The Challenges of Street Research on Drug Use, Violence, and Aids Risk

Abstract

Violence is a regular and consequential event in the lives of street drug users, commonly beginning at an early age and continuing throughout their drug careers. Growing evidence indicates that involvement in violence, of various kinds, including as victim, perpetrator, and witness, is a factor in the initiation and continuation of drug use, as well as in AIDS risk behaviours associated with illicit drug consumption. As a result, improving our understanding of the role that violence plays in drug use is critical to drug research, prevention and treatment initiatives, and the development of effective public health efforts designed to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS and other drug-related diseases. Paying closer attention to violence in qualitative research, however, raises a number of methodological and other problems for drug researchers. This paper, based on an ongoing ethno-epidemiological study of the relationship of violence to drug use and AIDS risk among not-in-treatment Puerto Rican street drug users in Hartford, Connecticut, examines ethical, methodological, human resource, and related issues encountered in studying the intersection of these intimately linked epidemics. Specifically, the paper examines the challenges presented to ethnographic researchers by the everyday violence in the lives of study participants. In other words, this paper is concerned with the study of violence among at-risk drug users and the ways in which a focus on violence challenges our personal, intellectual, emotional, and ethical capacities to undertake this research.