Shooting Dope

Want ads won't list it; minimum wage and the mommy-track are irrelevant. Yet, Faupel maintains, hard-core heroin use is a career much like any conventional occupation. In both cases, certain activities are valued more than others, ethics govern the workplace, entrepreneurial skills are rewarded, and turning points mark the career path. By using a career paradigm, based on hundreds of hours of life history interviews, Faupel portrays the phenomenon of addiction in a manner that is understandable to those outside the subculture. His model eliminates the ""dope fiend"" mythology and simple cause-and-effect explanations that surround criminal addiction and replaces them with a realistic view of addiction as a social process. His most controversial finding suggests that legalization of heroin will reduce the desperate, opportunistic and impulsive crime characteristic of the street junkie. While not claiming that legalization is a panacea for the crime problem, he maintains that current policies of criminalization force would-be users underground, thus bringing them into contact with the criminal subculture. He concludes, ""there is no reason to believe that under a policy of legalization new users of heroin (and there will be more users) will become part of a criminogenic subculture"". Because Faupel suggests that addiction is inherently a social process, his work also raises important issues for treatment and for community reintegration of addicts.