Drug Users

This chapter outlines some of the history and key attributes of ethnographies of drug users. Long before the invention of writing, human beings began noticing that other human beings behaved oddly when they consumed certain materials. In some cases, the observers imitated the consumption that they saw, and the behavior spread. Eventually, protoethnographers such as Herodotus and Bernardino de Sahagún wrote extensively about what they saw (and heard) about the consumption of drug plants and preparations among people outside their personal cultural experience. Until the fifth century before the common era (500 bce), however, only oral history stories described what people from distinct cultural backgrounds consumed to the point of intoxication. Formal ethnography, as defined by the relatively young disciplines of anthropology and sociology, emerged just before the twentieth century, and it gradually proved its worth as a strategy for understanding human life in its highly varied cultural manifestations. As ethnography became an increasingly apt tool for the study of human cultural life, some ethnographers used it to advantage in comprehending practices of drug users in terms of political economic context, psychopharmacological impact, interpersonal relations, and health risk. Ethnography of drug use has become an indispensable component in scientific efforts to understand drug use, mitigate its impact, and prevent its spread.