speaker 1: will fight for the people that they are faithful to
Speaker 1: and you can count on me to be a writer
Speaker 1: for you, or we're going out writing so you can
Speaker 1: round up your your faithful and go out and wreck
Speaker 1: moral violence on someone else. And the only way to
Speaker 1: do it is to do it by actively fighting. So
Speaker 1: it promotes perversity. And the person who first first saw
Speaker 1: it was George Karandino says his as his undergraduate thesis,
Speaker 1: he wrote a wonderful undergrad adgate thesis at University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: That was what we were trying to explain in a
Speaker 1: way that would be accessible. Basically, it's accessible to academics.
Speaker 1: I don't know how how, but it also makes sense
Speaker 1: when you when you try to explain it to someone.
Speaker 1: And so as an applied thing for policy, let's figure
Speaker 1: out how one can intervene in the moral economy to
Speaker 1: stop it from having to resort to violence and instead
Speaker 1: mobilize it for cleaning up the street, for mobilizing people
Speaker 1: to do good things for your community, because you would
Speaker 1: also see sometimes these same charismatic people leading cleanups, you know,
Speaker 1: of the block and do and starting all of a
Speaker 1: sudden a school lunch program for the kids on the
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, school after school program because they didn't
Speaker 1: have access to daycare for their kids after school either,
Speaker 1: so they would wouldever figure out ways of doing it,
Speaker 1: and their kids wanted to play with other kids, so
Speaker 1: you could see positive things. They were integrated into the
Speaker 1: neighborhood and and and there that that it's not hard
Speaker 1: even to figure that out. If you just have to
Speaker 1: have a society that wants to take care of its
Speaker 1: of its people, it's even stupider. You have to have
Speaker 1: a society that's smart enough to realize that they're gonna
Speaker 1: go out and get mugged or shot unless they do
Speaker 1: something about social inequality in their in their in their
Speaker 1: country and stop promoting the need for a culture of
Speaker 1: terror quote unquote, and stop making the moral economy of
Speaker 1: violence be violent. Yeah. But Philip, let me just push
Speaker 1: you on this a bit, because you also describe sort
Speaker 1: of the most heartbreaking element of when you're living in
Speaker 1: East Tarlem is what you see happening with the children
Speaker 1: of the crack dealers and the children of the crackheads, right,
Speaker 1: And you talked about when you first moved there in
Speaker 1: eight five. These six seven, eight year olds, nine year
Speaker 1: olds who are befriending you, and as you said at
Speaker 1: the beginning of our discussion, you know, they're just fascinating
Speaker 1: to meet you and all of sort of stuff, and
Speaker 1: by the time they're ending analysts and some of them
Speaker 1: are landing up being in very landing up in sex
Speaker 1: worker getting addicted themselves. And you also describe that the
Speaker 1: tradition of of some of the coraculs priding themselves like
Speaker 1: their fathers and grandfathers did back in the Old Country
Speaker 1: in terms of how many kids they have. But whereas
Speaker 1: there was a functional value of having lots of kids
Speaker 1: when you're living in a rural Puerto Rico, here they're
Speaker 1: having multiple kids by all sorts of women and almost
Speaker 1: priding themselves on not taking care of them. In many cases,
Speaker 1: there's a positive story to this ethan as well. Certain
Speaker 1: guys become, I forget what the term is, baby pops,
Speaker 1: who are like a mom's pops. So, for example, Primo
Speaker 1: bless his heart, he he actually really cared about his sons,
Speaker 1: and so he had started out by doing the hyper
Speaker 1: masculine thing, having multiple girlfriends, having kids with different people
Speaker 1: and so forth, and then all of a sudden he
Speaker 1: woke up and started taking care of them, and his
Speaker 1: kids actually came out beautifully. They didn't go into they
Speaker 1: didn't go into drug dealing, and one of them started
Speaker 1: a website, and and and you know, Philip, I wonder
Speaker 1: because if I remember about Primo, one of the things
Speaker 1: about him was that he had grown up with three sisters,
Speaker 1: all of them turned out more or less okay, where
Speaker 1: Caesar had had his sister brutally murder and his mother
Speaker 1: had killed somebody or something gone to prison. And so
Speaker 1: there may have been something about having grown up in
Speaker 1: a kind of more stable, semi stable family at least
Speaker 1: maybe inspired a greater sense of printal responsibility. But you
Speaker 1: also talk about the difference between the daytime and the nighttime,
Speaker 1: and at the daytime is still a time when kids
Speaker 1: can play in the streets and all this, but that
Speaker 1: the nighttime is owned by the small minority of the
Speaker 1: community who exercised the moral economy of violence, where this
Speaker 1: stuff where people can live in an element of terra
Speaker 1: and a fear of walking around in their streets and
Speaker 1: all of this. So I sometimes wonder how people in
Speaker 1: the community, most of the people living in East Haarlem,
Speaker 1: if they were to read your book In Search of
Speaker 1: Respect or the or the stuff you're writing about Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: you know, they would obviously recognize it. But I wonder
Speaker 1: would they share much of your perspective, And if not,
Speaker 1: is it just that they have bought into the kind
Speaker 1: of dominant frame that's imposed by mainstream society about how
Speaker 1: we interpret this and and blame the victim and blame
Speaker 1: the people without looking at the brother structural forces. You know,
Speaker 1: I get lots of comments from people over the years,
Speaker 1: because the book has been out since I forget when
Speaker 1: it came out, forget five or something, and so I've
Speaker 1: got I get lots of comments, and people actually usually
Speaker 1: thank me for writing the book and then tell me
Speaker 1: their particular story and and often it's a story of success,
Speaker 1: because that's who writes you to some extent. But people
Speaker 1: write me from jail also that and they they're very moving,
Speaker 1: either emails or letters when they're coming from jail, their
Speaker 1: handwritten letters. It's very moving. So there is a lot
Speaker 1: of people who recognize themselves. There's a there's a pattern
Speaker 1: of kids saying thank you for helping me forgive my
Speaker 1: crummy father. And that's the most moving for me, because
Speaker 1: you don't, like, you know, having to live in anger
Speaker 1: and resentment at your father. So when you can achieve
Speaker 1: a level of of of forgiveness for the father who
Speaker 1: abandoned you, or brutalized your mother or brutalized you, or
Speaker 1: or or just disappeared from your life and neglected you.
Speaker 1: It's helpful and and when you can humanize it and
Speaker 1: understand it as part of a larger force, it can
Speaker 1: be helpful. So I I appreciate that. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously there's gonna be people that just want
Speaker 1: they just want to just so story. They just want
Speaker 1: everything to be rosy and beautiful, and that's not the
Speaker 1: way life is. Poverty is painful. Poverty doesn't necessarily make
Speaker 1: you stronger. It often makes you tougher, but it can also,
Speaker 1: you know, also make make you traumatized. So that those
Speaker 1: are the realities. Humans are fragile people, whether they're rich
Speaker 1: or poor. That's our nature is to be fragile. We
Speaker 1: need to coddle each other. Sorry to sound like such
Speaker 1: a liberal, but that would be Caesar would make fun
Speaker 1: of me for that. Yeah, we maybe wonder if you're
Speaker 1: ever tempted to go and do a research project down
Speaker 1: in Puerto Rico. Oh absolutely, I've done. I've done feel
Speaker 1: work there. I love Puerto Rico. It's a beautiful place
Speaker 1: and it's it's just amazing. Yeah. Well, but when you
Speaker 1: think also about you look at the ways in which
Speaker 1: we look at what's going on a Central American now,
Speaker 1: which leads the world and levels of violence and homicide,
Speaker 1: and where it seems to be connected in all sorts
Speaker 1: of ways, not just to socio economic and political conditions
Speaker 1: down there, but also to basically Central American migrants to
Speaker 1: the US being sent back or going back to those
Speaker 1: countries and bringing a kind of true cultural street life
Speaker 1: back there. And I wondered, Puerto Rico, it must there
Speaker 1: must be elements of something similar going there. Right, it's
Speaker 1: worse than the Puerto Rico is a colony, right, it's
Speaker 1: a formal colony. It's not that's not a that's not
Speaker 1: whatever euphemism or metaphorical term, or whatever the term would be.
Speaker 1: It's legally economy. It doesn't have the right to make
Speaker 1: its own policies. It gets supervised by the US. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have the right to have an armed force, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have the right to pass law and for
Speaker 1: gun control laws, and that's really an outrage. Puerto Rico
Speaker 1: passed strong gun control laws and the US federal government
Speaker 1: forced them to obey US federal gun rules because they
Speaker 1: get driven by federal law and as a result, Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico and this is truly the tragedy and cruelty of
Speaker 1: of of colonialism. Puerto Rico has the highest level in
Speaker 1: the world of fire arm caused violence. And firearm caused
Speaker 1: violence is the most tragic one because that's the most
Speaker 1: spontaneous one. That's the one that was easiest to prevent. Right.
Speaker 1: It's because you know, you get suicide firearm with when
Speaker 1: there's a lot of guns around, the first thing that
Speaker 1: goes up as suicide you get depressed. Graham, you've got
Speaker 1: to you've got a gun hanging there, you grab it
Speaker 1: impulsively and blow your brains out. You you have an
Speaker 1: argument with your spouse, you know, boom, boom, boom. Without
Speaker 1: before you know what you've done, you shoot them. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the tragedy of be having guns forced on you.
Speaker 1: And that's why there needs to be gun control and
Speaker 1: and because there it's an industrial way to kill. And
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico had that imposed, has it actively imposed on
Speaker 1: itself now and it doesn't want to have so many guns,
Speaker 1: but the US federal government forces it to have so
Speaker 1: many guns because it's a colony of the US government.
Speaker 1: Uh huh uh Well, Lusen, I wanted as our readers
Speaker 1: to take a look at your books and even buy
Speaker 1: them in search your respect and righteous dopines are still
Speaker 1: in print. Okay, thank you very very much. Okay. Thanks.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it,
Speaker 1: or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear
Speaker 1: from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories,
Speaker 1: comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one
Speaker 1: eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three
Speaker 1: three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive
Speaker 1: at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Ethan Naedalman. You can also find contact information in our
Speaker 1: show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's
Speaker 1: produced by noha'm osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers
Speaker 1: are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geeseus and Darren Aronofsky.
Speaker 1: From Protosoma Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by
Speaker 1: Ari Blucien and especial thanks to a Bio s F
Speaker 1: Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next week, tune in for
Speaker 1: part two of my interview with Philippe Bougoi. When we
Speaker 1: moved from East Harlem to San Francisco, I wanted to
Speaker 1: find out useful things on how diseases were being transmitted
Speaker 1: in a practical way. And also, you know, anthropology doesn't
Speaker 1: tend often to force itself to try to be humbly useful.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be humbly useful, useful to the people
Speaker 1: I was studying, so that there would be more information
Speaker 1: on what could be done to reduce you know, how
Speaker 1: obviously devastating um their their use of heroin was on them,
Speaker 1: and the way they were being policed, and the way
Speaker 1: that services were mismanaging them and mistreating them even when
Speaker 1: it wanted to help them. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it,
Speaker 1: don't miss it.