Comprehending Drug Use: Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins

"For anyone wanting to obtain a better sense of the range and diversity of historical and contemporary ethnographic research on drugs, this fine book will clearly be the one to consult."–Geoffrey Hunt, Institute for Scientific Analysis

Comprehending Drug Use, the first full-length critical overview of the use of ethnographic methods in drug research, synthesizes more than 100 years of study on the human encounter with psychotropic drugs. The authors create a comprehensive examination of the whole field of drug ethnography–methodology that involves access to the hidden world of drug users, the social spaces they frequent, and the larger structural forces that help construct their worlds. They explore the intersections of drug ethnography with globalization, criminalization, public health (including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hepatitis, and other diseases), and gender, and provide a practical guide to the methods and career paths of ethnographers.

J. Bryan Page is a professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Miami. He is a leading ethnographer studying the use of particular drugs in different cultures. The author of dozens of journal articles, he has also contributed many book chapters in the fields of medicine and anthropology, especially drug research.
Merrill Singer is a professor in the department of anthropology and a senior research scientist at the Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention at the University of Connecticut. He is affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale University and the Global Center on Health in Central Asia at Columbia University. Having authored or edited more than 20 books and 200 articles and book chapters, he is also the recipient of several distinguished awards.