Hurt

Abstract

Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation weaves engaging first-person accounts of baby boomer drug users, including the account of the author’s own brother, a heroin addict. The compelling stories are set in their historical context, from the cultural influence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll to the contemporary discourse that pegs drug addiction as a disease punished by incarceration. Boeri writes with penetrating insight and conscientious attention to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as she analyzes the impact of an increasingly punitive War on Drugs on a hurting generation. The chapters narrate the life course of men and women who continued to use cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine after age thirty-five. They were supposed to stop drug use as they assumed adult roles in life—as the generation before them had—but the War on Drugs led to mass imprisonment of drug users, changing the social landscape of aging. As one former inmate hauntingly said, America’s drug policy left scars that may rival those of the slavery and genocide in America’s past. The findings call for new responses to drug use problems and strategies that go beyond coerced treatment programs and rehabilitation initiatives focused primarily on changing the person. Linking tales from the field with sociological perspectives, Boeri presents an exposé as disturbing as a dystopian dream, warning that future generations will have an even harder time maturing out of drug use if the War on Drugs is not stopped and social recovery efforts begun. The book ends with an appendix that details how the research was conducted, the data collected and analyzed, and the results were drawn. It describes the ethnographic methods, fieldwork, participant-recruitment strategies, and the innovative mixed method approach—a combination of data science techniques with qualitative data collection. It includes a description of the data visualization images used to illustrate each participant’s life and drug trajectory in graphic simplicity. This appendix offers insight into how to conduct careful quality control at each phase of data collection, team coding of the qualitative data, and why Boeri selected the stories to include in this book.