Lifestyles and Law Enforcement

Abstract

Too often there is an abject passivity implied in the lifestyle of those people who misuse drugs—typically summed up in the image of the ‘smacked out’ heroin addict and expressions such as ‘retreatist’ or ‘escapist’—although this is quite false to the actual experience. In their justly celebrated paper from New York in the late 1960s, ‘Taking Care of Business’, Ed Preble and James Casey (1969) set the life of the street addict in a different light. The day-to-day lifestyle of a heroin user, as they described it, is one which involves a hectic flurry of hustles and economic exchanges, requiring considerable resourcefulness, economic dexterity and entrepreneurial skill and committment. When not searching for money or drugs to start the day, the heroin user was trying to avoid the police, looking for a safe place to ‘get off’, searching again for more money and the next bag, in an endless cycle of activity. Being a daily heroin user, according to Preble and Casey, was a job of work, a kind of work, moreover, which was seven days a week with no rest days. Even so, the street addict had a spring in his step in the more usually down-trodden streets of the ghetto. He had a business appointment to meet, had maybe just missed it. Life was a frantic whirl of friendship and emnity, business and loafing, winners and losers.